NETANYAHU: APARTHEID 2.0?

NETANYAHU: APARTHEID 2.0?

Dividing peoples into good and evil - light and dark - is a classical colonial trope, one Africans unfortunately had to suffer from during Europe's assault on our continent. And now it's being marshalled against the Palestinians.

In this video, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks of a battle between the people of the light and those of darkness - as his country bombs and expands its ground operation into Gaza.

By the 'people of darkness', he will claim he means Israel's enemies. Still, the ease with which he slipped into this kind of Manichaean vocabulary indicates an apparent attempt to 'other' the entire Palestinian population living in Gaza. To us, it smacks of the sort of apartheid we once saw in South Africa. In apartheid South Africa, ethnicities were divided and codified through the Group Areas Act, where the most desirable lands were allocated to the White settler population. Then, the Asians and coloured and, finally, the least desirable slums were reserved for the Blacks. The European settlers justified all this by claiming that this was God's will and the Blacks were savages, aka the 'people of darkness'.

Do you see the parallels we're seeing?