Copmparing Israel with South Africa

Since Israel is often compared with South Africa nowadays, I decided to look at the demographics.

In 1990, when Mandela was freed, the population of South Africa was 30 million of whom 5 million were white. Twenty years later the population is: blacks 40 million, whites 4 million. (800,000 whites have left since 1995.) That means that whites are outnumbered by blacks by ten to one.

The figures for Israel are more difficult to determine, but it seems that:

The State of Israel had a population of approximately 7,503,800 inhabitants as of December 2009. 75.4% of them were Jewish (about 5,660,700 individuals), 20.3% were Arabs (about 1,523,900 inhabitants), while the remaining 4.3% (about 319,200 individuals) were defined as "others" (family members of Jewish immigrants who were not registered at the Interior Ministry as Jews, non-Arab Christians, non-Arab Muslims and residents who do not have a religious classification).

That doesn't count the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. If they are counted, then the Arab population is nearly 50% of the total.

Obviously Israel and South Africa cannot be compared historically or culturally. Although some Boers thought of South Africa as the Promised Land, it was not regarded by all Christians as such. And, although my Protestant Huguenot ancestors left France for the Cape of Good Hope 330 years ago to escape persecution by Catholics, they were not murdered by the millions like the Jews. (It's estimated that only a quarter of a million French Huguenots were killed or driven from their lands.) The plight of the Boers, in the eyes of sympathetic Europeans and Americans, is that they unfortunately picked the wrong place to settle.

But the plight of Jews is different. Israel was not only their refuge from anti-Semitism but, according to the Bible, it's the land that God gave them.

Now I'm going to commit heresy in the eyes of American conservatives.

I'm not a Bible-believing Christian so the whole "Promised Land" meme is not part of my thinking. I'm not a Zionist and don't understand why European Jews did not come to America to escape European anti-Semitism. Apart from the Biblical meme, what other reason was there for Europeans to settle in that part of the world?

Okay, the Jews are there now but they are not outnumbered ten to one by Arabs as the whites in South Africa are by blacks. So what's the problem? Why can't they face facts like the South Africans did?

Here's something that I did not know:

Israel has two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew is the primary language of the state and is spoken by the majority of the population. Arabic is spoken by the Arab minority and Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab lands (by 2002 these Jews and their descendants constituted about 40% of Israel's population.)

But I did know that 60% of the Jews in Israel are Europeans. They're immigrants just like the whites in South Africa and will have to adapt to reality.

Maybe the Israeli Jews are up against more dangerous enemies than white South Africans ever were. But the rest of Africa aided and abetted the African National Congress terrorists for decades in South Africa and Russia, through its proxy, Cuba, also waged war on South Africa for many years.

I'm not saying that I am not sympathetic to the Israeli Jews. Of course I am but I'm not more sympathetic to them than I am to white South Africans. It isn't easy being a small civilized and democratic island in an ocean of relative barbarity.

I don't have the answers - mostly because I'm not Israeli and am ignorant of the whole picture but also because I saw how stupid and destructive European and American interference in South Africa was. I also realize that it's probably not fair to compare Israel to South Africa.

It used to drive me nuts when ignorant Americans used to compare South Africa with the American South. South Africa has ten blacks for every one white. In certain states in the Deep South blacks make up 40% of the population. That's not quite the same.

Maybe Israel could be more accurately compared with the Deep South.