No.

Here's what I did say on the issue of Israel/South Africa parallels during the bullshit Annapolis conference:

"Let's discuss Israel/South Africa parallels in light of what's "on the table" at Annapolis. I think a lot of people who sympathize with the Palestinians are falling for a version of the "two-state solution" which is basically the same as what the apartheid government offered Black South Africans in the 1980s: an "independent" state consisting of unviable Bantustans, with continued exploitation of migrant labor. Most people do not know that, in 2007, white South Africans still have 80% of the arable land in South Africa, and overall apartheid didn't really die in economic terms. I think we should be extremely suspicious of the "peace process" allegedly unfolding in the West Bank and the other Occupied Territories on the same grounds.

A lot of people (including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) have made the apartheid/Zionism comparison, but I think there are four major similarities between the two conflicts that don't get discussed often enough.

1) The often-repeated argument that Palestinians are better off in the Occupied Territories and Israel than in the neighboring Arab states. White South Africans made (and still make) exactly the same argument, but about Blacks being better off in apartheid South Africa than in Black-ruled African states. See, for example, this blog post by a white South African retrospectively defending apartheid, in which he repeats this and similar arguments echoing those used by Zionists:

http://jamesbradfordpate.blogspot.com/2007/10/where-were-you-during-apartheid.html

In both cases, the claim is true by some measurements, but a) doesn't make the group in question any less oppressed by the state in question, and b) ignores the interventions of that same state in the neighboring ones harboring refugee populations, which affected how Palestinians and Blacks in Namibia, Angola and Mozambique were treated, respectively. We can also add c) the erstwhile support of the U.S. and Israel for allied Arab dictatorships (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia), and the erstwhile support of the U.S. and apartheid South Africa for Mobutu's Zaire, Idi Amin's Uganda, Emperor Boukassa's Central African Republic, and other dictatorships.

In the case of b), the apartheid South Africa/Israel parallels get really striking. Like Israel in 1967, South Africa invaded and annexed what is now Namibia (as a sort of Occupied Territory re-named Southwest Africa) during WWI, supposedly as part of the Allies' war effort (it was a German colony). They stayed there until 1988. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the South African army made incursions into Southwest Africa to crush the independence group SWAPO, partly because it aided and harbored Black militants from South Africa. When the Portuguese withdrew from their African colonies in 1975, revolutionary Communist governments who supported South African Black militant groups came to power in Angola (the MPLA) and Mozambique (FRELIMO). Both groups harbored ANC members, and on these grounds South Africa invaded Angola and Mozambique repeatedly during the 1970s and 1980s. South African refugees in these countries were also terrorized by South African and U.S.-funded/armed proxy armies (UNITA and Angola and RENAMO in Mozambique) that attacked Black South African refugee camps and African National Congress militant strongholds. Cuba sent thousands of troops to Angola and Namibia to fight on the side of the MPLA and their South African allies, bolstering the apartheid government's claims that their brutal invasions and repression in the Bantustans were both part of the Cold War. (The U.S. supported all this, of course, with the Reagan and Bush I administrations calling Mandela's African National Congress a "terrorist organization" tied to Communism and the Evil Empire.)

Similarly, it was partly conflict with the Arab states, and partly conflict with those Palestinians who left the Mandatory territory to become refugees in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan in 1948, that led to Israel's 1967 invasion and 1967-present occupation of chunks of each of those states. Like South Africa's attempts to crush Black South African militants operating out of Namibia, Angola and Mozambique, Israel has repeatedly invaded Jordan, Lebanon and Syria since 1967 in order to crush the PLO, which (like the African National Congress) was sponsoring attacks on military and civilian targets within Israel. Israeli and U.S. support for the Maronites in Lebanon, King Hussein of Jordan (who directed the massacre of thousands of Palestian refugees in 1970 Black September Episode), and Hosni Mubarak's police state in Egypt have been major factors in the shitty treatment of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Notice that I didn't say "the only factor," just a major one.

2) Like Palestinians in Mandatory Palestine before 1948, and in the Occupied Territories since 1967, Blacks were a majority in South Africa. Like Jews in Israel, whites in South Africa were a majority in "white South Africa," which consisted of designated areas in which Blacks were kept a minority (like Arabs in Israel), but brought in and out from the Bantustans daily as temporary laborers. According to the apartheid government, the Bantustans were independent states, so keeping them all-Black and the rest of South Africa under white rule was defended as just, a sort of two-state solution. It just happened to be the case that whites had 90% of the arable land in South Africa as a whole (they still have 80% of it in 2007), and the Bantustans were essentially native reserves built on the most marginal land. Similarly, in the Palestinian-majority Occupied Territories, the Israeli settlers have claimed the best land. They control the major aquifers in the West Bank and the (Lebanese) Shabat Farms, for example, leaving many Palestinians dependent on inferior well water.

3) Also, in both cases there was/is a spectrum of opinion that shouldn't be reduced to what extreme ideologues say. Some South African Blacks wanted all whites to leave; others, like the ANC, wanted a single multiracial state with equal rights for all; and a sell-out fringe supported the apartheid government's supposedly "separate but equal" two-state solution. Hamas has made some statements analogous to the extreme South African groups, but now accepts the Arab League position of a two-state settlement on the pre-1967 borders. Fatah (the degraded remnant of the PLO) is a lot like the Bantustan leaders backed by Botha and Vorster, e.g. accepting a non-viable statelet with major chunks left to Israeli settlers, under economic strangulation. There have always been Palestinians who supported a single-state solution with equal rights for all (the late Edward Said was one of them). Yet they have been demonized as wanting "the destruction of Israel" when they call for a single state that is pluralistic (not a "Jewish state" OR an "Islamic state"), just as the ANC was accused of wanting to drive the Afrikaners into the sea.

At this point, though (and this is the major difference between Israel and South Africa) a two-state settlement on the pre-1967 borders is probably the best likely outcome, and the international consensus. So a pluralistic single-state solution, as in South Africa, is probably not in the cards. (And, looking at the extent to which the post-apartheid South Africa remains economically white-dominated, not taking that path may be a good thing.) So we're left with, at best, a more humane version of the "separate but equal" two-state solution advocated by the apartheid government in South Africa. What's being proposed at Annapolis right now is basically this minus the "more humane" part. (East Jerusalem, major West Bank settlements blocs and a separation wall beyond the 1967 borders in places is being assumed as a sin qua non by the Olmert government.)

4) In both cases, the oppressive arrangement was defended on geopolitical and security grounds: apartheid was supposedly part of the Cold War; the occupation was supposedly part of the Cold War until 1989, and since 2001 it has been part of the War on Terror. There was/is a kernel of truth in each of these global pretexts, which are related to U.S. involvement in both regions. Cuba and the Soviets did support the MPLA, RENAMO, SWAPO and the ANC to counter the U.S. and its major African ally; Iran does support Hezbollah and Hamas as a way of countering Israel, as it supports Shiite militants in Iraq to counter the U.S. The ANC and the PLO both were labelled terrorist organizations, and did support certain brutal actions that killed innocent civilians. But, as Tariq Ali has said of Palestinian suicide bombers vs. the Israeli army, "the boot of murder is overwhelmingly on the other foot." That was true in South Africa (2 million killed in the apartheid government's invasions of neighboring states in the 1970s/80s, untold thousands of Blacks in South Africa, vs. a few hundred whites), and it's true in Israel through the intifidas (tens of thousands killed in the Israeli invasions of Lebanon; a ratio of 3:1 Palestinian to Israel deaths even at the height of the intifadas, and much higher before and after them). It's also true of Iraq (bombing+sanctions+more bombing vs. car bombs and IEDs) but I don't want to get sidetracked into that.

In the end, you can't defend either apartheid or the occupation on the grounds of violent or stupid actions performed by those resisting it, because each involves institutionalized violence on a much larger scale."