Apartheid

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they accumulated sympathy for the Jewish case abroad. In a speech to Jews in London after
World War I, the future first president of Israel, Haim Weizmann, had insisted:
The Jewish state will come, but it will not come through pledges or
political statements, it will come through the tears and blood of the
Jewish people. . . .A society in Palestine which will be Jewish as much
as England is English and America is American. 650
Then came the Third Reich and the Second World War, in which six million Jews,
around two-thirds of all Jews at the time, were murdered along with six million others by the
Nazis in a singularly horrific, industrialized manner. The large number of displaced and
homeless Jews after this war was one of the most important factors behind the decision to set
up a homeland for the Jews.
From an ideological point of view, the Holocaust further increased the Jews’ interest
in Palestine as a national homeland as well as international sympathy for their cause and
plight, especially through what historian Norman Finkelstein has called ‘The Holocaust
Industry’, the shameless instrumentalization of Jewish suffering prior to and during the war
which resulted in a lucrative money-making machine as well as an efficient weapon to
discredit critics of modern Israel, especially since 1967 in and from the USA. 651
Zionism was not only the driving ideological force behind the establishment of the
modern state of Israel. Along with the Torah, it is still the foundation of Israeli law. Three of
the main areas in which Israeli law discriminates against non-Jews are residency rights, the
right to work and equality before the law. This brings us back to land confiscation,
exploitation in the production process and the lack of equality before the law and the lack of
an Israeli-Palestinian TRC, respectively. But the influence of Zionism also goes well beyond
the law.
The similarities between Israel and pre-1994 South Africa lie…in the
ideological underpinnings of Jewish and Afrikaner nationalism, and in
the consequent apartheid systems each has deployed in order to assure
purity of and power through their respective nationalisms. Afrikaner
Calvinist belief that Afrikaners were predestined to settle and develop
the land of South Africa, along with a strong exclusive national culture
fostered through the Afrikaner language, gave justification and
legitimacy to their expropriation of the land. There was simply no
moral space in Afrikaner thinking for indigenous Africans. Apartheid
was embraced as a way to ensure white survival, and was rationalised
as providing an opportunity for Black development in tribal
Bantustans. The South African National Party believed political power
to be an essential safeguard for Afrikaner survival as a nation, just as
the major Israeli political parties believe Jewish power is necessary to
Israeli survival and security. Zionist exclusivism, based as it has come
to be on Abraham’s covenant with God and the notion of redemption,
has its own agents of intellectual legitimisation. 652
There are differences between Afrikaner nationalism and Zionism, but the reason the
author uses the word ‘apartheid’ to describe the two systems of human rights violations is a
reason strong enough to also consider the similarities as not only more essential, but as
overwhelmingly essential.
An increasing de-secularization of society in the interest of the political elites of Israel
650
Heikal 1996: 42
651
Finkelstein, N. G.: The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 2000. See
also Akram 2002.
652
Hagopian: Soweto on the Jordan, 1998