Mouood Mouood English Edition
In November 1973, the United Nations General Assembly instituted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, defining apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” As examples of apartheid in practice, it lists “murder, torture, inhuman treatment and arbitrary arrest of members of a racial group; deliberate imposition on a racial group of living conditions calculated to cause it physical destruction; legislative measures that discriminate in the political, social, economic and cultural fields; measures that divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate residential areas for racial groups; the prohibition of interracial marriages; and the persecution of persons opposed to apartheid.” All of these are practiced in Israel. Literally all of them.
Many try to speak of South African apartheid as if it were some uniquely evil form of injustice that did not exist elsewhere and will never return again. The unfortunate truth is that, under Jim Crow, the US was too an apartheid state. Still today, systemic racism in the US satisfies the legal definition of apartheid. It is for this reason that, in August 2014, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who herself endured the brutality of apartheid in South Africa, likened the systemic racism in the US against black Americans, and more specifically the violent police crackdown on the recent nonviolent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, to the violence she saw under the horrific white supremacist system in her home country.
Unfortunately, there is a small yet vocal movement in the US, consisting mostly of young, nationalist liberals, that criticizes any attempts to liken the South African and black American struggles to that of the Palestinians. They claim that drawing these parallels is merely “exploiting” the struggle of people of African descent in order to advance another cause. Such a position is hopelessly misguided. Drawing analogies between other examples of apartheid should by no means be interpreted as a means of diminishing the horror of South African apartheid. The racist South African regime was grotesque and despicable; pointing to other instances of grotesque and despicable regimes only strengthens the understanding that these sickening injustices are products of larger global systems of oppression.
Internationalist and intersectional struggle is not the “Oppression Olympics,” if you will. Not only does this questionable movement silent the voices of countless South Africans and black Americans who have firmly drawn parallels between their struggles for liberation and that of the Palestinians, it is fundamentally anti-intersectional and anti-internationalist. It is imperative that we recognize that the fight for justice in Palestine is not an isolated one. It is inextricably linked to the US’ own history, and continued present reality, of racism and settler colonialism; it is part of the global ills of imperialism and white supremacy.
All of this said, I am sympathetic to the position that the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy breaks down when one considers some important factors. For one, Israel’s policies toward the occupied territories is very different than those directed toward Israeli Arabs. In the words of Noam Chomsky, “In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by ‘apartheid’ you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse.”
More simply, Palestinians living in Israel live in an apartheid system. Palestinians live in the occupied territories live under something far worse.
Zionism is an explicitly racist and explicitly settler colonialist ideology. The “Father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, openly spoke of “the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea,” calling it “something colonial.”
Consequently, if one had to pick a historical parallel to the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, perhaps the best option would be the European colonialists’ own project of settler colonialism in what we call the “Americas.” This is particularly true in the US and Canada, where the preponderance of the population is not of Indigenous descent.
The land we now inhabit was ethnically cleansed in an intentional project. European colonialists used African slave labor in order to build their country. There were indeed indigenous slaves, but, to speak generally, the European colonialists’ preferred strategy was to ethnically cleanse natives by forcing them off of their land into smaller and smaller settlements, or by simply killing them.
Similarly, in 1947-1948, the agenda of Zionism was to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs in order to create a Jewish state. Distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has painstakingly detailed these blatant policies in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This is the Nakba.
In Israel-Palestine, on the other hand, not only does Israel not need Palestinian labor, it does not want it. Many modern Zionists are motivated by an extreme nationalist, frankly fascist, and often religious fundamentalist, ideology. The reason they do not give equal rights to Palestinians is because they do not want Palestinians in what they see as “their” land. They want a Jewish state in the literal definition of the term—what Israeli scholar Oren Yiftachel refers to as an “ethnocracy.” Many Zionists believe God gave them all of the land West of the Jordan river – or even beyond, in the case of Kahanists, including parts of modern-day Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq as well. Many non-religious Zionists believe the same. As Pappé once joked, “Most Zionists don’t believe that God exists, but they do believe that He has promised them Palestine.”
The apartheid regime in South Africa was indeed a colonialist project, but it was not necessarily a settler colonialist project, in the same sense of that in historic Palestine and that in what we today call the Americas. In these regards, the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy does break down, because Israel’s project of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and what Pappé calls “incremental genocide” in the Occupied Territories is even worse than apartheid.
None of this should be controversial. These are incontrovertible historical facts.
A critical parallel between the South African and Israeli apartheid regimes that must not go unmentioned is the question of US support. Steadfast US support is common to both.
For many years, the US government officially considered South African leader Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress “terrorists.” In fact, it was not until July 2008 that Mandela’s name was removed from the US’ “terrorism” watch list. On Larry King Live in 2000, Mandela recalled “I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists. I tell them that I was also a terrorist yesterday, but, today, I am admired by the very people who said I was one.”
Reagan was an enormous supporter of South Africa and its system of institutionalized white supremacy. In a 1981 CBS interview, the US president asked, in earnest, “Can we abandon a country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought, a country that strategically is essential to the free world in its production of minerals we all must have?” The International Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) had been so successful by the 1980s that even the UN General Assembly demanded that countries divest from and impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Reagan refused to do so, preferring what he called a policy of “constructive engagement.”
