“This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses.
We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”

—Ronnie Kasrils after a 2004 visit to the Palestinian territories, quoted in Chris McGreal, Mail & Guardian, October 24, 2006

“Apartheid was all about land. Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here, particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of
property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank.”

—John Dugard, South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor, quoted in Chris McGreal, Mail & Guardian, October 24, 2006.

“The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure—in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation....These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday’s South African township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the occupied territories….If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined.”

—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Nation, July 15, 2002

 “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”

—Former South African President Hendrick Verwoerd, Rand Daily Mail, November
23, 1961

Quotes by Israeli Individuals and Organizations on the Apartheid Analogy

“The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.”

—Former Israeli Minister for Education and Israeli Prize laureate Shulamit Aloni, Yediot Acharonot, December 20, 2006.

“Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same are and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, as is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

—Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank, May 2002

 “It goes without saying that ‘cooperation’ based on the current power relationship is no more than permanent Israeli domination in disguise, and that Palestinian self-rule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanization.”

—Former mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies, 1995

 “To a Jew, to concede the predominance of a racial world view of subjugating Palestinians is difficult to accept. But, unfortunately, the fact of the absence of a racial ideology is not sufficient because the realities that have emerged in some ways are clearly reminiscent of some of the important trappings of an apartheid regime.”

—Israeli lawyer Daniel Seidemann, quoted by Chris McGreal, “Brothers in arms: Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria,” Mail & Guardian, October 24, 2006

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/downloads/AAFQuotes.pdf