Any time that a politician or commentator compares the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to South Africa under apartheid, the response is swift denunciation. Yet many prominent, respected academics and politicians—including Jimmy Carter—have drawn such parallels, arguing that Israel’s treatment of its Arab-Israeli citizens and the people of the occupied territories amounts to no less a system of oppression than apartheid did.
Peoples Apart marks the first major scholarly attempt to analyze the apartheid analogy and its implications for international law, activism, and policy making. Gathering contributors from a wide range of disciplines and fields, including historians, political scientists, journalists, lawyers, and policy makers, the collection offers a bold, incisive perspective on one of the defining moral questions of our age.
Any time that a politician or commentator compares the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to South Africa under apartheid, the response is swift denunciation. Yet many prominent, respected academics and politicians—including Jimmy Carter—have drawn such parallels, arguing that Israel’s treatment of its Arab-Israeli citizens and the people of the occupied territories amounts to no less a system of oppression than apartheid did.
Peoples Apart marks the first major scholarly attempt to analyze the apartheid analogy and its implications for international law, activism, and policy making. Gathering contributors from a wide range of disciplines and fields, including historians, political scientists, journalists, lawyers, and policy makers, the collection offers a bold, incisive perspective on one of the defining moral questions of our age.
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Overview
Any time that a politician or commentator compares the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to South Africa under apartheid, the response is swift denunciation. Yet many prominent, respected academics and politicians—including Jimmy Carter—have drawn such parallels, arguing that Israel’s treatment of its Arab-Israeli citizens and the people of the occupied territories amounts to no less a system of oppression than apartheid did.
Peoples Apart marks the first major scholarly attempt to analyze the apartheid analogy and its implications for international law, activism, and policy making. Gathering contributors from a wide range of disciplines and fields, including historians, political scientists, journalists, lawyers, and policy makers, the collection offers a bold, incisive perspective on one of the defining moral questions of our age.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783605897 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zed Books |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2015 |
| Pages: | 225 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Ilan Pappé is professor of history, codirector of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies, and director of Palestinian Studies Centre, all at the University of Exeter.
Read an Excerpt
Israel and South Africa
The Many Faces of Apartheid
By Ilan Pappé
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Ilan PappéAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-590-3
CHAPTER 1
Birds of a Feather: Israel and Apartheid South Africa – Colonialism of a Special Type
RONNIE KASRILS
Victory over fascism in 1945 raised the hope of freedom throughout the world. The stage was set for the de-colonisation of Africa and Asia – yet 1948 proved to be an annus horribilis for both black South Africans and native Palestinians, with the hawks of war darkening their skies. For South Africans, May 1948 marked the election of the apartheid government, consolidating over three centuries of colonial conquest and subjugation, and the prelude to a forty-six-year maelstrom. For the Palestinians, 1948 opened a truly catastrophic era (Al-Nakbah) of brutal dispossession at the hands of a rampant Zionist project, resulting in expulsion from a land they had inhabited continuously for millennia, and the displacement by an exclusivist Jewish settler state whose unilateral independence was declared on 15 May that year. While apartheid was replaced in 1994 by a democratic, non-racist, non-sexist, unitary state of equal citizens, the suffering of the Palestinians only gets more excessive, and a just solution appears more distant.
While there are Zionist apologists who decry the likening of the policy and practices of the apartheid state with those of its Israeli counterpart, the blatant similarities of these two birds of a feather were vividly illustrated by the words of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd – former South African prime minister and the architect of 'Grand Apartheid'. In 1961, when expressing his deep admiration for Israel's foundation and socio-political architecture – and, more especially, for its character as an exclusivist, ethnic state, with special privileges in law for Jews, and the displacement of native Palestinians by foreigners – stated that: 'The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel like South Africa is an Apartheid state'.
Much has been written about the similarities between the legal and legislative framework governing Israel and Apartheid South Africa, the seminal work of which is Uri Davis' Israel: An Apartheid State (which referred mainly to Israel itself). The laws and measures adopted by Israel, whether civil or military, closely mirror those of South Africa before and especially during the apartheid period. Among these were the notorious nationality or race laws of both states which excluded non-Jews or non-whites, as the case might be, from the entitlement and privileges of full citizenship; the land and property laws that made it illegal for those same categories of people to own or lease land or own businesses, purchase or rent homes, except in specific areas; the issuing of identity cards based on strict racial classification and reinforced by obsessive Kafkaesque controls, which greatly limited the freedom of movement of Palestinians or black South Africans, including the right to live, work, study, play, relax, travel and be buried where they wished; and, scandalously, even laws affecting the rights of mixed-marriage couples, and so on.
The United Nations (UN) Convention Against Apartheid could have been written for Israel:
Any measures, including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof [is apartheid and illegal].
It is necessary to note that this legal framework relates to all Palestinians, whether they live within Israel as second-class, discriminated citizens with limited rights, or they are in the Occupied Territories, or they are refugees who fled abroad. The similarities with apartheid are remarkable and abundant, including the master-race psychosis engendered; the cruelty and race hatred generated; and the systemic trampling underfoot of the dignity of Arab or African. It is this colonial-type symbiosis on which this chapter will focus. Israel, from its very conception and inception, embodies similar features ascribed to 'Colonialism of a Special Type' (CST), the term coined by the South African Communist Party in 1962 in its characterisation of Apartheid South Africa. The thesis helped shape the strategy and tactics of the national liberation struggle and bears repeating here:
The conceding of independence to South Africa by Britain in 1910 was not a victory over the forces of colonialism and imperialism. It was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred not into the hands of the masses of people of South Africa, but into the hands of the White minority alone. The evils of colonialism, insofar as the Non-White majority are concerned, were perpetuated and reinforced. A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them.
On one level, that of White South Africa, there are all the features of an advanced capitalist state in its final stage of imperialism ... But on another level, that of Non-White South Africa, there are all the features of a colony. The indigenous population is subjected to extreme national oppression, poverty and exploitation, lack of all democratic rights and political domination ... The African Reserves show the complete lack of industry, communications and power resources which are characteristic of African territories under colonial rule throughout the Continent. Typical too of imperialist rule is the reliance by the state upon brute force and terror ... Non-White South Africa is the colony of White South Africa itself.
It is this combination of the worst features of both imperialism and colonialism, within a single national frontier, which determines the special nature of the South African system and has brought upon its rulers the justified hatred and contempt of progressive and democratic people throughout the world ...
If we were to replace the words 'South Africa' with 'Israel' or 'Palestine' depending on the periods; 'White South Africa' with 'the Jewish minority'; 'Non-White South Africa' with 'the Palestinian people'; and 'African Reserves' (i.e., Bantustans) with 'fragmented Palestinian territories', we find an uncanny resemblance between the colonial Apartheid South African model and that of Zionist Israel. The conceding of independence by Britain to the white minority in South Africa in 1910 is comparable to the 1947 partition deal that paved the way for the handing over of power in Palestine to the Jewish minority.
It is not at all difficult to demonstrate Zionist Israel's colonial agenda. Indeed, from the early so-called political Zionists onwards, to Israel's first prime minister and the associated military strongmen, we learn straight from the horse's mouth about the true colonial nature and objectives of their project, which at definitive times they did not bother to conceal.
The founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, stated in 1896 that once a Jewish state was established the aim would be to: 'Spirit the penniless population [the Palestinians] across the borders and be rid of them'.
According to Vladmir Jabotinsky, whose outspoken political radicalism of the 1930s has triumphed in Fortress Israel:
Zionist colonisation ... must ... be ... carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonisation can therefore continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy'.
Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who normally went to great lengths to conceal the true agenda, stated in an off-the-record discourse in the 1950s:
Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them. Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis ... but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their country.
Moshe Dayan, as outspokenly hawkish as Jabotinsky, unabashedly explained:
Before [the Palestinians'] very eyes we are possessing the land and villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived ... We are the generation of colonisers, and without the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home.
Such statements, consistently expressed by Zionist leaders from the time of Herzl, reliably contextualise Israel's expansionist objective and provide the clues as to why it has not been interested in real peace terms. Given the consistency of such formulations, which are not simply isolated rhetoric since they have been realised in systematically consistent actions and serial aggression, it becomes obvious that Israel's existence has been based on colonial conquest, annexation (whenever the time is ripe), ever expanding settlement, and, in those words of South Africa's CST definition, 'constitute the reliance by the state upon brute force and terror'.
The question arises: does the CST analogy assist in understanding the Palestinian–Israeli situation and does it point to its resolution? We can examine this by referring to Shamil Jeppie, a South African academic, who has provided a useful analogy in the article 'Israel: A Colonial Settler State? What Kind of Decolonisation? Some Reflections from Africa'.
Jeppie's starting point was the French historian Maxime Rodinson's celebrated essay on Israel, a 'colonial-settler' phenomenon, written forty years ago. Jeppie writes that Rodinson's arguments 'remain persuasive and valid for scholars looking for conceptual language to understand the origins and practices of the Israeli state, and for activists whose sympathies lie with the cause of the Palestinians'.
I totally concur and am of the view that it is essential to grasp the colonial factor in understanding the Palestinian case: a national liberation struggle of the indigenous and uprooted Palestinians against a colonial-settler project whose community has come to acquire a distorted national identity within the same territory, i.e., the CST paradigm. It is Zionist Israel's racist, colonialist agenda that is the fundamental cause of the conflict, as was the case in the South African example. After dealing with the validity of this for analytical purposes, I will return later to the relevance for activism.
It stems from the Zionist world view: its belief in a perpetual anti-Semitism that requires that Jewish people around the world – a faith group – usurp as a national home the territory of another people. The biblical narrative was evoked to proclaim Palestine as the 'Promised Land' reserved exclusively for God's 'chosen people' and their civilising mission. It sounds all too familiar, as the vision of the South African colonial settlers and exponents of apartheid was similar. In history, this has consistently given rise to racism, segregation and a total onslaught on those who stand in the way, whether Africans or Arabs, native Americans, Asians or Aboriginals. As with those whites who joined in the struggle for South Africa's liberation, many Jews, within Israel and even globally, reject the Zionist world view, and declare that being anti-Zionist and critical of Israel does not equate with anti-Semitism – any more than the accident of possessing a white pigmentation meant one was a proponent of apartheid.
Far from being a land without people, as Zionist propaganda falsely proclaimed, to attract and justify colonial settlement, the fact was that an indigenous people – the Palestinians – lived there and had developed agriculture and towns from Canaanite times over 5,500 years ago. In South Africa, too, colonial and apartheid mythology taught generations of schoolchildren that, when the Dutch colonists arrived on the shores of the Cape in 1652, the 'Bantu tribes' in their migration from the north had barely arrived to cross the Limpopo River into what later became South Africa.
Undermining the Zionist claims on Palestine, a delegation of sceptical Vienna rabbis travelled to the Holy Land in 1898 to assess the Zionist vision and cabled home: 'The Bride is indeed beautiful but already married'. This did not deter the Zionists, who plotted to forcefully abduct the bride and do away with the groom by whatever means necessary; and then to defend what they had stolen at all costs by creating a supremacist 'Fortress State' (as best described by Jabotinsky).
This exactly sums up the bloody and tragic fate that befell the Palestinian people, and their Arab neighbours, at the hands of a predatory, expansionist Zionist project that has been the source of war and untold suffering in the Middle East for sixty-seven years or more (when we include the pre-1948 Zionist settler violence against the indigenous Palestinian population). This colonial dispossession inevitably has regional repercussions for it threatens the entire Middle East, in much the same way that Apartheid South Africa constituted a threat of destabilisation and aggression to the entire Southern African region and beyond with its invasions, use of proxy forces, destruction, assassinations and massacres within and across its borders. From the start, Zionists such as Herzl made no bones about placing a future Jewish state at the disposal of imperialism. Such a state, he promised, would constitute for Europe in Palestine 'a part of the wall against Asia, and serve as the vanguard of civilization against barbarism'. This prophetic racism was amply demonstrated within eight years of Israel's independence, in the joint invasion of Egypt in 1956 with Britain and France, and in the temporary seizure of the Suez Canal. Little wonder that back in 1921 Winston Churchill, then Britain's Colonial Secretary, had observed: 'Zionism is good for the Jews and good for the British Empire'. For the many years of the South African liberation struggle against apartheid, the West similarly saw in the Pretoria regime a bulwark and ally against Soviet communism. And Apartheid South Africa played that card – 'the red peril' – for all its shabby worth.
After the Suez fiasco, America soon demonstrated its willingness to become Israel's chief backer. The late Egyptian scholar Abdelwahab Elmessiri pointed out that Israel had become a 'functional' client state for US interests. It is well documented that it was through America's more than generous assistance in developmental and military aid that Israel became a regional superpower. America has been providing approximately $5 billion in aid annually – $3 billion per annum for military requirements alone since 1967 – and sees Israel as its strategic ally of choice with regard to keeping the oil-rich Middle East under control. An American organisation, Jewish Voice for Peace, has pointed out that US military aid to Israel since 1949 'represents the largest transfer of funds from one country to another in history'. It is estimated that this military aid had amounted to $100 billion by the end of the twentieth century.
As US President Ronald Reagan explained in 1981:
With a combat experienced military, Israel is a force in the Middle East that is actually a benefit to us. If there were not Israel with that force, we'd have to supply it with our own.
President George W. Bush demonstrated Washington's support for Israel with a $30 billion dollar military aid programme announced in 2007 – within a year of Israel's barbaric onslaught on the Lebanon. Then, of course, we have witnessed the scandalous manner in which Washington, with EU complicity, rallied to Israel's support, immediately replenishing its arsenal, after the onslaughts on Gaza from 2009 to 2014.
Israel's partnership with the Western powers ran in tandem with that of South Africa's apartheid state, which loyally proclaimed its service in the anticommunist, Cold War crusade and – like the Zionist state in relation to Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan – sought to destabilise the perceived Sino-Soviet threat in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe. In fact, an unholy alliance between the two emerged when almost the entire world was boycotting South Africa as a leper state – and Israel became its closest ally. The two rogue states connived in secret arms deals and Israel enabled the apartheid state to upgrade its jet fighter squadrons, naval fleet and weapons systems, and helped in the development of seven nuclear devices. The arms industries of the two states became closely intertwined, with billions of dollars' worth of profits generated. It has taken some time for a democratic South Africa to cut this Gordian knot – but, unfortunately, not entirely and not as far as should be the case, ensnared, as a democratic South Africa is, in the grip of a neoliberal paradigm where rhetoric is one thing and action quite another.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Israel and South Africa by Ilan Pappé. Copyright © 2015 Ilan Pappé. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Ilan Pappe
Part 1: Historical Roots
1. Ronnie Kasrils - 'Birds of a Feather: Israel and Apartheid South Africa - Colonialism of a Special Type'.
2. Ilan Pappe - 'The Many Faces of European Colonialism: The Templers, the Basel Mission and the Zionist Movement'.
3. Oren Ben Dor - 'Asking the Question of the Origin of Apartheid'.
Part 2: The Boundaries of Comparison
4. Jonathan Cook - 'Visible equality'' as Confidence Trick'.
5. Leila Farsakh - 'Apartheid, Israel and Palestinian Statehood'.
Part 3: Nuanced Comparisons
6. Anthony Löwstedt - 'Femicide in Apartheid'.
7. Amna Badran - 'The Many Faces of Protest: a Comparative Analysis of Protest Groups in Israel and South Africa'.
Part 4: Future Models and Perspectives
8. Steven Friedman - 'The Inevitable Impossible: South African Experience and a Single State'.
9. Virginia Tilley - 'Have We Passed the Tipping Point? Querying Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism in Israel-Palestine'.
10. Ran Greenstein - 'Israel/Palestine and the apartheid analogy: critics, apologists and strategic lessons'.