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Desmond Tutu: 'Israeli Apartheid worse than South Africa'

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (7 October 1931 – 26 December 2021) was a leader in the fight to end white minority rule in South Africa. He played a vital role in the anti-apartheid movement and served as the chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this 2012 interview with Sir David Frost he talks about how Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is ‘in many ways worse than apartheid in South Africa’.

October 7, 2024 at 9:10 am

When the world lost Archbishop Desmond Tutu on 26 December 2021, it lost more than just a Nobel Peace Prize laureate or the former Archbishop of Cape Town. It lost a moral compass, a voice that refused to be silenced in the face of injustice, whether in the townships of South Africa or Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

Born on 7 October 1931 in Klerksdorp, South Africa, Tutu’s journey from hero of the anti-apartheid movement against minority white rule in South Africa to global human rights icon was marked by an uncompromising commitment to justice. But it was perhaps his outspoken advocacy for Palestinian rights that most vividly demonstrated the depth of his convictions and his willingness to speak truth to power, regardless of the consequences.

As the chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Tutu had guided his nation through the painful process of confronting its past. This experience, coupled with his firsthand knowledge of apartheid, gave him a unique perspective on the nature and roots of Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine – one that he was not afraid to share with the world. For Tutu, Israel’s domination over Palestine is simply another form of apartheid.

Tutu displayed a rare foresight that was lacking in most public figures. As early as 2002, in an article for the Guardian titled ‘Apartheid in the Holy Land’ he described Israel as an apartheid state, a stance taken at a time when such comparisons were still relatively rare. The former US President Jimmy Carter was the only other global figure to describe Israel as such in a 2006 book titled ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’. Many have followed since, and over the past few years, a wall-to-wall consensus has formed within the international human rights community about Israel’s practice of apartheid.

In South Africa as in Palestine: Why we must protect the legacy of Desmond Tutu

Talking to South African media, Tutu would say: “I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”

Often he’d describe the racism perpetrated by Israel as being worse than the racism in South Africa. “In many instances [Israeli apartheid] is worse” than South Africa under white minority rule, said Tutu in a 2012 interview with David Frost.

Tutu’s journey to becoming a leading voice for Palestine began in the townships of South Africa, where he witnessed the daily indignities and injustices of apartheid. As Tutu rose to prominence in the Anglican Church and the anti-apartheid movement, he developed a theology that emphasised what he would describe as God’s concern for justice and human dignity.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” Tutu would say. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

There was no doubt Tutu’s experiences in South Africa under apartheid rule profoundly shaped his perspective on the subjugation of Palestinians under an ideology that, like white minority rule in his home country, advocated racial supremacy. On his visits to Israel and Palestine, Tutu immediately recognised echoes of his homeland. The forced removal of the native population, house demolitions, humiliation at checkpoints, systems of control on movement, confiscation of land for Jewish-only settlements and the confinement of Palestinians to isolated areas of territory, were all reminiscent of the Bantustan – black homelands – in apartheid South Africa. Above all, he saw one people controlling another who, like black South Africans until 1994, had little say in their governance.

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In no doubt of what he witnessed, and the moral duty he felt in dismantling a system of racial domination under which black South Africans suffered, Tutu would go on to become a leading voice for the Palestinians. In 2014, Tutu wrote a powerful statement in support of sanctions against Israel: “I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed.”

Tutu’s advocacy for Palestine intensified following a visit to the region as part of The Elders, a group of independent global leaders working for peace and human rights. What he saw there shocked him. Commenting on the illegal Separation Wall Israel constructed in 2000, he said that even apartheid South Africa didn’t have such a barrier which “encroached so very seriously on the territory of other people.”

The archbishop was particularly disturbed by the checkpoints he witnessed, where he saw young Israeli soldiers “behaving abominably badly.” He expressed concern not just for the Palestinians subjected to this treatment, but also for the Israelis carrying it out. “When you carry out dehumanising policies,” he told Frost, “whether you like it or not, quite inexorably those policies dehumanise the perpetrator.”

In the Frost interview, Tutu addressed the often-cited justification for unconditional support of Israel – the guilt of Western nations over the Holocaust. While acknowledging this guilt, Tutu said that it should not come at the expense of Palestinian rights. “If they’re penitent,” he said, referring to Western nations, “they ought to be the ones who pay the price of that penitence. But the price is being paid by the Palestinians.”

The depth of Tutu’s commitment to the Palestinian cause is perhaps best encapsulated in his own words: “I wish I could keep quiet about the plight of the Palestinians. I can’t! The God who was there and showed that we should become free is the God described in the Scriptures as the same yesterday, today and forever,” he told the Washington Post in 2013.

As a member of The Elders, Tutu continued to actively campaign for an end to apartheid in historic Palestine. He emphasised the importance of international pressure and the need for Israel to comply with international law. His voice, along with those of other Elders like former US President Jimmy Carter, helped to keep the plight of Palestinians in the international spotlight.

The archbishop’s advocacy extends beyond rhetoric, just as it had in the case of South Africa under the apartheid regime. He firmly backed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, seeing it as a nonviolent means of pressuring Israel to end its system of racial domination and subjugation of non-Jews in Palestine.

Tutu’s voice on Palestine is particularly powerful because of his moral authority as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and his reputation as a champion of reconciliation. He brings to the issue not just righteous anger at injustice, but also a vision of a future free of violence, racial supremacy and the domination of one people over another.