Apartheid

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shocking and unacceptable as these insults are (not to mention the racist act of murder itself),
they are still not quite as dehumanizing as the references to Palestinians by Israelis as ‘snakes,
cockroaches and grasshoppers’, quoted above. 661 The reason for this is that the evolutionary
distance of humans to other mammals is not as great as that to reptiles or insects. In order to
emphasize this point, in September 2002, none other than the Israeli Health Minister, Nissim
Dahan, referred to Palestinians as ‘foxes who evolved gradually to become snakes and
scorpions’. The leader of Dahan’s orthodox Jewish Shas party, a junior partner in the ruling
coalition under Sharon’s Likud party, had previously called Arabs ‘damned evil-doers’, and
Palestinians ‘snakes’. 662 It should not be forgotten in this comparison that the quoted
Palestinian suicide bomber was an oppressed and humiliated, young, desperate, and
unemployed man, whereas the Israelis quoted are mature men with enormous powers, state
security protection and other privileges, considerable wealth, and last but not least,
responsibilities in their roles as public servants, including great responsibilities for millions of
disenfranchised Palestinians living and dying under their rule.
The de-humanization of Palestinians went even further in the same year with the
implied yet obvious insults voiced by Moshe Ya’alon, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Chief of
Staff, i.e. the highest ranking military commander in Israel, who described the ‘Palestinian
threat’ as ‘like a cancer’. He went on to explain that ‘there are all sorts of solutions to
cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy.’ 663 At least
healthy foxes, snakes, scorpions, cockroaches and grasshoppers all consist of organic cells,
which work together for the harmony and well-being of the whole organism, but cancerous
cells are deadly anomalies, which, if left alone, will invariably kill their host. (Notice that
Israelis are here implicitly identified as hosts, Palestinians – the indigenous people – as
ungrateful guests who have long outstayed their welcome.) To call cancerous cells ‘forms of
life’ is somewhat perverse, and that is apparently what the top Israeli soldier wishes to express
publicly with regard to Palestinians. He also seems to imply that his temporary solution is to
kill controlled numbers of Palestinians indiscriminately but gently, and that with the means at
his disposal he could apply an even more radical treatment, namely, that of a total excision.
This is nothing new. Said refers to several attempts by Israeli Jews and their American
allies, including many academics and high-ranking politicians, to depict Palestinians or Arabs
as a fatal disease, as something that must be fought. 664
The difference in de-humanization between Palestinians and Jews appears to be
correlated with the relative effectiveness of propaganda on each side of the conflict, and with
the relative confidence with which it is being perpetrated. Given their financial resources and
their allies, it is not surprising that the Israelis are winning the propaganda war in the short
term. But in the long haul, if the war and the hate are perpetuated like this, Israeli Jews are
likely to face a rude awakening, and it may prove fatal for the Israeli Jews to underestimate
Palestinian ingenuity as well as Palestinian humanity, just as it did for Whites with regard to
Blacks in South Africa.
Palestinians are the only main victims out of my three main examples of apartheid
societies who are not African. But I do not believe that this sets them apart in any systematic
or theoretical way from the main victims of apartheid in Egypt or South Africa. The
Palestinians are closer to the Egyptians in space and closer to the South African Blacks in
time. They speak an Afroasiatic language like the ancient Egyptians did (and unlike the South
661
See footnote 370, above. In a similar fashion, Galen, the famous physician and philosopher who studied in
Alexandria, and whose authority in medicine in the western world would remain ‘virtually undisputed’ until the
16 th century, compared non-Greek languages to the sounds of pigs, frogs, ravens and jackdaws. Werner 1992: 18;
N.N.: Article ‘Galen (130-200)’, no date. See Werner 1992: 9, for further ancient Greek sources describing the
languages of barbarians as animal sounds.
662
N.N.: Row Erupts over Israeli Minister “Snake” Remark, September 26, 2002
663
Fisk: How To Shut Up Your Critics With A Single Word, 2002
664
Said 1979 (1978): 306ff.