Apartheid

Americans), Nazi Germany (against Jews, Roma, and others), Australia, New Zealand,
Guatemala, Bolivia, Rhodesia, the Crusaders’ Kingdom of Jerusalem, Ireland from the Middle
Ages until 1921 and Northern Ireland since then, Hong Kong, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan
under Taliban rule, Tibet under Chinese rule, South Vietnam under US military occupation,
Kosovo and Bosnia under Serb rule, the whole world under white domination and white rule,
and others still. As we shall see, ‘apartheid’ can under certain circumstances be a justified
label for many of the conditions and practices and for certain time periods in each of the latter
histories, but I also hope to show that it is even better, and even more properly, applied to
each of the three central subjects of this investigation.
The wider concept of ethnicist, systematic, gross human rights violations, in my
understanding, consists of colonialism, apartheid and genocide on the one hand, and of
discrimination against minorities in ‘self-rule’ situations – whether undemocratic or not – on
the other. An example of the latter, among countless others, would be the widespread, deeply
entrenched, and systematic discrimination against people of Asian, African, and Afro-
Caribbean descent in present-day Britain, or against people of North and West African or
Afro-Caribbean descent in France today. 5
This kind of human rights violations could also be seen as one starting point of many
for a continuous spectrum of other, i.e. of non-ethnicist kinds of ‘domestic’ oppression and
repression – within a society, a family, or an individual – as explained or studied by, for
example, Marxism, gender theory and psychoanalysis. Obviously, an oppressive society can
be global, and the use of the term ‘domestic’ may be justified for such a situation as well. In
an era of globalization, there are in fact ‘domestic’ laws, policies and practices, especially
corporate ones, being developed and more or less implemented for the whole world, in any
case regardless of borders between nation states. What I tentatively call ‘domestic’ human
rights violations can therefore also exist on transnational levels. Incidentally, each of the four
kinds of ethnicist human rights violations – colonialism, apartheid, genocide and domestic
oppression – can be racist as well.
In the reality of social life, however, ethnicist oppression is hardly ever separable from
domestic oppression. People are sometimes, perhaps even often, oppressed because of their
ethnicity, their economic class and their sex at the same time. Most of the time, ethnicist
human rights violations could involve at least one of these two other main categories. In my
opinion, poor Palestinian women and poor black South African women are among the most
violated demographic groups with regard to human rights during this last half century.
The decisive differences within the loose conceptual framework proposed here for the
study of apartheid, is whether a majority or a minority of people is oppressive – only a society
where an ethnic minority is oppressive will be referred to as ‘apartheid’ – and secondly, the
recent geographic origins of the populations under study. Only a society where the oppressive
ethnic minority has invaded the country in some manner and subjugated the indigenous people
will be referred to as ‘apartheid’. Obviously, both of these criteria are imprecise, and they will
have to be sharpened.
One example of a disputed majority/minority question is the state of Israel, where the
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (or ‘Israeli Arabs’, as Israel and its allies like to call them)
now make up a mere 19 per cent of the six or so million people. Yet, there are nearly seven
million other Palestinians, about half of them under Israeli military occupation and/or under
Israeli military siege outside the state of Israel, i.e. in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and
most of them refugees due to the establishment and the expansion of the state of Israel. Thus
the Palestinians are in fact the majority, that is, in comparison with the Israeli Jews. There are
almost twice as many Palestinians as there are Israeli Jews, and international law (still)
5 Ibid: 203-211; Pilkington: Racial Disadvantage and Ethnic Diversity in Britain, 2002; freundinnen und freunde
der klassenlosen gesellschaft (eds.): Rauchzeichen aus den Banlieues: Reflexionen zur Revolte in den
französischen Vorstädten, 2 2006
17