Apartheid

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(and the British Commonwealth’s (least of all thanks to Britain) as well as the European
Communities’) condemnations and sanctions against apartheid in South Africa, which helped
isolate the country and pressure states, other institutions, and individuals to sanction apartheid
there bilaterally as well as diplomatically. In the end (from 1986 to 1990), only Israel, Taiwan,
to some extent France, a group of large western business corporations, and Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher, leaders of the world’s two most powerful governments, were
effectively supporting South African apartheid internationally. The rest of the outside world
was working together to eliminate apartheid, with opinion polls indicating that the vast
majorities of Americans and British people also at least sympathized with the anti-apartheid
movement. Finally, at the end of the 1980s, the US and UK parliaments, in rare shows of
democracy with regard to foreign policy in those two countries, then overruled Reagan and
Thatcher and made the US and the UK join comprehensive international sanctions against
South Africa as two of the last countries in the world. By this time, even Reagan and Thatcher
were forced to realize that the days of apartheid in South Africa were numbered.
Sporadic condemnations and initiatives by the international community against
apartheid in Israel have so far only had minor effects, mainly due to US and western European
interventions against these condemnations. Most of the time, both with regard to South Africa
and Israel, there was (is) complicity by the superpowers of the day, especially by the USA.
Their elites also profited from apartheid, or they thought they did. The US elites certainly still
think so today. 172
Apartheid is war, but most of the time it is a slow war. It is in my view better to refer
to this aspect of apartheid as ‘violence’, and thereby accentuate that apartheid is both war and
oppression and that it often lies between these two phenomena as understood traditionally. As
the 21 st century started, we witnessed a continuation of earlier trends with regard to wars: ever
fewer declared wars, more and more civilian casualties in relative terms, fewer and fewer
military casualties, and an increasing difficulty to draw the line between civilians and military
personnel. The victims of suicide attacks in Israel, and both in Iraq and the USA, were not
only civilians, but also reserve officers in civilian clothes, and Pentagon or Israeli Defense
Force employees in civilian clothes, as well as people who had been or were profiting from
the oppression of people, in whose names the attackers then struck. Similarly, Jewish settlers
and US army contractors operate in civilian clothes, sometimes killing other people in civilian
clothes. War and oppression are not mirages – that is not my point here – they are part of
something larger. Unfortunately, I have no theoretical way of tackling this larger entity. But I
believe it can usefully be referred to as ‘systematic human rights violations’, a descriptive
rather than a theoretical term.
Oppressive minorities generally establish and maintain power by the threat (the
‘declared design’, in Locke’s rendition) and practice of violence, but also by using different,
subtler methods of dividing actual or potential resistance. Mostly, it seems that dividing
resistance is successfully achieved in apartheid by the elites through a system favoring a tiny
indigenous class economically, and thereby securing its collaboration with the oppressors,
although it will not always work. In several instances, the collaborators have switched
allegiances on more than one occasion. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, this class was undoubtedly
the priests, in South Africa and Israel the ‘assimilated’ political leadership and parts of the
business communities. Israel has also given limited political and civil rights to Palestinians
who have stayed in what is now the state of Israel and taken Israeli citizenship, though hardly
any rights at all to the great majority of Palestinians, who are refugees and/or subject to Israeli
military rule in the occupied Palestinian territories. Similarly, both apartheid South Africa and
Graeco-Roman Egypt afforded inferior forms of citizenship to some of the indigenous.
Although many, if not most, of the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship refer to themselves as
172 Anglin: The Frontline States and Sanctions against South Africa, 1990: 254ff; Blum: Voting for Apartheid at
the UN, 2003; Fredrickson 2002: 133. See also Chapters III.2-5, below.