Apartheid

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Expressions in 2005, while 148 countries voted for it! 765 As we saw in Chapter II.9.3, of all
the countries in the world Israel and the USA are especially interested in monopolizing
information and culture on the worldwide stage, because, in Palestine at least, they stand for
discriminatory invader minority rule and cultural hegemony that is unmatched in today’s
world.
The destruction of cultural diversity is a hallmark of apartheid. It may always be and
has indeed been achieved by apartheid, as well as by other kinds of ethnicism. For this reason
alone, ethnicism as a whole should join the narrower concepts of genocide, racism,
colonialism, and apartheid as a ‘crime against humanity’. (We have also looked at many other
reasons in the course of this investigation.) Apartheid would then no longer be seen as a fringe
phenomenon among crimes against humanity and its long overdue dismantling in the one
place where it still exists unabashed and in full force – in Israel and the occupied Palestinian
Territories – could be accelerated. Let colonialism and majoritarian ethnicism instead belong
to the ‘fringe crimes against humanity’ (see Section II.Introduction), of course as long as they
do not become genocidal in character. According to the theory proposed here, however, a
predominantly colonialist society would have to become apartheid before it could ever
become genocidal. Even if only for a short while, that is exactly what happened to the
indigenous people in the Americas, in Australia, in the European colonies in southern Africa,
and elsewhere.
Moreover, the Bantustan conditions imposed on the Palestinians by Israel and the
USA through the Oslo Accords and since then, are apartheid crimes. They are thus part and
parcel of a crime against humanity and as such they should be eliminated, the sooner the
better. Mistakes of the past can be avoided, especially if the past is known well and well
known. The Palestinian ‘state’ so far proposed by the Israeli apartheid elites and the USA is
an elusive carrot, which may seem like an attractive prize compared to the stick of continued
military occupation. Yet, it should not be recognized as a state by the international
community, for exactly the same reasons that not one state other than South Africa recognized
its Bantustans as independent states during the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, although Israel, apartheid
South Africa’s closest ally, as the only state in the entire world apart from South Africa itself,
very nearly recognized the ‘Homeland’ of Bophuthatswana, a fragmented ‘entity’ of poor land
with a high population density, i.e. similar to what is now referred to as the ‘Palestinian selfruled
areas’ in the West Bank. 766 History has shown that elites will use whatever means are
available in order to divide and rule, and Palestinians should continue to beware of the
apartheid tricks with which the Israeli elites will continue to come up.
A modern Canaan, i.e. an inclusive, secular, democratic state for Arabs, Jews and
others, indeed seems to be a worthy goal, but it is not the only solution, nor even necessarily
the best one. The solution is deceptively simple: to eliminate apartheid, and thus to save lives,
money and environment and to spread more widely both human rights and wealth. Except
with a very short-term perspective, it is not hard or expensive to destroy apartheid; it is in fact
much more expensive and difficult to uphold it. The Israeli and US business elites are learning
this (over and over again) as well as the South African elites did. They do, however, manage
to raise the money (over and over again), both through exploitation of the indigenous and
others, through taxes and private donations, from their electorates – with generous assistance
and collaboration, as we have seen, from many if not most of the largest privately and
publicly owned mass media in the world, among many others.
It may be the case that no upper social class has ever voluntarily given up economic
privileges. The South African Whites merely gave up political and social privileges in the
1990s. Since then, the overwhelming majority of them (in particular the elites) also cling to
765 Unescopress: General Conference Adopts Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of
Cultural Expressions, October 20, 2005. Additionally, four countries abstained from voting.
766 See footnote 415, above.