Apartheid

counterpart. Thus, with the rapid shrinkage of Palestinian land even to
bury their dead, the similarity with apartheid South Africa is all too
self-evident. Under the latter system a 5% white minority appropriated
87% of the land. 168
101
I will attempt to show that there are even more and even closer parallels between the
South African and Israeli apartheid systems in the following. First and foremost, apartheid is
based upon the de facto invasion of a country or a region by an oppressive minority. The
human rights violations that accompany and follow this invasion amount to a pattern or a
structure, under which the indigenous majority is subjugated, exploited and otherwise
victimized, often and essentially in a violent manner. Members of the ethnic elite are also
victimized, both by other members of the same elite and by resistance fighters, but never to
the large extent that the prime victims are. The pattern consists of nine holes, which are all
plugged in an apartheid society, if it exists long enough. The holes are plugged, one by one, in
different sequences and under different circumstances, in order to maximize control over and
exploitation of natural and human resources in a conquered land. The first and most important
one, however, is violence. The holes are interdependent, sometimes mutually reinforcing,
sometimes rather balancing each other. Thus, if violence becomes rampant then apartheid
thought is usually provoked and follows suit by becoming more extremist; but apartheid
thought may also be weakened, take a vacation, as it were, when levels of violence rise.
The process of apartheid oppression on a macro-level is fairly simple. It could also be
crudely likened with the checking of items on a shopping list. I cannot determine to what
extent this is carried out consciously, but I believe it gets more conscious with time. Today,
Israeli apartheid has the most precedents, and it therefore probably exhibits the most
consciously perpetrated, and the strategically, militarily, legally, and diplomatically most
sophisticated form of apartheid. 169 Graeco-Roman Egypt, in sharp contrast, did not have the
wealth of historical material that has been at the disposal of proponents of 20 th - and 21 st -
century apartheid. For example, the Greek and Roman forms of ethnicist taxation, which was
actually the main form of economic exploitation in Egypt – as opposed to slavery elsewhere in
168 El Fassed: Satyagraha to End Apartheid in Palestine, 2001. El Fassed might be referring to a five per cent
minority of white land-owning families in South Africa, or to the class of land-owning Whites. During apartheid
in the narrow sense the white population as a whole dropped from around 21 per cent to around 14 per cent of
the total population. It has since slipped further, to under 11 per cent, due to white flight as well as to humanized
immigration laws and practices, including the reintegration of South Africa into its continental economic, social,
cultural and political contexts, among many other factors. See Chapter II.2.2, below. On Israeli disregard for – or
provocation against – Islamic law, which requires that the dead be buried quickly, see Johnston: Palestinians Still
Unable to Bury Rafah Dead, 2004. The Palestinians, however, have also desecrated Israeli corpses, for instance
those of soldiers killed in Gaza by Palestinian freedom fighters, previous to the big-scale incursion into Rafah
with its concomitant Israeli massacres of indigenous civilians. See Sagar: The Crash of Civilizations, 2004. On
El Fassed’s call for ‘satyagraha’ in Palestine – Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of non-violent resistance which
inspired both the civil rights movement in the USA and the resistance against South African apartheid – see also
Tomasevic: Israel’s W.Bank Barrier Like Apartheid--Gandhi Kin, 2004, which describes how Gandhi’s
grandson, Arun Gandhi, takes a firm stance against Israeli apartheid, and encourages further non-violent
resistance by Palestinians and the international community.
169 A confidential 10-year forecast government report, prepared by Israel’s foreign ministry and then leaked by
(or to?) the media, warns that ‘Israel could end up on a collision course with the European Union and face
sanctions like apartheid-era South Africa...’ And as the expanding EU might grow more powerful and influential
to the detriment of Israel’s main ally, the USA, the report cautions that ‘the Jewish state could become
increasingly isolated internationally’. Spetalnick: Israel, Europe Could Be on Collision Course –Report, 2004.
The quotes and the facts speak for themselves in this regard. In my opinion, Israel has every reason – good and
bad – to learn from the South African apartheid experience, as opposed to Israel’s foes and victims. I believe that
knowledge gathered from my own investigation can therefore be used, for human rights, reconciliation, and
peace. But it could also be abused, in order to cover up and even to intensify crimes against humanity. It is
therefore my hope that this investigation be used first and foremost by opponents and victims of apartheid rather
than by perpetrators and apologists for it, unless of course the latter be converted to abandon their belief and role
in or support of apartheid.