Today is Yom Ha’Shoah, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day. In previous years, it was a solemn occasion to honour the memory of the murdered six million. Today, it has an additional significance: to guard the meaning of genocide itself. In an era where genocide has been robbed of all sense, including, in Pedro Sánchez, by the leader of a powerful, Western nation, the few sane souls left have the duty to bequeath truth to the next generation.
It didn’t start with genocide though. It began, in South Africa of all places, with the repurposing of apartheid, one of the great moral crimes of the 20th Century. As with genocide, converted into a weapon of antisemitism by the evil and the ignorant, apartheid was ripped from the memory of South Africa’s oppressed black majority and converted into the latest verbal pogrom.
The genealogy of language inversion from apartheid to genocide via ethnic cleansing and colonialism has been swift and painful. It is delegitimising the Jewish people as we speak and the true import of the Holocaust has already been forgotten.
In this much needed restatement of fact, Uri forensically lays out the evidence, starting with definition of apartheid in its South African crib and overlaying it with the multicultural reality of modern Israel. The case is clear, compelling…and obvious. Unfortunately, as with genocide, evidence is a post-truth irrelevance to those that who traffic in antisemitism.
If you care for truth, read on. If, however, you reject fact for anti-Jewish demonisation, continue as you are. Lie away. For you and Sánchez, like Haman before, will be condemned to the infamy of history. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor)
Other titles from the Guerre & Shalom Publishing House:
BLURB: What if the world’s oldest hatred didn’t disappear—only learned new grammar? What if antisemitism no longer arrives as theology or race science, but dressed up as “human rights,” “decolonization,” and the moral language of the age? Rooted Truth exposes the continuity of the lie—and why Israel became its preferred target.
With historical depth and briefing-grade clarity, Uri Zehavi traces the Jewish people’s unbroken connection to the Land of Israel—from covenant to exile, from Balfour to Ben-Gurion—and shows how history, law, and identity converge in one stubborn fact: the Jews are home. Across four parts, he dismantles the propaganda that now passes for analysis: the myth that Jewish indigeneity is metaphor, the weaponization of “apartheid/colonialism/genocide,” the bureaucracies of denial that launder bias into legitimacy, and the moral case for sovereignty and survival.
Clear. Disciplined. Unapologetic. Not a plea for sympathy, Rooted Truth is a legal brief, a moral argument, and a warning. The campaign to turn Israel into a question mark is a campaign against truth itself.
Rooted Truth: Israel’s Case Against the Deniers
by Uri Zehavi
Preface & Introduction: The Return of the Lie // Chapter 1: Setting the Record Straight // Chapter 2: From Balfour to Independence // Chapter 3: By Right, Not Permission
Part Two: Weaponization of Language
Chapter 4: Apartheid as Propaganda
Apartheid. The word itself is a curse in the political lexicon. It conjures passbooks, police raids, and the sound of bulldozers flattening black neighborhoods in South Africa. It meant benches labeled Whites Only and families dragged from homes they built because a white government wanted the land. Apartheid was not a vague prejudice. It was a system of law built on race, enforced by violence, and proud of both.
Under that regime, every South African carried a racial ID card—white, black, “Coloured,” or Asian—and that card decided where you could live, whom you could marry, and what rights you could never have. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 criminalized marriage across racial lines. The Group Areas Act of 1950 herded non-whites out of cities and into barren “homelands,” leaving the white minority, just one-fifth of the population, in control of nearly all the land and all the power.
Black South Africans could not vote in national elections, could not hold office, and could not live in “white” zones except as servants. Apartheid was state-mandated racial supremacy. It declared one group master and the rest permanent subordinates.
Now, keep that system in mind and look at the accusation flung at Israel today. “Israel is an apartheid state,” the slogan goes—chanted on campuses, printed on placards, and repeated in glossy reports by NGOs that long ago traded credibility for applause.
“Apartheid” functions as political shorthand for absolute evil, the one accusation that cancels dialogue. Call Israel an apartheid state and you need no evidence, no argument, no context. You have pronounced the moral death sentence.
That is why the word is used. It collapses history into propaganda. The people chanting it could not tell you what South African apartheid actually was, or what Israeli law actually says. They do not have to. The label does the work. It transforms a Jewish democracy into a colonial caricature and its citizens into villains unworthy of defense. It is not a charge that invites scrutiny. It is a weapon designed to shame and silence.
The claim that Israel practices apartheid fails every test—legal, factual, and moral. What it reveals, instead, is how language itself has become a battlefield, where the old war against Jewish existence now marches under the banner of “human rights.” The apartheid slur endures for one reason: not because it is true, but because it is useful.
Israel’s Reality of Equal Citizenship
Start with the country as it is, not as a chant imagines it. Inside Israel’s sovereign borders, citizens share the same civil and political rights in law and in practice. Arab citizens vote in every national election. They serve in the Knesset, lead parties, chair committees, and argue bills on the same floor as Jewish legislators. Israel has appointed Christian Arab ambassadors abroad; George Deek’s posting to Azerbaijan is one example. Another, Christian Arab jurist, Salim Joubran of Haifa, sat on the Supreme Court and chaired the Central Elections Committee—he literally ran the national vote. Under real apartheid that sentence would be a punch line. In Israel, it is just business as usual.
Equality is written into the state’s founding promise and carried forward in the Basic Laws that protect human dignity and liberty. Courts read those guarantees broadly. Citizens use them daily. Arab mayors run Arab towns. Arab lawyers argue before Jewish and Arab judges. Arab and Druze officers command Jewish soldiers. In 2021 Mansour Abbas and the Ra’am party signed a coalition deal and became indispensable to forming a government. He negotiated budgets and delivered billions for Arab municipalities. That is democratic power, not apartheid.