The ANC and many peoples who have experienced or critically studied colonialism, imperialism and apartheid in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas have rightly condemned the continuing violence in Palestine as a whole, which includes what is now known as the state of Israel.
The peoples who live in the area between the River Jordan and Mediterranean Sea are blood relatives just like the San, Khoe Khoe, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, and Tswana are related by blood and marriage here in South Africa.
The Canaanites, Arabs and Hebrews are genetically related and have lived intermingled in Palestine over several thousands of years – even before the biblical times, and harbouring in their minds the concept of one God.
Today Jews live in many countries such as Iraq as cultural Arabs but as religious Jews. Many Arabs, Africans, Ethiopians, Libyans and other nationalities have been Jews over several thousands of years while practising other cultures and speaking other languages other than Hebrew.
Many Hebrews and Jews through many wars left their villages in Palestine and settled in other continents including Europe, Africa and South Africa. In Europe, Jews were hated and locked up in ghettos and subjected to xenophobia, genocide and pogroms.
European Christians started a movement known as Christian Zionism which was eventually overtaken by Hebrew Zionism in the 1880s. Zionism is the idea that Hebrews and Jews must rather found a land of their own than continue to be attacked, oppressed and discriminated against by Europeans outside of their ancestral lands.
The Germans and Nazis took the hatred of the Hebrew to a whole new level, by launching a full-scale state sponsored mass murder of Jews around Europe. The mass murder is known as the Holocaust.
‘No future for Jews in Europe’
But the idea of killing and hating Hebrews and Jews was common in Europe anyway. That idea was related to the enslavement of Africans and Asians, genocide in the Congo, Namibia, Australia and in the Americas. The idea being that you can gain land and wealth simply by killing or subjugating the rightful owners.
The Holocaust Encyclopaedia states: “In the aftermath of the Holocaust, most survivors felt there was no future for Jews in Europe. They desired a homeland where Jews would no longer be a vulnerable minority. Those hopes were realised on May 14, 1948, when the modern State of Israel was established. Jews have had historical and religious connections to the land of Israel for thousands of years.”
The Hebrews and Jews genuinely wanted a haven, running away from clear European ethnic cleansing. It is important to know that Hebrews are not all religious Jews or Bible believers, some are just Hebrews with no spiritual commitment.
The trouble started when the Hebrews decided that in the land granted to them by the British in Palestine among the local Arabs and other ethnic groups, they could engineer that they become a majority and not a minority.
That idea has led to forced removals of local Palestinians from their towns and villages so that those who remain behind are majority Jews or Hebrews. Other scholars and reporters have indicated that that is even a de-Arabisation of villages, towns, and persons where places with Arab names are renamed in Hebrew and Arabs are taught to be more Hebrew.
In all this, the land available to the native majority who are not Hebrew has significantly shrunk since 1948 when the state of Israel was formed mainly by Hebrews and Jews who came from Europe.
Even now lands taken by force from non-Hebrew Palestinians have been settled by Hebrews and Jews.
It also important to note that native Palestinians themselves are not all Muslims but some are Christians and Jewish and so on. There has been a great effort to cast Palestinians as Muslims or just Arabs. This does not accord with objective facts, archaeology, and DNA tests and so on.
The ideal solution would be to make sure that all the peoples who live in the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean join one voters’ roll, live under one tax system and benefit equally and fairly from the investments that the US and the Europeans make into that region.
There has been a US-European sponsored bias to make the Hebrews and Jews more special and dominant than necessary in Palestine. That means that each generation of Palestinians who are not Hebrews has a task of de-establishing any form of Hebrew and Jewish exclusivity and domination in Palestine, which even former US president Jimmy Carter of the US calls apartheid.
White on white apartheid, similar to the hatred and abuse the Hebrews ran away from in Europe.
- Swana is an academic, a political analyst and a member of the 70s Group
