Kudos to David Hirsh for publishing an op-ed in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian which drives a stake into the heart of the apartheid analogy.

This is a particularly salient point:

“There is a temptation to treat the Middle East as an empty vessel which we can fill with our own issues. In England thinking is often influenced by colonial guilt; in Germany Israel is understood through the lens of the Holocaust; in Ireland the Palestinians become Republicans and the Israelis Unionists. In Poland many sympathize with Israel as a small democratic nation threatened by tyrannical neighbours. In South Africa the conflict is increasingly thought of in relation to apartheid.”

Hirsh makes another important observation:

“But if we listen to Hamas we will be confronted by one key difference between Israel and apartheid. The Hamas Charter sews hatred of Jews and it promises a war against them to the finish. The Hamas Charter is not like the Freedom Charter because the Middle East is not like apartheid South Africa.”

Hirsh doesn’t name the prominent South Africans who would argue otherwise - Desmond Tutu, Ronnie Kasrils, John Dugard and others, some of whom have argued that Israel is actually worse than apartheid South Africa - but it’s clear that this piece is aimed at them.

I would underline one more critical difference between the two situations. Apartheid was based upon an ideology of racial superiority - that whites are more civilized and from better stock than blacks. That pestilent idea generated an entire legal system which micromanaged the lives of South Africans on the basis of their skin color. If you want a historical parallel, the Nuremburg Laws introduced by the Nazis offer some approximation.