Apartheid

to leave the Occupied Territories, despite systematic state as well as civilian terrorism against
them, a non-viable Palestinian ‘state’, uncannily similar to the nominally independent
‘Homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’ of South African Blacks, is to be set up at the end of this
process. The natives are to be isolated, surrounded three-dimensionally, contained, and selfpoliced,
on fragments of land, or prisons, that will be almost hermetically sealed: a nonsolution
to the armed conflict, and a recipe for further disaster, in my opinion. I will attempt to
explicate the reasons why in Chapters II.3.3 and III.5.
The question of Jewish origins is of course also hotly debated. In any case, it is clear
that many people classified as ‘Jews’ in Israel and elsewhere have no ancestors who ever lived
in Historic Palestine. I will save detailed discussion of this thorny issue until Chapter II.9.3.
With my definitions of majority and minority, as well as of recent geographic origins, I will
eventually claim that Israel qualifies as an apartheid society in the wide sense, i.e. in the same
broad way that South Africa under white rule did until 1994 and that Egypt did under Greek
and Roman rule. As can be gleaned already from these two examples of concepts central to
my definitions, ethnicism shares a great deal of structural features and numerous overlaps
with domestic oppression as a whole, and I will make no attempt to separate those concepts in
a philosophically satisfactory fashion. If I were able to do that, I would already have that
elusive scientific theory of human rights and human rights violations that could judge the
relative importance of each kind of oppressive system, and, hopefully, also provide scientific
clues on how to eliminate or minimize human rights violations.
Though perhaps not very helpful in this regard, it is my position that enhancement of
power and wealth are the main motivating factors behind apartheid and that concentrations of
power and wealth are (at least short-term) consequences of it. Power and wealth, moreover,
are interdependent. You cannot really have one without the other. A third important
motivating factor is hate. It is common in apartheid, perhaps even necessary, and perhaps even
as important as power or wealth, but I am, unfortunately, unable to determine this
conclusively. For example, even when South African Blacks were commonly resigned to
white rule (or at least to non-violent resistance against that rule), especially during the first six
decades of the 20 th century, the Afrikaners, in particular, would still keep alive and rekindle
their (inaccurate, exaggerated and mostly invented) myths of savage bloodbaths of civilized
and peaceful white settlers perpetrated by the Zulus and other black warriors during the 19 th
century. 6 In the final analysis, power, wealth, and hate (wishing to annihilate the enemy) as
goals may also be considered the main motivational foundations or functions of the three main
apartheid elites, the chief politicians, the big business people, and the armed forces,
respectively. But the lack of a grand theory of human rights and human rights violations
prevents me from following up systematically on that possible clue, i.e. on that triple
correspondence, in this investigation.
This first part of my inquiry into apartheid does, however, look into aspects of the
framework and some of the theoretical conditions for such a grand theory, although its future
existence is far from guaranteed. In reference to Chela Sandoval, another great social thinker
and activist for the downtrodden, Angela Y. Davis, regards the critique of ‘race, class and sex’
as one beginning of emancipation. 7 A theory of ‘social dominance’ somewhat differently
6 Keegan: Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order, 1996: 12, 192ff. The wall-reliefs in the
gigantic, conceptually and architecturally Nazi-styled ‘Voortrekker Monument’, erected with the aid of Germans
in the 1930s between Johannesburg and Pretoria, depict stark examples of this myth. During the (in South
Africa) relatively peaceful ‘30s, they were apparently conceived to strongly reinforce (white) people with the
outrageous, but at that time mainstream, prejudice of the utter lack of trustworthiness of black people and of their
dangerous, violent streaks. Of course there were exceptions to the ‘resignation’ to white rule. During the 1920s,
for example, massacres with even more victims than in Sharpeville 1960 (see Chapter II.1.2) took place, due to
white greed and brutality and black resistance. See Mandela 2002 (1965): 135.
7 Davis, A.: Foreword, in Sandoval: Methodology of the Oppressed, 2000: xi. See also Davis, A.: Women, Race
and Class, 1983; hooks: Intersections: Race, Sex and Class, 1997
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