"The Tale of Two Apartheids"

by Paul D'Amato
Dissident Voice
February 6th, 2009

In April 1976, John Vorster, president of the then-racist apartheid regime of South Africa, paid an official state visit to Israel, where he was given the red-carpet treatment.

Israeli television showed him on his first day, visiting the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. At an official state banquet held for Vorster, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin toasted the “ideals shared by Israel and South Africa.”

Why was an outspoken member of a Nazi militia in South Africa during the Second World War and a leading member of the party that crafted official apartheid policies in South Africa being feted in Israel?

A statement in the South African government’s yearbook made two years after Vorster’s visit provides an answer: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

These close ties came from the identification that both states had for each other’s cause. Both were settler states that claimed to be bringing “civilization” to so-called backward peoples. And both were committed to using any and all means to maintain their regional domination over the “natives” that they had conquered–in South Africa, to create a white state based on the exploitation of Black labor; in Israel, to create an exclusively Jewish state through the systematic removal of the indigenous Palestinian population.

Read the rest of the article here.

SIDE NOTE: There is more than irony in the fact that apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel enjoyed warm and supportive diplomatic relations. Afterall, both nation-states are founded on the contrived notion of racial-religious superiority and, therein, lies enough space for empathy and more.

During the 80s the apartheid regime sold military equipment to Israel including Impala aircraft.

Apartheid South Africa also assisted Israel to develop its nuclear installations and weaponry.

I have written below that while the images of the War on Gaza filtered through I kept thinking that even apartheid South Africa did not launch missiles from the ground, sea, and air into Black townships.

What Israel did in less than a month Gaza is unparalled in apartheid South Africa!

Nonetheless, it hardly surprises me that both regimes killed and murdered in the name of God and for the purpose of the 'Herrenvolk'.

In this respect, apartheid and Zionism is also very much like Nazism in cause and effect.

Apartheid was eventually proclaimed a "crime against humanity" by both the post-apartheid government and the United Nations.

I look forward to the inevitable day when Zionism is ascribed the same fate.

Onward!