A South African in Hebron

AFP/Getty Images Palestinian schoolgirls taking a shortcut to avoid Hebron settlers

It is hard to avoid talk of Jimmy Carter's comparison of Israel with Apartheid South Africa. So I thought I'd check in with a visiting delegation of South African politicians, human rights activists, clergymen, and professors who toured Israel at the West Bank. The first stop, as it often is for VIP visitors to Israel, was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum.

I'll let one of the delegates --Andrew Feinstein, a former parliamentarian from the African National Congress and a Jew-- tell his story. “My mother was the only one of 11 brothers and sisters who wasn't killed at Auschwitz, so the museum visit was extremely emotional for me. There were words at the entrance to Yad Vashem, something like: ‘A country is to be judged not on what it does but on what it tolerates' and I thought: How true.'”

Feinstein and the 22 others spent Wednesday in Hebron, and those words came back to haunt him. “To me, what I saw in Hebron, defiles the memory of the Holocaust and the name of Judaism.” Strong words, and not ones that Feinstein uses carelessly.

First, he says, the Israeli army arrested three Israeli organizers from a human rights group called Breaking the Silence, in an obvious effort to turn back the delegation from the city where less than a thousand settlers, and their IDF bodyguards have succeeded in paralyzing Palestinian life in the heart of Hebron. The Jewish settlers then charged the South Africans with a megaphone. “One of them shouted with the megaphone right in my ear: ‘Just like you're killing children under Apartheid, I'm killing my enemy,' Feinstein recounts. “Strange. The settler didn't even know that Apartheid was long over.”

Next, they were taken to an old and sick Palestinian woman who recounted how the settlers routinely harass and intimidate her to leave so they can occupy her house. They were shown a video of Jewish settler children hurling rocks at tiny Palestinian schoolgirls while Israeli soldiers looked on, doing nothing. “I understand Israel's fears for its security but that doesn't justify what they're doing in the name of Judaism. That famous phrase: “Never Again”, was never just about the Jews. It was about all of humanity."

And is Israeli practicing Apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories? Feinstein replies: “No, historically, it's very different. But there's a massive imbalance of rights, with many instances of Israelis de-humanizing Palestinians, and that's the basis of all racism.”

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem