Home > Rubriques > Languages - International > English > S. African Jewish minister sends support to `Israeli Apartheid Week (...)

Jerusalem Post (London)

S. African Jewish minister sends support to `Israeli Apartheid Week organizers

By Johnny Paul

Monday 26 February 2007

A Jewish member of South Africa`s cabinet has sent a message of support to the organizers of last week`s `Israeli Apartheid Week` at London University`s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa`s minister for intelligence, sent the letter to the Palestinian Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies. In the the message, Kasrils said he was writing `in his personal capacity,` the Palestinian Society said.

Nevertheless, it cited his position and was titled a `message of support from South Africa.`

`Please convey to all involved my wholehearted support for your week of solidarity with the Palestinian people in your appropriately entitled `Israeli Apartheid Week,` he wrote.

`This year sees the 60th anniversary of the UN Partition Plan that set in motion the monstrous Zionist plot to violently dispossess the Palestinian people of their land and rights, and their dispersal through serial ethnic cleansing that has continued in one form or another to this day.

`To any fair minded person, this process of colonial-style dispossession is the fundamental cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is certainly akin to the racist-style humiliation and brutality of the notorious apartheid system under which South Africa`s landless and dispossessed people suffered,` he continued.

Lorna Daniels, a spokeswoman for Kasrils, told The Jerusalem Post: `It is quite clear that it was administered in Ronnie Kasril`s private capacity. It was not done on official paper and was clearly signed and delivered in his private capacity.`

Kasrils has been minister for intelligence services since 2004. He has been a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress since 1987 and a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party since 1986.

A.K.