Apartheid

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Authority, which does not prosecute perpetrators as much as it could do, and third the Israeli
elites, whose racist immigration and settlement policies exacerbate and perpetuate the
submissiveness and victimization of Palestinian women to patriarchally-dominated
demographic warfare, and who are eager to capitalize on any division within the ranks of their
sworn enemies.
Let us turn now to the immediate perpetrators. We have looked so far at why
Palestinian, black South African and Egyptian men under Graeco-Roman rule, as collectives,
commit, encourage or allow femicide. But what about individuals? Why do some do it, while
other do not? What is the mechanism or the psychological rationale that perpetuates the
process, generation after generation, century after century?
Although I cannot provide anything even approaching exhaustive answers to these
questions, I would like to explore them by means of the motto: ‘blaming the victim’, which I
believe will provide a further argument for the extenuating circumstance of apartheid
oppression in Palestinian femicide, and add to the argument that an end to apartheid would be
extremely helpful in bringing about an end to femicide, and perhaps not only in apartheid
environments. Even in South Africa, apartheid, in the wider sociological sense, especially in
the economic sense, is not gone, although much progress has been made since 1994. But
femicide is still taking place there as well. And in Egypt, it is quite possibly the case that only
femicide is left in a sociological sense from the days of apartheid. (There were of course class
societies and other forms of oppression in Egypt prior to the arrival of the Greeks.) It is not
essential to my argument whether femicide is eventually found to be older than apartheid in
Egypt or in South Africa. Either a pre-existing form of femicide was kept alive and
exacerbated by apartheid in Egypt, as in modern Palestine, or it was invented there under
apartheid rule by Europeans, as may also have been the case in South Africa.
One of Israel’s and its allies’ favorite pastimes, it seems, is blaming the victim: Israel
is illegally occupying Palestinian land because the oppressed Palestinian people rebel
violently against the occupation. The circularity of this argument can become lost on the
distracted mass audiences around the world who are conditioned by most of the media with
global reach, as well as the allies and patrons of these media, to see Palestinian reactions to
Israeli aggression as unprovoked attacks, and Israeli aggression as responses. 288 And the
attempted justifications or excuses for rape or femicide are also exactly that: blaming the
victim.
As Jacqueline Rose said: ‘the most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat
it.’ 289 Jewish Israeli aggression against Palestinians would probably not have happened,
certainly not to the same large extent, if it were not for the previous Nazi and other
judeophobic aggressions against Jews in Europe with excuses involving some sort of mystical
inherent and blanket blameworthiness of Jews. And, similarly, Palestinian femicide might not
have existed at all 290 since 1948 if it were not for Israeli aggressions against Palestinians with
288
Ashrawi 2001; Ashrawi October 18, 2000; see also Chapter II.9.3, below.
289
See footnote 182, above.
290
According to Armstrong 2000, ‘honor’ killings represent extensions of pre-Islamic sexist traditions which
were actually fought by the Prophet and most of his followers. They take place today in Palestine, Jordan,
Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and among communities stemming from these countries, i.e. in a
minority of Muslim countries whose combined populations account for a minority of Muslims worldwide.
However, there are still lethal, systematic sexist crimes against women in Iran, Bangladesh, Somalia, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, and India which go back to different traditions, as well, e.g. FGM, female infanticide, or
killings of widows, though all of these are also alien to Islam. In Palestine, for example, femicide takes place in
Christian as well as in Muslim families and communities, just as FGM does in Egypt and elsewhere. The fact
that Lebanon and Jordan are usually mentioned first along with Palestine when it comes to ‘honor’ killings and
these countries’ interactions with Israel historically suggest that Israel’s demographic warfare has an effect on
these neighbors as well as on Palestine. Most of the population of Jordan is in fact Palestinian. There is a huge
Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon as well, and the Palestinian communities have high birth rates there
too. (In richer countries (and in richer Palestinian families in Palestine), however, Palestinian birth rates are not