The “doc­u­ment of prin­ci­ples” Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu laid out for post-war man­age­ment of Gaza looks more like a back­room amateur’s attempt to clone South Africa’s Ban­tus­tan plan for keep­ing blacks in pover­ty and sub­servience. If that’s the best he can come up with, there are a cou­ple of oth­er apartheid quirks more wor­thy of consideration.

Report­ing on the build-up to South Africa’s first one- per­son-one-vote elec­tions, we went to a for­ti­fied home on the out­skirts of Pre­to­ria to inter­view a man whose pol­i­tics would make the Ku Klux Klan, QAnon adher­ents and MAGA con­spir­a­cy zealots seem liberal.
He proud­ly informed us the pis­tol and extra mag­a­zines strapped on his hip includ­ed  “hydra-shock” rounds that would “go right through a man and blow his back away.”
He said he was “in the chem­i­cal busi­ness”, which meant “I can start chem­i­cal war­fare if I want to.”
What, I asked, would make him do that?
With­out bat­ting an eye, he said: “If the (extreme pejo­ra­tive for black peo­ple) take power.”
A few weeks lat­er, Man­dela won the elec­tion, so we went back to ask Mr Chem­i­cal War­fare what he thought about it.
“I vot­ed for Man­dela,” he said.
When I got my breath back, I asked him why.
“One word,” he said. “Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Any man, espe­cial­ly a black, who can spend twen­ty-sev­en years in our jails and come out and say rec­on­cil­i­a­tion (which Man­dela did, repeat­ed­ly), I say give him a  chance.”

                                         THE EQUIVALENT

The much-tout­ed and ever dis­tant “day after” in Gaza, and by exten­sion the entire Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict, will require such men on both sides.
Ami Ayalon, a high­ly dec­o­rat­ed Israeli offi­cial who once led the Shin Bet secu­ri­ty ser­vice, pin­points Mar­wan Bargh­outi as the Pales­tin­ian most like­ly to fit the bill. Cur­rent­ly serv­ing con­sec­u­tive life sen­tences in an Israeli jail for var­i­ous acts of ter­ror­ism, the 64-year old Bargh­outi speaks flu­ent Ara­bic, Hebrew and Eng­lish, and tops the polls as the politi­cian Pales­tini­ans most respect. “He is the only leader who can lead Pales­tini­ans to a state along­side Israel,” Mr Ayalon said. “First of all because he believes in the con­cept of two states, and sec­ond­ly because he won his legit­i­ma­cy by sit­ting in our jails.”
The divi­sions between the per­pe­tra­tors and vic­tims of apartheid are in many ways mir­rored in the Israel-Pales­tin­ian strug­gle. As for­mer U.S. ambas­sador to Israel and Assis­tant Sec­re­tary for Near East­ern Affairs, Mar­tin Indyk, wrote recent­ly: “…there is a com­plete dis­con­nec­tion between renewed inter­na­tion­al calls for a two-state solu­tion and the fears and desires cur­rent­ly shap­ing Israeli and Pales­tin­ian society.”
Any hope of address­ing that requires the equiv­a­lents of Man­dela and F.W. De Klerk, the last white pres­i­dent of South Africa. So far, there’s no one like them even close to being in place.

                      TIME FOR A FOCUS SHIFT?

A recur­ring theme in war report­ing is the resilience, courage and human­i­ty of the vic­tims. In the case of Gaza, the will­ful stu­pid­i­ty dis­played by the antag­o­nists deserves almost equal attention.
Hamas espous­es the myth that it can destroy Israel, and is will­ing to sac­ri­fice Pales­tin­ian civil­ians in its name.
Netanyahu and the reli­gious zealots on whom he is depen­dent shout about “total  vic­to­ry” over Hamas, but do not and prob­a­bly can­not cogent­ly define it.
In the first 100 days of the war, Israel dropped the kilo­ton equiv­a­lent of three nuclear bombs on the Gaza Strip. By now they’ve prob­a­bly added the equiv­a­lent of anoth­er, yet the war goes on.
By what mea­sure could spend­ing untold mil­lions of dol­lars turn­ing Gaza into what the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion (WHO) called “a death zone” cre­ate any­thing but a bot­tom­less ter­ror­ist recruit­ing pool.?
Is there no one on either side who can work out how much more use­ful it could be for all con­cerned to spend the mon­ey on efforts to resolve dif­fer­ences by mak­ing everyone’s life and future more, not less attractive?
I once tried to argue with a hard-core Afrikan­er that South Africa’s quest for a nuclear bomb to defend apartheid was point­less, because the fall­out would kill white South Africans too. “You don’t under­stand,” he said. “If we drop the bomb, we win.”
Like him, Israel and Hamas are prime exam­ples of humanity’s bound­less capac­i­ty to embrace the irra­tional in the name of winning.
The lat­est report by the World Bank says Israel’s bomb­ing cam­paign in the war Hamas start­ed has had a “cat­a­stroph­ic” effect on the territory’s infrastructure.
That makes as much sense as the famous quote attrib­uted to an Amer­i­can major in the Viet Nam war: “It became nec­es­sary to destroy the town in order to save it.”
Plant­i­ng your flag atop a pile of destruc­tion and dead bod­ies only defines vic­to­ry in the extreme stretch of the fevered imag­i­na­tions of racists, reli­gious zealots, or the just plain stupid.

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