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By Femi Fani-Kayode
For those who dispute the fact that apartheid is alive and well in Israel, I urge them to consider the words of Gideon Levi, a highly celebrated and respected Israeli journalist, who said the following at the Oxford Union a few years ago:
“I am an Israeli. I was born in Israel. I am even perceived to be an Israeli patriot. I care about Israel. I belong to Israel and I am attached to Israel. Don’t speak about symmetry because there is no symmetry.
“I would even suggest there is no conflict. Was there a French-Algerian conflict?
“There was a brutal French occupation in Algeria which came to its end. There is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is a brutal Israeli occupation which must come to an end one way or the other. In our dark backyard, there is a regime that today is by far one of the most cruel, brutal tyrannies on earth. Not less than this. I know what I say because I covered it for 40 years and this regime cannot but be defined as apartheid. Two peoples live in one piece of land and one people has all the rights in the world and I am talking only of the occupied territories. Two people share one piece of land there. One people has all the rights in the world, the other people have no rights whatsoever. It looks like apartheid, it talks like apartheid, and it is apartheid. Nobody can contradict it: nobody who has been there and nobody who is fair enough to look.
“Go to the Jordan Valley, see their prosperity in the settlements and then go and see the Palestinians who live there with no electricity, without water, without any rights, and then tell me if it’s apartheid or you might invent another title. When I steal your car, I am not in a position to put conditions on returning the car. First of all, return the car and the only way to return the car is by giving EQUAL RIGHTS TO THE PALESTINIANS.”
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If there are still any righteous and God-fearing men left in Israel, Gideon Levy, who is a regular contributor on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera, is one of them. It takes courage to swim against the tide and speak truth to power when you are a Jew that still lives in Tel Aviv. Kudos to him.
Many talk about the frightful and horrific events of October 7th, when the Al Qassam Brigade, the armed wing of the Palestinian resistance movement known as Hamas, struck a devastating retaliatory blow against their oppressors, killed over 1,000 Jews, including women and children, and abducted over 200 others. Yet they conveniently forget that Israel struck the first blow in 1948 by killing over 700,000 innocent and defenseless Palestinians, including women and children, and displacing over one million and taking over their homes during the infamous Nakba!
Worse still, ever since that time, and for the last 76 years, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank have been murdered by Israeli security forces and armed right-wing militant settlers. Tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children have been illegally detained in Israeli prisons, while Gaza, a tiny strip of land of over 2.5 million Palestinians sandwiched between Israel and the sea, was turned into the world’s largest and most degrading concentration camp, second only to Auschwitz, by the Zionists!
As if that were not harrowing enough, let us consider the fact that well over 60,000 civilians, most of whom are still buried below the rubble and three-quarters of whom are women and children, have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force in the last one year alone!
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Fani-Kayode is a former Minister of Aviation
