Archbishop Tutu! Revisit Israel!
Apply Truth and Reconciliation to Israel and Israelis
in the name of Judeo-Christian values.
What is it about Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Apartheid, and
Israel? Why is it that Israel, and only Israel, is the one country that drives
this clergyman to apoplexy? Not Syria, not the Sudan, not Nigeria, not Mali,
where thousands of fellow Christians are slaughtered as you read my words. Not
even Mauritania, where the minority Arab Muslims apply ethnic cleansing,
torture, and even slavery against his fellow black religionists. No. It’s only
Israel that gets his goat.
Now we read that Tutu has added his endorsement to a
billboard campaign on the New York subway castigating Israel as being the one
and only Apartheid state in a wicked world.
Amazingly this Anglican bishop has joined with the
American Muslims for Palestine, keen to add yet another Shariah state to the
region in place of the one and only Jewish one, in depriving the Middle East of
the exclusively liberal democratic nation where Apartheid is the last thing
being practiced.
In the scrawl of his message he says how distressed he
was during his last visit to the Holy Land. “It reminded me so much of what
happened to us black people in South Africa.”
I have no idea where he visited in Israel that reminded him of the shameful townships I saw during my trip to South Africa last year. There I witnessed the crime of the apartheid of poverty being inflicted by his political party on millions of Africans who live in tin shacks with no electricity or sanitary system. Show me one Palestinian living in such condition. Decades after the removal of the white regime Tutu’s South Africa has done little to relieve the poverty, or reduce the murderous crime statistics. What is it they say about people who live in glass houses? The same applies to those who tolerate tin shacks.
The last time Tutu visited Israel was way back in 1989.
Then he offended many by insensitively saying about the Holocaust during a
visit to Yad Vashem Memorial, “We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us
so that we in our turn will not make others suffer."
To say these
words at that special place in the heart of the Jewish State was deeply
hurtful.
Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center called
it "a gratuitous insult to
Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere.”
The Archbishop
revealed an inherent anti-Semitism when, with a slip of the tongue at a 2002
public lecture on divestments from Israel, he said, "People are scared
in this country [the US] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is
powerful – very powerful.” His remarks were met with outrage. In 2005, in a
reprinted version of his speech, he diverted his anti-Semitic reference to
reflect an anti-Israel bias by replaced the expression “Jewish lobby” with
“pro-Israel lobby” but the anti-Semitic cat was already out of the
bag.
Famed US
attorney, Alan Dershowitz, called Archbishop Tutu “a racist and a bigot” during
the controversial Durban 2 Conference in 2009.
Archbishop
Tutu is closely linked to a black liberation theology. This may have its place
against the background of the painful South African experience of blacks
against whites. Where it loses its value, and warps into a misguided racism, is
when people like Tutu try to apply black liberation theology on to the
Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nothing can be further from the truth, and truth
is what Tutu purports to promote, if one recalls his notable Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. Archbishop
Tutu, as a man of truth, must reassess his opinion of Israel.
He wrote an
op-ed piece in the Tampa Bay Times in which he thanked the Jewish people
for being on the side of the “disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones” during
the dark days of Apartheid South Africa.
Jews, and
Israelis, have always stood on the side of the suffering, while defending
ourselves against those who come to harm us. Israel, more than most countries
including South Africa, has reached out to relieve the suffering of others with
humanitarian aid and practical assistance, especially in times of grave
distress.
Universally,
millions have benefitted from Israeli innovation, scientific, medical, and
agricultural achievements, but Tutu turned his article into an anti-Semitic
screed by adding;
“Whether
Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can’t ever hope to be
judged by the same standards which are used for other people.”
Clearly, he is
among those who have never judged Israel by any decent standard. This can be
seen by his refusal to condemn the people who are persecuting his
co-religionists in Africa and in the Arab world with the same passion and
standard that he applies against Israel. Neither will we hear any condemnation
from him for the blatant apartheid policies carried out against the Palestinians he purports to support in the
Arab regimes where they find themselves without status, without work, without
education, without freedom of movement, without representation, without a vote,
solely based on them being Palestinian in Arab and Muslim lands. Isn’t that
pure Apartheid?
Instead, Tutu
claims Israel has “oppressed more than the apartheid ideologues could ever
dream about in South Africa.”
In Tutu’s words,
Israel outdoes the white regime in South Africa as an apartheid regime.
It’s
absolutely time for truth, Archbishop Tutu! Let us start with this accusation
and the truth.
One of the criticisms
I heard while I was in South Africa was that Israel was the last nation on
earth to cooperate with the white regime.
Not so! How
about the Arabs? Where did the white regime get the oil that fueled their
industry and military machine? Not from Israel, I can assure you. They got it
from the Arabs, the ones that Tutu prefers to support even as they commit
genocide and slavery against the black Christians of Africa.
I ask the
clergyman to carefully look at whose side he is supporting.
We, in Israel,
find his bias against us strangely troubling. Tutu and Israel should be joined
by our Judeo-Christian values in fending off a common enemy. We should be bonded
in a unified fight against the same enemy that is persecuting and killing us
both. Instead we find Archbishop Tutu in the camp of our mutual enemy.
I call upon
him to at least to be a champion and protector of black Christians being
victimized by the same cultural and religious hatred that is being waged
against us both, even if he doesn’t care to defend our Jewish sense of
survival, or support our dire need for Jewish self-determination in our holy
land based on a historic injustice that has been perpetrated against Jews, by
both Christians and Muslims.
I implore him
to search his soul, look to his core responsibility as a Christian leader, and
reassess his position on these vital issues. Our decades-old conflict with the
Arabs is not a black and white issue. They are not the blacks, and we are not
the whites. If he looks closely at Israel he will find us to be a Rainbow
Nation. We are made up of refugees and people of many tongues and colors who
have returned home from all over the globe, including Africa.
In supporting
the Palestinians he supports a man, Mahmoud Abbas, who has declared “I will
never accept the Jewish State of Israel, not in a thousand years!” That, to us, is like someone saying “I
will never accept black rule in South Africa, not in a thousand years!”
Such is the racist meaning at the heart of both statements. How can any learned
person tolerate such a position?
I ask him to
reassess his attitude for the sake of truth and reconciliation between him, his
country, and Israel. Let me address him this way;
Please come
again to Israel. Let us introduce you to the true face of our nation. Open your
heart and discover for yourself the people of our amazing land. Open your mind
to the new experience of an Israel you do not know, and let us work, hand in
hand, for truth and reconciliation between our two peoples.
Barry Shaw is
the Special Consultant on Delegimitization Issues to The Strategic Dialogue
Center at Netanya Academic College. He is also the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming
the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com
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