10 Jan 2022; MEMO: The warnings stated recently by Yair Lapid, the Israeli Foreign Minister, regarding the insistence of those that he described as enemies of the occupation to describe the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians an "apartheid state", which is the other term of the "apartheid regime", are still provoking more internal Israeli reactions, as well as a state of annoyance that is spreading in the Israeli diplomatic community.
The Israelis are afraid of what they consider as a policy adopted by human rights organisations to 'distort' the reputation of the occupation state, and to compare it to the system of apartheid that prevailed in South Africa in previous decades, based on ethnicity and the division between whites and black Africans, who formed the vast majority. This system prevailed for more than 40 years amid a state of disdain, since blacks were deprived of the right to vote and other freedoms.
Dan Perry, a writer in "The Times of Israel" website and head of the Foreign Press Association, said in his article translated by "Arabi 21" that "the Israeli fear is due to the efforts of international human rights legal organisations to compare the Israeli policy applied against Palestinians to what happened earlier to blacks in South Africa. Today, they are persecuted in the United States; they are deprived of most rights and are considered victims of apartheid by a minority ethnic group."
He added that "the positions of the anti-Israeli forces consider that there is a broad common genetic basis between the countries that practice apartheid, such as the former South African regime, and now the United States in conjunction with Israel, which practise the same policy with Palestinians in the West Bank, through adopting the genocide policy and linking the Palestinians to the term 'illegal' with any reference to Jewish settlements.
Through a statistics review, the Israelis are afraid of the notion that most of the world's population was born after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa. So, they rush to describe Israel with the same description, which requires Israelis to work to prevent the use of the term apartheid system, even though Israel has taken control of the Palestinian lands for 54 years. It is not expected that it will change its hostile policy towards them. It now builds settlements for Jews and establishes universities there, in spite of the world's objection.
At the same time, what reinforces the world's repetition of the notion of apartheid rule is the fact that Palestinian Authority lands have become islands surrounded by land under the total control of the Israeli army. It causes a depressed acceptance of the Bantustans, reminding the whole world of the situation that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s under the regime in South Africa. Perhaps the policy practised by the occupation forces against the Palestinians is racism.
It is worth mentioning the pessimistic Israeli estimates expect that the New Year 2022 will witness a campaign by the international and UN organisations to select the terms and vocabularies related to apartheid, regarding the Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, which prompted the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the consulates around the world to diplomatic alertness to encounter what they consider as a political tsunami against them.
