Apartheid

with South Africa is the presence of an oppressive ethnic minority. 77 (This is not to say that
oppressive ethnic majorities elsewhere do not at times act in similar ways to the way an
apartheid regime or elite does. Most conspicuously, that was the case in the USA 78 , but in
each of the first three examples in the previous section, we saw examples of that.) I believe
that the three main cases of my investigation share this and certain other basic traits that
systematically set them apart from cases of majoritarian oppression. ‘Minoritarian’
oppression, moreover, has some paranoid features that are usually missing in majority-ruled
societies. It is of course essentially undemocratic, though some democratic aspects can and do
exist as well.
Another basic trait is the (relative) geographic origin of the oppressive minority. It
turns out that, somewhere along the timeline of historical events, this group successfully
invaded the country, whether it actually used force against the (relatively) indigenous majority
or just explicitly or even implicitly threatened to do so.
A preliminary definition of an apartheid society would be a society where an
oppressive, economically exploitative and ideologically ethnicist, de facto invading ethnic
minority is in power, with or without the rule of law. The last condition is important, since it
enables us to extend the concept of apartheid to practices such as the discrimination against
non-Whites and bans on interracial marriage, which both go back to the very first white
settlements in South Africa.
Obviously, South Africa in 1947 has more in common with South Africa in, say, 1967
than with any other country at any time. In the course of this investigation, we will witness
how several racist laws, policies, and practices developed continuously towards the 1948
together with the ‘Israeli Arabs’ – 19 per cent of the Israeli population – and the Palestinian non-refugees in this
area, then the Israeli Jews are still an ethnic minority in the immediate area. Within the wider geographic,
political and strategic context of the mainly Arab and Muslim Middle East, the Israeli Jews are, of course, a tiny
minority, and in a very similar situation to South African Whites in the Southern African region (see Reinhart:
Mideast Apartheid? Peace? 2000) or to late antiquity Greeks and Romans in the North African and Southwest
Asian regions. Surrounded by some 250 million Arabs, Israel still only has around 4.7 million Jews, whereas
there are nearly 8 million Palestinians (including ‘Israeli Arabs’), most of them refugees. After World War II
and, even more, after the Cold War, there has been increasing international pressure on governments to
democratize. With regard to that, it has been the policy of Israel to turn its system of oppression of a majority
into one of a minority – by immigration, migrant labor and ethnic cleansing, i.e. apartheid, genocidal and
expulsion policies – even though exploitation of indigenous labor will not necessarily be as profitable any more.
It is a typical (and desperate) apartheid strategy that was also attempted, though unsuccessfully, by the
government of P.W. Botha in South Africa (1978-1989). Less recently, however, it was applied much more
successfully by Whites in the Americas, in Australia and elsewhere. But in those cases, it was also less apartheid
than genocide. Expulsion and migrant labor were not applied to the indigenous to a great extent, perhaps mainly
since there were then even fewer international enforcement pressures with regard to human rights standards than
there are now. It may seem easy or even inevitable to assign structural blame to democracy for the gross human
rights violations perpetrated by Israel and South Africa in this instance. To introduce democracy they had to
expel or eliminate enough members of the majority, in order to transform it into a minority. But it is in fact the
international system, which only allows democracy within nation-states (and not transnationally), and which
values citizens’ rights so much more than human rights, that is to blame, not democracy per se. See Iliffe 1995:
283f; and Chapters II.2.2-3, 3.2-3, and 5.3, below.
77 Further recent examples of oppressive ethnic minorities in regions without state- or even provincial status,
among many others, would be the Serbs from 1989 to 1999 under President Milosevic’s leadership in Kosovo,
and previously also the Serbs in Bosnia, as well as the British in Ireland and the Chinese in Tibet. On Kosovo
and Bosnia, see F.F.: Die Etablierung eines Apartheid-Systems: Im Kosovo wenden die Serben die gleiche
Strategie an wie zuvor in Bosnien, 1999; Lane: TRB From Washington: Trouble Spot, 1998; N.N.: Bosnian
Leaders Strike Deal on Equal Ethnic Rights, 2002. Serbia has also been compared in detail with Israel, especially
with regard to state violence with impunity: see Ron: Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel,
2003. The comparison with apartheid was used explicitly against Milosevic in his trial at the war crimes tribunal
in The Hague, when the first witness, Kosovo Albanian Mahmut Bakalli, testified. See Roche & Levene: First
Witness Confronts Defiant Milosevic, 2002. Similar to both Kosovo and Northern Ireland is the situation in
Tibet. See N.N.: Tibetans at Racism Meet Accuse China of Apartheid, 2001.
78 Cf. Massey & Denton: American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, 1993
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