Israeli and South African Apartheid: A Comparison

The analogy between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and South African apartheid remains contentious, with a number of disagreements over the specific parallels one can draw. Needless to say, there are vital differences between these systems. However, a number of figures in the Palestine solidarity movement, including Ilan Pappe, Leila Farsakh, and others, have been explicit in calling for a comparative analysis, which avoids falling into the trap of reductionism and remains sensitive to the specific dynamics of Israeli settler-colonialism. In this article, I argue for the validity of the analogy as a whole, while noting that we should take into account key differences with the structure and historic evolution of South African apartheid.

The broadest and most glaring historical similarities are captured by Ronnie Kasrils in an essay on Colonialism of a Special Type (CST). This term was coined by the South African Communist Party in 1962 in its description of Apartheid South Africa.² It refers to a specific type of colonialism in which the “the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them.”³ As a peculiar form of settler colonialism, CST in Palestine can be seen to manifest after the 1947 partition deal that paved the way for handing power to the Jewish minority; and, one can argue, similarly, in 1910 when Britain conceded independence to the white minority in South Africa. Ideologically speaking, just as Zionist propaganda claimed the territory as a “land without people, for a people without land,” apartheid mythology in South Africa taught that when the Dutch colonists arrived 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.”⁴ These myths comprised a distorted national identity and reinforced South African apartheid, and in a parallel manner with the Zionist mythology that reinforces Israeli apartheid. However, the Zionist belief that the Jewish people are “returning home,” a foundational belief of Israeli society, differs ideologically from South African apartheid.

We should also consider differences within a colonized population, and how settler-colonial ideology locates them in variable ways. More concretely, as Heribert Adam and Kodila Moodley argue, the differential treatment of Palestinians in Israel and those under occupation should be accounted for here. Indeed, on one level, an obvious difference between “Israel proper” and apartheid South Africa lies in suffrage. Around 20% of Palestinians, those inside Israel, have the right to vote for the Knesset.₅ Despite this apparent difference, however, an array of laws — 50 of which have been documented by Adalah — directly and indirectly discriminate against Palestinians.5 These laws are intended to maintain the Jewish character of the state and cripple the Palestinians in different areas of life, from education to political participation to land access. Although the oppression of Palestinians in the OPT more closely mirrors South African apartheid, those in Israel, Adam and Moodley cogently argue, in some ways resemble the status of “Colored” and Indian South Africans.₆

By this they mean that, in both cases, there have been attempts at cooptation; in South Africa, the “Colored” group was allowed to vote in 1983, albeit in separate parliaments, which could never challenge their white creators and acquired little legitimacy and power.⁷ In Israel, Arab parties sometimes hold the balance of power in a split Knesset, but like the black majority under South African apartheid, Palestinians are “restricted to second-class citizenship when another ethnic group monopolizes state power, treats the minorities as intrinsically suspect, and legally prohibits their access to land.”⁸ Moreover, this inclusion into the political system is quite precarious, as has been documented by Mahmoud Mi’ari in “Collective Identity of Palestinians in Israel after Oslo.” The June 2007 Democracy Index of the Israel Democracy Institute found, for example, that “most of the Jewish public support the idea that the state should encourage Palestinian emigration from Israel and oppose the inclusion of Arab political parties in the government.”⁹ This ill-concealed distrust comes from the belief that the Arab minority is a “fifth column” whose very existence threatens to subvert the Jewish character of the state.

Israel’s immigration policies are a testament to these pervasive fears and worries, which run parallel, to a certain degree, with varying immigration entitlements under South African apartheid.¹⁰ South Africa “encouraged and subsidized white immigration from any country,” while prohibiting nonwhite immigration.¹¹ In a similar though not identical vein, the Law of Return in Israel passed in 1950 “allows every Jewish person to immigrate to Israel and automatically become a citizen of the state.”¹² Put another way, dispossessed Palestinian refugees were barred from returning, while people from around the world were allowed in, just by virtue of being Jewish; but whereas in Israel security justifications were deployed, in South Africa little to no attempts were made to conceal the racism. Still, “whatever the historical differences between Zionism and Afrikaner nationalism, their adherents share the notion of their current residential territory as their only homeland, regardless of whether this is accepted by their neighbors.¹³”

This exclusionary dimension of Israel’s political system expresses itself in what Jonathan Cook terms a formal “visible equality,” which provides a patina of equality while maintaining Jewish dominance.¹⁴ Whereas the white elite in South Africa was faced with controlling a black majority, Israel is faced with a Palestinian minority, at least inside Israel’s boundaries. The Citizenship Law and the Law of Return created a hierarchy based on ethnic belonging, and also enshrined the Jewish character of the state on another level: “Israeli law does not recognize the nationality of ‘Israeli,’ instead treating citizenship and nationality as entirely separate and independent categories of belonging.”¹⁵ Every Israeli shares a common Israeli citizenship, whether they are Jew or Palestinian, but none is entitled to an Israeli nationality. ¹⁶ Instead, as Cook writes, the state selects each citizen’s nationality “from a list of more than 130 possibilities that include Jewish, Arab, Hebrew, Samaritan, Russian, and Assyrian.”¹⁷ This division has set the basis for “visible equality” — Israel is defined as a state of the Jews, not the state of Israelis.

While some may argue this marks a difference with the naked character of apartheid South Africa’s laws, such a strategy has in fact ensured the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Jews in the diaspora are eligible for the privileges of automatic citizenship; Zionist groups such as the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency enjoy quasi-government status to promote Jewish interests rather than those of all Israeli citizens; and Palestinian citizens have no legal basis to demand national rights, let alone challenge the exclusivity of national rights for Jewish citizens.¹⁸ In “Visible Equality as Confidence Trick,” Cook puts forward that this has left Palestinians in a limbo, in a liminal space. Israel denies them the right “to exercise communal rights” as members of a national group, “whether in culture, language, or education.”¹⁹ At the same time, however, they cannot identify their nationality as Israeli because they are not Jewish, and this has left them in a status similar to that of long-term temporary guest workers.

An earlier Palestinian member of the Knesset, Asmi Bishara, once noted that South African apartheid, unlike the Israeli iteration, “took place within a framework of of political unity. The racist regime saw blacks as part of the system, an ingredient of the whole. The whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity.”²⁰ At least in this regard, the situation of the Palestinians may be even worse. This is especially true for a population of Palestinians in Israel called “present absentees,”the appellation for those internally displaced in 1948. A group comprising around 300,000 people, they are considered present in Israel but permanently absent from their homes. They are thus unable to reclaim their land or property, which was transferred after their displacement to the Custodian of Absentee Property. ²¹ In 1992, when Israel passed the Basic Law of Human Dignity and Freedom — considered to be the country’s bill of rights — it was initially thought it would resolve the situations of “present absentees” and other Palestinians in Israel.²² However, not only did this law not enshrine basic constitutional protections, but it also, Cook writes, reaffirmed the definition of Israel as a Jewish state.²³

The drive to preserve Israel as a Jewish state is another area which separates it from South African apartheid.²⁴ Adam and Moodley write that “despite its denominational diversity and widespread adherence, religion in South Africa served as a point of commonality for whites and blacks alike.”²⁵ Desmond Tutu was able to mobilize Christian theology in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which drew on its assumptions about healing and forgiveness.²⁶ In Israel, by contrast, a religious minority of approximately 20% holds the balance of power. Orthodox Jews have managed to impose “religious prescriptions on a multi-religious state that defines itself officially as Jewish,” although most Israeli Jews are nonobservant and the Palestinian minority belong to Muslim, Christian, or Druze denominations.²⁷ Jerusalem has been the center of the religious-historical dimension of the conflict. Considered an especially intractable problem, it was designated during the Oslo talks to be a part of “final status negotiations,” which still have not occurred.²⁸ This is hardly surprising, given that “Jerusalem embodies a nationalist commitment and historical identity for both sides, which has no equivalent in South Africa.” ²⁹ Israeli apartheid has been inflected by this history.

This has also come into sharp relief when, for example, Israel has engaged in archaeological research in and around Jerusalem in an attempt to increase the legitimacy of its claims. Going further, in 1996, Prime Minister Netanyahu opened the Western Tunnel Walls, “whose outlet was in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.”³⁰ This was followed by a declaration that the tunnels were the bedrock of Israel’s national existence; Palestinians responded with archaeological excavations of their own, designed to resist the process of Judaization. Neil Silberman writes that “claims and counterclaims about exclusive historical ownership weave together the random acts of violence in a bloody fabric of bifurcated collective memory.” ³¹

The claims then, and the apartheid system which Israel erected in their defense, are rooted in a mythologized past. In South Africa, on the other hand, there was no parallel example of disputed holy lands. Indeed, as Adam and Moodley write, “even during the Group Areas Act of ethnic cleansing of integrated city neighborhoods during the late 1960s,” the bulldozers which destroyed slums left unscathed the mosques, churches, and Hindu temples.³² Afrikaner nationalists, for all their intolerance and racism, never anchored their colonial ideology as deeply in religious mythology as ultra-Orthodox Jews.³³ However, Calvinism did focus on proselytization on an individual level, which led them to relate to the black majority differently.³⁴

On a more political level, particularly when it comes to what Leila Farsakh refers to as “separate development,” there is a convergence in South African and Israeli apartheid. The Oslo Accords give the Palestinians limited political autonomy, but they do not guarantee the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. Farsakh argues that the “the accords’ legal structure puts the Palestinian entity in a similar position to South African Bantustans under the apartheid regime, in three main ways.”³⁵ First, Oslo failed to guarantee an end to Israeli occupation of even historic Palestine’s remnants and, as with South Africa’s Bantustans, instead chose a piecemeal approach to self-rule, first handling Gaza-Jericho and then giving limited autonomy to the West Bank.³⁶ Second, it only allowed limited native sovereignty within the parameters set by the Israeli military authority, like the commissioner general in the case of South Africa. And third, it did not recognize the elevation of international law over Israeli law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The Oslo Accords also set the basis for the fragmentation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by encroaching settlements. Farsakh writes that the consolidation of Bantustans in Palestine through settlement construction differs from that in South Africa — where they were created through the NP’s legal devices.³⁷

The intricate labyrinth of checkpoints and the permit system are other points of crossover between apartheid as it existed in South Africa and apartheid in Israel today. The latter placed over 770 checkpoints in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after the October 2000.³⁸ Also, between 1993, and 2000, Israel decreed over 484 days of closure, “which slowed the Palestinians in over sixty-three enclaves and stalled any attempt to grow domestically.”³⁹ In some ways, this mirrored the system of Bantustans in South Africa. However, whereas in South Africa the function of the pass system was to discipline a supply of cheap labor for the South African economy, in Israel and Palestine it arguably goes much further in its scope.⁴⁰ Indeed, the Protocol of Civil Affairs specifically states that permits are the only papers that allow Palestinians to enter areas under Israel’s control; this hastens the territory’s fragmentation.

Moreover, as with South Africa’s Bantustans during apartheid, the West Bank and Gaza after Oslo were characterized by dependent trade relations. One difference, though, was that the former continued trading with white areas, while the latter under the PLO signed a customs union agreement that permitted Palestinians to trade a few allowed items with third countries. Aid and foreign investment were also considered paramount in both South African and Palestinian Bantustans. But in South Africa, the white government provided most of the aid, which “was used mainly to help cover their fiscal deficit and generate rural and industrial reforms.”⁴¹ In the case of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, meanwhile, the PNA received no financial aid from Israel; most of it came from the international community, through organizations like the World Bank and IMF. Despite the fact that an average of 850 million dollars a year in aid was sent into the Palestinian economy between 1995 and 2000, however, there has not been any reduction or alleviation of poverty.⁴² In fact, as late as 2014, poverty ensnared 45 per cent of the population in the Gaza Strip and 16 percent in the West Bank.

The arrest and detention on a mass scale of Palestinians is another area of similarity with South African apartheid, although it may actually be worse in the OPT. As John Dugard and John Reynolds write in “Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” one count “puts the number of Palestinians imprisoned at some time since 1967 at over 650,000, close to 40 per cent of the male population.”⁴³ Israel’s Supreme Court in 1998 held that “brutal and inhuman means” of interrogation were unlawful, but it allowed for a defense of “necessity” which has in effect sanctioned the use of harsh techniques, which in their intensity constitute torture.⁴⁴ In Gaza and the West Bank, however, executive detention is more frequently employed than under South African apartheid. In the former, despite its formal disengagement in 2005, Israel still retains control over military affairs: the 2006 Criminal Procedure Law, for example, allows the state to imprison “security suspects” in detention facilities in Israel.⁴⁵ This parallels some of South African regime’s practices, albeit to a much greater degree and scope.

Finally, one difference between the two models is the broader international contexts in which they operated and were inescapably situated. With growing fears of terrorism after 9/11, Israel embarked on a strategy of linking Palestinian resistance to its apartheid policies with the emerging Islamic extremism. The outbreak of violence during the Second Intifada was cast as a threat not just to Israel but the “civilized world.”⁴⁶ By contrast, after the decolonization struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the ANC was able to slowly capture world opinion.⁴⁷ According to Adam and Moodley, the ANC succeeded to a large extent because of its politics of inclusion and nonracialism.⁴⁸ This may be explained by the fact that black South Africans comprised the majority, however, and, as explained earlier, experienced a different power dynamic with the apartheid regime. South African diplomat Andre Jacquet argues that the negotiations on Namibian independence in 1990 convinced hardliners in Pretoria “that you could talk to ‘terrorists’ and achieve a mutually satisfactory result.”

In conclusion, as we have shown throughout this essay, there are numerous similarities between Israeli and South African apartheid, just as there are relevant differences. An understanding of this comparison may help shed light on the trajectory of the Palestinian struggle, although it would be premature to assume that it will exactly dovetail the South African experience with ending apartheid. How the situation will unfold and be resolved remains unclear. Still, we can imagine different scenarios and possibilities, and “Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid,” an anthology compiled by Ilan Pappe, was useful in researching for this article. One essay in particular, “Israel-Palestine and the Apartheid Analogy: Critics, Apologists, and Strategic Lessons,” offers a robust analysis of the prospects for an end to the apartheid system and the attainment of Palestinian self-determination. As the author, Ran Greenstein, writes, a campaign that positions Palestinian national demands within a framework of rights “is one way of establishing a link between particular and universal discourses.”⁴⁹

Citations

1. Pappe, Ilan, ed.. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015: 25
2. Ibid., 25.
3. Ibid., 26.
4. Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005: 23.
5. Adalah. The Discriminatory Laws Database. 2012. Web.
6. Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005: 23.
7. Ibid., 25..
8. Ibid., 23.
9. Mi’ari, Mahmoud. “Collective Identity of Palestinians in Israel after Oslo.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 1.8 (2011): 224.4.
10. Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005: 23.
11. Ibid., 34.
12. Adalah. Law of Return. 2012. Web.
13. Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 25.
14. Pappe, Ilan, ed.. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015: 126.
15. Ibid., 128.
16. Ibid., 126.
17. Ibid., 126.
18. Ibid., 127.
19. Ibid., 127.
20. Ibid., 128.
21. Ibid., 128.
22. Ibid., 129.
23. Ibid., 129.
24. Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005: 64.
25. Ibid., 64.
26. Ibid., 64–65.
27. Farsoun, Samih K and Naseer H. Arruri. Palestine and Palestinians: A Social and Political History. Boulder:
    Westview Press, 2006. Print: 246.
28. Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005: 65.
29. Ibid., 66.
30. Ibid. 65.
31. Ibid. 65–66.
32. Ibid., 66.
33. Ibid., 66.
34. Ibid., 66.
35. Pappe, Ilan, ed.. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015: 172.
36. Ibid., 172.
37. Ibid., 174.
38. Ibid., 177.
39. Ibid., 176.
40. Ibid., 177.
41. Ibid., 180.
42. Ibid., 180–181.
43. Dugard, John and John Reynolds. “Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The European Journal of International Law 24.3 (2013): 892.
44. Ibid., 894.
45. Ibid., 894.
46. Farsoun, Samih K and Naseer H. Arruri. Palestine and Palestinians: A Social and Political History. Boulder: Westview Press, 2006. Print. 14.
47. Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Print. 75.
48. Ibid., 75.
49. Pappe, Ilan, ed. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015. Print. 359.