Apartheid

well. (Apart from that, the Afrikaners also set up the independent apartheid republics of
Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natalia in order to escape British rule during the 19 th
century.) Modern South Africa occupied and colonialized Namibia. And Israel has displayed
colonialist streaks in the territories it conquered in the 1948 war, in southern Lebanon, Syria
(the Golan Heights), Egypt (the Sinai peninsula), and most of all in the currently partly ‘selfgoverning’,
previously, until 1967, Jordanian and Egyptian territories, i.e. the West Bank and
Gaza. Today’s Israel within the 1967 borders is an apartheid society, although most of the
oppressed majority has been expropriated and expelled, and has become a minority, because
the Palestinian refugees are still Palestinian. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, however,
Israeli presence is both colonialism and apartheid, with some additional genocidal policies and
practices. Over ten per cent of the population in those territories are illegal Jewish settlers.
The invasions are sporadic, discontinuous and sometimes reversed. Just as Israeli
troops invaded Lebanon in 1982 and (almost) vacated it in 2000 after 18 years of military
occupation and destruction, the British administration of South Africa annexed Transorangia,
the area between the Orange and Vaal rivers (including Lesotho) in 1848, but withdrew in
1852-54. They would not return for decades. The Israelis returned shortly to (the south of)
Lebanon in 2006, killed over 1,300 people there, mostly civilians, destroyed the whole
country’s infrastructure through bombings of civilian targets, and threatened to return soon
again. After 28 years of military occupation of the West Bank, the Israeli forces also withdrew
from some towns there, and there, too, they were back again, in most of the so-called
‘Palestinian Autonomous Areas’, within a decade.
The aftermath of apartheid is also different from that of colonies: liberation and
democratization in particular must (in both a moral and a politically constraining sense)
involve tolerance and integration of the descendants of the invaders and oppressors. After
colonialism, however, the colonializers formally and easily withdraw. As can be observed in
the liberated South Africa thus far, land and business ownership remains to a very large extent
in the old hands of the formerly ruling ethnic minority, leaving behind a legacy of apartheid
that lingers far beyond its formal and official demise.
Unlike colonialism, apartheid can never be a mere chapter in the history of a society. It
is invariably a traumatic process that changes a society beyond recognition. I am not denying
that colonialization under special circumstances can be equally traumatic, but in most cases,
especially when it was short and relatively undramatic, it became a much more manageable
burden to bear for subsequent generations. I distinguish ‘colonialization’ of inhabited land
from ‘colonization’ of uninhabited and unclaimed land.
The equally close proximity of apartheid to genocide is partly due to the simple fact
that the oppressed and impoverished indigenous majority in an apartheid society will multiply
faster than the privileged majority will, and to the fact that this becomes a challenge and a
threat to the power of the privileged minority. Even in the era of weapons of mass destruction
power still resides in population numbers. My sections on apartheid ‘Violence’ and
‘Repopulation’ will deal with the reasons behind this as well as the forms that genocidal or
near-genocidal behavior takes. In order to manage apartheid, the ruling elites will thus time
and again employ measures to ‘cull’ the indigenous. They will also do so for related reasons,
e.g. to make space for privileged immigrants, and/or as punishment for and deterrence against
uprisings and other kinds of resistance, etc. On the whole, indigenous human lives are not
worth much, if anything at all, to those in power. Unlike essentially genocidal societies,
however, the elites will let an indigenous majority stay alive, mainly for reasons of profitmaking
– they find ways of making the majority work for them – and in the cases of South
Africa and modern Israel, also because of a potentially threatening world public opinion,
which could turn into intervention. (In a few cases, moreover, they might not have the military
or political means to bring about ethnic cleansing or genocide, and in others they may feel that
they might not have enough immigrants available to fill the places of the indigenous.)
International sanctions due to (internationally perceived) gross human rights violations,
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