By Deon de Lange
MPs on Friday gave the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Dov Segev-Steinberg, a severe tongue-lashing, accusing his government of perpetrating "racist" abuses against the Palestinian people "that make apartheid look like a Sunday school picnic".
And as the war in Gaza rages for its fourth week, Cosatu has called for the Israeli ambassador to be "kicked out" of South Africa, for the embassy to be "shut down," for a "total boycott of Israeli goods" and for the "savage rule of Zionism over the Palestinian territories to come to and end".
A red-faced and clearly agitated Segev-Steinberg dismissed apartheid comparisons as "rubbish," but the National Assembly's foreign affairs committee chairperson, Job Sithole, was unrelenting in his condemnation of the Israeli government and its armed forces.
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"When Palestinians have to go through checkpoints like cattle through a dip, this is apartheid. When they cannot drive on the roads by virtue of the fact that they are Palestinian, this is apartheid," the chairperson insisted.
He was supported by ANC MP Patrick Sibande, who, in an angry tirade against the ambassador, accused the Israeli government of an "ethnic cleansing" programme against Palestinians.
"Why always when there is destruction, Israel is involved … I feel very strongly that this is part of an ethnic cleansing programme … I think this is a seizure of power that you are doing there …" he said.
ANC MP Albertinah Luthuli, granddaughter of the late ANC leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Luthuli, also slammed the ambassador for his government's refusal to allow international journalists into the Gaza Strip.
"It seems as though Israel is saying 'we should just go in there and kill those people willy-nilly and there should be no independent reporting'."
Referring to the thousands of rockets Hamas combatants have fired at Israeli over the past eight years, Luthuli said "one has to say they do very little damage compared to what Israel is doing in Gaza".
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