...named Farid Esack speaking on Israel/South Africa parallels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGWFnsqLPVE

He's a Black South African Muslim theologian, now a visiting professor at the Harvard Divinity School. The immediately rewarding stuff, regarding specific commentaries on what's discussed in this thread, begins at the 12:50 mark, although the beginning (a long anecdote and which takes longer to absorb) is excellent and thought-provoking at a higher level of abstraction. After describing the white minority regime's police state terror, he says that he and many other South African comrades who fought apartheid, and know the details of the "Israel/Palestine conflict," believe the following:

"I am quite clear that the Palestinians, what they are experiencing, is infinitely worse than what we have ever experienced under apartheid, and the price that they have to pay for resistance much more horrendous, in at least several different areas. the white people in South Africa had never envisaged their futures entirely without Blacks. What people created these Bantustans, and these Bantustans were going to be reservoirs of labor that white people needed. White people needed Black people, and needing of Black people, there was a combination--there was a benign-ness in the middle of all of this repression. Many whites actually grew up fond of Blacks. "Oh, Blacks as our housekeepers, Blacks as our gardeners, Blacks as nannies for the children."

"There was never actually a move to wipe Black people out of South Africa."

Whereas many Israelis, well before the Holocaust (read Jabotinski, for example) and on into the present continue to fantasize about a Jewish-only, or artifically constructed Jewish-majority, Greater Israel.

I love the broad way in which he frames the problem of Zionist exceptionalism. After comparing the 'foundation myths' of the Masai in Kenya (according to which all the cattle in the world belong to them, so they can enter the lands of others to take cattle), to the Africaners in South Africa (according to which they were 'there before' indigenous African population) to the Ulsters in Northern Ireland (according to which they are the rightful owners of the land, not the indigenous population), to the Serbs in former Yugoslavia (guess what they believe), he asks:

"Why should we not hold their creation myths in more reverence ? What elevates the Zionist foundation myths above others such that theirs are beyond critical scrutiny? What process of history involving power and the powerful transforms the foundation myths of some people into folklore, and others' into non-negotiable truths that must not be measured by the standards of universal human rights? But all of us, including normal, critical scholars, must now tip-toe around."

Great stuff.

Another great part, using the Adam and Eve myth as an example:
"Am I frozen in an ahistorical definition of what is means to be, if I insist, for example, that my manhood is intrinsically connected to my being in relation to you as a woman, but in relation Eve was created from the rib of Adam? And she was created for Adam? So my existence as a man-this is my identity in relation to you as a woman-if I insist that this foundation myth must imply a superiority over you, you have every right to say: "Well, I'm really sorry, but your "being a man" must be revised. You may want to ascribe this value to your masculine identity, but if it is tied to my inferiority as a woman, I'm really sorry, but you've got to find another way of being a man.

If your Muslim-ness is tied to the supremacy of Muslims over others, you've got to find another way of being a Muslim than expecting me to buy into your Muslim-ness. If your Jewish-ness implies a chosen-ness, or a connection to a particular land that other people were living in, I'm really sorry, I can't stand in reverence at your creation myths.

And so, the question then is not simply one of "Who I am?" but "Who do I want to become as I grow into a deeper awareness of my own identity-constructions for the lesser one?" All notions of unchanging selves are ultimately at the heart of racism, chauvinism, literalism and fundamentalism. And within them are the seeds of the mistrust of all endevours that seriously engage other people, and that take the quest for justice seriously."