From South Africa to Israel: personal stories of apartheid

From South Africa to Israel: personal stories of apartheid

Jesse Rosenfeld



I grew up in an anti-apartheid household in Toronto. My parents met while my father was touring southern Africa as part of a Canadian anti-apartheid organisation, building links with postcolonial African socialist states and the South African liberation movement. On long car journeys, our family would mix Nelson Mandela’s autobiography with Just William children’s story tapes, and my parents would occasionally hire a babysitter so they could attend organising meetings for the international boycott campaign against South Africa.

As much as I was taught about apartheid, the violence of segregation, and the brutality of a state designed only to serve a settler population, I didn’t experience it first-hand until I moved to Ramallah in 2007.

Going to Jerusalem through the Qalandia terminal checkpoint and watching the soldiers harass and degrade Palestinians with Jerusalem IDs – while most of my Ramallah friends were barred from travelling there altogether – was the first I saw of state-run segregation. Walking through the Balata refugee camp on the edge of Nablus was the first township-style ghetto I set foot in. Seeing the Palestinian Authority beat anti-Bush demonstrators in the street during the former president’s visit in 2008 was my first real taste of the bitterness of Inkatha-style divide-and-rule.

In Ramallah I was regularly woken in the middle of the night to the sounds of my neighbours’ gates being blown off, followed by the screams of children as their father or brother was violently taken by the Israeli army. However, it was not until I met Ibrahim Bornat that I really understood the price Israel imposes on Palestinians who demand freedom and equality.

A vocal activist in the West Bank town of Bi’lin, struggling against Israel’s use of the wall to annex village farmland to the nearby Jewish settlement, Ibrahim was arrested on February 2 during a night raid on the village. After appearing regularly in the front lines of the weekly protests against Israel’s barrier, he now sits in Israel’s notorious Ofer military prison alongside other leaders of the town’s Non-Violent Popular Committee, facing a slew of charges in a military court.

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http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100303/OPINION/703029942/1080/FOREIGN

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