Professor William Fletcher (former assistant to President John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, former -CEO of the TransAfrica Forum and Belle Zeller Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.) in 1 December 2006 talk at the Palestine Center, entitled, "Two Walled Cities: Jerusalem and Johannesburg, Apartheid and Palestine": “The logic of both Israel and Apartheid-era South Africa can be found in their common origins as settler states. In both cases the settlers created myths, semi-religious or explicitly religious, including that God had provided the land for them and that the land was unoccupied upon arrival...In both cases, the settlers portrayed themselves to be victims against the natives, who were described as semi-barbaric and/or intolerant. Given the permanent state of siege, every settler state's aggression came to be described as a defensive act" (quoted in William Hughes, “Israel is a rabid state”, Rense, 9 December 2006: http://rense.com/general74/isss.htm ).