Who said nearly 50 years ago that Israel was an Apartheid State?

Address by Ronnie Kasrils: “ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK”

Mandela: ‘We South Africans cannot feel free until the Palestinians are free.’

At the onset of international “Israel Apartheid Week” in solidarity with the embattled Palestinian people, I want to start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as far back as 1963 that “Israel is an apartheid state.” Those were not the words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu or Joe Slovo, but were uttered by none other than the architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime Minister, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

He was irked by the criticism of apartheid policy and Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech , in contrast to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.

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Torture Team – Book Review
 
 

‘Many in the Bush administration fall into Sand’s description of complicity in war crimes.’
 
By Jim Miles

Torture Team – Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law. Philippe Sands. Allen Lane, Penguin. New York. 2008.

"Only a few pieces of paper can change the course of history. On Tuesday, 2 December 2002 Donald Rumsfield signed on that did." From such a singular beginning Philippe Sands writes the history of U.S. attempts to abrogate international laws and conventions on the use of torture and the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. This is the memo Rumsfield approved with the sarcastic comment about standing: “However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” Perhaps Rumsfield should have been subjected to the other seventeen “techniques” that accompanied the memo to see if his limits for them were any better. 

Torture Team begins carefully, reviewing and structuring the trail of evidence and the chain of command. Most of the participants in the chain of command were interviewed, some more willingly than others, and good portraits of their characters come through. They varied from casually ignorant and insouciant to defensively firm in their self-perspectives on the various papers, actions, and36that occurred. Through it all, the only groups/people that appear to be relatively ‘clean’ in these36are the military themselves and the FBI. All others, politicians (starting at the top with Bush, Rumsfield, Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz et al), government lawyers and advisors (Gonzales, Haynes, Jay Bybee, John Yoo et al), medical personnel, psychologists, anthropologists – pretty much anyone who had a hand in the interrogation – become complicit in war crimes under international law. 

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