Apartheid

school texts, have been found in the country from only another century or so after that. 86
There was never any large-scale massacre of apartheid perpetrators or their descendants after
defeat. They were never driven into the sea.
South African apartheid was reined in by globalized capitalism and the elites were
forced to incorporate parts of a black underclass rapidly growing in numbers into the
economic and political structures of administration. 87 Again, the Whites were never driven
into the sea. To stay with the previous, telling example from Egypt: one may perhaps expect
that school textbooks in Afrikaans will only be produced for another hundred years, but
English is still expanding its influence on the country’s culture, though much more to due to
global than to local conditions. Moreover, Afrikaans is still an official language of South
Africa, and Afrikaner culture now enjoys unprecedented protection as a minority culture in
this country.
Israel is still holding out, but on some indications it seems to be heading the way of its
South African predecessor. Whether it will or not is in my opinion among many other things a
question of morality and decency. For instance, if the United Nations became a more
democratic institution and expelled and/or really punished Israel for ignoring and making a
mockery out of its resolutions and declarations as well as a host of human rights declarations
and conventions to which both Israel and its present patron, the USA, are signatories; if Israel
were forced to stop killing UN employees, journalists and other neutral non-combatants; if the
world’s countries, transnational corporations and trade blocs increased bilateral pressure on
Israel by economic and other sanctions as they did on South Africa; if Israel’s only real
nation-state ally, the USA, stopped providing Israel with $3 to 5 billion of aid every year
(most of which is military aid) and if the USA refrained from repeatedly, almost continuously,
abusing its undemocratic veto power in the UN Security Council in favor of Israel, then Israel
would be likely to follow South Africa’s fate sooner rather than later. (I will expand on my
view of apartheid responsibilities at the end of Part I.) There are also domestic, local, and
regional parameters to the problems at hand. Though highly unlikely, Israel may one day
unilaterally end the daily physical violence by pulling out its troops and settlers from the
Occupied Territories. It may end the physical violence in this way due to the wishes of its own
business community, which hopes to have access to cheap Palestinian labor, and might be
faced with worldwide economic sanctions as Israeli crimes against humanity accumulate
further, or due to the Israeli electorate eventually tiring of the war and its costs, or even to its
becoming aware of the deep injustice and immorality of Israeli apartheid. The inevitable
decline of US imperialism, Palestinian population growth, and relative Israeli-Jewish
population retreat as well as the resistance from within and from neighboring Arab countries
may also become factors spelling the end, or at least a considerable weakening of apartheid in
Israel, but these too are seemingly becoming increasingly remote opportunities. We shall
return to the destinies of apartheid societies, and especially to that in Israel and Palestine, in
Part III.
The conclusions and parallels offered here could become useful in case an institutional
search for truth and reconciliation with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be
initiated, as it was in Guatemala, Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria and elsewhere. The uses of
studying systematic human rights violations in late antiquity are less tangible. I find Egypt a
particularly interesting case in point since the colonializers came from the two leading
military powers of their eras, European powers, and the oppressed ethnic majority was
African, as in South Africa. Although more than a millennium lies between these two
societies, several of the contingent parallels are also striking in their similarity.
I do not believe, however, that this has any deeper anthropological significance to the
effect that ‘Europeans’ should be considered automatically oppressive or even that they
86
Morgan: Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, 1998: 42. See also Chapter III.5, below.
87
Iliffe 1995: 281-284
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