In the annals of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, when a small white minority brutally oppressed the mainly black majority and denied them the right to vote, Soweto occupies a special place. The sprawling, poverty-stricken black township on the south-western edge of Johannesburg was the site of a mass uprising in 1976 and numerous other protests.

Last Sunday, February 3, anti-apartheid fervor returned to Soweto. But this time, according to the Palestine News Network, the target was Israeli “apartheid.” The occasion was the official launch of “Israel Apartheid Week 2008″, which will take place not just in South Africa, but in several other countries around the world.

The Soweto event was apparently attended by Eddie Maque, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. The main attraction was Azmi Bishara, a former member of Israel’s Knesset for the Arab nationalist party, Balad.

No doubt, the enthusiasm with which many South Africans, including several individuals with stalwart anti-apartheid credentials, embrace the application of the “apartheid” label to Israel is something of a publicity coup for the anti-Zionists. After all, who knows better what apartheid is? And if the boycott tactics urged by international activists against apartheid South Africa provided a rallying point back then, why not invoke them against Israel now?

There are several reasons why not. I’ve written about them at length here, the courageous South African journalist Benjamin Pogrund has written about it here (and in many other places, as a “Pogrund apartheid” internet search will reveal) and The Economist ran its own trenchant critique here. It is a debate that has raged with special ferocity since the publication of Jimmy Carter’s deeply flawed book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Careful examination of Carter’s own use of the term “apartheid” reveals that he conceded it might not have been so appropriate after all. In his book, he wrote “the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples…is not racism but the acquisition of land.”

This is not just a semantic difference. Apartheid was, indubitably, a concept of government based upon racism - and it resulted, as Sasha Polakow-Suransky observed, in “an extraordinarily intricate system designed to control the movement and labor of blacks and strip them of South African citizenship by removing them to ‘homelands’ where they would be granted nominal but meaningless independence.”

Even so, despite the myriad flaws with the apartheid analogy, Carter could not resist its provocative, eye-catching appeal. It would seem that some South Africans are now making the same error.

This brings me back to the Soweto event, which perfectly symbolizes the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to accusing Israel of practicing apartheid. What was truly notable was the banner which greeted Azmi Bishara: “Silenced in Apartheid Israel,” it declared, “Welcomed in Soweto.”

Bishara’s job in Israel - a member, alongside several other individuals from the Arab minority across various parties, of the country’s legislature - would have been unthinkable for a non-white political activist in apartheid South Africa. While in the Knesset, he spoke out freely, something he did on the outside too. On a visit to Lebanon (a state which does not recognize Israel and which the Islamist terror group Hezbollah uses as a base), Bishara’s strident anti-Zionist oratory descended into open racism: “We are the original residents of Palestine, not those who came from Poland and Russia…Return Palestine to us and take your democracy with you. We Arabs are not interested in it.” His freedom to make such heinous remarks encapsulates what The Economist article linked above describes as the “chief difference” between Israel and apartheid South Africa: “Israel is a robust democracy.”

Just as it’s important to issue a reminder that Bishara took full advantage of his right to free speech, so it is important to point out that he was not “silenced”. As well as visiting Lebanon, Bishara also visited Syria, a state still formally sworn to Israel’s destruction - in other words, an act not dissimilar to a hypothetical US Congressman paying a tribute visit to an Al Qaeda encampment in Afghanistan.

While in Syria, in 2001 and 2006, Bishara declared his solidarity with Hezbollah and refrained from any mention of the dissidents locked up by Bashar al Assad’s dictatorship. Given Syria’s material support for Hezbollah, an organization which attacks Israeli population centers and kidnaps Israeli soldiers, one could be forgiven for wondering why Israel waited until 2006 to begin investigating Bishara’s activities.

It was this investigation of Bishara’s contacts with an enemy state - the standard and expected response of any democracy - which led to his resignation from the Knesset. Since then, he has travelled widely, almost always to places which indulge his self-image as a free speech martyr.

Now he can add South Africa to the list. But is the condemnation of “Israeli apartheid” as grassroots a phenomenon as Bishara’s South African supporters would like us to think? In the coming weeks, Z Word will be publishing an important essay by two South Africans, human rights activist Rhoda Kadalie and journalist Julia Bertelsman, which argues that the “Israeli apartheid” chorus is being orchestrated by a small elite within the ruling African National Congress (ANC). It should make very interesting reading.