Revolution #213, October 10, 2010
Israel: Perception & Reality Quiz Answers and Sources
PART 2: ISRAEL AND COMPARISONS TO APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
1.
Answer: C
The Israel-South Africa alliance began in earnest in April 1975 when then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres signed a secret security pact with his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha. Within months, the two countries were doing a brisk trade, closing arms deals totaling almost $200 million; Peres even offered to sell Pretoria nuclear-capable Jericho missiles. By 1979, South Africa had become the Israeli defense industry's single largest customer, accounting for 35 percent of military exports and dwarfing other clients such as Argentina, Chile, Singapore, and Zaire. There was nuclear cooperation, too: South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium while dozens of Israelis came to South Africa in 1984 with code names and cover stories to work on Pretoria's nuclear missile program at South Africa's secret Overberg testing range. Foreign Policy, October 2, 2010; mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/05/10/gold_stones_glass_houses; Rose M. Byrnes, ed., South Africa: A Country Study: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1996, countrystudies.us/south-africa/85.htm
2.
Answer: C.
In 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster—a former Nazi sympathizer and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler—to make a state visit….Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” Chris McGreal, The Guardian, Tuesday 7 February 2006 www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel; The Jerusalem Fund, July 6, 2010, “Apartheid South Africa’s Secret Relationship with Israel, Dr. Sasha Polansky, www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/d/ContentDetails/i/14385/pid/v
3.
Answer C
Palestinian residents of Jerusalem face especially acute discrimination in the provision of municipal services and access to land for residential building. Those residing in East Jerusalem, seized by Israel in 1967, have been required to prove that Jerusalem constitutes their "center of life" and risk the loss of residency rights there. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem characterized the set of pressures faced by native non-Jewish residents of Jerusalem as a form of "quiet deportation." Coupled with an aggressive campaign of Jewish settlement, Israeli policies amount to a form of 21st-century colonialism. Counterpunch, Intolerance at Jerusalem's Museum of Tolerance , George Bisharat, www.counterpunch.org/bisharat09092010.html ; Asia!, Sheikh Jarrah: The Holy City's telling battle on two fronts (Part two), Dan-Chiyi Chuya, July 21, 2010. Baltimore Chronicle, September 13, 2010, East Jerusalem Palestinians Denied Basic Rights, Stephen Lendman, baltimorechronicle.com/2010/091310Lendman.shtml
4.
Answer A
Three years ago, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the former Italian prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, as telling dinner guests at a Jerusalem hotel that, on a visit to Rome a few years earlier, Sharon had told him that the bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. When one of the guests suggested to D'Alema that he was interpreting, not repeating, Sharon's words, the former prime minister said not. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister," he said. With Sharon out of politics, his successor Ehud Olmert has pledged himself to carrying through the vision of carving out Israel's final borders deep inside the West Bank and retaining all of Jerusalem for the Jewish state. Chris McGreal, The Guardian, Tuesday 7 February 2006, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel, Haaretz.com, Sun, October 03, 2010 Tishrei 25, 5771, Akiva Elder, www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/people-and-politics-sharon-s-bantustans-are-far-from-copenhagen-s-hope-1.10275
5.
Answer: D.
The Report of the United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, December 3, 1986, proposed that the UN General Assembly condemn a comprehensive collection of Israeli policies and practices. These included, among many oppressive Israeli actions, “Collective punishment, mass arrests, administrative detention and ill-treatment of the Arab population,” and “Interference with the freedom of movement of individuals within the Palestinian and other occupied Arab territories.” (United Nations, Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, December 3, 1986 www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r063.htm)
The UN General Assembly voted to demand that Israel “cooperate with the Special Committee in implementing its mandate, and deplores those policies and practices of Israel that violate the human rights of the Palestinian people and other Arabs of the occupied territories.” (United Nations General Assembly Report, GA 1092, December 10, 2009, unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/df6fd1175ec2c4658525768c00540c4f?OpenDocument
6.
Answer: C
Defenders of Zionism invoke religion; Israel has no Constitution and in any event does not promise formal equality to Palestinian citizens; Israel provided covert military assistance to the Nicaraguan “Contras” who carried out terrorist attacks on civilians, civilian property, and infrastructure as part of a campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government in the 1980s. Estimates of Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal range from 75 to 200.
The Federation of American Scientists states “Israel has not confirmed that it has nuclear weapons and officially maintains that it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Yet the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons is a "public secret" by now due to the declassification of large numbers of formerly highly classified US government documents which show that the United States by 1975 was convinced that Israel had nuclear weapons.” (--www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/ )
“Most experts estimate that Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in the 1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the country's Dimona nuclear reactor.
“The U.S., a key ally of Israel, has in general followed the country's policy of "nuclear ambiguity", neither confirming or denying the existence of its assumed arsenal.
“However, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert included Israel among a list of nuclear states in comments in December 2006, a week after US Defense Secretary Robert Gates used a similar form of words during a Senate hearing.”
--BBC News, “Israel 'has 150 nuclear weapons'” May 26, 2008 news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7420573.stm
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