Apartheid

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consideration here. Both Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt had high population densities with
overwhelmingly settled populations when the invaders first arrived. South Africa also had
settled populations, but nomadic pastoralists and hunters-gatherers, as well. It is also a very
much larger country than the other two. The huge geographic and epidemiological distance
between the Netherlands, the source of most of the invaders, and South Africa, together with
the lack of intense contacts before the initial invasion therefore constitutes a main difference
from my other two examples.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has probably cost more Jewish lives than the white
lives that were lost in the White/Black conflict in South Africa; in all certainty this applies to
South Africa between 1948 and 1994. This is a mere quantitative difference, but it has
contributed to the very widespread, yet deeply mistaken, impression that the Israelis are being
victimized in general, whilst the Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular, are the
aggressors. A couple of quantitative differences intimately linked to this one are also worth
keeping in mind in this context: The Israelis have been much more successful than the South
African Whites were at ethnic cleansing. A mere 19 per cent of Israeli residents are now
Arabs, whereas there was a two-third Arab majority inside the much smaller state of Israel
that the UN had granted when the state was founded in 1948. Conversely, the Whites in South
Africa were never more than around 25 per cent of the total population. The number of killed
Jews, moreover, remains a small fraction – between 1 to 12 and 1 to 25 – of the Palestinian
death toll, since hostilities started. (See Chapter II.1.3, below.) Furthermore, South Africa was
never as densely populated as Palestine has been since Jews started arriving in large numbers
last century. That meant that land was scarcer in Palestine and competition for it was therefore
more intense.
In my comparative cases, the initial de facto invasions also assumed varied forms. The
Greeks expelled and took over Egypt from the previous Persian occupying forces, South
Africa was conquered with firearms and a part of what is today Israel was ‘given’ to the Jews
after World War II by the UN and the previous British occupying power against unanimous
Arab resistance, which also resulted in warfare. The rest was taken by force. Here Israel
represents a middle instance, between the forms of invasion in South Africa and Egypt. From
these three slightly different initial conditions the societies then developed more and more
similar characteristics as the occupations endured in time.
With their crucial strategies of ‘divide and rule’, the apartheid elites always ensure that
there is a tiny minority of indigenous people, who are relatively privileged and collaborate
with the invaders. Thus, there are always some minor indigenous figures among the apartheid
elites. In South Africa and Israel, those groups were (and are) mainly to be found among the
indigenous political and business leaders. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, however, they were
priests, a fact that reflects the extreme degree of ‘de-secularization’ that characterized that
society. Nonetheless, these priests appear to have been the only indigenous political and
business leaders as well, in the informal sense of the latter positions. There were also other
relatively powerful or rich Egyptians who cooperated, at least with the Greeks. 85 Moreover,
collaborators can probably be found among indigenous spiritual leaders in both apartheid
South Africa and modern Israel/Palestine. This difference is therefore not as great as it might
appear at a first glance. Moreover, the indigenous apartheid elites are almost always men.
Perhaps the most important differences are neither spatial nor temporal, but the fates
that each of the three apartheid systems under consideration met with (so far). Roman Egypt
was conquered by Muslim Arabs in 642 CE. It has since then become an Arabic-speaking
country with a 90 per cent Muslim majority, without apartheid but with many other internal
conflicts and varieties of oppression. Most importantly, ethnic Greeks and Romans were in no
way automatically part of the country’s elites since the Muslim conquest and ‘opening’ of
Egypt (the standard Arab reference to the liberation of the country). Greek texts, including
85 They probably included the family of the last indigenous king. See Huß 2001: 213ff.