Apartheid

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particular by armed frontier settlers. 11
A further difference between South Africa and Israel is that South Africa was
conquered by the barrel of the gun, whereas a large portion of what today is Israel was given
in 1948 to the Jews by the United Nations and the British, who had ruled it as a colony up to
that point, though more than half of what is today Israeli-controlled territory was later
conquered with military force. The UN-granted independence of a Jewish state, one of the few
elements of international law to which Israel adheres, however, is also in my view a
superficial difference from the total illegitimacy of white supremacist rule in South Africa,
mainly because Palestinians and Arabs had no voice at all in the UN at the time of the birth of
the modern state of Israel, nor were they ever asked. The establishment of Israel therefore
amounts to a de facto invasion by foreigners. One group of foreigners handed over the land to
another, without even asking the indigenous people what they thought about this. Egypt under
Greek rule presents a scenario much more similar to modern Israel than to South Africa in this
regard. The country was taken over by the Macedonians and Greeks from earlier, colonialist
occupiers, namely the Persians.
In summary, these three apartheid societies share being so-called ‘civilized societies’.
They all had strong centralized states. They all built cities. They all knew and used the
inventions of phonographic writing, metallurgy, the wheel, the sail, money, and more. These
are all inventions which only go back 5,000-6,000 years. I am not aware of any earlier
apartheid societies, or of any that do not share these basic characteristics. This sets apartheid
societies apart from the vast majority of human societies. But then they are also different from
the vast majority of civilized societies. They are countries, to some extent even ‘civilizations’
in their own right (though the root meaning of ‘civil’ may be overstretched by such strong
states as apartheid states), where the land was conquered by force or mainly by force by an
invading group of people who shared much with each other but little with the indigenous,
conquered, and oppressed group of people, who remained the majority. My definition of
apartheid is at the same time an analysis of these kinds of human rights violations. The second
part of this book is the evidence that provides an empirical underpinning for the use of the
concept of apartheid for Graeco-Roman Egypt, for South Africa under white rule, and for
modern Israel.
In the course of this first part I hope to point to the desirability of a powerful general
theory of war and oppression, especially of one that takes the – in my opinion so far
underestimated – role of ethnicism into account. 12 That underestimation is not necessarily one
11 Cf. Fredrickson: Racism: A Short History, 2002: 4: ‘racism does not require the full and explicit support of the
state and the law.’ This is a very simple but, in my opinion, crucial insight, necessary especially for the
understanding of apartheid, but also for genocide and for domestic kinds of ethnicism.
12 An opposite and pessimistic outlook can be found in US philosopher Richard Rorty’s post-modernist essay,
‘The End of Leninism, Havel and Social Hope’, 1998: 239: ‘We shall have to get over the hope for a successor to
Marxist theory, a general theory of oppression which will provide a fulcrum that lets us topple racial, economic,
and gender injustice simultaneously.’ It is unclear what Rorty means exactly by ‘simultaneously’, but I see it as
being a rather inclusive term in his context, which would justify my calling his idea ‘pessimistic’. Marxism, of
course, never was as general a theory of oppression as many came to believe. (See, for instance, footnote 14,
below.) By overemphasizing economic injustice in particular, it effectively – and to some extent probably
unconsciously – marginalized other kinds of injustice. Feminist theory seems to do the same in favor of gender
issues. (See Chapman: The Feminist Perspective, 1995: 113.) An improved theory of ethnicism should be careful
not to perpetuate that trend. Not only if it understands itself as a successor to Marxist theory: it must be more
differentiating and less reductionist than that. To cite just one example of reductionism, exaggerating the
importance of racism, or rather, overlooking the importance of economic injustice: in an otherwise excellent
treatment of the insidious and in many ways very special kinds of racism perpetrated against middle-class Blacks
in the USA, author Ellis Cose mentions different kinds of discrimination in that country beside racism, including
sexism, ageism, and discrimination of people due to their sexual orientation. In this context, however, he entirely
forgets about economic discrimination and exploitation (of employees) and state discrimination against noncitizens
in particular, but also against citizens, as well as the many mixed forms of oppression that exist between