Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Let's get real!

Before I left the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, some twenty years ago, I went around and said goodbye to everybody.  One of my neighbors was a Black American, which was pretty unusual in that place.  We got to chatting, which we had rarely done before, and when I told him I was going to live in Israel he was shocked.  He really said, how can you go and live in such a racist country.  We discussed the situation and he told me that at a recent dinner party he had attended made up of all Black professionals, the topic under discussion was how Israel was supporting then-apartheid S. Africa.  I told him that France, Britain and the US all supported S. Africa more than Israel, and that S. Africa, which has no oil of its own, could not survive without oil imports from Arab countries.  He said it it was illegal under UN boycotts to sell oil to S. Africa, and I pointed out that nevertheless huge quantities of Arab oil were being shipped to S. Africa thru middlemen.  He asked me to document my assertions.
I contacted the Israeli Embassy and other organizations and amassed a collection of mostly newspaper articles that documented the delivery of oil shipments by tankers from Iraq via third countries to S. Africa.  I also gave him a listing of military shipments to S. Africa, that showed that Israeli support to the S. African regime was dwarfed by those of other Western countries, for example France was at that time selling warships to apartheid S. Africa, without any public protests.  I pointed out to him that the US was a racist country, with many examples of discrimination against Blacks, but that within Israel there was no such prevalent racism and Arabs were represented in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset.. 
After he had perused this material he came back to me and thanked me.  I told him he was the victim of propaganda, of a public relations campaign designed to delegitimize Israel, when the US was much more racist and much more supporting S. Africa than Israel.  I asked him to share this information with his friends and to start a campaign to oppose Arab oil imports to apartheid S. Africa.  I doubt whether this made any difference, but at least it made me feel good.  The same gang of Arabs and their supporters are still trying to hang the "apartheid" label on Israel.  It is nonsense and it won't stick, but nevertheless, having lost in their attempts to destroy Israel physically they still attempt to de-legitimize Israel.  And unfortunately there are many poorly informed liberal-minded people who are prepared to accept this nonsense at face-value.  Come on guys, get real! 

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