Israel-Palestine crisis not comparable to Rhodesia
The parallels Kin Bentley finds between events on our doorstep and in the Middle East are not quite as he paints them (“Some Israel-Rhodesia parallels”, The Herald, February15).
The fall of Rhodesia was not a simple matter of demographics, as a key event in that country’s history is often ignored.
Before Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front came to power, the Garfield Todd government passed legislation that would radically have altered the course of that country’s history had it had the desired response.
Under [former] prime minister Todd, the parliament in Salisbury (now Harare) made it possible for black voters to register and be enrolled as parliamentary voters.
The qualifications for potential voters entailed possessing a certain level of income or degree of literacy, which would have limited the numbers eligible to be enrolled.
But the intention was that, once black people were represented in parliament, more would join their ranks as more people’s income or education rose to the level required.
This would have ensured a gradual enlargement of the number of black voters, undercutting the more racist elements in the white population.
However, the scheme was torpedoed, not by white politicians, but by a black one.
Bishop Abel Muzorewa, leader of the African National Council, denounced the move and demanded that all black adults immediately be granted the franchise.
His ANC forced potential voters to stay away from the registration process, thus ensuring an all-white parliament.
The result? “Good Old Smithy” and his right-wingers formed the next government and the bush war began.
At its end, Muzorewa was installed as leader of the new Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, but the extremists ousted him and the communist Robert Mugabe took his place, inaugurating his leadership by sending in North Korean-trained troops to commit genocide among the amaNdebele of Matabeleland.
Bentley is dishonest in labelling Israel as an illegitimate colony and denouncing the Balfour Declaration as being infamous.
He seizes upon an incident in 1933 in which a small Jewish faction in the Palestine Mandate made a deal with Nazi Germany to take German Jews into the Mandate, and makes it out to be a vast Zionist plot.
In fact, the men who made the deal were denounced by most of the Jews in the Mandate,
and while it was a pact with the devil, it did enable many Jews to escape the Nazi persecution that was to follow. Today, Israel has two million Arab citizens who enjoy full rights in that country.
In fact, while Israel conscripts its Jewish citizens, Arabs are exempt from conscription, yet many Arabs
(Muslims, Christians and Druze) are loyal enough to serve in the Israel Defence Forces.
In 1948, vast numbers of Arabs in the Mandate left the proposed Jewish state because they had been ordered out by the country’s Arab neighbours, and chose to wait while five Arab armies destroyed
Israel.
Instead those Arab armies and their supporters in the Arab population of the Mandate were soundly thrashed by the Israelis.
The self-exiled Arabs (who only in 1964 began calling themselves Palestinians) were resentful of Israel, and their resentment was heightened
by the Transjordanian occupiers of Judaea and Samaria and the Egyptians in Gaza, who kept them in “refugee camps”, refusing to allow them into either Transjordan (which soon annexed Judaea and Samaria and called itself Jordan) or Egypt.