Minister of Safety and Security Ronnie Kasrils, MP
6 June 2007
Free Palestine: End Israeli Occupation
Madam Speaker, Honourable members, this speech is dedicated to the memory of
David Rabkin, South African freedom fighter, who died in Angola. Forty years
ago this week Israel's military unleashed lighting attacks against Egypt,
Jordan and Syria, alleging provocations as justification for its strikes.
Within six-days the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem,
and Golan Heights had been captured.
Apart from the Sinai from which Israel withdrew in 1977; the other areas
remain under Israeli military occupation and control to this day. Whilst some
justify Israel's actions on the grounds of pre-emptive self-defence, the
obverse was the truth. From the horses' mouth we learn who the aggressor
was:
Israel's military Chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin stated: "I do not believe
that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 [1967]
would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it
and we knew it."
Menachem Begin, later Israel's Prime Minister, reminisced that the Egyptian
army deployment in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was about to attack
Israel. "We must be honest," he explained. "We decided to attack him."
General Moshe Dayan explained that "many of the fire-fights with the Syrians
were deliberately provoked by Israel." He said that the kibbutz residents who
pressed the Government to take the Golan Heightsâ¦did so less for the security
than for the farmland"
These are clearly statements of an aggressor. Nevertheless, some claim that
Israel is justified and obligated, from its birth as a state in 1948 in fact,
to defend its land and people by force whenever necessary. But where is the
morality in this? Fortress Israel, a militarist aggressive state, defends a
stolen land that belonged to another people.
Moshe Dayan unabashedly explained:
"Before, the Palestinians very eyes we possess the land and villages where
they and their ancestors, have lived. We are the generation of colonisers, and
without the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home."
Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, stated in the 1950s:
"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never
make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God
promised it to us, but what does that matter to them. Our God is not theirs. We
come from Israel, its true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to
them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis but was that their fault? They
only see one thing; we came here and stole their country."
Such statements contextualise Israel's position and show it has not been
interested in real peace terms. In 1897 the founding father of Zionism, Theodor
Herzl, stated that once in power the aim would be to: "Spirit the penniless
population the Palestinians across the borders."
Therein lays the fundamental cause of the conflict, lest anyone remains
unclear. It stems from the Zionist world view, its belief in a perpetual
anti-Semitism that requires that Jewish people around the world; a faith group
â should have a national home of their own. The biblical narrative was evoked
to proclaim Palestine as the Promised Land reserved exclusively for God's
"chosen people" and their civilising mission. It sounds all too familiar as a
vision the Voortrekkers had in this country. It gives rise to racism, apartheid
and a total onslaught on those who stand in your way, whether blacks or Arabs
or red Indians. Many Jews do not agree with this Zionist world view, and
declare that being anti-Zionism and critical of Israel does not equate with
anti-Semitism.
Far from being a land without people, as Zionist propaganda falsely
proclaimed, to attract and justify colonial settlement, the fact was that an
indigenous people, the Palestinians lived there, developed agriculture and
towns since the Canaanite Kingdom over 5 500 years ago. Indeed a delegation of
sceptical Vienna rabbis travelled to the Holy Land in 1898 to assess the
Zionist vision and cabled home: "The Bride is indeed beautiful but already
married."
This did not deter the Zionists who plotted to abduct the bride and murder
or expel the groom by whatever means necessary; and then defend what they had
stolen at all costs by creating a supremacist Fortress State. That exactly sums
up the bloody and tragic history that befell the Palestinian people, and their
Arab neighbours, at the hands of a rapacious, expansionist Zionist project that
has been the source of war and untold suffering in the near East for the past
sixty-years and is the root cause of the conflict that threatens the entire
region and beyond.
With the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan of November, 1947; a
Jewish homeland was accorded 56% of the territory although they owned seven
percent and were one-third of the population (most of who had recently arrived
as Holocaust refugees from Europe). The Palestinian majority were given 44% and
were never consulted nor had they anything to do with the abominable suffering
of the European Jews. The Zionists accepted partition with alacrity but never
intended to honour the decision.
According to the Zionist's strategy, which has become public record with the
declassification of documents, the intention was to roll-out a systematic reign
of terror, massacres, dispossession and expulsion. This drove out the
Palestinian population in a horrific episode of ethnic cleansing that saw over
750 000 or two-thirds of the indigenous people at that time becoming penniless
refugees, as Herzl had promised. By the 1949 Armistice the Israeli state had
expanded to 78% of the territory.
That was almost sixty years ago. The result of Israel's war of aggression of
forty-years ago this week, an extension of 1948, saw Israeli military
occupation of the remaining 22% of the land. The people within the West Bank
and Gaza are literally imprisoned under the most unjust conditions suffering
hardships and methods of control that are far worse than anything our people
faced during the most dreadful days of apartheid.
In fact any South African, visiting what amount to enclosed prison-ghettoes
imposed by a Jewish people that tragically suffered the Nazi Holocaust will
find similarity with Apartheid immediately coming to mind and even more
shocking comparisons with some of the methods of collective punishment and
control devised under tyrannies elsewhere. An Israeli cabinet Minister, Aharon
Cizling, stated in 1948, after the Deir Yassin Massacre: "Now we too have
behaved like Nazis and my whole being is shaken."
If anyone has any doubt what the 1948 and 1967 wars were about, listen to
Ben Gurion who stated in 1938: "after we become a strong force, as the result
of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the
whole of Palestine."
And mark these words of Moshe Dayan:
"Our fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognised in the United
Nations Partition Plan of 1947 [56% of the land]. Our generation reached the
frontiers of 1949 [78% of the land]. Now the Six Day Generation [of 1967] has
managed to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights. This is not the end."
Indeed the saga of agony for the Palestinians continues, inevitably creating
insecurity for Israelis as well; because as we know from our own South African
experience, injustice and repression generates resistance. It is no good
blaming the victims when they hit back. The Palestinian people's fate clearly
reflects that of South Africa's indigenous majority during the colonial wars of
dispossession of land and property, and the harsh discrimination and suffering
of the apartheid period classified as a crime against humanity and violation of
international humanitarian law. Israel is as guilty as the Apartheid regime.
Israel's conquest and occupation, with the latest land grab caused by its
monstrous Apartheid Wall and continued construction of the illegal settlements
has reduced the West Bank into several disconnected pockets amounting to 12% of
former Palestine. No wonder that Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Tutu and others
compare the situation to Apartheid and the infamous Bantustans â which gave 13%
of land for South Africaâs indigenous people.
This people's Parliament should be unanimous in calling for Israel's
immediate withdrawal from the occupied territories, lifting the physical,
economic and financial blockade and siege of Gaza and the West Bank removing
the physical impediments to the freedom of movement of Palestinians including
the Wall and over 500 check-points dismantling the illegal settlements â
releasing 10 000 political prisoners (113 women and children amongst them) -
negotiating a just solution with the elected representatives of the Palestinian
people and implementing the UN Resolutions, including Resolution 194 of 1948,
concerning the Right of Return of the Refugees.
These are necessary steps to create lasting peace, justice and security for
Palestinians and Israelis alike, reinforced by international guarantees, so
they may live in harmony. Since 1988, when Chairman Yasser Arafat and the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) agreed to accept 22% of historic
Palestine in the interests of peace they show they have been ready for
negotiations.
Let us unanimously extend our solidarity and support to the forty-two
members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, including the Speakers of the
West Bank and Gaza, who together with ten Ministers have been summarily
detained without trial, most for nearly a year, by the Israeli security forces.
This is a shocking illustration of Israel's disrespect for Parliamentary
democracy, the law and basic human rights so reminiscent of what we suffered
under apartheid. We call for their immediate and unconditional release; and all
prisoners held by both sides.
In support of these demands let us join with the people of our country, and
the international Community, in the solidarity marches, rallies and
demonstrations this week, the 40th Anniversary of Israelâs unjust occupation.
And we make it clear to our Jewish community; these peaceful and disciplined
actions are aimed solely at that government. The struggle for freedom and
justice is against a system and not a people.
Let me conclude with the words of President Mandela, who declared in 1998
during the visit to South Africa by Chairman Yasser Arafat:
"We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the
Palestinians."
1 David Hirst: The Gun and the Olive Branch
2 Naom Chomsky: The Fateful Triangle
3 New York Times, May 11, 1977
4 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi: Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism
and Israel
5 Nathan Goldman: The Jewish Paradox
6 The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol 1, p 86
7 Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall
8 Tom Seger: The First Israelis
9 London Times, June 25, 1969
10 Speech by Nelson Mandela at the Banquet in Honour of President Yasser Arafat
of Palestine on 11 August 1998
Issued by: Secretariat for Safety and Security
6 June 2007
