60 Years of Apartheid

Israel's Grim Anniversary

By SHARON SMITH
CounterPunch

"South Africa’s white minority government was finally overthrown in 1993, after decades of black popular and working-class resistance. That year, the black majority democratically elected the African National Congress--previously derided as a “terrorist” organization by apartheid’s imperial supporters, including the U.S.--to lead its government. Freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, having spent 27 years in a South African prison and reviled as an international terrorist, was reinvented in the Western press as an elder statesman......

As in South Africa, Israeli apartheid can only survive for so long before it is overthrown from below. Indeed, if Israel’s current starvation tactic toward Palestinians, currently locked down in their future “Palestinian state,” is any indication the Camp David solution is dead. Only a genuine democracy encompassed by one–person/one-vote, that Israel so fears, points the way for the future—in a single, secular state in which all citizens are equal, without regard to race or religion."