Apartheid

includes racism, but it also goes beyond it. It is more inclusive. After all, it would simply
sound strange if one spoke of an Arab race and a Jewish race, or a Serb race and a Croatian
race, instead of the respective ethnicities.
A generalized and consistent theory of human rights and human rights violations, I
believe, is now needed more than ever. Among other things, it should be able to solve the
following apparent paradox: On the one hand, both class- and gender-based oppression, both
classism and sexism, would fit in under the broad definition of ethnicism, proposed above.
They both invoke real and imagined, cultural and biological differences between unevenly
powerful, competing groups of people. On the other hand, to take just one example of
ethnicism, an apartheid society is a class society par excellence, with very strong patriarchal
and repressive aspects. Ethnicism and ‘domestic’ oppression are thus parts of each other,
which is of course impossible from the powerful perspective of analytical logic.
My investigation will not resolve this paradox. I merely wish to draw attention to it
and to some of the other problems inherent in attempts to develop a general theory of human
rights or oppression. The theory of ‘arbitrary sets’, cited above, does not seem able to solve
the paradox either. In my view, it makes an unwarranted categorical distinction between
biological and cultural dominance by distinguishing gender and age on the one hand from
arbitrary sets, on the other, and thus to some extent it overlooks the numerous and indeed
essentially arbitrary elements of gender and ageism. The distinction may therefore lead to
confusions of sex with gender, and of age with ageism.
Perhaps human rights as a whole must be thought over and thought differently. Maybe
the current understandings of ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, ‘economic class’ and ‘gender’ do not employ
precise enough concepts for a general and improved theory of war and oppression. It is also
possible that ‘war and oppression’ or ‘human rights violations’ are not the concepts that are
ideally used for a general theory of racism, sexism, classism, etc. Unfortunately, I will not be
able to pursue these basic theoretical issues further in this investigation.
An important, additional kind of problem for any general theory of war and oppression
is that oppression continues to exist today. Its perpetrators have learned to skillfully wipe their
tracks and distract investigators as well as opponents. One example of this activity, which we
will look at in some detail, is the Israeli society’s effort to make its legal system as different as
possible from the South African apartheid laws, apparently only for cosmetic reasons of
public relations, because the reality on the ground is obviously very similar, but Israel does
not wish to be accused of apartheid, due to the illegality and the notoriety of South African
apartheid as well as to its eventual and dramatic failure. A further motivation might well be
that investigations into Israeli apartheid could successfully be derailed by getting caught up
and entangled in relatively superficial differences such as those of legal texts and even legal
structures. As we shall see in Chapters II.2.3 and II.4.3 respectively, the Israeli elites have
successfully banned interfaith – i.e. interethnic – marriage, and minimized Palestinian land
ownership in relative and absolute terms even more successfully than the South African
apartheid elites were ever capable of minimizing black land ownership. And the Israelis did
this without invoking the legal machinery of the state at all, unlike the South African elites.
The problem whether these Israeli kinds of discrimination should be called ‘apartheid’
issues or not, however, is one that I hope to solve with a definitive, affirmative answer in the
course of this investigation. Although a strong state, which discriminates against the
indigenous majority, is a necessary precondition for apartheid, it is not always a sufficient
one. Neither apartheid nor ethnicism in a wide sense needs the state or the law to support it
with regard to every aspect of the human rights violations. Another example of this basic
characteristic is that coercion and physical violence in apartheid societies are often practiced,
not only by state employees, but also by vigilante and paramilitary individuals and groups, in
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