Racism

"If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands."

"Racial segregation must be seen for what it is — and that is an evil system, a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity."

"It is to meekness that Christ summons his followers: Learn from me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. Yes, he was meek. He did indeed carry lightly the heavy burden that far exceeded the powers of a human being, indeed, of humankind. But when someone, at the same time as he himself is carrying this heaviest burden, has the time and the willingness and sympathy and self-sacrifice to concern himself unceasingly with others, to help others, to heal the sick, to visit the miserable, to rescue the despairing-is he not carrying the burden lightly! He carried the heaviest burden in solicitude, solicitude for fallen humankind; but he carried it so lightly that he did not quench a smoking wick or break a bruised reed. As the prototype was, so also ought the follower to be. Thus, if the one who does not know today what he is going to have tomorrow, if he, in accordance with the Gospel test (since Christ did not come into the world in order to abolish worry about making a living by bringing prosperity), does not worry about tomorrow, then he is indeed carrying the heavy burden lightly. If someone who is born a slave, if he, according to the apostle’s fervent admonition (for Christ did not come in order to abolish slavery, even though that will follow from it) is not concerned about freedom and only if it is offered chooses to be free-then he is carrying the heavy burden lightly."

"Who cares if it's legal? I don't care if it's legal. Slavery was legal once too, and not just in America, but just about every other country in the world. The powerful have always legalized their subjugation of the less powerful."

"Yet despite occasional slave rebellions – most famously the Spartacus War of 73 BC – there was no movement to abolish Roman slaveholding, seemingly on the part of anyone. Only occasionally were efforts made to protect slaves from the grossest abuses: Hadrian (r. AD 117-138) unsuccessfully tried to stop slave-traders castrating African boys, while Constantine I (AD 307-337) forbade the practice of facial tattooing – an edict very likely made with overzealous slave-owners in mind. But to go very much further – still less to contemplate a world without slaves – would have been nonsensical. Philosophically, slavery was assumed to be essential to a free society – a natural phenomenon without which liberty for the true and noble Roman could not exist. Economically, the entire edifice of Rome and its empire relied upon mass bondage, facilitated by the same long and complex trading networks that supplied the empire with essential commodities and luxury goods. Ultimately, Rome was a patriarchal society in which slaves occupied a position of inferiority that was simply their lot. John Chrysostom, a Christian preacher of the late third century AD, sketched out this hierarchy for his audience. Even in a poor man’s house, he said: ‘the man rules his wife, the wife rules the slaves, the slaves rule their own wives, and again the men and women rule the children’. During the Middle Ages that followed, slavery declined in scale, yet it remained ubiquitous across the west. And even in places where slavery seemed to die out, its place as a pillar of economy and culture was often replaced by serfdom – a system of human bondage to the land. This was not quite the same as chattel slavery, although the difference would have felt slight to the people involved. And a large part of western attachment to slaving sprang from the fact that slavery had been indistinguishable from Rome’s swaggering glory."

"Slavery was a fact of life throughout the ancient world. Slaves – people defined as property, forced to work, stripped of their rights, and socially ‘dead,’ could be found in every significant realm of the age. In China, the Qin, Han, and Xin dynasties enforced various forms of slavery; so too did ancient rulers of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and India. ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves,’ God told the Israelites, asking them only to refrain from enslaving one another. Yet Rome was different. There have been a bare few handful of examples in recorded history of true ‘slave-states’ in which slavery permeated every facet of society, and on which an entire economy and culture was built. Rome was one."

"The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve."

"Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages and giveth him not for his work."

"Slavery is hard history, it is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it."

"The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object."

"Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come."

"Your favour of July 31, was duly received, and was read with peculiar pleasure. The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor to both the head and heart of the writer. Mine on the subject of slavery of negroes have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain."

"I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it."

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose powers supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."

"There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him."

"Slaves, though held by the laws of men, are free by the laws of God."

"Our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it. Some liberal and conscientious men had indeed, by their conduct and writings, drawn the lawfulness of slavery into question."

"It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused."

"That men should pray and fight for their own freedom, and yet keep others in slavery, is certainly acting a very inconsistent, as well as unjust and, perhaps, impious part, but the history of mankind is filled with instances of human improprieties."

"There are and always will be some who, ashamed of the behavior of their ancestors, try to prove that slavery wasn't so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists and not the habitual lot of the slaves. Men will say (and accept) anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience."

"In Israel, I am now witnessing the apartheid with which I grew up."

"I loved South Africa, but I loathed the apartheid system. In Israel, I saw a fresh start for a people rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, a place of light and justice, as opposed to the darkness and oppression of apartheid South Africa."

"There are no discriminatory laws in Israel and while there are certain practices that may be interpreted as segregation, in fact they are not. ... the Government does not prevent Arab children from attending the bredominantly Jewish schools. ... In the Knesset, the official languages are Arabic and Hebrew, but the Israeli-Arab MKs mostly address the house in Hebrew. This is an indication that there are no major racial divisions in Israel. The quality of life and civil liberties enjoyed by Israeli Arabs are far better than in much of the Middle East. ... Unfortunately, due to propaganda and unprincipled leadership, the majority of ordinary people in the territories still yearn for Jews to leave the region or 'be pushed to the sea'. This is the challenge facing Israel. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that any allegation of 'apartheid state' can be so easily refuted."

"You have Palestinians living in Israel with full political rights. You don’t have discriminatory laws against them, I mean not letting them swim on certain beaches or anything like that. I think it’s unfair to call Israel an apartheid state. If Kerry did so, I think he made a mistake."

"This is a state of apartheid. It's taken me less than a week to lose impartiality. In doing so, I may as well be throwing stones at tanks."

"As somebody who understands the pervasive evil of apartheid, to say 'Israel is an apartheid state' is not only false and prejudicial to Israel, but it undermines the real struggle against apartheid and the integrity of that movement."

"Israel and its defenders often claim that it is the "only democracy in the Middle East." But what I saw was an ethnocracy, where half the people are first-class citizens, and the other half are something less. And this is a system sponsored and endorsed by the United States of America. The endorsement is not contradictory. For most of its history, America too was an ethnocracy in democratic clothing."

"I think some of the frustration that certain, certain people feel about the lack of African American support for this war comes from this notion that we should have people’s back as they drop bombs to try to defend a segregationist apartheid regime. We shouldn’t do that. And we haven’t done that. That’s the history that you allude to, I mean, going back to Angela Davis, to SNCC, to Black Lives Matter. I stand here, or I sit here, very, very humbly as a latecomer to the cause, but someone who has come to the cause nonetheless."

"The word is the most accurate available to describe Palestine. Apartheid is when two different people live in the same land, and they are forcibly segregated, and one dominates or persecutes the other. That's what's happening in Palestine: so the word is very, very accurate. It's used widely, and every day, in Israel."

"Only under a system as warped as apartheid, does a government need to label and treat non-violence as terrorism."

"What does apartheid mean, in Israeli terms? Apartheid means fundamentalist clergy spearheading the deepening of segregation, inequality, supremacism, and subjugation."

"I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. I was one of those people who could be counted on to argue that, while the country's settlement and occupation policies were anti-democratic and brutal and slow-dose suicidal, the word apartheid did not apply. I'm not one of those people any more."

"We now have a law that confirms the Arab population as . It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid. I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that. That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today."

"I think my appointment is the example and answer for those who accuse Israel of being an apartheid state. It shows minorities have equal rights and we are part of the government, the state and the parliament."

"Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude... they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."

"It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through."

"Comparing Israel to apartheid, which most consider slander and simply part of the assault on Israel, is especially sensitive in South Africa where apartheid was born, grew and died."

"Those who use the apartheid accusation employ the old anti-Zionist arguments. These constitute a multi-layered construct of fundamental ideological positions and analytical constructs, one of which is the purposeful displacement of the real nationalist context for historical comprehension of Zionism with the vilifying label of colonialism. Many anti-Zionists, but not necessary all of them, apply identifiable double standards of judgment to Israel traceable to the characteristic anti-Semitic premise that all things Jews do are inherently evil, including their nationalism."

"Since 1967, Israel has built more than 130 settlements (and helped build about 140 settler outposts) in the West Bank...Israeli settlers, who have full civil and political rights and are seamlessly connected to Israel’s infrastructure and resources, reside alongside millions of Palestinians subject to Israeli military rule who have zero say over how they are governed. Numerous leading Israeli and international nongovernmental organizations have likened this bifurcated system to apartheid."

"I know about apartheid. I was born in South Africa and spent 26 years as a journalist specialising in reporting apartheid; I have also written several books about it. I only left South Africa because my newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, of which I was then deputy editor, was closed down by its commercial owners under pressure from the government. We paid the price for being the country's leading voice against apartheid. I also am familiar with Israel. I have lived in Jerusalem since 1997 and for more than 12 years was founder director of the Yakar Center for Social Concern whose purpose was to promote dialogue between Jews and Christians, Jews and Muslims, and Israelis and Palestinians. ... Why do I dismiss the apartheid analogies so emphatically? Because I straddle both apartheid South Africa and Israel today and have knowledge of the good and the ill in both societies."

"The difference between the current Israeli situation and apartheid South Africa is emphasised at a very human level: Jewish and Arab babies are born in the same delivery room, with the same facilities, attended by the same doctors and nurses, with the mothers recovering in adjoining beds in a ward. Two years ago I had major surgery in a Jerusalem hospital: the surgeon was Jewish, the anaesthetist was Arab, the doctors and nurses who looked after me were Jews and Arabs. Jews and Arabs share meals in restaurants and travel on the same trains, buses and taxis, and visit each other’s homes. Could any of this possibly have happened under apartheid? Of course not."

"We know people cannot own property and it can be seized without any compensation, which is what we experienced in our own country. People have to carry identity documents that reflect their ethnicity rather than citizenship. All of this is part of the apartheid feature."

"No apartheid law will erase the fact that in this homeland there are two nations."

"Israel, since its inception, has relied on external support, particularly from the Western world, for justification of its policies in Gaza and the . These relationships are contingent on many things, including values the West claims to hold dear like freedom, democracy, civil rights and equality. The prospect of a negotiated agreement based on two-states has allowed Israel to stave off the confrontation between the myth of these values and the reality on the ground. But as the notion of a two-state agreement fades firmly into history, the apartheid reality becomes impossible to ignore, and further episodes where Israel will confront masses of mobilized Palestinians demanding their rights will continue to highlight this contradiction."

"Pluralistic democracies that respect human rights do not find themselves resorting to using lethal force against demonstrators. That’s what apartheid states do. But Israel has sold itself to the world as something else, a beacon of liberalism and democracy. Few things expose this image as a sham as well as massive non-violent mobilizations or civil disobedience."

"I grew up in South Africa, so believe me when I say: Israel is not an apartheid state ... The difference between the two countries could scarcely be more stark. Under apartheid, a legal structure of racial hierarchy governed all aspects of life. Black South Africans were denied the vote. They were required by law to live, work, study, travel, enjoy leisure activities, receive medical treatment and even go to the lavatory separately from those with a different colour of skin. Interracial relationships and marriages were illegal. It was subjugation in its rawest form. Contrast that with Israel, a country whose Arab, Druze, Bedouin, Ethiopian, Russian, Baha’i, Armenian and other citizens have equal status under the law. Anyone who truly understands what apartheid was cannot possibly look around Israel today and honestly claim there is any kind of parity."

"The "Left" repeatedly calls for boycotts of Israel because it is, they claim, "an apartheid state." Israel is so totally free of apartheid that anyone who has spent ten minutes there knows the accusation to be an outright lie. So why keep on saying something untrue? That is anti-Semitism."

"A Messianic, criminal group who graduated from the hilltop youth took advantage of his weakness, people who do not even understand what democracy is. They came from the West Bank. For 57 years there has been no democracy there. There is absolute apartheid there. The IDF against its will has to enforce sovereignty there and is standing by and watching the rampant settlers and is beginning to be complicit in war crimes. This is 10 times worse than the issue of [the IDF] being ready and training hours. Walk around Hebron and you will see streets where Arabs cannot walk, just like what happened in Germany."

"I was shocked to see these walls, it's a new apartheid, barbaric behavior: How can you impose such a collective punishment and separate people? After all, we are all living on the same planet. It seems to me the world should have already learned from what happened in South Africa. And a country that hasn't learned should be boycotted, so that's why I don't perform in your country."

"The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue."