I first learned of the visit of a “South African Human Rights Delegation to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories” when I was on a brief visit to London last week. Ducking into a corner store to escape the incessant rain, I flicked through that day’s edition of The Independent and came across an article by Donald Macintyre, the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent, headlined “This is like Apartheid.”

“Veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle,” Macintyre began, “said last night that the restrictions endured by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories was in some respects worse than that imposed on the black majority under white rule in South Africa.” And so on.

Over the next few days, I did some more research and established that the delegation’s perspective, despite a web site with the hackneyed image of a gun-toting Israeli soldier and smiling Palestinian kids, was a little more nuanced than Macintyre’s account allowed for. Even so, my initial reaction to his piece (basically, “why on earth are the judgments of this group portrayed as definitive?”) remains, I think, valid.

Because of the legacy of apartheid, South African interventions into international debates about human rights enjoy a certain privilege. Therefore, when the word “apartheid” is invoked, people, especially those on the liberal left, tend to stop and listen, even if, as Rhoda Kadalie and Julia Bertelsmann have so eloquently argued, it is done stupidly and maliciously, as it is in the case of Israel.

I am tired of this halo effect, and I don’t think I am alone. Yes, South Africa has made some huge advances since the nefarious apartheid regime was dismantled. But South Africa is not the embodiment of global conscience. It is one state among many. The views of its leaders, parliamentarians and opinion-formers are just as prone to error and distortion as those of the rest of us.

But whereas Jews are frequently told, when it comes to Israel, that they are either exploiting the Holocaust or ignoring its lessons, post-apartheid South Africans are seen as untouchable. No matter what their government does elsewhere in the world, any South African with even a vague amount of clout who analogizes Israel and apartheid is guaranteed a respectful, even gleeful, audience.

Hence the innate power of a human rights delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories. If South Africans are there expressing concern, the logic goes, then that is because of the inescapable comparisons with apartheid. By virtue of being South Africans, they know, better than we do, what human rights abuse really means, especially in the Middle East. It is a particularly intriguing and effective way of muzzling debate.

Yet reality has to intrude. The record of South Africa’s government over neighboring Zimbabwe, where Mugabe has turned torture and political murder into a grizzly routine, has been a disgrace. On the very day that Macintyre’s report was published, South Africa voted against a UN Security Council resolution toughening sanctions against Mugabe and his cronies. In the last 40 days, in defiance of the UN’s main refugee agency, South Africa has sent a breathtaking 17,000 Zimbabwean refugees back to Mugabe’s hell on earth. And that’s not even mentioning the anti-foreigner pogroms which erupted across the country in May, leaving scores dead and injured.

Imagine if, during this unspeakable violence, a group of Israelis, solemnly invoking the persecution, ghettoization, murder and genocide which have indelibly marked the Jewish experience, had landed in Johannesburg on a fact-finding mission. Such a delegation would have been - to say the least - mocked and reviled.

Does it then follow that all of the conclusions of the delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories should be dismissed? No, not necessarily. Certainly, the delegation’s credibility was done no favors by Macintyre, or by an even more ludicrous article in Ha’aretz penned by Gideon Levy. Their complete inattention to the security-driven aspects of Israeli policy - put bluntly, how many suicide bombers were there from Soweto? - was jaw-dropping. But their collective conclusions were basically moderate, if unremarkable (…”it is clear to us that there should be freedom and security for all who live here”), and occasionally astute (for example, High Court Judge Dennis Davies observing to the BBC that if “Israelis and Palestinians are serious about a two-state solution, it has to be an amicable divorce because they are going to end up living side by side.”)

All of this is trumped, however, by a truth that the delegation will find unpalatable. It is only because of the false, ugly apartheid analogy that their views are given more credence than those of a delegation from Mexico, say, or Iceland. In other words, this seemingly noble discourse rests upon a lie.

Some South Africans might draw the right conclusion from that, and focus instead on a principled, genuinely international fight against racism, rather than franchising the word “apartheid” out of political expediency. A delegation might be sent to, for example, Italy, which has been sharply rebuked by the European Parliament for fingerprinting gypsies (although they should be as wary of saying “apartheid” there too; it’s more properly called “discrimination”). Or they could focus on their own continent.

One can hope, after all.