Apartheid

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III. Conclusions
I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a
description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
could describe events in South Africa.
(Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Jerusalem on Christmas Day, 1989) 716
1. Apartheid War and Oppression
The three societies that have been investigated here are apartheid societies in the wide
sense. They all manifest gross human rights violations (also in a wide sense) in the realms of
physical violence; repopulating activities; grants, demands, and denials of citizenship; land
confiscation, land redistribution and forced removals; exploitation in the production process;
engineered, ethnically motivated differences in access to necessities; education; language; and
ideological thought, including de-secularization and vast spectra of racist myths that have led
to powerful, collective misperceptions of reality, often with resultant psychopathological
streaks among both perpetrators and victims. These gross human rights violations stem from
the military and paramilitary conquest of land, natural resources, and people by a de facto
invading ethnic minority, which bases its system of gross human rights violations against the
country’s indigenous majority upon its own superior military technology, an ideologically
conditioned readiness to develop and use it, and an actual use of it. I believe that due to these
structural parallels, investigated in detail above, Israeli-ruled Palestine and Graeco-Roman
Egypt are the societies that bear the closest overall resemblance to apartheid South Africa.
Apartheid works in the following way: Even after the invasion and the military or
semi-military conquest, an overwhelming majority of human rights violations are carried out
by the ethnic minority, victimizing the ethnic majority in each of the nine realms that we have
investigated. One of the most basic features of those violations is the disproportionality of
value attached to human lives, human rights, and human dignity.
If one member of the oppressive minority is killed, then a proportionate punishment in
the eyes of the elites will often be the retaliatory, extrajudicial and indiscriminate killing of
sometimes ten, or fifteen, or more, members of the indigenous majority. Yet, on the whole,
Africans did not choose Whites as enemies, Palestinians did not choose to fight the Jews. It
was solely the invaders who made a more or less collective choice to fight the indigenous.
That choice, however, was more often than not an undemocratic choice, even within the
invader community. In each case, there are identifiable elites that made the decisions that led
to apartheid.
The disproportionality takes many forms aside from physical violence: If 70 per cent
of the population is not allowed to own more than 13 per cent of the land, as in 20 th century
South Africa, then that is also considered by the apartheid elites as sound, lawful, just, and
proportionate, of course only as long as that majority is indigenous, and the other 30 per cent
are not. If the indigenous majority (most of which has been forcibly exiled) owns only two per
cent of the land, as in 21 st century Israel, then that is even better, from the perspective of the
apartheid perpetrators. The same goes for wages, taxes, rents, etc. If each of the majority
Palestinians get a fifth of the water that the average Israeli gets, it is appropriate in the eyes of
the Israeli elites responsible, even if the average Palestinian under Israeli military occupation,
whose well-being legally falls under the responsibility of the Israeli state, gets much less
water than the WHO recommends, while the nearby Jewish settlers waste water on shiny
lawns and in large swimming pools and enjoy a vast array of other rights and privileges that
are illegally denied the Palestinians. In the mass media and in public debate, finally, the ruling
ethnic minority stances and perspectives are overwhelmingly misrepresented, in a
716 Quoted in Abuhalwa: Apartheid’s Accidental Prophecy, 2002