Apartheid
Apartheid Apartheid
230 responsibility for a basic human right being denied to a whole nation’s children. 539 On top of all that, more than a quarter of all Palestinian children now live in poverty and growing numbers are being forced out of school to work, according to Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics director Hassan Abu Libdeh. ‘Among the most important reasons for this rise is the overall drop in the standard of living of Palestinians,’ He said a survey conducted in 2000 showed more than 25 percent of children in the Palestinian-ruled parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip lived in poverty and almost six percent of those aged between ten and seventeen were in the labor market. As the Intifada broke out later that year, things went from bad to worse. In June 2001, the International Labor Organization, ILO, reported that a quarter of the Palestinian adult work force was out of work and this forced even more children out to work, although there was hardly any to be had. They missed school all the same. Later in the same month, the Palestinian Labor Minister estimated an overall unemployment rate of 50 per cent. By March 2003, that figure had risen to a staggering 53 per cent, as estimated by the traditionally pro-US, and indeed US-created, World Bank. 540 Meanwhile, the relatively ‘over-funded’ schools for Jews were also becoming increasingly ideologized. A column criticizing the changes in education content under prime minister Ariel Sharon, published in the Swiss newspaper, Berner Zeitung, made further headlines when a complaint filed against it was taken up by the Swiss Press Council in 2002. The organization, ‘David (Center against Anti-Semitism and Denunciation)’, had filed the complaint, accusing the column of being ‘unambiguously anti-Semitic’. But the complaint was not upheld by the esteemed, independent council, which considered acceptable the Berner Zeitung column’s criticism of Sharon’s insistence on more teaching in Israeli Jewish schools from the Bible’s Book of Joshua. The column had described the book on the legends of Moses’ successor as the ‘most bloodthirsty’ and most ‘martialist’ book in the Bible and as approving in its description of the genocidal slaughter of the indigenous Cana’anites by the invading Jews. 541 We shall return to the lasting and onerous impact of the Book of Joshua and other apparently pro-genocidal holy texts, on both Jews and non-Jews, in Chapter II.9.3. 539 N.N: Thousands of Palestinian Children Denied Access to Schools, October 2, 2002; N.N.: Israel Curfews Hurt Palestinians’ Schooling-UNICEF, October 2, 2002 540 Heinrich March 5, 2003; N.N.: Poverty Forcing Palestinian Children to Work, April 10, 2000; Nebehay: Closures Mean Crisis for Palestinian Workers - ILO, 2001; Drees: Rising Palestinian Unemployment Is Burning Fuse, 2001; Ass’adi: Palestinian Boy Struggles to Make Ends Meet, 2001. The latter is a description of a day in the life of eight-year-old Ahmed Shqeir, who sold coffee by the cup at the Israeli army checkpoint at Qalandiya in the West Bank. Ahmed was the sole provider for his family of ten. His ten-year-old brother used to do the job but was hit by a car and lost his spleen. Their father was banned from working in Israel for ‘security reasons’. He was even jailed for four months for working inside the Jewish state without a permit. (The article did not say what happened to those who employed him.) Ahmed wanted to be a mathematics teacher when he grew up, and was quoted in the article as saying: ‘I dream of having at least one day off.’ 541 N.N.: Kritik an Israels Erziehungspolitik in der Schweiz Nicht Unzulässig: Presserat Weist Antisemitismus- Beschwerde Zurück, January 22, 2002. In the 1993 documentary film about his life and work, ‘Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media’, directed by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, Chomsky (himself a Jew, ex-Zionist, and son of a Zionist) goes further and calls the Bible ‘one of the most genocidal books ever written’, also most likely with the Book of Joshua in mind, without any legal or paralegal repercussions known to me. The genocide carried out by Joshua and his followers, by the way, is described in the Bible as well premeditated, since Moses, before he dies, instructs the Israelites to kill all the people who reside in the Promised Land, in Deuteronomy 5:1-7:16. See also Chapter II.9.3., below.
8. Language Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war? (Ray Gwyn Smith) 542 231 In the realm of language, apartheid oppressors display remarkable arrogance. From the time of the first invasion onwards, they overwhelmingly refuse to learn the language of the indigenous majority. Instead, they try to and often succeed in more or less forcing the latter to learn theirs. Moreover, the political and physical geography is slowly but surely renamed into the language and symbolism of the invaders. A very often and very much desired long-term effect of these two apartheid strategies by its perpetrators is the death of the indigenous language. Because we think so much in words, the loss of languages limits the possibilities of thought. And this is what the apartheid elites want to prevent in the long term: critical thought, the thought of liberation and resistance, the recollection of true history. By making it harder for the indigenous to comprehend elite thought as well as to express themselves, the elites may also be able to uphold and further entrench the ethnicist stereotypes: that the indigenous are culturally, and perhaps even biologically, inferior to the invaders and their descendants. The concept of ‘linguistic genocide’ was separately defined and roundly condemned by the United Nations (in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) among other reasons in order to emphasize that it is a far more common occurrence than physical genocide. 543 Linguistic genocide, a crime against humanity when perpetrated consciously and intentionally, takes place in apartheid societies as well as elsewhere, for instance against the imported slaves in racist slave societies such as the ones in the Americas or in the Dutch Cape Colony. It was also achieved in South Africa with most Khoisan languages, and in Egypt with the language of the entire indigenous majority. In this way, aside from the indigenous disadvantages to which I just referred, much of the resistance practiced by the indigenous becomes defense of their culture, which on the one hand helps to solidify resistance, but on the other hand this defense takes away indigenous time and energy from the resistance against the more physical or concrete aspects of human rights violations that we have dealt with in earlier chapters. Another hallmark of the three apartheid societies under investigation is the introduction by the elite minority of an official, elite language that is practically useless outside the apartheid country, even in the countries of the invaders’ origins, yet useful to the invaders themselves and their descendants in order to exclude the indigenous from elite culture in the widest sense. This was achieved with ancient varieties of the languages spoken by the apartheid invaders in Egypt and Israel, and with the settlers’ new variety of Dutch, called ‘Afrikaans’, in South Africa. Hebrew, the language spoken by some of the Jewish invaders and immigrants to Palestine, had been reconstructed and reinvented during the decades prior to the establishment of the modern Jewish state, and it thus represents a middle instance between Graeco-Roman Egypt’s and South Africa’s elite apartheid languages. From another perspective, Israel is the least oppressive of the three apartheid authorities with regard to language. It is the only one to formally grant the language of the conquered indigenous majority the status of official language of the apartheid state. As we shall see, however, 542 Quoted in Anzaldúa: How to Tame a Wild Tongue, 4 2001 (1987): 572 543 At the time of writing, around half of the world’s languages are threatened by extinction. This is almost certainly unprecedented in human history. Analysts mainly blame the spread of commercialism and consumerism, and, secondly, the spread of English, as the main factors behind this, perhaps the greatest, threat to cultural diversity ever, but there are many additional factors, such as US- and UK-driven cultural imperialism, oligopolistic and centralist developments in communications technology, population increases, the spread of French and Chinese, to name but a few. N.N.: Terralingua: UNHCHR Submission on Linguistic Rights in Education, 1998, UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/AC.4/1998/2; Hamelink: Confronting Cultural Rights, 2001; Skutnabb-Kangas: Linguistic Genocide in Education – Worldwide Diversity or Human Rights?, Outline of the Book, 1999
- Page 179 and 180: 179 whatsoever. Like the women in A
- Page 181 and 182: 181 KwaZulu comprised twenty-nine m
- Page 183 and 184: 183 Just as the Basic ‘Law of Ret
- Page 185 and 186: 185 health care and other rights, s
- Page 187 and 188: 4. Land 187 Land dispossession and
- Page 189 and 190: 189 separate quarters for Greeks of
- Page 191 and 192: 191 towns under the condition that
- Page 193 and 194: 193 settlements were being built th
- Page 195 and 196: 195 because when given self-rule in
- Page 197 and 198: order to enjoy elementary rights. W
- Page 199 and 200: 199 5.1. Tax unto Starvation Ptolem
- Page 201 and 202: 201 keeping such a brutal industry
- Page 203 and 204: 203 and often extremely unhealthy w
- Page 205 and 206: 205 In most cases, these passes are
- Page 207 and 208: 207 corporate giants. Here we have
- Page 209 and 210: 209 As elsewhere in the developing
- Page 211 and 212: 211 in and by itself apartheid in t
- Page 213 and 214: 213 near-psychotic state of mind of
- Page 215 and 216: 215 periods at varying times and ar
- Page 217 and 218: 217 overcrowded. For example, Ramal
- Page 219 and 220: 219 that in the Palestinian territo
- Page 221 and 222: 221 Third World citizens or worse:
- Page 223 and 224: 223 Manetho’s account. 501 From M
- Page 225 and 226: From the second and third centuries
- Page 227 and 228: education is inferior and a crime a
- Page 229: 229 on the other hand, aid from the
- Page 233 and 234: 233 case in the Americas during the
- Page 235 and 236: therefore throws into high profile
- Page 237 and 238: 237 Today, there are still many tow
- Page 239 and 240: 239 Learning Hebrew, on the other h
- Page 241 and 242: 241 be overemphasized. The South Af
- Page 243 and 244: 243 It might seem vastly exaggerate
- Page 245 and 246: 245 and it continued throughout the
- Page 247 and 248: 247 A prime example of the classica
- Page 249 and 250: 249 greedy, cunning, unreliable and
- Page 251 and 252: 251 behind nuclear physics being su
- Page 253 and 254: 253 argued, already in the sixth ce
- Page 255 and 256: 255 at the end of the 19 th century
- Page 257 and 258: Inevitably, these racist stereotype
- Page 259 and 260: 259 edge of the sword’ (ibid: 6:2
- Page 261 and 262: 261 be denied access to or be expel
- Page 263 and 264: 263 ‘unified’ their countries d
- Page 265 and 266: 265 can be observed as in the cases
- Page 267 and 268: 267 of Arabs that are essentially t
- Page 269 and 270: 269 shocking and unacceptable as th
- Page 271 and 272: 271 This prevalent hypocrisy inhere
- Page 273 and 274: inclusive, democratic and secular v
- Page 275 and 276: 275 The misrepresentation and the l
- Page 277 and 278: 277 militants on September 5-6, 197
- Page 279 and 280: 279 Palestinian and otherwise, are
8. Language<br />
Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?<br />
(Ray Gwyn Smith) 542<br />
231<br />
In the realm of language, apartheid oppressors display remarkable arrogance. From the<br />
time of the first invasion onwards, they overwhelmingly refuse to learn the language of the<br />
indigenous majority. Instead, they try to and often succeed in more or less forcing the latter to<br />
learn theirs. Moreover, the political and physical geography is slowly but surely renamed into<br />
the language and symbolism of the invaders. A very often and very much desired long-term<br />
effect of these two apartheid strategies by its perpetrators is the death of the indigenous<br />
language. Because we think so much in words, the loss of languages limits the possibilities of<br />
thought. And this is what the apartheid elites want to prevent in the long term: critical thought,<br />
the thought of liberation and resistance, the recollection of true history. By making it harder<br />
for the indigenous to comprehend elite thought as well as to express themselves, the elites<br />
may also be able to uphold and further entrench the ethnicist stereotypes: that the indigenous<br />
are culturally, and perhaps even biologically, inferior to the invaders and their descendants.<br />
The concept of ‘linguistic genocide’ was separately defined and roundly condemned<br />
by the United Nations (in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the<br />
Crime of Genocide) among other reasons in order to emphasize that it is a far more common<br />
occurrence than physical genocide. 543 Linguistic genocide, a crime against humanity when<br />
perpetrated consciously and intentionally, takes place in apartheid societies as well as<br />
elsewhere, for instance against the imported slaves in racist slave societies such as the ones in<br />
the Americas or in the Dutch Cape Colony. It was also achieved in South Africa with most<br />
Khoisan languages, and in Egypt with the language of the entire indigenous majority. In this<br />
way, aside from the indigenous disadvantages to which I just referred, much of the resistance<br />
practiced by the indigenous becomes defense of their culture, which on the one hand helps to<br />
solidify resistance, but on the other hand this defense takes away indigenous time and energy<br />
from the resistance against the more physical or concrete aspects of human rights violations<br />
that we have dealt with in earlier chapters.<br />
Another hallmark of the three apartheid societies under investigation is the<br />
introduction by the elite minority of an official, elite language that is practically useless<br />
outside the apartheid country, even in the countries of the invaders’ origins, yet useful to the<br />
invaders themselves and their descendants in order to exclude the indigenous from elite<br />
culture in the widest sense. This was achieved with ancient varieties of the languages spoken<br />
by the apartheid invaders in Egypt and Israel, and with the settlers’ new variety of Dutch,<br />
called ‘Afrikaans’, in South Africa. Hebrew, the language spoken by some of the Jewish<br />
invaders and immigrants to Palestine, had been reconstructed and reinvented during the<br />
decades prior to the establishment of the modern Jewish state, and it thus represents a middle<br />
instance between Graeco-Roman Egypt’s and South Africa’s elite apartheid languages. From<br />
another perspective, Israel is the least oppressive of the three apartheid authorities with regard<br />
to language. It is the only one to formally grant the language of the conquered indigenous<br />
majority the status of official language of the apartheid state. As we shall see, however,<br />
542 Quoted in Anzaldúa: How to Tame a Wild Tongue, 4 2001 (1987): 572<br />
543 At the time of writing, around half of the world’s languages are threatened by extinction. This is almost<br />
certainly unprecedented in human history. Analysts mainly blame the spread of commercialism and<br />
consumerism, and, secondly, the spread of English, as the main factors behind this, perhaps the greatest, threat to<br />
cultural diversity ever, but there are many additional factors, such as US- and UK-driven cultural imperialism,<br />
oligopolistic and centralist developments in communications technology, population increases, the spread of<br />
French and Chinese, to name but a few. N.N.: Terralingua: UNHCHR Submission on Linguistic Rights in<br />
Education, 1998, UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/AC.4/1998/2; Hamelink: Confronting Cultural Rights, 2001;<br />
Skutnabb-Kangas: Linguistic Genocide in Education – Worldwide Diversity or Human Rights?, Outline of the<br />
Book, 1999