Apartheid

human rights violations, that they have committed, but the context of punishment for those
crimes must in my opinion always include the Israeli apartheid that victimizes Palestinians.
The pattern of systematic collective punishment of Palestinians by Israel is based on
the simple principle that people are punished for crimes they did not commit. That is the
essence of collective punishment. Still, despite all the military and political force and
propaganda stacked against them, the Palestinians are better off than the black South Africans,
and many other similarly oppressed ethnic groups, such as the Kurds, the Northern Irish
Catholics, or the Native Americans of all nationalities, but only from the perspective of
international law. The United Nations has granted the Palestinians the right to compensation
for their losses in 1948, as well as the right to self-determination. Only exceptionally foul play
– by now drawn out for a preposterous length of time, over half a century, which next to US
and Israeli defiance of the international community and international law also includes the
longest military occupation in the world since the end of the Second World War – is hindering
the realization of these rights. By early 2006 the USA had vetoed UN Security Council
Resolutions against Israel no less than 32 times since 1982. This is more than all the vetoes by
all the other four permanent UN Security Council members combined. 165 These are
undoubtedly unambiguously, anti-democratic measures employed by unambiguously antidemocratic
regimes.
If my method of identification and analysis of apartheid should be called a
‘moralizing’ approach to writing history, then I would be the first to confess to it. 166 But it is a
moralizing that I have tried to base on some of the most fundamental principles of
international law: human rights, cultural diversity and biodiversity. In my opinion, these are
the most important values, and I believe that they are still by far underrepresented in all kinds
of law, although significant progress has been made since World War II. Their lingering
relative weakness alone does not make them values that should be promoted in social science
or historiography, but the ‘moralizing’ tone that may perhaps be detected in the structure and
sometimes the language of this investigation is no way anti-objective. I do not just wish to be
on the side of the weak; I also try to be on the side of justice, righteousness, and, last but not
least, truth. With regard to the nuances of reality, I believe that there are good and bad actions,
structures, and people on both sides of all armed conflicts, and apartheid is no exception to
that. For instance, I try as often as possible to reiterate the justification for human rights
abuses by white South Africans and Israeli Jews. But the near-constant reiteration of ‘security
reasons’ also gets tedious for the reader, and so I have often left them out. In some cases there
were no excuses offered at all. In other cases, it was impossible for me to find out if there
were any attempts to justify the crimes, the representation of which makes up most of Part II,
below.
Thus, the perpetrators of apartheid may find themselves underrepresented on this
account. Yet, the perpetrators of apartheid have been and remain overrepresented in almost
every other forum, as Section II.9 will show. And therefore, I find my work not guilty of one-
165 Mearsheimer & Walt 2006: 4; N.N.: Factbox: U.S. Help to Israel, June 4, 2003; Soueif: Contagious
Exchanges, 2003: 179-185; Arieff: US Vetoes UN Plea to Block Israeli Security Fence, 2003
166 In his history of racism, Fredrickson (2002: 158) goes a step further than I do, claiming that one should not
moralize or condemn racism, but treat it like a virus. ‘[i]t is legitimate to assume…that racism is an evil
analogous to a deadly disease.’ We should try to understand this evil ‘…so that it can be more effectively
treated’. (ibid.) In my opinion, Fredrickson is too sure of himself, perhaps especially since he is a white
American. His title of the last chapter of the history of racism, that of the 20 th century, as the ‘Climax’ of racism
(ibid: 93), where he describes the rise and fall of Nazi Germany along with South African apartheid and Southern
US racism against Blacks is apparently yet another attempt by a white US male to sweep the genocides of Native
Americans and the Transatlantic Slavery – unmistakably gross racist crimes in which US Whites either were or
belonged to the main perpetrators – under the carpet. I am not saying that Nazi Germany was any better. In my
opinion, too, racism should be treated like a disease, but I believe it still needs to be condemned, and I am not
convinced that the 20 th century was the climax of racism. Both the future and the not-so-distant past could in my
opinion be argued to outdo the last century in this regard.
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