Apartheid

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sidedness, due to context, and I believe it is indeed a much-needed corrective. Furthermore, I
am convinced that many more will be needed. Besides, there are, in my opinion, a great deal
more bad aspects to the side that creates, defends and promotes apartheid and other crimes
against humanity. I will return to these issues in the Conclusions.
In summary of this first part of my investigation, apartheid is a structure that can be
found under many different circumstances and conditions. But it always involves the
undemocratic rule of an invading minority and its self-defined descendants. It also involves an
important civilian element of this oppressive minority as well as a strong and independent
state.
As for the differences between apartheid societies: South Africa and Egypt, for
instance, did not have a biased, all-important ‘peace-broker’ like Israel does in the USA. Yet,
Britain and the USA did play a similar, though weaker, role for South Africa in the later
stages of apartheid in the wide sense. As we shall see, Rome also played a similar role during
the later history of the Ptolemaic state. Both Israel/Palestine and Graeco-Roman Egypt were
‘handed over’ from one set of occupying forces and ethnicist minority rulers to another. In
Israel’s case, however, only part of what is now Israel, and an even smaller part of what is
now under Israeli military and political control, was handed over to the de facto invaders by
the UN. Palestine and Graeco-Roman Egypt also share not having to deal with disastrous
disease epidemics being spread (inadvertently or not) by the new occupiers. Furthermore, also
unlike South Africa, Palestine and Egypt were never slave-labor based economies under
apartheid. On the other hand, Israel and South Africa were both propped up by NATO, the
latter allegedly as an anti-Communist bulwark in the region, the former for no official reasons
other than the right of the ‘Jewish state to exist’, unofficially though, for US and other NATO
member countries’ strategic access to Middle East oil as well as fear of Islamic or Arab power
coupled with very strong Zionist lobbying groups in the USA and beyond. 167 South Africa and
Israel were no superpowers like the USA, the Soviet Union or the British Empire,
respectively, at the height of their power. That also sets them apart from Ptolemaic Egypt,
which was, for a while, the world’s leading military and political power. Yet the former two
were (and Israel still is) among the four to ten (at the most) strongest military powers in the
world. And, as I will try to show, the essential system of violence, oppression, and
exploitation is the same in each of my three main examples of apartheid. In fact, it is glaringly
similar in the two more current cases.
Israel’s apartheid policies are based on the following elements: The
exclusive claim of one group to a country at the exclusion of non-Jews
accompanied by their attempt to physically separate from them;
displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population and the seizure
of their lands and properties, confining them to small enclaves and
transforming them into a permanent underclass; formalization of
unequal power relations through discriminatory laws and policies,
enforced by political means as well as by the military and security
services; and the formulation of a meta-narrative that supports the
claims of the dominant group over the others, demonizing and
excluding the ‘others’’ claims. . . .
In the Gaza Strip, it means, among other things, that 500,000
Palestinian refugees will remain holed up in 3 square miles of derelict
camps surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled 24 hours a day. While
more than one million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have access to
only 60% of the land, 4,000 Israeli soldiers occupy 35%. The average
Israeli settler has 146 times more living space than his Palestinian
167 Mearsheimer & Walt 2006; Albert: Interview with Chomsky, In Depth Discussion on Israel/Palestine, 2002.
See also Wright: U.S. Isolated But Dominant at Middle East Talks, 2002; Plitnick 2003, and Chapter II.9.3,
below.