Cape Times oped
Apartheid is alive and well in a street in the Israeli-controlled West Bank
February 25, 2010 Edition 1
By Zenande Booi and Quinton Combrink
Apartheid South Africa demanded surplus quantities of moral blindness and monomaniacal creativity from those tasked with ensuring the separation between black and white. And then the systems of influx control, separate identity cards, and Bantustan development folded like a spectacular house of cards.
Off somewhere, in old age, sit those men who played God, either reconciled to their folly or nursing an injured pride while doggedly insisting on the unappreciated genius of their grand policy of separation.
It would surely add insult to injury for them to find out about the current arrangements in Shuhada Street in the Israeli-controlled West Bank. Not only is the separate-roads policy, of which Shuhada Street is a prime example, an absurdity that surpasses South Africa’s separate beaches, but it is also part of a planned "policy of separation" – because that is the official terminology – alive and well in the 21st century.