That oppressive regime exists to this day.
Here are the words of another veteran Israeli politician, Yossi Sarid, on the comparison of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians and Apartheid. Sarid served as a member of the Knesset for the Alignment, Ratz and Meretz between 1974 and 2006. A former Minister of Education and Minister of the Environment, he led Meretz between 1996 and 2003:
The white Afrikaners, too, had reasons for their segregation policy; they, too, felt threatened - a great evil was at their door, and they were frightened, out to defend themselves. Unfortunately, however, all good reasons for Apartheid are bad reasons; Apartheid always has a reason, and it never has a justification. And what acts like Apartheid, is run like Apartheid and harasses like Apartheid, is not a duck - it is Apartheid. Nor does it even solve the problem of fear: Today, everyone knows that all Apartheid will inevitably reach its sorry end. One essential difference remains between South Africa and Israel: There a small minority dominated a large majority, and here we have almost a tie. But the tiebreaker is already darkening on the horizon. Then the Zionist project will come to an end if we don't choose to leave the slave house before being visited by a fatal demographic plague. It is entirely clear why the word Apartheid terrifies us so. What should frighten us, however, is not the description of reality, but reality itself. Even Ehud Olmert has understood at last that continuing the present situation is the end of the Jewish democratic state, as he recently said.
Another
prominent Israeli politician who served many years in the Knesset, Shulamit
Aloni, has also been scathing in her criticism of Israel=s policies toward the
Palestinians. Aloni, is the Israeli Prize laureate who once served as Minister
of Education under Yitzhak Rabin. She wrote:
"Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what's right in front of our eyes. It's simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population."
The
following are comments made by Yossi Beilin, a member of the Knesset, and
chairman of the Israeli MeretzYahad Party, on the uproar caused in the United States
over former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid:
What Carter says in his book about the Israeli occupation and our treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories - and perhaps no less important, how he says it - is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country. There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves.
Another example of the type of discussion that goes on in Israel is the following statement made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: "For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. This discrimination is deep-seated and intolerable." Olmert made this statement while addressing a meeting of the Knesset committee that was investigating the lack of integration of Arab citizens in the Israeli public service. Prime Minister Olmert also made the following comment in an interview with Haaretz: "If the day comes when the two state solution collapses, and we face a South African style struggle for equal voting rights, then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."
Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, and former Prime Minister, also has used the Apartheid analogy. At the annual national security conference in the Israeli city of Herzliya Barak "delivered an unusually blunt warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish majority or an "Apartheid' regime."
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