Archbishop Condemns Occupation
Apartheid in the Holy Land

BY DESMOND TUTU
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In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust center in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.

What is not so understandable, not justified, is what Israel did to [the Palestinian] people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.
My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions?

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured.

Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or — I hope—to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land.

You know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the U.S.]. To criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group.

[In the U.S.] people are scared to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, [and] to the Palestinian people and say: Peace is possible. Peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers. 

Desmond Tutu is the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and chairperson of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This is an edited version of an address he gave at the “Ending the Occupation” conference held in Boston earlier this year.

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