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By Fadi Nazeeh Kiblawi

The crash through the roof woke the young baby. Before she could let out a cry, the weight of the one-ton bomb fell upon her. Two-month-old Dania was saved from a life full of curfews, checkpoints, roadblocks, house demolitions, torture, imprisonment, degradation and desperation. In that context, perhaps Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was ironically right when he deemed the pre-dawn bombing of the densest district of the densest area of the world, taking 10 children, three women and two men from the captivity of life under occupation to the grave, a “success.”

After 20 months of tit-for-tat violence by Palestinians and Israelis – marred by innumerable massacres committed by both sides – I have become immune to the emotional symptoms that should accompany death and destruction. It has come to the point where you just have to ask, what is the cause of all this?

From the Israeli viewpoint, the problem is Palestinian violence and terrorism. Apparently, Palestinians have this unexplainable desire to kill Jews, driven by nothing but an innate tendency towards terror.

This argument reeks of racism, and rests on the assumption Palestinians have a special “terrorist” gene. Apparently, the ethnic cleansing, expropriation of land, refusal of free movement, and constant degradation of occupation has nothing to do with their violence.

I guess when a Palestinian suicide bomber massacres Israelis, his displacement and subsequent imprisonment under an inherently violent occupation is not the cause of his acts. I guess when Nat Turner in 1828 slaughtered white families, men, women and children alike, his subjugation under slavery was not the cause of his acts, either. I guess when members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress planted bombs in bars, restaurants and busses, maiming white civilians, apartheid was again not the cause there, either. The list goes on.

It should not surprise us when congressmen, such as Henry Waxman and Tom Lantos, blindly support Israel. They subscribe to the Israeli philosophy and Zionist ideology by which it is justifiable for one religious group to reign superior inside a state’s borders; thus it is natural for them to support the Jewish-only state.

This approach, wherein full blame is placed on the historic victims (the Palestinians) and the racist nature of the aggressor is ignored, is not a new one. If you recall, when it was South African apartheid descending on us, Congress and our administration sponsored and legitimized the white, racist government and placed the burden of peace on the struggling indigenous black population.

A second and more severe degree of apartheid is seen in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which Israeli governmental maps include within Israel’s borders. In an attempt to steal the Palestinian political identity through a systematic expropriation of land, construction of Jewish-only roads and settlements, and imposition of draconian measures, Israel isolates the 3.6 million non-voting Palestinian natives into 13 cantons, exhibiting an uncanny resemblance to the Bantustans of South Africa under apartheid. This has accelerated during the past year under the guise of a “war on terrorism”.

The nominal self-determination the Palestinians were given in 1993, and then prospectively extended at Camp David, shadows South Africa’s system of disconnected, yet self-determined “homelands.”

The two greatest factors in ending South African apartheid were the amount of international pressure amassed against it and the emergence of a leader of the colonizing party who made sacrifices against the wishes of his class in the interest of justice and equality. The latter could not have existed without the former, thus highlighting the importance of the international community’s role.

In the United States, the most tangible anti-apartheid movement was the divestment campaign that hit college campuses from coast to coast. The role of the movement cannot be underestimated. It was this 100-plus campus campaign in the 1980s that persuaded Congress, after nearly 40 years of recognizing and complying with the apartheid government, to pass the anti-apartheid bill that cut ties to South Africa and paved the way for a political revolution.

This same course of action must be taken against Israeli apartheid. Our government has been hijacked by ideologically backward racists, resulting in a confused, yet wholly complicit, foreign policy.

In the words of Archbishop Tutu, “If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction.”