April 29, 2002

2002-103

(ENS) Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu compared the Israeli occupation of West Bank towns to South African apartheid in remarks to an audience of 200 gathered at Boston’s Old South Church. Tutu spoke April 13 at a “Conference on Ending the Israeli Occupation,” co-sponsored by Sabeel, a Palestinian ecumenical liberation center in Jerusalem, and the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.

“In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were the Jews,” Tutu said. “Jews 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 a patron of the Holocaust Center in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders,” he assured the audience.

But that does not justify Israel’s actions on the West Bank, Tutu continued. “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us blacks in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks. They suffer like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. They seemed to derive so much joy from our humiliation.”

Tutu criticized Israeli authorities for excluding the news media from the West Bank and making it difficult to know what is really going on there. He spoke of the “desperation” of Palestinian Christians who have lost land and homes to Jewish settlers. “Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation?” he said. “Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people.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 stalemate filled with hatred and vengeance; exterminate all Palestinians; or strive for peace based on justice–withdrawal from the territories and establishment of a viable Palestinian state with secure borders,” Tutu said. “Peace is possible–we are free today in South Africa because of people like yourselves.”

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