On Friday, Sept. 27, this paper was honored to feature a guest editorial by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a hero of the anti-apartheid movement in his native country and elsewhere. Bishop Tutu supplied what has to be among the most dignified arguments in favor of the Israeli divestment movement that has appeared on various college campuses such as UC-Berkeley, Michigan and Harvard. Unlike others, he took great pains to emphasize Israel's status as the lone democracy in the Middle East and avoided any hint of anti-Semitism while still emphasizing his profound disagreement with Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories. However, he nevertheless invoked arguments deserving of a reply, and I shall endeavor to answer him with the utmost respect.
Bishop Tutu perceived a resemblance between the heavy security measures imposed on the territories and the human rights abuses of Botha and company in South Africa. Sadly, this is a false comparison in both deed and spirit. South African troops arbitrarily beat, raped, tortured and killed innocent black South Africans. The motive was racial oppression for racial oppression's sake. IDF forces in the territories do not arbitrarily use force but have the definite goal of seeking out potential suicide bombers, such as those affiliated with Hamas and Yassir Arafat's Fatah, based on specific intelligence. The goal is not to oppress, but to stop plots of murder. Palestinians do not endure the same abuse as blacks in apartheid, and the cause is so different as to compare imprisonment with common kidnapping.
Admittedly, the work is gruesome by our standards, but they are dealing with an enemy for whom a fundamental aspect of traditional military theory, the foot soldier's fear of death, does not apply. The blame for this situation lies not with Israel but the Palestinian Authority itself. Their public television encourages suicide bombing, praises \martyrs"" and ""suicide warriors"" and talks about the glory of killing Jews'and that's just the children's programming. Whereas the victims of apartheid were nothing more than people demanding their natural rights, Israel must deal with a Palestinian Authority government that actively promotes wanton murder of civilians.
Further, Botha never sat down to a negotiation table with Nelson Mandela. Israeli governments, both Labor and Likud, have repeatedly attempted to negotiate with Arafat, making greater and greater offers each time, only to hit the same wall: Arafat is not interested in peaceful coexistence, but the genocide of Israelis. Any momentary concession is merely an incremental step to his final solution of Israeli destruction. Again, an apartheid-Israel comparison is false; one had nothing to fear but coexistence, the other desires coexistence but cannot produce it from an unrelenting enemy.
Going beyond the occupation, the status of an Arab citizen of Israel underscores just how just a country Israel is. An Arab Israeli has all the rights of any other citizen of Israel, and several serve in their parliament. There is no great suppression of information or criticism of the government as in Apartheid South Africa. As compared to the Palestinian authority, which executes critics for ""collaboration"" with Israel and whose everyday abuses of human rights have been exhaustively revealed (such as a recent piece in The New Republic detailing policies of sadistically torturing homosexuals), Israel is clearly the humane power'the bulwark of liberal democracy that has been forced to protect itself.
Thus Israel's occupation is shown not to be racially motivated or driven by any other prejudice. It is entirely a concern of security. While peaceful coexistence would surely be favorable to occupation, the continued refusal of Palestinians to accept such a decent and equitable solution makes it a necessary evil. I close with words from Martin Luther King Jr. in March of 1968, defending the 1967 war and the beginning of the present occupation: ""Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.""
