Apartheid

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structure of violence and oppression, a structure that I believe is crucial and indeed defining of
such a society, despite some counter-instances on the levels of individuals, and of relatively
small and powerless groups. A strengthening of this kind of interaction, however, is my
primary wish, and we will look into some of the realistic (and some not so realistic)
possibilities for peace along with a necessary minimum of justice in Part III. South African
Whites who were opposed to apartheid did in the end play an important role in bringing down
that odious system in their home country. There are at least as many Israeli Jews adamantly
opposed to apartheid in their country, but so far they lack especially the mass media
possibilities that were eventually (by the late 1980s) afforded their dissenting white South
African predecessors by the global media corporations and other global elites, and that is no
accident (see Chapter II.9.3). Indeed, many of them are in jail, for refusing military service, or
kept busy with court cases on the same or similar charges, or even on charges of treason.
Other oppositional Israeli Jews are in more or less forced exile (though of course by far not as
many as the Palestinians, the majority of whom are refugees).
My whole investigation may seem to some as a biased way of looking at apartheid, as
a sole perspective, namely from the point of view of the indigenous population. But I am
convinced that the main perpetrators and their supporters and allies desperately need to
become aware of and realize this perspective. It may seem a shock to some, but it is, in my
opinion, the only way to achieving anything even approaching peace on equal terms. And I
am in no way uncritical of resistance strategies, which have left a lot to be desired, in all
apartheid societies. Most of all, I fail to see a continuously prioritized agenda of human rights,
cultural diversity and biodiversity among the resistance groups.
Apartheid was condemned as a ‘crime against humanity’ by the United Nations in
1968, and by the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in
2002. 185 I believe the same label can and should be applied to my widened concept of
apartheid, which is not diluted in any way. It does not contain anything that lessens the scope
or the severity of human rights violations in comparison with South Africa from 1948 to 1994.
On the contrary, it makes the concept of apartheid inclusive of more instances of human rights
violations, some arguably even worse than those that occurred between 1948 and 1994 in
South Africa. From a contemporary perspective, we are thus investigating a specific system or
structured pattern of grave human rights abuses.
My two modern examples, especially Israel’s brand of apartheid, might even be seen
as bigger crimes than ‘merely’ against Humanity. The production and partial use of ABC
(atomic, biological and chemical) weapons and the deliberate poisoning of soil and water are
at least potentially crimes against Life itself. They could wipe out whole species and render
vast areas of land and water unfit for life in any form, or in any advanced form. It should be
added, however, that neither South Africa nor Israel invented any of the three main varieties
of ABC weapons as such, although they certainly cooperated with the military powers that did
(the USA and the other NATO powers) and have also worked further on and succeeded in
developing these particularly ignoble, dangerous, and most cowardly techniques of killing.
the people oppressed by apartheid are often routinely and systematically deprived of good education, of
resources for research and of possibilities of publication. On these problems and their ethnicist causes, see
Sections II.7 and II.9, below. My saving grace is the fact that the best-educated (in a qualitative rather than a
technical sense) Europeans, European descendants and Jews – and there are many of them – are critical of or
opposed to apartheid and ethnicism in general. Nonetheless, the reliance on authors on apartheid that belong to
the ethnic elites or are somehow related to them has undoubtably helped to obscure the true characteristics of the
system, and probably not mainly because of bad intentions. It is perhaps not until now, with the Palestinians, that
we finally have a considerable number of reasonably- and well-educated members of an oppressed indigenous
ethnic majority suffering from apartheid. This is the case due mainly to international aid, which has done much
to keep Palestinians relatively well-educated despite enormous obstacles. That, finally, is reflected in the
relatively large number of Palestinian and Palestinian-related sources used throughout this investigation.
185
N.N.: A United Nations Priority: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no date; N.N.: Rome Statute of
the International Criminal Court, 1999