Apartheid

have settled and ruled supreme in South Africa for longer and in greater absolute and relative
numbers than anywhere else on the continent, except in Egypt during late ancient times.
Furthermore, South Africa under white rule was at times a colony – of the
Netherlands, the Dutch East India Trading Company and the British Empire – and Egypt was
degraded to a corresponding provincial status under Roman rule. Typical apartheid societies
as I understand them, however, are generally independent and sovereign countries, which the
de facto invading ethnic minorities consider to be their homes. This applies to Greek-ruled
Egypt as well as to independent South Africa or independent parts of it under white rule, and
to modern Israel since its creation in 1948. Colonies, on the contrary, are of course never
independent and the sense of home (if any) in the colony for the conqueror is tempered by the
important fact that the colonializers are always formally welcome back home to the
motherland after having served it in the colony.
Since modern Israel – alone among my three prime examples of apartheid – was never
a colony of a Jewish-European motherland nor a Jewish colony in any other way, it is not
surprisingly the least colonialist and in more than one way, arguably, the most genocidal of
the three. In any case, its combination of killings and expulsions, its so-called ‘ethnic
cleansing’ of the indigenous inhabitants, has created a huge majority of Jews in the state of
Israel, although there are (still) only about half as many Israeli Jews as there are Palestinians,
most of the latter now being refugees. 15 On the other hand, South African Whites, as well as
Greeks and Romans in Egypt, were always minorities. Like the Israelis, however, the South
African Whites and the Greeks in Egypt cooked the books to make themselves appear to be
majorities, also mainly through the extremely selective and ethnicist use of the institution of
citizenship, which was denied many or almost all of the indigenous.
Yet it is notoriously difficult to compare instances of genocide, or of other crimes
against humanity. Israel has achieved a kind of genocide in relative terms, although, so far, it
expelled many more people than it killed. The Palestinian refugees and their descendants
number over 4.5 million, the people killed by Israel include over 264,000 Palestinians and
more than 120,000 citizens of neighboring countries. In addition, at least hundreds of
thousands, probably millions, of Palestinians and other Arabs have been permanently disabled
or wounded. (See Chapter II.1.3, below.) Millions have fled, been forcibly expelled, lost their
property and are in many other ways condemned to poverty, a significantly shorter life
expectancy and a much lower quality of life.
In absolute numbers, however, the Whites in South Africa appear to be the most
murderous, probably exceeding three million victims over its 350 years of apartheid in the
wide sense, one and a half million of whom were directly or indirectly killed alone during the
last 34 years of white supremacist rule. However, there are now nearly four times as many
black South Africans as there are Palestinians. Therefore, absolute numbers are not good
indicators for what constitutes genocide. To ask who has suffered more in general, then, is
also ungrateful to the victims and indeed pointless. Graeco-Roman Egypt, on the other hand,
was unique in achieving the demise of a great civilization, wiping out the language, religion,
scripts and other cultural aspects of ancient Egypt. After this had been achieved, it took almost
1500 years before the Egyptian script was deciphered, read and understood again – ironically,
mainly by Europeans. We have no idea, however, how many Egyptians were killed by the
European invaders and their descendants, allies and collaborators. South African Whites
indirectly and directly achieved the same kind of ‘cultural cleansing’ as the one in Egypt upon
several indigenous Khoisan groups, coupled with physical genocide and inadvertently spread
diseases, though not upon the larger Bantu-speaking groups. The cultures of the latter,
however, were changed beyond recognition. For hundreds of thousands of Palestinian
refugees, the term ‘cultural cleansing’ also applies. The razing of their homes and whole
15
Herman.: Israel’s Approved Ethnic Cleansing, Part 1, Making “Facts on the Ground”, 2001, see also Chapters
II.1.3 and 2.3, below.
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