Apartheid

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disappeared, it may drop Israel’s undemocratic and racist regime when the perceived need for
oil disappears, as it certainly will one day.
Yet, we certainly are not condemned to wait for the oil wells to run dry. The same
goes for demographic development. It seems as if it will eliminate apartheid in time, unless, of
course, intensified genocide or ethnic cleansing sets in. But the future itself remains unwritten,
and the nearly inevitable overthrow of any apartheid regime still usually happens in an
unexpected way. It is not only dependent on geopolitical, demographic and economic trends,
but also, as Said insisted, on the actions and the mentalities of people.
Israel and South Africa are different, but there are commonalities. . . .
One of these commonalities is that a large part of the population feels
itself denied access to resources, rights, ownership of land and free
movement. What I learned from the case of South Africa is that the
only way to deal with a complex history of antagonism based on
ethnicity is to look at it, understand it and then move on. What I have
in mind is something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
And I think we, the Palestinians, are the ones who have to do it. Just as
Desmond Tutu and the blacks did it. Of course, they had first won.
They got rid of apartheid. 756
Although the TRC in South Africa has been successful in revealing numerous truths
and in bringing about reconciliations, and although a TRC may prevent witch-hunts in which
innocent people are harmed or killed, the future application of its basic principles in other
conflict zones could still be improved upon. Most importantly, it can never totally replace the
function of criminal justice. South Africa’s apartheid perpetrators wanted a blanket amnesty.
But the victims would never have accepted that. They would understandably have preferred to
continue their militarily hopeless armed struggle. My primary suggestion for internal
improvement of TRCs would be to widen the concept of gross human rights violations from
focusing only on the occurrence of physical violence for awarding and denying amnesty and
to include at least some of the additional aspects of apartheid touched upon here.
After all, the Nuremberg Tribunal also worked with a wider concept of gross human
rights violations than the South African TRC did. The example of the Nazi media mogul,
Julius Streicher, and his execution (See Chapter II.9) illustrates this point sufficiently. In the
end, the global criminal court is likely to improve the external conditions for TRC work, both
for post-apartheid and for other kinds of societies emerging from institutionalized human
rights violations.
This is not just an academic exercise in what would happen if guns and bombs would
not speak the loudest. On September 7, 2004, the ruling Likud party of Israel sent a mediumlevel
delegation to South Africa to meet with prime minister Mbeki and other members of the
ruling ANC-led government and ‘discuss how they [Likud] can learn from its relatively
peaceful transition’, according to South African officials. It should be remembered that only
15 years earlier, Likud (as well as Israel’s Labor party) was supporting apartheid in South
Africa. Likud, of course, wants South Africans to forget this, but according to the delegation
leader, the deputy minister of trade and industry Michael Ratzon, discussions at the meeting
would include ‘Israel as a state of Jewish people, a review of the conflict between Israel and
the Arab people and the political and historic process as well as relations between the two
countries’. So even if the Israeli delegation did not come to learn, they might have learned
something anyway. However, a communiqué, released after the talks had ended, implied that
no apparent progress had been made on improving the strained relations between the two
sides. Nevertheless, only a few weeks later, Ehud Olmert, the communications, industry, trade
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Said, in Shavit, see footnote 744. See also Index On Censorship, 2001: 5. Further: Sahyoun: The Unlikely
Road to Peace: Truth and Reconciliation, 2001