Apartheid

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ruled today by hawks whose vision is an unending war. Israel, whose leaders are always eager
to go on [with] another war, is an asset in this vision.’ 159 Although this perspective might
seem like an invitation to utter despair, I do believe that one should hang on to hope, against
most of the odds. In the early 1980s the South African Whites had a similar unrelentingly
belligerent and arrogant attitude, yet only ten years later they themselves voted in a
referendum to dismantle political and judicial apartheid. Pride cometh before a fall.
To blame Israeli apartheid mainly on the USA or on US elites, however, would be to
miss some essential and very important points. Other actors who should shoulder considerable
parts of the blame are the British, who were able to rule Palestine colonially by pitting Jews
against the majority Arabs and (most of the time) giving Jews vastly preferential treatment
(similar to Belgian and German colonial use and escalation of Hutu-Tutsi conflicts, whilst
mostly favoring the minority Tutsis, in Rwanda) 160 . As we shall see, the ancient Roman
dictum, divide et impere, i.e. divide and rule, no doubt partly informed by British colonialist
practices, is now also being followed by Israel’s apartheid governments, though only seldom
so openly or crudely in these days. The British in fact played a much larger role than the USA
in the creation of the state of Israel, not least because of guilt feelings over belated allied help
for the European continent’s Jews during World War II, but a pro-Jewish and anti-Arab bias
in British policy was obvious already in the Balfour Declaration at the end of the first world
war. Secondly, the Zionist ideas of a homeland for Jews and a Jewish state were spawned in
an intellectual climate second to none in terms of ethnicism, i.e. in 19 th century Europe, which
was to a large extent dominated by western European, especially British, thought. Thirdly, just
as the western (north Atlantic) elites were interested in encouraging local wars and disunity in
southern Africa with its vast mineral wealth (gold, diamonds, copper, etc.), they were
interested in disunity within the Arab world after it had become clear that its mineral wealth
(especially oil) would become increasingly crucial for the global economy. With their nearoligopoly
on the advanced weapons market, the western political, economic, and military
elites were enabled to pick and drop allies and enemies in these regions as they see fit. This
159 Reinhart: Guaranteed Failure of the Roadmap, 2003. See also Ess: The Stage is Set for Ethnic Cleansing,
2003. Similarly, Nelson Mandela himself slammed the re-election of Sharon and his right-wing government in
2003 as ‘suicidal’ for peace, and said US President George W. Bush’s sidelining of Palestinian President Yasser
Arafat was a big mistake for a man who was ‘President of the United States, not President of Palestine’. See
Reynolds: Mandela’s 85th Birthday Will Bring Sage Advice, 2003. By this time, the USA, the ‘mediator’, had
found a new, more willing Palestinian negotiating partner, Mahmoud Abbas, who was resigned to give up the
fight against apartheid in Israel and most of the illegal settlements and cared mainly for easing Bantustan
conditions of a future Palestinian ‘state’. Now, Bush even promised US assistance, $20 million, to the Palestinian
Authority for the first time (a drop in the sea, less than one per cent, compared to the $3 billion that Israel gets
from the US annually). This money would be used for infrastructure in areas devastated by the Israeli army.
According to Reuters: ‘By increasing aid to the Palestinians for basic services, U.S. officials hope to gradually
reduce the influence of the militant group Hamas, which has garnered grass-roots support with a network of
schools and welfare services that fill gaps left by inefficient Palestinian Authority institutions.’ Entous: Bush to
OK First Direct Assistance to Palestinians, 2003. A former US Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, known
in his time with the Carter administration as a ‘hawk’, has even gone so far as to accuse the Bush-led Republican
regime of belligerent paranoia, and castigating it for its support of Israel’s implementation of a policy leading to
apartheid. This is in my opinion a vast understatement (of Israeli state policy), but nonetheless remarkable for a
US statesman. Perhaps, however, the statement should be interpreted as domestically motivated pro-Democrat
election propaganda rather than a substantial critique. See Brzezinski: To Lead, U.S. Must Give Up Paranoid
Policies, 2003.
160 On the British in Palestine, see N.N. (ed.) 1989: 5-8; Segev: One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under
the British Mandate, 2000, and Chapter II.9.3, below. On Rwanda, see Reader 1998 (1997): 665ff. I am not
treating Rwanda at any point as an example of apartheid (but as domestic classism or even as caste conflict and
genocide and colonialism from abroad) since the minority Tutsi never invaded the country. They are in fact as
homegrown as the Hutu majority whom they have almost constantly dominated over the centuries, during the last
one due to exacerbation of the domestic conflict by colonializing Germans and Belgians who mistakenly
imagined that the Tutsi had invaded the country (allegedly from the north) at some point in time. See
Lemarchand: The Rwanda Genocide, 2004: 395-412; Melson: Modern Genocide in Rwanda, 2003: 325-338.