Apartheid

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prior to 1945.
Moreover, the kind of social Darwinism implied in the quote from Peres is reflected in
the physical violence and the nigh daily justifications offered by the Israeli Defense Force
‘securocrats’. These justifications, ‘we must attack the Palestinians in their towns and homes,
because otherwise they will attack us in ours’, are similar to the cynical attitudes manifested
in the quotes by Peres and Netanyahu, above. ‘We believe that might is right, but we will
never admit that, so we will publicly just keep reiterating our historical and/or divinely
revealed ‘rights’ to the land and/or our mystic qualification as a people and/or our enemies’
lack of such a quality.’ This is not essentially different from the meta-ideology of the
Ptolemies in Egypt or of the ultimately self-appointed ‘civilizing’ or missionary duties of the
South African Whites. It is insidious ideology.
As in South Africa and in Graeco-Roman Egypt, violence and ideology are the two
utmost pillars of an analyzable system of racist or ethnicist subjugation that is built upon all
nine principles of apartheid’s gross human rights violations, as detailed above. These nine
principles lend each other the sufficient and necessary support to enable a privileged ethnic
minority to hold sway for centuries. Sooner or later, however, it seems the final bell will start
to toll. In Egypt, the Romans and Greeks were finally overthrown by a new invading force,
the Arabs. In South Africa, the demographic growth of the black underclass as well as foreign
and domestic pressures relentlessly forced the Whites to retreat, and in Israel a similar
scenario seems to be underway. I will return to this issue in the Conclusions.
At present, the approaching nominal independence of Palestinian ‘Bantustans’ mirrors
the stage of development of apartheid that the South Africans had reached in the 1970s. US
and British governments and businesses are still supporting Israel qualitatively like they did
South Africa until the 1970s and even 1980s 673 , although Israel is receiving much more aid, as
we have seen. On the other hand, the first Intifada, which got underway already in 1987,
corresponds in many ways to the Soweto uprising in 1976 and thus, by comparison, has
pointed towards an immediate end to the Israeli apartheid system since 2005. The second
Intifada of the fall of 2000 resembles the township uprisings of the 1980s in South Africa,
thus heralding possible liberation within a decade. 674 It may seem futile to bring the parallels
of Israel and South Africa too close with such simplistic attempts at comparison and
prediction, but the signs of an impending revolutionary end (within the next few decades) to
apartheid in Israel, whether violent or not, are as we have seen many. Nevertheless, optimism
in this regard may be illusory and very counter-productive, as the following assessment from
1998 shows.
Interestingly enough, when the PLO adopted the notion of a
democratic secular state in all of Palestine for Palestinian Arabs and
Jews, it found no real international support. Separation by partition or
agreement was what the international community supported. And this
is because they were committed to a Jewish state, whereas the African
National Congress could refuse separation, and the world accepted
that. Now, because of the failure of Oslo to produce a viable two-state
solution, the international community may come to support a
democratic secular state for Arabs and Jews in all of pre-state
Palestine. This can only happen if the Palestinians can offer a credible
673 N.N.: US, European Banks Propped Up Apartheid Government, March 3, 1999. See further Egli, Madörin,
Tsele & Wellmer: Apartheid-Caused Debt: The Role of German and Swiss Finance, 1999, and Chapter III.5,
below.
674 The following quote by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher brings the advent of Palestinian liberation
even closer: ‘Israeli colonialism in the land of Palestine which it has occupied since 1967 is living, in my
opinion, its last moments…We have seen throughout history that colonialism gets more brutal in its final hours’.
The same of course goes for South Africa, which may very well have been on Maher’s mind as he made that
statement. See N.N.: Israeli “Colonialism” in Final Throes - Egypt, August 14, 2001.