Apartheid

essentially excuses for oppression, discrimination and incrimination. In apartheid, then, the
indigenous people who make up the largest population group are systematically robbed of
their rights – including, sometimes, even their right to live – on arbitrary and invented pretexts.
Whether apartheid in a given society is constitutional or not, even whether it is
sanctioned by law or not, is another question that I do not consider essential for apartheid.
South Africa had a racist, apartheid constitution. Israel does not have a constitution, but ‘Basic
Laws’, one of which is an apartheid repopulation law, the so-called ‘Law of Return’ to Israel
of all Jews, or, implicitly, the immigration of as many Jews as possible. Additionally – to
some extent probably in order not to appear too much like South Africa – Israel has given
religious authorities and other non-state entities powers that effectively enforce apartheid. As
mentioned above, there is no possibility of civil, non-church marriage in Israel, which makes
marriage between Jews and non-Jews practically impossible. Similarly, land ownership is
regulated by religious authorities, which do not grant permission to own land to non-Jews,
even if they are Israeli citizens. (See Chapters II.2.3, 3.3 and 4.3, below). Both of these were
apartheid measures taken care of by the state in South Africa. On the other hand, the Israeli
state, its judiciary, laws and executive powers do enforce apartheid in many ways, too. In fact,
all three of my main examples of apartheid manifest a ‘plethora’ of apartheid laws, as
Thompson described it for South Africa. For instance, Israel also differentiates ‘citizens’ from
‘nationals’, the latter being Jews with more rights and privileges. Again, the effects of all the
widely divergent apartheid strategies under different conditions or in different countries can
be indistinguishable.
Most of the main differences between my points of comparison are of a quantitative or
geographic nature. Egypt was an apartheid society for 972 years, South Africa for 350 years,
and Israel, so far, for 58 years. This accounts for a number of peculiarities with each case.
Only in Egypt do we observe a kind of cultural genocide without much trace of physical
genocide. The Egyptian language, religion and culture (in a fairly wide sense) were all gone
by the end of the Roman period. In South Africa there was, in effect, physical genocide of
Khoisan peoples. To what extent it was intended, however, is hard to ascertain. As in the
Americas, diseases brought along by the invading Whites seem to have been even more fatal
than ‘ethnic cleansing’ was. 84 Geographic conditions contributed to make South Africa an
example among many for this kind of ‘genocide’. The indigenous populations of many
Southern or Western Hemisphere outposts suffered extinction or near-extinction from
European conquest, e.g. the Caribbean islands, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia and Tasmania,
partly due to their untested immune systems. Egyptians and Palestinians, on the other hand,
were much more resistant to the invaders’ diseases due to their ‘continental crossroads’
locations.
Low population density, moreover, was decisive for the establishment of a slave-laborbased
economy that lasted for nearly two hundred years in the Cape Colony. Such an
economy would not have worked in Egypt or Israel during the time periods that are under
84 For example, the mighty Inca Empire was reduced from an estimated 32 million in 1520 to around 5 million
inhabitants in 1548, mainly due to massive measles epidemics originating from the Spanish conquistadors, but
also because of the Spanish wars of conquest, genocide, and expropriation. Ryan: Explorers Unearth Lost Inca
Stronghold in Peru, 2002. According to Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years, 1998 (1997): 78, around 95 per cent of Native Americans, throughout the Americas, were
killed by diseases imported by the Whites. See further Iliffe 1995: 124. The present post-apartheid government in
South Africa is doing a great deal to salvage fragments of the almost annihilated Khoisan culture. See, for
instance, Sithole: South African San Bushmen Get New Lease for Survival, 1999, on the return of land (an
apartheid-era game reserve) to a San community, and N.N.: !Xu, Khwe to Live On on South African Radio,
2000. Yet, neither !Xu or Khwe nor any of the other Khoisan languages are among the eleven official languages
of the liberated South Africa. There simply are not enough people who speak or understand them in order to
make elevation to the rank of official language economically feasible. The European Union has also failed to
make many aboriginal western European languages official, e.g. Basque or Samiti.
63