Apartheid

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the perpetrators and much of the rest of the world perversely blaming the Palestinian victims
in the process. If Israel had not imposed itself on Palestinian land, society, and culture,
Palestine (and at least parts of some of the surrounding countries) could have started
developing a human rights culture earlier and extended all human rights to women in
accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. On the other hand, Palestinian femicide may also have taken place in an independent
Palestine. In hindsight, it is, of course, impossible to say.
The losses due to the demographic war in human terms are of course immeasurable,
and directly comparable to the ‘conventional’ devastation wrought by apartheid, in South
Africa as elsewhere. Although I am a convinced anti-elitist, and I am sure he is too, the words
of Hugh Lewin rang as true in my memory for me in Palestine as they did when he explained
how apartheid destroyed a generation of black moral leaders in South Africa. Lewin is an
apartheid survivor who was tortured by the state authorities. When I visited him at the
Institute of Advanced Journalism in Johannesburg in June 1998, Lewin showed my students
and me examples of how the most intelligent and moral young people in black communities
around the country were targeted and often eliminated by South Africa’s state powers during
the apartheid era. The people who make up most of the casualties in conflicts involving
demographic warfare, it seems, are particularly targeted not only if they are young but also if
they have a strong sense of justice, if they are morally intelligent. One of the main horrors of a
demographic war is that a second prong, kept running by the apartheid elites as well, but also
by the remaining indigenous patriarchal elites, attacks the most intelligent and morally
developed young people from another angle, an entirely gendered angle: Just like the
Palestinian boys and young men who go out to demonstrate against the unjust laws and the
unjust occupation (which are all illegal under international law) and get shot, young
Palestinian women, who believe in the just cause of making their own decisions about their
own lives, may also pay with their own lives.
As with white and black South Africa, we are dealing in Palestine-Israel with two very
traumatized societies, not only traumatized by the violence of the last four and a half years, or
the violence of the last 57 years. I have found the origins of the demographic war extremely
hard to trace and pinpoint, in each of my three prima facie examples of apartheid societies.
Just like most conventional armed conflicts nowadays, demographic wars were never born
with any kind of formal declaration of war.
Furthermore, most Palestinians and most Jews live in their respective Diasporas.
During the last five or six generations, many if not most of them were born as refugees or
have themselves been made refugees, sometimes more than once in the same generation.
Maybe this shared experience can provide some of the common ground required for a
peaceful resolution. Yet, whereas the Palestinians were exiled by the Israeli Jews, the Jews
were not exiled by the Palestinians, but by Europeans. That is a crucial asymmetry to always
bear in mind while appreciating this common ground.
Both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis now need serious long-term commitments from
the international community, not just short-term or interim measures from the USA and its
NATO allies, its G7 partners, and its permanent UN Security Council colleagues, and
certainly not Zionist commitments – the main financial, political, and ideological factor
stoking the flames of this war. Ethnicism is a crime against humanity, and only humanity can
put an end to it. How can this be achieved? It is not difficult. What Israel has to do on a legal
level is to start by removing the portion of its Basic Law that proclaims Israel a Jewish state,
and then continue by repealing the many laws and practices that utilize this law as a linchpin
for ethnicism, including the increasingly conspicuous absence of civil marriage. We will
return to this theme in Part III. In the next section we will look at the Israel Council for
so high.) Israel’s demographic war on Palestine could thus also be said to extend beyond the borders of historic
Palestine.