Green foolish to liken Israel and apartheid

In a word, it's nonsense. Anyone who knew South Africa in the bad old pre-1994 days of apartheid and is familiar with Israel and the Middle East knows that to be the case. All Byrne's attempts to whip up support for the so-called BDS movement ("boycott, divestment and sanctions" against "Israeli apartheid") won't win her any credibility beyond the loony, leftist fringe of the Greens.

Israel is a vibrant, fully functioning, hotly contested parliamentary democracy in which every citizen can play a part. It is the only such democracy in a Middle-Eastern sea of corrupt autocracies and dictatorships that are now being challenged by Arabs seeking freedom and a new course for their countries. A place where there is completely free political debate, a completely free press and a completely free judiciary.

Contrast Israel's democracy with the situation in South Africa during the dark days of apartheid when a small elite of whites held virtually all the political and economic power and members of the numerically overwhelming black majority - 30 million to fewer than three million - were, simply because their skin was the wrong colour, discriminated against at every level and denied any role that didn't involve servility and servitude.

"Whites Only" signs meant that blacks were excluded from park benches, couldn't go to beaches, had to queue in different lines at post offices, couldn't get hospital treatment, could mostly work only as menial labourers or domestic servants, had to ride in separate elevators, and had relationships across the colour bar only on pain of being hauled before the courts and imprisoned under the Immorality Act.

For a time, blacks were even barred from placing family funeral notices in newspapers. The right to mourn the loss of loved ones was segregated. That was the evil of racial discrimination.

As is now recognised by those who see the way apartheid barriers have been smashed since the country held its first democratic election in 1994, the system of racial discrimination was crazy stuff.

Decades ago, Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, declared: "We do not want to create a situation like that which exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners and the rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled, if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our homeland."

Israel has never wavered from that ideal, though, hardly surprisingly given that the country is at war and under constant armed attack, there have been restrictions on people living in the occupied territories.

South Africa's apartheid was an indefensible system based entirely on race in its basest and most outrageous form, on whites believing they were superior by virtue of their skin colour, and insisting that blacks should be condemned to a life of servitude for white masters.

There is simply no basis for any similar condemnation of Israel. Yes, there are restrictions on the flow of people to and from Gaza - hardly surprising given Gaza's role as a hotbed of anti-Israeli ferment and violence and the power base of the murderous, Iranian-backed Hamas militants. How could Israel reasonably be expected to do otherwise?

How about Byrne and her Greens being a bit more perceptive about the reality of life in the Middle East, as seen by the popular uprising that led to the Jasmine Revolution in Egypt and similar ferment in Tunisia and countries across the Arab world? Arabs themselves speaking out against the system.

These uprisings are about people desperate for freedom and democracy. The sort of freedom and democracy, it must be said, that is seen in only one state in the region, namely, Israel. Even the Palestinian territories cannot make similar claims.

And how about the sort of outrageous discrimination that exists in places such as Saudi Arabia based on religion and gender? Is Byrne going to get excited about that?

It's easy, of course, for the likes of Byrne to mouth slogans that seek to compare apartheid in South Africa with Israel, easy for the dopey Marrickville council to say it's going to boycott Israel. But those slogans don't pass any test of credibility or veracity.

They're nonsense. They make Byrne and the Greens look foolish. Happily, they have as much relevance to the real world as Marrickville council's boycott of Israel.

Bruce Loudon is a senior writer with The Australian who has worked in both South Africa and the Middle East as a foreign correspondent.