Apartheid

16
discrimination outside South Africa, it was only applied loosely. In this first part of three of
this investigation I wish to provide a definition of apartheid, by means of which comparisons
can be shown to be close to or distant from the South African phenomenon – and to and from
each other irrespectively of South Africa – in rough, yet measureable, degrees. I will also
attempt to place the phenomenon of apartheid in a sociological and legal context and identify
the milestones in the historical developments of three apartheid societies: Graeco-Roman
Egypt, South Africa and modern Israel.
Still commonly referred to, the concept of apartheid, the denotation of the word, has
drifted away from its original lexical meaning to denote outright physically repressive,
economically exploitative and ideologically racist or ethnicist segregation, not only in South
Africa, and not only against non-Whites or Blacks. 3 In this investigation, rather than ‘racism’,
I will use the term ‘ethnicism’ to encompass both racism and similar violent and oppressive
practices, policies and thoughts directed against other (arbitrarily) constructed groups of
people than ‘races’.
The members of an ethnic group share at least one characteristic – biological or
cultural, material or mental, real or imagined – which other people, who compete against
them, do not share with them. 4 The fact that human ‘races’ are imagined entities that do not
correspond to the complex reality of human biological and cultural diversity does not make
racism unimportant within ethnicism. As we will see in a great variety of examples, the
indicative statements that are part of an oppressive ideology pay scant regard to reality. In the
course of this investigation, we will encounter racism frequently, both in its culturalistic and
biologistic forms. I will mainly refer to it, however, with my generic term of choice,
‘ethnicism’.
This study focuses on three apartheid societies in the current popular sense of
oppression, exploitation, and ethnicist violence. It does not define or understand apartheid in
the way that the NP did. Instead, my investigation analyzes the phenomenon of apartheid as a
form of systematic oppression and war. In my opinion, it is wise to follow the current global
usage of the term ‘apartheid’ rather than its suspect elitist and white supremacist beginnings
within the ideology of the NP. This investigation also offers a partly new conceptual
framework for a social scientific study of the ethnicist grave human rights violations against a
society’s indigenous majority by a de facto invading minority, based upon nine structures,
which together constitute my proposed definition of apartheid – its own specific forms of
violence, repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education, language, and thought.
I will argue here that apartheid systems in Graeco-Roman Egypt and in modern Israel
have more in common with apartheid in South Africa than do any other societies’ systematic
gross human rights violations that have been compared to it. Many of those comparisons will
be dealt with in some detail. They include the USA (both against Blacks and Native
3 The United Nations’ International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid
(1976), describes the latter as: ‘racial segregation; and various inhumane acts’. Moreover, its Article 2 states that
the crime of apartheid ‘shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as
practiced in southern Africa’ (The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 1976). As I
shall argue here, this Convention is indeed applicable to present-day Israel as are many other aspects of
international law, conventions and treaties, which, incidentally, Israel and its closest allies routinely violate and
ignore, whether they are signatories to them or not. Israel, Canada, the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand
did not sign the convention. See footnote 732, below, and Chapter I.4, which deals with a wide variety of uses of
the term ‘apartheid’ for oppression and conflict outside South Africa, aside from Israel and Graeco-Roman
Egypt. On the UN and apartheid, see N.N.: United Nations in the Struggle against Apartheid, no date.
4 Similarly, Steve Fenton makes a sociological distinction between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, the latter being a
preferable analytic term, with ‘real’ or ‘material’ as well as ‘symbolic’ aspects. Much like my approach, Fenton’s
nonetheless holds ‘race’ and ‘racism’ to be indispensable terms for sociology, but in his case only because of
their symbolic importance. See Fenton: Ethnicity: Racism, Class and Culture, 1999: 2ff. In my partly contrasting
approach, ‘race’ is indeed only symbolic, when applied to human groups and individuals, but racism is more than
that.