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Dear Archbishop Desmond Tutu

(Jerusalem Post) Warren Goldstein - By recently adding your iconic voice to the campaign for sanctions against Israel, I believe you are making a terrible mistake. I am convinced that the sanctions campaign against Israel is morally repugnant because it is based on horrific and grotesquely false accusations against the Jewish people. The truth is that Israel is simply not an apartheid state. In the State of Israel all citizens - Jew and Arab - are equal before the law. Israel has none of the myriad apartheid laws South Africa had. Israel accords full political, religious and other human rights to all its people, including its more than 1 million Arab citizens, many of whom hold positions of authority including that of cabinet minister, member of parliament and judge at every level, including that of the Supreme Court. All citizens vote on the same roll in regular, multiparty elections; there are Arab parties and Arab members of other parties in Israel's parliament. Arabs and Jews share all public facilities, including hospitals, universities, malls, buses, cinemas and parks. The other untruth is the accusation of illegal occupation of Arab land. There is no nation that has a longer, deeper or more profound connection to its country than the Jewish people have to the Land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem. All the books of the Old Testament describe the deep connection between the Jews and the Land of Israel, including the West Bank, known in the Bible as Judea and Samaria - the area that contained the great cities of the two previous Jewish commonwealths, such as Jericho, Shiloh, Beit El, and Hebron. The Arab/Israeli conflict is not a struggle against apartheid or occupation. It is a century-long war against the very existence of Jews and a Jewish state in the Middle East. Since 1967, one aspect of this century-long conflict has been the demand for a Palestinian state. In spite of the deep historical and religious roots of Jews in all of Israel, generations of Jewish leaders have been prepared, for the sake of peace, to give up ancestral and covenantal land to establish a Palestinian state. So why has there not been peace? The African National Congress (ANC) taught us you can't make peace on your own. No matter how deeply the ANC was committed to a peaceful resolution of the South African conflict, until the National Party was prepared to accept that black South Africans had a place in their own country, there could be no peace. And so too, until the Arab/Muslim world accepts that Jews have a right to a state of their own on their ancestral land, there will be no peace. The writer is chief rabbi of South Africa.
2010-11-05 09:55:50
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