Via Desert Peace. Ronnie Kasrils — Palestine at the Crossroads (pdf).

He blames the violence on those who refused to accept the vote of the Palestinian people. (Hamas 74 seats, Fatah 45).

Instead of fostering division and disunity they should have been following President Mbeki’s advice of ‘ending all measures intended to isolate the Palestine Authority,’ release funds, reduce misery, and ‘create a climate conducive to peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’

He likened the factional violence to South Africa’s ‘black on black’ violence well known pre-1994, and linked to old order apartheid security elements. This brings to mind that awful aim of Israel’s General Eytan and his ‘drugged cockroaches in a corked bottle’ phraseology which spelt out Israel’s war of attrition – the objective of which has been to pit Palestinian inmate against inmate in sealed Bantustan-style prisons.

[...] Those Palestinians who managed to remain within Israel’s 1948 borders live as discriminated citizens in a virtual apartheid-type existence. So impressed was [South Africa's racist Prime Minister] Dr. Verwoerd, that he stated admiringly in 1961:

‘The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel like South Africa is an apartheid state.’