Apartheid & Zionism: the same fight

When the Afrikaner nationalists, with an outspokenly fascist core at their centre, began to to move down the authoritarian slide toward fascism, South Africa saw the emergence of the Black Sash in 1956. These were women whose conscience bound them to protest about the erosion of the few vestiges of democracy left in what had become the apartheid state.

The Zionist state of Israel now faces a similar development although conditions now are infinitely more horrendous. It is not just imprisonment without trial, increasing ethnic cleansing, or the numbers of deaths in detention, and the subjugation of the majority of the population.

Today, in Gaza and in the occupied territories, such conditions apply to a much greater degree than they did in South Africa. But there is also murder at a greater scale that amounts, in the case of Gaza, to what is, by legal definition, genocide. And the majority sufferers — those who will suffer into the future — are the children,. Thousands have been slaughtered, shot deliberately by snipers or buried with their families under the rubble created by 2-ton “block buster”: bombs dropped on residential areas.

Following Israel’s breach of the Gaza ceasefire, this “killing of the innocents” proved the impetus for two women, Amit Shilo and Neora Shem to organise a few activists. They decided, carrying pictures of children massacred in Gaza, to stage a silent weekly demonstration at Begin Gate – the entrance to Hakirya, the military’s headquarters in central Tel Aviv.

There were perhaps 12 individuals who stood in silence as people streamed by to join weekly demands for the return of captives held in Gaza. Another of the organisers, Alma Beck, told Haaretz about that first demonstration: “We thought we were going to get beaten up. We were very, very surprised that the response was different, that people came over, asked what this was, who are those children, what happened to them. The first responses were like ‘Is this real? No, this cannot be true.’”

And so they have kept going and, last Saturday, there were an estimated 1,000 Israeli men and women, each holding a picture of a child killed in Gaza (see the pic below). The facts of their deaths and the circumstances of their dying are provided by Adi Argov, of the activist group Looking the Occupation in the Eye that collects pictures and stories of Palestinian minors killed, including before October 7. Argov, a 59-year-old clinical psychologist, relies on data from Gaza’s Health Ministry, Palestinian media, social media posts and memorial websites.

While the protest has grown and the reactions have, for the most part, not been hostile, it is clear that this protest represents — as is the case with Israeli journalists — a small, principled minority in the face of an increasingly brutal regime on the verge of dropping all pretence at being other than fascist.

Last Saturday in Tel Aviv: remembering the murder of Gazan children