There were righteous Afrikaners, too
By James North on May 4, 2010
I have tremendous admiration for John Mearsheimer’s intellectual courage, but I think he is mistaken to use the expression “new Afrikaners” to describe the people who will excuse anything Israel does.
During my years in southern Africa, I met plenty of Afrikaners who opposed apartheid, people like the great cleric Rev. Beyers Naude and the novelist Andre Brink. The poet Breyten Breytenbach spent 7 years in the apartheid prisons for trying to organize an underground resistance. Mearsheimer’s expression suggests a tribal unity among Afrikaners that never completely existed, and disregards the contributions of these remarkable people and others.
Also, equating apartheid with Afrikaners lets a lot of other people off the hook. Many among the English-speaking 40 percent of the white population were careful to distance themselves from the regime’s worst excesses, but they made little real effort to change a system that gave them the highest standard of living in the world. Further up the chain of command were the large mining houses, such as Anglo-American and DeBeers, who said they favored change but in fact did nothing.
And, elsewhere, the CEOs of the big Western banks and corporations continued to lend and invest in apartheid all the while claiming they had nothing to do with the system’s more unsavory features. It was not until resistance inside the country grew, along with Boycott Divestment Sanctions in the rest of the world, that the regime and its supporters realized they had to negotiate.
John Mearsheimer has quite rightly identified a group of people who will go through strenuous intellectual contortions to justify Israel’s land-grabbing and violence. I just wish he would find a different name for them — maybe “the Israel Apologists”?
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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