South African and Israeli apartheid compared

As you know, comments on internet sites are often worthless, particularly if there is no moderator. But they can be very illuminating. The site Mondoweiss usually has worthwhile comment threads from thoughtful people that serve to expand upon the articles from which they are inspired.

Below is a comment from Mondoweiss reader Krauss who makes distinctions between what the whites of South Africa were about in the days of apartheid in that country and what the Israelis are about today in Palestine...

The Afrikaaners knew that they could never expel the blacks because there would be no labor, no economy and ultimately no state.

Therefore the goal was always (to suppress) them, (while) appeasing them sufficiently to quell the most obvious reasons for rebellion.

This is also why they created the bantustans, because giving local chiefs the illusion of power and letting them squabble over small patches of land allows people to get greedy and think of themselves first and foremost.

Still, all this required the building of hospitals, schools, roads and bridges. The apartheid system actually invested in the black, native population... True, the investments were kept at a minimum but it was nonetheless far more than Israel does.

Israel doesn’t try to improve life at all. It actively brutalizes the native population, steals their farms, their water, kills their cattle, lets the settlers run wild and plague and torment the farmers while the IDF soldiers watch (or even join in, laughing).

This is a slow-motion ethnic cleansing which is different from apartheid South Africa. That’s why the freedom fighters who fought apartheid have said time and again that what is happening in Palestine is worse than what went on in South Africa, as bad as it was.

Apartheid is the most vaguely proximate term available but it even it does not capture the full brutality of the Jewish state towards it’s non-Jewish population in the West Bank.