Apartheid

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Egypt today by one of its foremost foes, Nawal El Saadawi: ‘And so, if you want to be
provocative, you could say that there is a connection between George Bush and female
circumcision.’ 296 But to further explore this multi-faceted and complex connection would take
us far beyond the theme investigated here.
There are crucial differences between apartheid societies as well as similarities. And
the future remains unwritten. Unlike the South Africans and the Egyptians, Palestinians may
yet defeat femicide, perhaps even before they defeat apartheid. Palestinian birth rates would
almost certainly continue to plummet as a result. Would it be playing into the hands of the
Israeli elites if that were achieved? I do not think so. Although a certain edge might be lost in
the head-to-head demographic struggle, it would in my opinion lead to more strategic
advantages than disadvantages for Palestinians to bring femicide to an immediate conclusion.
The Palestinians are already almost twice as many as the Israelis. An end to Palestinian
femicide would end divisions in Palestinian society that Israel has prompted, provoked and
brought into being through its practices of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. And if Palestinian
women and men cannot really trust each other, whom can they trust?
The new unity brought about by an end to Palestinian femicide would strengthen
Palestinian society immeasurably. A demographic minority’s oppressive rule always depends
on the divide-and-rule method (often along with military superiority through war technology),
and although there are many other ways in which Israeli elites try to sow or encourage discord
in Palestinian society, femicide has been the most violent, and thus the most successful partly
Israeli-induced belligerency between Palestinians so far. An end to Palestinian femicide
would also end much Palestinian self-doubt and needless shame and embarrassment over this
and perhaps other aspects of Palestinian culture. A further indirect positive consequence of an
end to femicide would be that the resultant diminished population race would have a less
disastrous effect on the natural environment, and the prevention of environmental degradation
could therefore provide an additional incentive to end apartheid.
If advances are made against apartheid, they can only benefit the struggle against
femicide. The struggle against apartheid must therefore not be abandoned as long as apartheid
continues to exist. But conversely, a campaign to eradicate femicide can only benefit the
Palestinian people in the long as well as the short term. Both femicide and apartheid should,
according to the view offered here, be seen as ultimate crimes, as crimes against humanity,
and as mutually unranked priorities with which humanity should deal, along with other
threats, in the struggle against oppression and for human rights and human dignity.
It should be borne in mind that there are pseudo-solutions to the problems investigated
here, which may appear to address the problem but are in fact creating new problems or being
counter-productive. To legally limit the amount of children allowed in a family, as in
overpopulated present-day China, is simply an instance of barking up the wrong tree. Women
296 El Saadawi: The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, 1997: 67. See also footnote 64, above. In Guatemala, a society
with an apartheid past and a strong, lingering apartheid legacy (see Chapter I.4, above), yet another main kind of
femicide is now plaguing the country. Young indigenous women, i.e. mainly women of child-bearing age, are
being raped and slaughtered at an alarming rate by members of organized crime groups, soldiers, and police, who
practically enjoy almost total impunity for these and many other crimes. A similar kind of femicide is taking
place in northern Mexico, near the US border. In both of these Western Hemisphere instances, the main victims
are poor factory- and sweatshop-employees. See Grais-Targow, Rita: Femicide in Guatemala, 2004;
Lakshmanan: Unsolved Killings Terrorize Women in Guatemala: Culture of Impunity Seen, 2006. I am not sure
if my analysis of the role of femicide in apartheid societies can be helpful in this instance, since members of the
oppressive ethnic minority are the main perpetrators in Guatemala, as opposed to my main three examples of
apartheid. Nevertheless, further analysis and preventive action are urgently needed. It seems to me that these
killings can be explained as combinations of femicide with genocide, rather than with apartheid. A closer parallel
to the apartheid cases can perhaps be provided for femicide against black women in the USA, where women are
also involved in a continuing struggle for human rights for members of their ethnicity and where violence against
women is also generally, so far, seen as unrelated to the political struggle against ethnicism. See Santer: How
Domestic Violence and Political Activism Are Related: A Case Study on African-American Women, 2002.