“Apartheid,” today's prime stigmatic code-word for racist evil, has
become a potent weapon for delegitimizing and demonizing Israel,
especially since it evokes the precedent of powerful external pressure
in the form of boycott and sanctions as was applied against the
apartheid regime in South Africa. Hence, in the propaganda war against
Israel an equation is fabricated insidiously between the present State
of Israel and the former apartheid state of South Africa.
This must be exposed as a malicious slander, and
utterly refuted. It is also a crass abuse of the valuable lessons that
might be learned from the odious apartheid experience of South Africa.
There is no objective basis whatsoever for attributing to Israel the
ideology, policies and praxis that were known as apartheid in South
Africa. The historical context of white-black relations which spawned
apartheid differs fundamentally from that in which conflict developed
between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
The essence of Israel's conflict situation has always been a clash of
nationalisms; ultimately over the question of who should have primacy
in gaining national self-determination in a contested territory. By
contrast, the South African conflict evolved out of a centuries-long,
near absolute domination exercised by a self-defined racial minority
(the whites) over an externally-defined racial majority of the
population, which was denied equal civic rights, above all the primary
democratic right, enjoyed exclusively by the whites, to elect and be
elected to the legislature and government of the state. The Afrikaans
term “apartheid” originated during the 1940s to describe an ideological
conception and political program that justified, systematized,
reinforced and expanded this pre-existent system of racial
discrimination and separation.
What justified the utter excoriation of apartheid? From a moral point
of view, it must be stressed that what was so abhorrent about apartheid
as to justify sanctions and boycotts of South Africa, was neither its
undemocratic nature nor the severe repression of all resistance, the
likes of which could be found abundantly in many other countries
plagued by severe ethnic conflict. Rather, valid world condemnation
targeted two indefensible wrongs: firstly, the legalized racist basis
of apartheid’s enforced inequalities; secondly the adamant refusal of
the apartheid regime to cease its unilateral dictates and accept the
option of negotiation. Of course, an essential condition for such
negotiation was not only the willingness of the dominator to dismantle
the apartheid regime but also the willingness of the dominated majority
not to resort to reverse domination. When the statesmanship of both
Frederik Willem de Klerk and Nelson Mandela ensured that these
conditions were satisfied, condemnations of the South African state and
boycotts and sanctions against it rightly ceased.
Manifestly, neither of the above-mentioned wrongs applies in the case
of Israel. Israel’s democratic praxis certainly has faults and moral
failings. But apartheid they are not. Any conscionable person, who has
lived (as I have) in both apartheid South Africa and Israel, knows
this. Only hostile prejudice or rank ignorance can explain the charge
that in Israel, as in apartheid South Africa, it is skin color or any
statutory race classification that determines every aspect of one's
human and civic rights from birth to death: whether one has the right
to vote and be elected or not, live or work in one place or other,
study in one institution or other, have one occupation or other, be
treated in one hospital or other, eat in one restaurant or another, go
to the theater, sit on a particular park bench or ride in a particular
bus.
As for refusal to negotiate a settlement, no Israeli government, not
even the present hyper-nationalist one headed by Binyamin Netanyahu,
has refused this option. Self-evidently, the boycott campaign is aimed
less at ending the occupation than at ending the State of Israel
itself.
There is, however, a sense in which the South African case is
instructively comparable to that of Israel. It relates to the reality
of Israel's decades long occupation regime over the post-war militarily
occupied territory known as the West Bank, or in Jewish tradition as
Judea and Samaria. No military occupation can be morally benign and
this one is undeniably no exception. Manifestly, its paramount tasks
are not only to administer the region but especially to protect the
Jewish settler population as well as the security of Israel proper. It
fosters Jewish settlement while subjecting the Palestinian majority to
a wide range of administrative and legal discrimination and hardship,
including the severely damaging effects of sections of the security
barrier, and limitations on freedom of movement and housing
development. Arbitrary military suppression of resistance is
ameliorated or stemmed only by the Israeli political system's inbuilt
democratic inhibitions, especially interventions by Israel's Supreme
Court, and monitoring by Israeli human rights associations.
Thus it is that the everyday reality of governance, work, protest and
suppression in the occupied territory looks a lot like South Africa
under apartheid, especially when depicted on TV screens, mostly
tendentiously and devoid of context. Yet, no matter how morally
deplorable, this is not apartheid: it simply is not the same
phenomenon. If one is to draw lessons, Israel's occupation regime is
equally comparable to the situation in any number of other cases of
post-war occupation or ethnic domination in deeply divided and
conflict-ridden countries, not least of all in the Arab world.
If, however, one does choose to make South Africa the comparative
model, it is important to know that, in the course of the apartheid
regime's evolvement, the strategic goal of white ethnic supremacy
acquired a rationale that professed to be independent of racist
premises. Its proponents were a stratum of Afrikaner intelligentsia and
clergy (known at the time as verligtes, meaning "enlightened ones") who
spoke of "separate development" and sought to undo the racist
underpinning of apartheid policy by discarding its "petty apartheid"
manifestations, such as legalized prohibition of any inter-race
intimacy and racial separation of public amenities. The revised
rationale was survivalist; born of the whites’ conviction that this was
a zero-sum game; a case of dominate or be dominated!
The most notable measure of this "reformed apartheid" praxis was the
ruthless enforcement of the homelands ("Bantustans") policy. Only in
their own homelands were voting rights to be granted to the blacks,
including those domiciled in white areas. This ensured continued white
supremacy. Another measure was the 1983 tri-parliamentary
constitutional reform aimed at co-opting those racially classified as
Coloured and Asian (Indian). They were to have their own separate
legislative assemblies, calculatedly subordinate to the purely white
parliament. Eventually, when the bleak realization dawned that, apart
from moral considerations, even this modified strategy was not viable,
the path of negotiation was adopted, culminating in the dismantling of
the entire edifice of white supremacy.
Herein alone lies the relevance of comparison with Israel, for it must
be acknowledged that there is a large political and civic sector of
Israel which, for reasons of fundamentalist religious faith or zero-sum
survivalist strategy, is obdurately intent on perpetuating and
buttressing this occupation regime as a permanent de facto annexation.
This sector is assertively represented by several ultra-nationalist and
national-orthodox religious parties in the present government. Theirs
is manifestly a policy and vision that replicates the theory and praxis
of the reformed phase of South Africa's apartheid policy, which was
adopted as a survivalist strategy but ultimately abandoned out of
enlightened realism, if not moral compunction. Characteristically, they
too cast about for spurious arrangements calculated to ensure Jewish
control and privilege – for example non-sovereign cantonized autonomy,
devoid of Israeli political rights, or relegation of citizenship and
electoral rights to the adjacent Kingdom of Jordan.
It is in this respect alone that use of the South African analogy to
critique Israel is justified, and importantly so. Never as grist to the
mill of those who labor to delegitimize and demonize Israel by falsely
labeling it an apartheid state and subjecting it to sanctions and
boycotts, but certainly as a warning cry lest perpetuation of the
occupation regime cause Israel to replicate South African reform-phase
apartheid; a strategy which proved to be not only morally reprehensible
but also realistically untenable.
The writer is Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose published works include Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa.