South African politician and Evangelical pastor Kenneth Meshoe, who lived under apartheid, isn’t buying it.
“There is nothing in Israel that resembles apartheid,” Meshoe told an audience of Evangelicals and Jews at Toronto’s Beth Shalom Synagogue Nov. 19. “They are minimizing the pain that people who lived under apartheid endured… You are belittling the seriousness of apartheid.”
Israel Apartheid Weeks are used to promote a program of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel — a program launched by 170 Palestinian and international NGOs, churches and political organizations in 2005. It is supported in Canada by the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Toronto assembly of the United Church of Canada.
The Jewish community in Canada has reacted bitterly against the analogy between Israel and the institutional, theological and legal racism of South Africa prior to Nelson Mandela’s return from Robben Island. The only country in the region with a free press, independent courts and free elections cannot be compared with an international pariah state that tried to redefine the majority of South Africans as non-citizens, they say.
Meshoe laid out seven South African laws that held the apartheid system together for more than 30 years. Laws that mandated identity cards by race, created separate homelands for black South Africans of various ethnicities, determined where blacks, coloureds and Indians could live and gave the police power to stop and search any black person.
Given that Arab Israelis hold equal citizenship with the right to move around the country, vote, participate in public and political life, there can be no parallel with apartheid, said Meshoe.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu however has endorsed the idea that treatment of Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza by Israel’s military and legal system is equivalent to apartheid.
“With Archbishop Tutu, I certainly don’t agree with everything he says. But I think on this particular application of the term from his context to another, I would say we can rely on his judgment because he knows apartheid like no one else,” Concordia University theology professor Paul Allen told The Catholic Register.
Founder of the Hope and Glory Tabernacle with 3,000 congregants in Johannesburg, Meshoe rejects the Anglican Tutu’s use of apartheid to describe Israel.
“Jews should understand that there are two kinds of Christians. There are Christians who believe the Bible and there are Christians who don’t. Archbishop Tutu is one of those Christians who don’t believe the Bible,” said Meshoe.
Allen calls the invocation of apartheid in the debate around Israeli occupation of Palestinian land “strategic” and says it is a term “that’s sufficiently vivid to at least prompt some people to ask questions,”
Meshoe’s appearance in Toronto was sponsored by an Evangelical organization started in the 1980s by white South Africans. The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem promotes Christian zionism. Many of its American supporters are Dispensationalist Christians who believe that only when all the Jews are gathered in Israel can the Second Coming and the end times begin.
The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem has little connection with Palestinian Christians.
“The local Christian community sees them essentially as an organization that undermines their own interest and is playing footsie really with the Israeli government,” said Fr. John Pawlikowski, Chicago Theological Union professor of social ethics and director of the Catholic-Jewish studies program.
Pawlikowski was banned from South Africa for a period when he was writing and speaking out against apartheid. He has doubts about the comparison between South African apartheid and Israel.
“I would make certain distinctions with apartheid in South Africa, where I was deeply involved,” Pawlikowski said. “That doesn’t mean that one can’t be critical of Israel and the settlements and so on. But I’m not sure that it is apartheid.”
“The Vatican and its various emissaries and the patriarch of Jerusalem have been clear over and over again for years, decades now, that the security of Israelis and the fundamental rights of Palestinians are not mutually exclusive,” Allen said. “I think we should stare power and injustice in the face and say no to the Israelis when they try to capture more territory and build settlements and say no to the Palestinians when the resort to violence is made.”
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