Don Krausz, Johannesburg
On 31 October 2011, Richard Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, submitted an article to the New York Times headed, “Israel and the apartheid slander”. In it he stated the following, “I know all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system,” before describing what apartheid entailed.
He continued, “In Israel there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute. Israeli Arabs – 20% of Israel’s population – vote, have political parties, and representatives in the Knesset, [Israel’s parliament], and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment. The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes rather than promotes peace and harmony.”
A judge of the Constitutional Court is one of the highest legal positions in the land. Acclaimed journalist Shaun Johnson stated the following about Goldstone, “This is no tame judge, and no political lackey. [He] is perhaps the most important lifeline to credibility the [SA] government has. In a land of villains, Judge Goldstone is a South African hero.”
As a young man, I lived in Israel for more than four years. My friends and I toured the country extensively. Our social life included girls from Yemen and Egypt – brown – and also from Ethiopia – black. I saw none of the racial brutality that I had witnessed in South Africa.
Which brings us to Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.
Tutu is on record as saying that apartheid in Israel is worse than it was in South Africa, contradicting Goldstone. Yet, both these men are prominent figures of that period. From what I know of Tutu, he is not an anti-Semite, so racial hatred can be ruled out. However, he may prefer Palestinians to Israelis. Being an archbishop means that he must be an intelligent man. Unfortunately, as the past century has shown, emotion often overrides intellect.
