Apartheid

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is no longer present, as in present-day South Africa. Violence begets violence, and if it cannot
be directed back at the real enemy, it will invariably be directed inwards, victimizing the
innocent and the relatively innocent. 196 In Palestine itself, however, crime levels, aside from
Israeli assaults and Palestinian-Israeli femicide, are low. In the case of an otherwise relatively
crime-free society, I believe solidarity has prevailed in the face of a common enemy, and also
due to the lack of extreme metropolitan overcrowding, such as the case was in both Graeco-
Roman Egypt and in the crime-ridden townships of South Africa. Although urbanization is
accelerating in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, especially in Gaza, mainly due to Israeli
land theft and sabotage of Palestinian agriculture, it has been taking place in the area for
10,000 years now already, i.e. the population has had sufficient time to adapt and to avoid a
social meltdown in the face of accelerated urbanization.
In late antiquity Egypt, following the onslaught of Christianity, religion became a
dividing factor perhaps equal to ethnicity in importance. Violent clashes between the Pagan,
Jewish and Christian communities, especially in Alexandria, led to further divisions within the
population. 197 Unlike the ethnic class divisions, which appear to have been planned carefully
and engineered meticulously by the rulers, the severity of religious divisions – which
developed loosely along ethnic lines (especially for the Jews, and a tendency of Egyptians to
adopt Christianity and of Greeks to stay Pagan (see Chapter II.9.1)) – seems to have been
unforeseen by the authorities and more difficult to handle than the divisions originally
imposed with purely ethnicist apartheid. At first, Christianity was outlawed by the Romans
and the proselytes were persecuted and killed en masse. As the tables turned, Christianity
became the imperial state religion, and all other faiths were now persecuted. Especially the
ancient Egyptian and Greek faiths and their mixed, state-imposed forms (see Chapter II.9.1)
suffered. Followers were killed with the same zeal as the Christians before them, and
eventually the older religions were simply terminated. By this time the Egyptian religion had
probably existed for over 4,000 years, longer than any (phonographically literate) religion
before or since, as far as we now know. (Judaism comes in second place, possibly together
with Hinduism, with less than 4,000 years of independently recorded history.)
In the recent past, the break between ethnic and religious identity as the predominant
identity in Roman-ruled Egypt has certainly been overemphasized by scholars. Being
Christian during late antiquity was seen by many of them as contradictory to being Greek.
This view is, however, in the process of being revised. The Greeks who turned Christian in
fact remained very much Greek, perhaps especially in Egypt and the rest of North Africa. On
the whole, the Greeks also remained the privileged class. When Arabian forces finally
‘opened’ or liberated Egypt in 642, many Egyptians, though Christian, joined the Muslims. 198
196 Stoddard: South Africa’s Mbeki Faces Huge Crime Challenge, 2000: ‘In fairness to Mbeki and his
government, some of the biggest causes of crime in South Africa [which today has one of the highest rates of
violent crime in the world, perhaps even the highest], including poverty and income disparities, are legacies of
apartheid.’ And it goes further than that: ‘Apartheid society was also ridden with mental stress and violence.
Suicides were exceptionally frequent among white South Africans. Murder was a frequent cause of death among
Africans and Coloureds.’ Thompson 1990: 204; see also Abashiya-Malepe 1977. Mental disorders were also
spreading anew in the Holy Land following the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Israelis are jumpy about suicide
bombers, but the Palestinians are even harder hit. In 2002, an estimated ninety per cent of Palestinian children in
the Occupied Territories suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, manifesting itself with aggression,
sleeping problems, loss of appetite and depression, due to Israeli closures, bombings, and the shootings.
McAskill: Children are New Martyrs of Gaza, 2002. See also Goldin: Palestinian Children’s Dreams Haunted by
Bloodshed, 2000; Holmes: Gaza Palestinians Speak of “World’s Biggest Prison”, 2001; Fahmy: Violence Takes
Toll on Palestinians’ Bodies, Minds, 2001; Gershberg: Permanent Vigilance Takes Toll on Israelis, 2001;
Heinrich: Nightmares Haunt Gaza Children after Missile Hit, 2002; Johnston: Gaza Children Fear Death from
the Sky, 2004.
197 Haas, C.: Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict, 1997: 9ff
198 Schmitt: Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene: Politik und Philosophie, Hof und Provinz als
Handlungsräume eines Aristokraten bis zu seiner Wahl zum Metropoliten von Ptolemaïs: 24f, 50f. On ‘native