Apartheid

Ancient, Past, and Present

Gross Racist Human Rights Violations

in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, Israel/Palestine and Beyond

by Anthony Löwstedt

with a Foreword by Ilan Pappe, and a Postscript by Richard A. Falk

Wien: Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie und kritische Anthropologie

September 6, 2014
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Ilan Pappe (2010) 5
Preface 7
I. The State of Apartheid and the Apartheid States 25
1. The Big Picture: Human Rights Violations and Racism 25
2. The Theoretical Context: Colonialism, Apartheid, and Genocide 36
3. Apartheid in the Narrow Sense (South Africa 1948-1994) 46
4. Apartheid Compared 51
Comparisons with Genocidal Societies
‘Life Is All Right in America, If You’re All White in America’ 51
Ethnic Cleansing from the South: Australia and New Zealand 57
Third Reich Racism 59
Comparisons with Other Apartheid Societies
From Zimbabwe to Rhodesia, and Forwards Again 62
Spanish Mayhem in Guatemala 63
Overboard in Outremer: The Crusaders’ Kingdom of Jerusalem 66
Invasions, Segregation and Discrimination in Liberia 73
Comparisons with Colonialist Societies
British Destruction in Ireland 77
Drug Dealers versus Squatters in Hong Kong 79
Soviet Oppression at Home and Abroad 80
Comparisons with Other Kinds of Societies
Taliban ‘Gender Apartheid’ 81
Environmental and Global ‘Apartheid’ 82
Postmodern Racism 85
5. Apartheid in the Wide Sense: A Preliminary Definition 88
6. Differences and Similarities between Apartheid Societies 91
7. Definition of Apartheid in the Wide Sense 98
8. Beyond Settler Colonial, Postcolonial, and Postmodern Theory 103
9. The Historical Frameworks 115
1. Graeco-Roman Egypt 115
2. South Africa 122
3. Israel 126
Methodology, Epistemology, Paradigms, and Values 136
II. A System of Gross Human Rights Violations 164
Introduction: Apartheid as State of War and Crime against Humanity 164
Escaping International Law and Dividing the Resistance 164
Trauma and Schizophrenia as Consequences and Aspects of
Apartheid 168
Love and Cooperation vs. Crimes against Humanity, and Worse 172
1. Violence 175
1.1. Invasion, Uprising, Clampdown, Female Infanticide
and Genital Mutilation 179
1.2. Firearms, Stabbing Spears, the ‘Medical Battalion’, and
‘Witch’-burnings 186
1.3. Death Squads, Torture, Weapons of Mass Destruction,
Suicide Attacks, and ‘Honor’ Murders 196
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Interlude: The Other Gross Human Rights Violations in Apartheid 230

The Pervasiveness of Apartheid 230
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions 233
The Rest of this Book 234
2. Repopulation 235
2.1. Bringing in the Civilians 237
2.2. ‘Family Planning’ and Circumscribed Immigration 243
2.3. Statisticians, Gynecologists, and Settlers 245
3. Citizenship 255
3.1. ‘Greek Ancestry on both Paternal and Maternal Sides’ 256
3.2. The Bantustans: Fragmentation of Indigenous People 261
3.3. From Bustan to Bantustan to Native Reservation and the
Law of ‘Return’ 263
4. Land 270
4.1. ‘Clearing’ Land and Facilities for the Immigrants 271
4.2. Dispossession and Selective Urbanization 274
4.3. Ethnic Cleansing of Non-existent People 276
5. Work 283
5.1. Tax unto Starvation 284
5.2. Work to the Bone 288
5.3. One Bad and One Good Thing about Globalization 292
6. Access 299
6.1. ‘All Egyptians Are to Be Expelled, except…’ 299
6.2. Separate Necessities 301
6.3. Pass Laws, Closures, Bypass Roads, Water Theft, and the
Apartheid Wall 305
7. Education 315
7.1. The Museum, the Gymnasia and the Definition of Writing 315
7.2. Bantu Education and Baasskap 319
7.3. Denial of the Right to Education versus State-sponsored
Religious Instructions for Genocide 322
8. Language 328
8.1. Atticism and the Obsession with Language 329
8.2. What Sparked the Soweto Uprising 334
8.3. Hebrew and Yiddish, English, Arabic, and Russian 337
9. Thought 343
9.1. Zero-sum Competition and the Climax of De-
secularization 345
9.2. The Power of Racism and the Superiority Complex 357
9.3. The Bible, Hasbara, the Money, and the Media 363
III. Conclusions 403
1. Apartheid Human Rights Violations 403
2. Struggle 408
3. Minimum Requirements for Ending Israeli Apartheid 420
4. The Quantities of Responsibility 424
5. Epiapartheid, Truth, and Reconciliation 426
6. Justice? 433
Postscript by Richard A. Falk (2014) 447
Bibliography 450
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Foreword (2010)

By Ilan Pappe

Although the association of apartheid South Africa and the Palestine issue has been in
the air for quite a while, very few scholarly books tackled the comparison in a profound and
professional way. This book is one of the first serious attempts to engage with the complex
situations both in South Africa and in Israel/Palestine.
As this book shows in a very clear way, apartheid is a multifaceted system of
oppression, violence and dispossession. The treatment of apartheid in such a comprehensive
manner allows for a better and more useful comparison of the various components that made
up the historical case of apartheid in South Africa in the past and which are at the basis of the
current situation in Israel and Palestine, however one chooses to define it. As this book and
other works have shown, there are also quite significant dissimilarities between apartheid
South Africa and the historical and current situation in Israel and Palestine, nonetheless there
are still many principal aspects of the phenomenon which are almost identical.
But, as the writer of this book notes, ‘Apartheid is not a very complicated
phenomenon’, and its basic impulses and aims were clear and they are easily identified in the
Israeli policy in Palestine. This was long ago recognized by the non-professional section of
Western society. The public opinion and activists have not waited for scholarly research in the
matter to mature and be completed. They are already inspired by the comparison with South
Africa in the struggle for Palestine and the Palestinians in two ways.
Firstly, the term, ‘apartheid’, seemed to be as close as one could get to describe the
Israeli policies, which are mainly characterized by the fragmentation of the Palestinian
existence through colonization, segregation and dispossession. The different Palestinian
groups are subject to different policies: from second-rate citizenship inside Israel to a slow
genocidal strangulation in Gaza. And yet there are common features for this Israeli policy and
strategy and one of them is the wish to exclude the Palestinians from the privileges and rights
that the Jewish population enjoys in, and on, the land. This exclusion was easily described as
apartheid by the activists around the world who showed solidarity with the Palestinian
struggle; even more so after the Israelis created the Apartheid Wall on the one hand, and
passed explicit apartheid laws against the Palestinian citizens in Israel in recent years, on the
other. Secondly, the struggle today for public opinion and support is deeply inspired by the
anti-apartheid movement in the world that became quite potent and influential during the
heyday of the South African oppressive regime.
So there are ample and good reasons to provide a deeper and wider scholarly
infrastructure for the political impulse and solidarity strategy. This book is a very good
beginning. It does not confine the comparison to South Africa alone. After all, apartheid and
segregation accompanied other colonialist and post-colonialist regimes and these case studies
are equally important for such a comparative study.
The novelty here, however, is not confined to extending the comparison
geographically or chronologically. What the author calls the ‘wide sense’ of apartheid exposes
layers quite often hidden from the public, and quite often the professional eye. These include
the impact of segregation polices in both societies on individual violence, family cohesion and
gender issues. It is this expansion of the definition of the phenomenon of apartheid that
enables one to see similarities not immediately observed, and also differences that at times
show how bad the situation of the Palestinians was and still is.
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The awareness that the story in one case, South Africa, has come to an end, and the
terrible sense of worse to come in the other, in Israel and Palestine, give this book particular
urgency and vitality. As the author concludes: this state of affairs should be cautiously
regarded as hopeful for Palestine and the Palestinians. Despite the conflict and tension in post-
apartheid South Africa, the process of reconciliation and change has been completed. Cynics
would point to the continued role of capitalist global powers in the process and highlight the
less savory aspects of the transition. But, as this book makes abundantly clear, justice was
nonetheless served when apartheid fell. So it is not a super model, nor one that cannot be, or
should not be, improved. But it is inspiring to think that it would be possible for the South
African model of post-apartheid justice, as flawed as it is, to recur and reappear in Israel and
Palestine.
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Preface
Apartheid is often explained – by institutions, groups and individuals who tend to
either trivialize or mystify it – either as purely a state phenomenon, or basically a legal
phenomenon, or an ideological phenomenon, or, again, as a mere matter of violent racial
conflict. Among other things, this investigation attempts to refute all four of these important
misconceptions.
Firstly, I hope to show that a powerful portion of civil society is needed to support
apartheid and that the latter cannot exist without the cooperation, empowerment, and
enrichment of a considerable number of civilian – as well as many state-employed – members
of an oppressive racial minority. This does not mean that, for instance, all white South
Africans were in favor of apartheid or supported it. On the contrary, some opposed it and even
gave their lives for opposing it. But the overwhelming majority of Whites in the country
accepted apartheid and supported it, at least indirectly, during almost the entire period of
white domination. The same applies to Israeli Jews with regard to their very similar system of
violence and discrimination against Palestinians. In this sense, there was never only an
apartheid state responsible for apartheid, but in each instance also a wider apartheid society.
Likewise, apartheid never was fundamentally based on law. It was always based on
practice, and so, ultimately, were the apartheid laws. In fact, legislative, executive, judicial,
business, and information powers and institutions are generally and habitually used and
abused in apartheid societies in order to support, uphold, implement and reinforce such
practice. The spectrum of that practice reaches from entirely unprovoked physical violence
over legalized theft to insidious ideology. Thus, apartheid law never has become an organic
legal or even political entity, but, rather, it has remained a constantly shifting, haphazard
result of strategies, full of internal contradictions, inconsistencies, even containing conscious,
unconscious and half-conscious lies, such as the South African law that made the white
‘nation’ the most populous ‘nation’ in the country, with only around 15 percent of the
country’s actual population.
Apartheid laws are mainly the results of the conflict-engendering interests and
perceptions of different elites within the oppressive minority and of the fluctuating
environment of resistance against the realization of those interests. For example, when
apartheid became explicit government program and policy in South Africa in 1948, the
country was geographically surrounded by European colonies, run by white (British and
Portuguese) supremacists allied with or sympathetic to the South African regime. By 1980,
however, each of these colonies had turned into an independent enemy country. The laws of
apartheid changed accordingly. Among many other new developments, the apartheid elites
now introduced ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’ for the majority of black South Africans in
the so-called ‘Homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’, small pockets of land, poor in agricultural quality,
reserved for huge numbers of black people whom it could not possibly support. The new
developments also included an attempted political courtship of the relatively educated, urban
black ‘elites’ within the directly white-ruled South Africa, who were, according to the novel
plan, to be turned against the rural and urban proletariats and to be raised to the social and
legal level of ‘Coloureds’ and people of Asian descent. All of these schemes were eventually
to fail spectacularly, except the creation of new, small black elites, which have now appeared
in South Africa’s political, business and culture spheres, and have often been turned against
the poor masses, but they have also risen far above the level that ‘Coloureds’ used to occupy
under apartheid in terms of both wealth and influence.
Only in times of crisis for the apartheid system do the differences between the
apartheid elites fade in importance. Even then, however, fundamental contradictions within
the apartheid society, within the apartheid system, persist to make laws and decrees retain
their ad hoc character. The cheap labor supplied by members of the oppressed indigenous
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majority, for instance, may be tempered or even halted when an increase in resistance
activities is perceived by the elites. One among countless examples of this is the application of
one of the Israeli Basic Laws, the ‘Law of Return’ – guaranteeing Israeli citizenship for any
Jew who wants it and even for some Jews who do not want it – which is carried out with a
much wider definition of ‘Jews’ whenever the Israeli political and military elites perceive a
stronger need for increased immigration of non-Arabs to the country, such as the case has
been since well before the outbreak of the Palestinians’ Second Intifada (uprising) in
September 2000. In this situation, the apartheid business elites obviously still want indigenous
employees, whose labor ultimately costs them less, but they are overruled by the military and
political elites who prefer gradual expulsion or even annihilation of the indigenous people and
their gradual replacement by a more ‘cooperative’ (docile) labor force and reserve labor force,
which, however, first has to be imported, acclimatized, taught the language, trained, etc. As
soon as things quiet down enough, Israeli business elites may find allies among the political or
military elites who are ready to make ‘concessions’ to remaining Palestinians in order to get
them back to work, so that larger profits from civilian business can be made again.
Furthermore, apartheid was never chiefly a matter of prejudice and cultural or religious
differences, but, a great deal more importantly, concrete and material violence, dispossession,
and exploitation. Apartheid takes place on the ground at least as much as it does in people’s
minds. This judgment is not meant to marginalize the important ideological warfare and
propaganda that, I hope to show, are also by necessity defining characteristics of any
apartheid society. Yet, too much emphasis on racism, and a forteriori on apartheid, as a
psychological, symbolic or mental phenomenon, e.g. as ‘prejudice’ or a ‘discourse’, or even
as a mental disease, may indeed skew the understanding of apartheid’s many fundamental
material and concrete aspects. Just because human ‘races’ (in the sense of biologically
discreet entities) do not exist in the real world, but only in people’s minds, does not mean that
racism does not exist in the real world.
Lastly, apartheid was never merely a state of war between different peoples either, but
also always a matter of invasion, oppression, theft, intimidation, and exploitative economic
and social relationships. In other words, it does not only consist of endlessly spinning cycles
of retaliatory violence; it has discernible, and indeed easily identifiable, beginnings, and it is
essentially much more than mere violence. In fact, cynics sometimes write it off the world’s
agenda of problems that can be solved, as a conflict or war that will never end and can never
end, as something inevitable, something spuriously based in human genes or in the necessary
structural building blocks of culture: Blacks or Non-Whites must fight Whites, and vice versa,
Arabs (or Muslims) must fight Jews, and vice versa.
For reasons such as these, the United Nations (UN), starting in 1966, as well as South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in its 1998 Final Report, the
International Criminal Court (ICC), in Article 7 of its 1998 Statutes, and many other
authoritative, judicial, and/or ethically oriented bodies and individuals have classified and
condemned apartheid as not just a crime, but as a crime against humanity. By referring
explicitly to apartheid in these legal texts as something neither confined to South Africa nor to
racism by Whites against Blacks, the international and global lawmakers intended to prevent
anything like apartheid from ever happening again to any human beings anywhere. Social
science, however, has not yet come up with a well-rounded understanding or precise
definition of apartheid. And so it could not yet be identified scientifically in any other places,
or at any other times than in South Africa from 1948 until 1994. This investigation is an
attempt to help fill that gap. By providing a definition in a wide sense, one that pays attention
to the essential, non-country-specific, non-culture-specific, and non-time-specific elements of
apartheid, and by comparing these elements in detail, I hope to identify apartheid scientifically
as a generic crime against humanity in many other locations than South Africa, and with many
other kinds of victims as well as perpetrators.
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Apartheid is not a very complicated phenomenon. I already outlined it, in mainly

negative terms, within the space of a few paragraphs above. The essence of apartheid and its
explication in positive terms, however, appear to be more difficult to grasp and express. Why?
In the course of this investigation, I will deal with several propaganda smokescreens and
ideological traps – more or less consciously devised by the oppressive racial minorities and
their allies – in order to obscure the nature of the beast, so that it can strike, as it were, entirely
unsuspected, from a well-camouflaged ambush position. Once the system of apartheid has
been formally defeated, personal and institutional responsibility for apartheid is also shirked
with the aid of such manipulations. For example, no civilian member of South Africa’s white
population has been found guilty of apartheid, a crime against humanity, by any court of law.
And in that country, the (still largely white) elites still talk far more often about the ‘apartheid
state’ than about any ‘apartheid society’. So far, consciously intended mystification has
proven to be one efficient, although far from sufficient, way among many of prolonging the
lives of apartheid societies, even beyond their formal or official demise. Apparently, then,
there is life after death for apartheid. For phenomena such as the practical impunity for
civilian as well as state-employed apartheid perpetrators, or the persistence of relative white
affluence and disproportionate white political influence in South Africa, I will use the term
‘epiapartheid’ (see Section III.5 below). This has become a burning issue with energetic
governmental attempts to prevent white capital flight and to encourage foreign investment,
among many other neo-liberal reforms of South Africa’s economy after the end of political
apartheid, which actually made white families richer and black families poorer, at least
between 1996 and 2002, and which have increased unemployment for black people (in
absolute but not relative numbers), though in a manner fundamentally different from apartheid
in the traditional sense. Previously boycotted and sanctioned South African commodities
started to bring in profits again after 1994, and most of the profits ended up in the pockets of
business owners, investors and executives, who were mostly white. On the other hand, there
are of course also many truly ‘post-apartheid’ conditions in South Africa, especially in the
political, cultural, and social spheres. There is much that Israelis and Palestinians can learn
from the South African experience, perhaps especially if they should achieve a similar end to
legalized and political apartheid – but not informal or economic apartheid – like South Africa
did so far.
Another reason why apartheid still eludes easy classification is that, like most armed
conflicts today, it does not readily fall under the classification of war, since the relationship
cannot be defined as a formal state of war between two states, except under highly unusual
circumstances. War is never formally declared, except under some of these rare conditions.
Today, in most conflicts, the two main warring groups usually lay claim to the same
territory as their homeland, and apartheid is just one example of this kind of conflict, an
example in which the two groups are not equally indigenous, nor equally large, nor equally
strong in the military sense. The apartheid wars in which the traditional sense of war does
apply are mainly colonial invasions, in which invader civilian settlements may be planned, but
are not yet an established fact. They also include wars with neighboring countries, such as
Israel’s wars of 1948-9, and in 1956, 1967, and 1973, in the latter three of which the disarmed
and isolated Palestinians were not significant participants. The Israeli invasions of southern
parts of Lebanon from 1982 through 2014 or the recurrent and continuing invasions of the
West Bank and Gaza (and the Golan Heights) since 1967, however, are not wars in the
traditional sense since Israel (in contradiction to international law) neither declared (or even
admitted waging) war nor recognized the sovereignty or rights to self-determination of the
states or nations that they invaded. Moreover, the Palestinians in Palestine and Israel, just like
the South African Blacks in South Africa, including the Homelands, were both disarmed and
surrounded, during most of these wars of the apartheid states against their neighbors. Lacking
states as well as military hardware, it was thus next to impossible for the main victims of
apartheid to wage war anyway. In Section III.4, I will argue that less than 2.2 percent of all
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gross human rights violations in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have been perpetrated by
Palestinians and their allies and supporters, and more than 97.8 percent by Israeli Jews and
their supporters and allies. In the Gaza war of 2008-2009, one hundred times as many
Palestinians as Israelis were killed. Long wars, especially those that rage for over 50 years, do
not usually manifest such extremely uneven statistics. The losing side would either have
capitulated or been exterminated by now.
But then, apartheid is not just oppression either. In the wider Israeli-Palestinian
conflict hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, in the southern African apartheid
conflict millions. Apartheid is something between war and oppression, and, at the same time,
both war and oppression.
Similarly, apartheid is something between crime and law, and lawful and criminal at
the same time. It is now a crime under international law, and before 1998, when (what was
later to become) the International Criminal Court decided to make it a crime against
humanity, aspects or parts of it were also crimes under international law. But its application
and realization are of course often required domestically by the apartheid regime’s laws.
Frequently, and in many ways, it is a crime or an offence to do anything against or even to be
opinionated against apartheid under an apartheid rule. More or less covert crimes under those
same laws are also sometimes, or often, encouraged by apartheid regimes, in particular gross
human rights violations, including murders, massacres and ethnic cleansing, carried out by
invading semi-civilian settlers and by so-called ‘state security forces’.
Apparently, apartheid needs to be understood with a conceptual apparatus that, at least
partly, transcends that of international law and traditional political science, in which ‘war’ is
understood as international, and ‘oppression’ as domestic. I believe this can be done with an
umbrella concept of ‘gross human rights violations’, encompassing acts of both war and
oppression. Thus, apartheid, along with genocide and colonialism (and other serious crimes,
such as racist slavery, or aggressive warfare in general), can be understood along the
investigative and judicial lines of the TRC, ICC and UN, yet also in a rigorous social
scientific sense, as ‘a system of gross human rights violations’, along with its status as a
‘crime against humanity’, i.e. the profound meanings of that phrase in judicial, jurisprudential,
diplomatic, political, ethical and philosophical contexts.
In this investigation human rights are understood in terms of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted on December 10, 1948 by the General
Assembly of the United Nations. This concept of human rights is far from unproblematic. It
contains a subtle bias of a pro-western nature as well as several potent contradictions. Civil
and political rights are emphasized whereas social and economic rights are downplayed. Many
people in developing countries resent this, considering for instance that there is more than
enough food for every human being in the world whilst the destitute, especially in these
countries, are starving or go hungry. Yet there is no specific, universal, and legalized human
right to be fed, nor are there any to water or to be sheltered or clothed (although all of these
and others are crowded into Article 25 as making up the case for everybody’s right to a
standard of living adequate for health). Furthermore, there is no system of rights, only a list.
And numerous conflicts between rights, e.g. between the rights to privacy and freedom of
expression, or between the right to life and the right to education, or the conflict between the
exclusivist rights to private property and privacy, and all the other rights, which are inclusive
rights, are left unresolved.
Nevertheless, among other things the UDHR often serves as a useful reminder of the
fact that every state, every society, violates rights and that the world could be a better place.
The fact that the UDHR only came about a few months after apartheid became explicit state
policy in South Africa, and after Israel, the Jewish state, had already become a reality, does
not mean that it cannot be applied to these and other earlier violators. First of all, both
apartheid South Africa and Israel became hypocritical signatories of the UDHR. Secondly,
there are older human rights-oriented elements of international law such as the Hague and
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Geneva Conventions, which both Israel and South Africa violate(d), not just repeatedly, but
continuously. Thirdly, and most importantly, human rights are universal. That means that they
extend indefinitely in both space and time. Victims of apartheid and other kinds of oppression
and war through the ages have known that they are being treated unjustly. Many human rights
are anchored in ancient religions and other moral and legal systems, and perhaps also in a
human ‘moral sense’ or ethical ‘intuition’. And many or all apartheid perpetrators have
therefore known that they have acted unjustly, as well. This, I believe, explains the high rates
of suicide and mental illness among Israeli (at least in 2003, more Israeli soldiers killed
themselves than were killed by Palestinians; the same may be expected in 2015) as well as
white South African apartheid soldiers and civilians.
Under ‘systematic and gross human rights violations’ I understand an intended pattern
of abuses that result in loss of life, serious injury or trauma, and abuser denial of the humanity
of the human victims. Aside from basing this concept on the UDHR I am probably mostly
influenced by Kantian deontology and (less consciously) by other kinds of European and
Christian ethics to arrive at this concept. A summary of what I understand as apartheid is
proposed as its definition, i.e. its explication in positive terms, in Section I.7 below.
Systematic and gross human rights violations amount to crimes against humanity, and
‘humanity’ is another concept that must be extended indefinitely in time and space, at least if
the wider concept of human rights violations is. Therefore, I will use the concepts of human
rights and human rights violations in this investigation in order to analyze societies as old as
Egypt under Greek and Roman rule, or the kingdom of Jerusalem under crusader rule. Of
course the attempts to justify apartheid will be different before and after the introduction of
human rights into national and/or international law. But these attempts are only a small part of
the story of apartheid. So are other peculiarities of late ancient, Graeco-Roman apartheid, e.g.
the religions and cults prevalent in those days, which were very different from those in
modern and post-modern as well as in crusader apartheid societies.
This approach towards human rights violations also leads me to analyze
responsibilities behind gross human rights violations quantitatively. Although differing
approaches will always be possible, I will also argue that similar percentages to the
Palestinian and Israeli ones (maximum 2.2 and minimum 97.8 percent, respectively) should be
expected to apply to other apartheid societies. In fact, they do obtain for another apartheid
society as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu and I both understand it, namely
Guatemala, where, according to the country’s own truth commission, between 93 and 97
percent of all physically violent gross human rights abuses during the second half of the 20 th
century were committed by state-employed or pro-government paramilitary representatives of
the elite ethnicity of European descent against members of the indigenous majority. From the
work I have carried out in writing and researching this investigation, I have become confident
that similar percentages also apply to apartheid South Africa, to Rhodesia, to the crusaders’
Kingdom of Jerusalem, to Graeco-Roman Egypt, and to several other apartheid societies
throughout history.

***

Equipped with a detailed definition of apartheid, my main new counter-strategy

against the propaganda smokescreens and traps set by apartheid’s defenders and apologists is
an attempt to extend the applicability of the term beyond apartheid in the narrow sense, i.e.
beyond South Africa between 1948, the year of explicit and formal governmental apartheid
policy, and 1994, the year of formal liberation. In order to make more sense, the meaning of
the term ‘apartheid’ must in my opinion be extended not only conceptually (from the
apartheid state to the wider apartheid society), but it must also be extended in both time and
space, like the concepts of ‘human rights’ and ‘human rights violations’. This is already
reflected in international law, which has made ‘apartheid’ – whether practiced in South Africa
12

or anywhere else, whether by the South African government or any other government,
whether by South Africans or any other nationalities – a term that refers to a crime against
humanity. In the theoretical, social scientific endeavor, however, ‘apartheid’ has so far mainly
been understood as a label for a unique South African phenomenon, or it has at most merely
been a convenient generic term for a phenomenon that has long lacked a suitable, descriptive
term, alongside a concept that has not yet been sufficiently grasped. In Chapter I.7 I will offer
my detailed definition of apartheid in non-country-specific terms, and at the end of the first
part of this book, I will deal extensively with the social scientific aspects of my investigation,
in particular its eclectic, yet carefully selective, position with regard to traditions and methods
of research in political science, as well as its underlying relationships with paradigms in
general epistemology and methodology, and a declaration of my own values that are, were, or
may have been significant for this research.
First of all, then, a systematic treatment of apartheid simply has to take into account
the invasions, the expropriation, enslavement and ethnic cleansing that were all initiated by
Whites in 17th-century South Africa and more or less perpetuated during the following three
and a half centuries of essentially undisturbed and intensifying white supremacy, enrichment,
and domination. Apartheid in South Africa simply cannot be understood without knowledge
of South Africa prior to 1948. Secondly, apartheid has structural parallels in countries other
than South Africa. These basic facts, which manifest apartheid’s being a systematic crime,
and which are indispensable for any understanding of apartheid from my perspective, had
been passed over silently by the white South African elites responsible for the introduction of
the policy of apartheid in the narrow sense in their definition of that concept. Any racist
privileges, especially land ownership and other kinds of wealth stolen from the indigenous
people before 1948 were thus off-limits for the judicial and executive branches of the ‘post-
apartheid’ state. I will demonstrate and argue that all of my proposed basic characteristics of
apartheid, without exception, had existed together, in South Africa itself and elsewhere, long
before the label was first used in a political and programmatic way by the South African
government from 1948 and onwards. ‘Apartheid’, then, is strictly speaking just a convenient
label for what I am investigating, something that is not necessarily tied to South Africa, and I
will use this label here in the sense of common parlance, and in the sense of international law,
but not in the mystifying and euphemistic way of the South African apartheid regimes.
In particular, the fundamental initial condition of apartheid is an invasion, either
military, aggressive, or at least a de facto invasion, i.e. the more or less peaceful takeover of a
country by a set of invaders from an earlier set of invaders. The apartheid invasion is carried
out by a conquering, racialized minority, which then holds on to its military superiority over
the also racialized indigenous majority for the duration of the apartheid conditions. This
essential element of my analysis is the first decisive drive of the stake into the heart of the
undead beast. In the long history of apartheid, the first stages of the invasion have taken
several different forms – from legal to illegal land purchase, to the loose imposition of
administrative rule (often colonial, i.e. essentially undemocratic, in style) over authoritarian
rule to military occupation, further to aggressive repopulation and settlement, ethnic
cleansing, and genocide. In South Africa, the invasion went on, in fits and starts, for more
than three centuries. It reached as far north as central Angola in the 1980s. From the point of
view of comparative apartheid studies, Israel 1948 should therefore ideally or most usefully
not be compared chiefly to South Africa 1948, but to South Africa 1652.
Roughly coinciding with the first invasion – in Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt
earlier, in South Africa slightly later – the immigration of a substantial number of civilians of
the same ethnicity or racial group as the invaders is either arranged by the actual or
prospective apartheid elites or happens in a more random manner. Partly in order to make
room for these immigrants, many indigenous people are eventually exterminated or expelled
from the country or from their land. Their houses and other belongings are often also stolen,
along with the land. In the Dutch Cape Colony, especially the theft of Khoikhoi cattle by the
 13

invading Europeans led to the extermination of this racialized group. In Israel and the
occupied Palestinian territories, the invaders often stole the indigenous people’s houses as
well as their contents after they had chased away or killed the inhabitants.
Large numbers of indigenous survivors, however, are kept alive or are allowed to stay
alive – if only barely – as an exploited work force and as an abused reserve work force, and
they are also kept as separated from the racial elite as possible, especially the ‘reservists’, in
South Africa the Bantustan Blacks; in Israel the refugees, the people of Gaza, and the
remaining three million Palestinians now dotted around the West Bank. A host of excuses and
remarkably flexible, yet often successful strategic reasons are invoked for recurrent
decimations of the indigenous population, as its birth rate is higher than that of the oppressive
racial minority. It is so high mainly because of the high child mortality rates and low average
life expectancy of members of the indigenous majority, and also due to peculiar cultures of
resistance, which are acted out mainly at the expense of indigenous women, and which
include indigenous killings of indigenous women (and some indigenous men) who will not –
or may encourage other women not to – participate as producers of large numbers of
indigenous babies. Nonetheless, despite these horrific conditions and their resultant huge
indigenous death rates, indigenous birth rates are normally even greater than invader birth-
plus-immigration rates. Population growth as a whole takes place much faster in the oppressed
apartheid populace than it does in the racialized elite community, despite racist immigration,
naturalization, and citizenship laws and, as in present-day Israel, hi-tech fertility boosters,
financial incentives and tax breaks for female and male parent members of this minority.
There is also aversion to and other unpleasantness resulting from killing ‘too many’
indigenous people, both among perpetrators and outsiders.
At some point in time during these developments, an independent, sovereign state is
declared by the dominant racial minority, whose members thereby formally become its most
privileged citizens or nationals. The privileges of members of the oppressive minority,
however, are not only consequences of the independence of the apartheid state. Both legal and
practical conditions of racist discrimination can, of course, also characterize pre-apartheid,
epiapartheid, post-apartheid, colonialized, racist slave-labor-based, and yet other kinds of
societies. (Moreover, the condition of independence is only absolute in a formal sense.
Political independence and especially economic and military independence are all matters of
degree in practice. In at least one practical sense, only the USA is today an independent
country, owing to the unrivalled economic and political power of its industrial-military
complex and its embeddedness in and control over the globalized capitalist economy. It
spends as much on weapons as the rest of the world combined. It dominates the revolutionary
mass medium of the era, the internet, perhaps more than any new mass medium of such high
significance has ever been dominated before. All other countries in the world are, in this
important sense, dependent on the USA. We all mistakenly believe that we are free and that
our freedom is to a considerable extent enabled, promoted, and defended by the USA.) But the
declaration of independence of the apartheid state makes the racist privileges much more
expeditious in a legal and executive sense.
Defenders of Israel against the charge of apartheid will often trumpet the fact that
‘Arab’ (Palestinian) citizens of Israel are not denied the vote. True, but they are only one-
ninth of all Palestinians. Eight-ninths of all Palestinians are not allowed by Israel to elect
representatives to the government that determines their lives, and that is the anti-democratic
equivalent to apartheid South Africa. Most of them are not even allowed to come home. The
vote, moreover, is very often mistaken for democracy. The one million Palestinians who do
have access to the vote in Israel are discriminated against in many other ways by the Jewish
state and even more so by the Jewish society in Israel. For instance, they are prohibited from
buying land, from forming political parties that contradict the Jewish character of the state of
Israel, they are systematically excluded from a range of professions by Jewish civil society,
and they, their communities, their language, their media, and their culture are all relatively
14

underfunded by the state, relatively to the Jews as well as to their own demographic position
as a 20 percent minority.
Towards the end of white supremacist rule, the South African apartheid regime was
also close to giving the vote to ‘urban Blacks’, a small minority of the resultant total
electorate, since so many Blacks had by then been forced out of the cities with an ethnic-
cleansing-by-bulldozer policy – similar to that of Israel’s in and around Jerusalem today. Most
Blacks were now restricted either to ‘homelands’, without South African citizenship – like the
four million Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who lack Israeli citizenship
despite being ruled directly Israel since 1967 or the four-and-a-half million refugees outside
Historic Palestine – or to ‘townships’ set up outside the cities, (but even more like the similar
number of Palestinians who are now barred from even entering Palestine, whether the part
now called Israel or the one called ‘under Israeli occupation’). Thus, Soweto, the South West
Townships, i.e. not a city, was classified as a suburban entity assigned to Johannesburg, not as
a city, or even part of a city, although the former had three million inhabitants and the latter
only one million.
As if all of this oppression were not enough, certain essential aspects of the invaders’
culture, including language and religion, are more or less forced upon the abused and toiling
indigenous masses in apartheid societies. Many members of the indigenous group eventually
come to believe, at least occasionally, that their cultures and they themselves are worth less
than ‘European’, ‘white’, ‘western’, or ‘Jewish’ cultures and people are, and their own
religions and languages and their very will to resist apartheid are therefore also brought to the
brink of extinction.
Due to these conditions, their implications and consequences, my widened concept of
apartheid represents no less a crime against humanity than the narrow concept (South Africa
1948-1994). It is in fact even more of a crime; among racist crimes it could indeed be seen as
second in severity only to genocide.
However, when racist slavery is viewed as an independent system of racism – separate
from both apartheid and genocide – the crime of racist slavery that was perpetrated over 400
years in the ‘Atlantic System’ may perhaps be counted as the one exception to the ranking of
apartheid as second worst only to genocide.
Yet, slavery in general is a classist crime (slaves always make up a distinct economic
class) as much as it is a racist one, whereas genocide and apartheid are generally more racist
than classist (or sexist or anything else). For instance, under South African apartheid Whites
and Blacks would sometimes do the same work, which was paid unequally to the vast benefit
of Whites, whereas Blacks in the Americas did slave work, while the Whites were the only
ones to get paid. Though in both cases divided racially, the economic classes were thus even
more separate, in an economic and social sense, under slavery than under apartheid. And,
because of that, there was less direct competition between them during slavery.
Even more importantly, the Atlantic system of slavery must also be seen as essentially
genocidal. As such, it could be considered as the worst genocide, the worst known crime in
human history. In my opinion, only the genocides of Native Americans perpetrated by western
European invaders and their descendants and the Nazi genocides of Jews, Roma, Sinti, Slavs
and others could match those horrors. Apart from the actual violent deaths of many tens of
millions of Africans and African Americans during capture or captivity, during transport or
unpaid work, the Whites who authored the crimes that make up the 400 years of the
transatlantic slave industry also intentionally and systematically robbed tens of millions of
Africans of their languages, their religions, their music and other essential aspects of their
culture and humanity by forbidding them to practice any of them. Moreover, they purposely
and systematically broke up African families and cultural groups, especially in North America
and the Caribbean. The latter are crimes that have not (yet) been classified by the United
Nations as genocide, although most members of the UN called for such measures already in
the run-up to the 1948 vote on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
 15

of Genocide, namely as ‘cultural genocide’ or ‘linguistic genocide’. I will return to these

issues (the relationships between apartheid and different forms of genocide, slavery, and
racism) in the course of the investigation, especially in the first part.

***

Although not as devastating as genocide per se, the wide concept of apartheid involves
even more serious human rights violations than those taking place under apartheid in the
narrow sense. In more than one way, the traditional concept of apartheid, created by white
supremacists, implicitly treats Whites as being no less indigenous to South Africa than
Blacks, since it does not refer to events prior to 1948. It therefore ignores and exonerates most
of the invasions and confiscations by white conquerors of land previously owned and tenured
by Blacks in South Africa or its predecessor states and other polities. It also ignores the most
complete cases of ethnic cleansing and physical and cultural genocide of Blacks by Whites
and their assistants and allies in South Africa, which all occurred prior to 1948. Outside of
South Africa’s state borders, however, the South African apartheid regime committed
unprecedented atrocities during the last three decades of its existence, especially in Angola,
Mozambique, and Namibia, as we shall see.
When the concept of apartheid is applied to present-day Israel, as seems to be taking
place now on a daily basis in the realm of rather marginalized publishing and in unpublished
communication, the initial de facto invasion of Palestine by immigrant, refugee, and Zionist
Jews during the course of the last century is often implied, but seldom, if ever, explicitly
compared to the white invasion of South Africa. One of the main reasons for this is of course
that many of the Jews in Palestine before 1948, the year of the creation of the modern state of
Israel, were law-abiding immigrants and refugees, rather than invaders, and that some Jews
were even Palestinians. Yet, others, the militant Zionists, were none of these things, and many
of them were later to become members of the new country’s elites. And the other Jews then
automatically formed with them the new country’s racial political, economic, military,
cultural, and social elite, receiving privileges at the expense of the indigenous population,
most of whom had by now either been killed or made refugees. The initial invasions were thus
slightly different. There were also, though not as many, law-abiding white immigrants and
refugees in white-ruled South Africa, but none before the initial invasion in 1652. Most
importantly, there are terrorist backgrounds to both the states of South Africa and Israel. Of
course many, or perhaps even all, states have terrorist backgrounds, but these are exacerbated
in apartheid states by the fact that the original inhabitants of the land, who remain a majority,
were turned into victims of a crime against humanity through the establishment of that state.
South African Whites invented the term ‘apartheid’ to refer to policy and practice after
1948 only, in effect sweeping their previous crimes and ill-gotten gains under the carpet. I
hope to have dug a level deeper with my analysis, exposing the necessity of an initial
invasion, or at least a de facto invasion – that is, the violent or ‘peaceful’ takeover of the land
by one group of foreigners from another – for the establishment of apartheid. Egypt was
conquered by the Greeks in a manner more similar to Palestine by the Jews than to South
Africa by the Whites. The Greeks took over Egypt from the Persians, who were running it as a
province or colony at the time. The Jews took over most of Palestine from the British, who
were also running a colony.
The wider concept of apartheid, in my view, is also structurally more coherent than the
narrow one. It exposes apartheid as a systematic crime, equally akin to colonialism and
genocide – yet with distinctive features of its own. Two of these are demography and
profitability. In colonialism, the presence of invaders is kept at a minimum, just enough in
order to keep an incessantly changing optimum level of exploitation running as smoothly as
possible. In apartheid, on the other hand, a large minority of semi-civilian and civilian settlers
is added to, or accompanies, the military and administrative personnel needed for mere
16

colonialism, which is, on the whole, not as profitable as apartheid. The exploitation of natural
resources and indigenous labor, in particular, is less intense in colonialism.
As indicated, apartheid also entails state sovereignty, which radically changes the
status of the oppressive minority, especially its status in the countries of origin. For the
invaders and all their descendants, the declaration of independence is a formal, and in many
respects also a practical, point of no return. All invaders came from somewhere, usually in
Europe, and to that place there is now no return. In genocide, finally, a racial minority or
majority, whether consisting of indigenous people or invaders, strives to become a totality. I
propose as a rule-of-thumb that invaders making up less than five percent of the total
population is typically a colony, between 5 and 50 percent typically apartheid, and more than
50 percent, as in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, typically genocidal. The presence
of invaders or oppressive indigenous people is kept at a rising maximum level in genocide.
The profit motive also looms large in genocide. After stealing land, especially, the prospects
of refugees, resentment, and calls for justice, which might find sympathetic ears and allies, are
seen by the perpetrators of genocide as threats and the refugees or potential refugees are
therefore often slain as well as those resisting the invasion. But genocide, like apartheid, is
often also blind racial hatred, which is perpetrated for no economic reason at all. It appears
hard, if not impossible, to determine whether genocide is generally more or less profitable
than apartheid or colonialism. There may be more for the first looters, but so much indigenous
knowledge of natural and human resources and the impact of the local nature and neighboring
cultures on humans is lost, forever, and that makes total genocide – complete physical and
cultural genocide – an even more rare event than apartheid. Total genocide must therefore be
less profitable than apartheid or colonialism. But with partial genocide, I am not sure.
Despite this shortcoming, which is – at least partly – conditioned by the absence of a
general theory of war and oppression, I hope that my analysis of apartheid can help to open up
the phenomena of racism, war, and oppression, including colonialism, genocide (both in the
sense of total annihilation and in the current legal sense of destroying a people in whole or in
part), neo-colonialism, neo-apartheid, and other forms of imposed servitude, misery, and
horror, to more systematic study and criticism. The way I have analyzed apartheid may be
heuristically useful especially for studies of genocide and colonialism, but perhaps also for
investigations into imperialism, slavery, prostitution, and other forms of systematic human
rights violations. Nevertheless, it is important to the conception of this work that apartheid is
unique in form: it cannot be reduced to a form of colonialism, or of genocide, or of
imperialism, classism, or sexism, or to any mixture of these. Although this book will not
deliver an exhaustive description of apartheid, I hope to have identified its most essential
features or aspects, and to have situated the phenomenon of apartheid within an admittedly
loose structural context of other kinds of systematic and gross human rights violations, of
other kinds of crimes against humanity. Apartheid is a form of racism that neighbors
colonialism as well as genocide, and it has strong, perhaps even exceptionally strong classist
and sexist aspects, as we shall see in the following. It is, partly, quite well understandable as a
mixture of these. But it also needs to be understood in its own right, and in its own wrong.
To refer to today’s South Africa or tomorrow’s Palestine as ‘postcolonial’, as is often
done, is in my view even worse than an underestimation of the problems that still have to be
faced in both of these contexts. It is an insult to the victims of apartheid. For most of these
victims, there are very few choices in life, and most of them are unattractive. Their backs are
literally against the wall. Black South Africans went through something much worse than
colonialism, something that is as close to genocide as it is to colonialism, and the Palestinians
are trying to do the same now.
The post-apartheid situation is very different from the post-colonial situation. The
latter is characterized by the physical departures of the former political, economic and military
elites, all of which normally stay on after apartheid. P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk, the only
former South African apartheid presidents alive after the end of apartheid, are still very much
 17

in South Africa (Botha died in 2006), whereas no former governor, as far as I know, stayed on
in a former colony. For example, the last governor, Chris Patten, left Hong Kong as soon as
the British flag was lowered for the last time over the crown colony in 1997. A former prime
minister Netanyahu (whether dead or alive) and his family are, similarly, very likely to stay on
in a future post-apartheid Palestine/Israel. The post-colonial independent state, moreover, has
to start from scratch, become a new member of the UN and/or other intergovernmental
organizations, appoint diplomats, set up ministries, etc., whereas both South Africa and Israel
already are UN members (and Palestine also has an official status as UN Observer, as a full
UNESCO member, etc.), and they all have their own political infrastructure, which sometimes
does not have to be changed at all after the switch to a post-apartheid situation, e.g. in South
Africa. I believe there is also a great difference between epiapartheid and neo-colonialism,
which I believe are the most important after-effects of these two separate kinds of racist
societies. In epiapartheid, illicit wealth and power are extended for many if not the majority of
members of the former racial elite. Most of all, they seem to hang on to ‘their’ land. In a neo-
colonialist situation, however, new ways of making profits from the work of formerly
colonialized people are devised and implemented, sometimes leading to unintended and
unforeseen consequences. Land ownership plays a much less prioritized role here. I would not
be surprised, for instance, if it turned out that US corporations have profited more from neo-
colonialist situations in former British colonies than British corporations have. On the other
hand, it should also be mentioned that there are similarities between epiapartheid and neo-
colonialism, as well. On a global scale, British companies have profited again from
anglification brought about by US power and wealth. The dependence on the language of the
former oppressors is a constant factor in both neo-colonialism and epiapartheid. After all, they
are both legacies of racist expansion, racist practices, and racist rule, of two related, and
sometimes (though only rarely) indistinguishable racist forms of systematic human rights
violations, i.e. of apartheid and colonialism.
Finally, this book is an attempt to understand and explain apartheid systematically
from the perspective of the people most affected by it, i.e. chiefly from the perspective of the
victims (on both sides), or rather, from a human rights perspective. As such, its approach lies
between that of comparative political science and that of political sociology, rather than being
comparative history. If read as the latter, it may appear biased to the reader. But as political
science or sociology it should offer partly new perspectives on oppression, race, and violence.
I am not writing histories of Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, or Israel/Palestine, nor even
histories of the political systems in these countries, but making a systematic inquiry into
physical and structural violence. I do not consider my writing political, since I am writing
neither in the interest of any government or political party nor of any intergovernmental or
nongovernmental organization, nor of any other legal or illegal organization. Instead, I am
writing in the interest of what I perceive to be human rights.
In this investigation, it is true, I go beyond merely condemning racism. With George
Fredrickson, I believe scientific knowledge about racism should be used to treat racism. In
other words, we should try to understand it in order to find ways to treat it (though of course
not the racists) as a disease. Racism is, however, a contagious disease. It is learned and not
inherited in any way. Quarantine is not a solution, other than for criminal convicts. But even
with regard to them, racism must be confronted and dealt with wherever and whenever it may
appear. Reverse racism is no better than the original, at least in principle, and this text is far
from being uncritical towards the most victimized groups in apartheid societies. In medicine
as well as in social science, it is in my opinion important to see both the active and the passive
sides of people, although members of the indigenous racialized majority in an apartheid
society severely lack options compared to members of the oppressive minority. There are
victims (mainly) and perpetrators on both sides, even though apartheid is neither a
symmetrical nor a reflective relationship, and the perpetrators are fewer in both relative and
absolute numbers within the oppressed indigenous majority than within the oppressive racial
18

minority. It is my hope that my work might therefore also serve as a corrective instance
against a great deal of literature and discourse that tends to play down or even deny the
oppressive aspects of apartheid and represents a distorted reality from the most privileged
racial minority perspective, in South Africa, which was after all still being defended by the
Reagan and Thatcher regimes during the 1980s, as well as in Israel, which is still defended by
even mightier powers at present.

***

During the long time it has taken me to finish this investigation – it started in 1998 – I
received support, inspiration, aid, and assistance from many people and institutions. I would
especially like to thank my wife, Kim Cooper, for her patience, love, steadfast assistance, and
support, her challenging and fruitful approaches to many of the problems I encountered in the
course of my work, and for all that I have learned from her about racism, sexism, and
resistance against injustice in general, and for inspiration and other kinds of help with
countless aspects of this project throughout its long period of becoming.
I wish to thank my colleague in Vienna and in Palestine, Husam Madhoun, for his
inspiration, his audacity against oppressors and his sense of humor in the face of disaster.
Being both an apartheid refugee and a man under military occupation due to his race, he has
been one of my most important sources for life under apartheid.
Another hero of Palestinian liberation is Ilan Pappe, from whose brilliant intellect and
superlative courage this book and I personally have benefited immensely. He belongs to that
rare, but incessantly growing number of people whom Nelson Mandela called ‘in many ways’
the bravest opponents of apartheid, i.e. people belonging to the elite racial group, who
nevertheless stake their existence on overthrowing the system that provides them with so
many privileges and advantages. Nothing would have been easier for them than to accept the
privileges with which they were born, and to defend them against those who are so naturally
and easily constructed and seen as outsiders, as invaders. Yet, Ilan Pappe has decided in favor
of what I also know is very difficult: to give up your legalized duty to defend your home
country and instead opt for justice beyond nation, race, or creed. The great difference is that I
only fled military service in Sweden (without actually breaking its laws), which is probably
the most peaceful country in the world in terms of suffered wartime losses during the last two
centuries, whereas Ilan made an elegant and dignified exit from one of the most war-torn
areas of the world, and, moreover, keeps going back to that country, where many of his co-
citizens consider him a traitor and an enemy, and some of the oppressed indigenous people
may consider him an enemy, as well, i.e. some of those who do not yet know him.
Rickard Löwstedt, my brother, has also aided me in many ways, as has my mother,
Patricia Löwstedt. She, in particular, took great care in reading and improving the text and
helped me with many of the details. My debt to my entire family is unfathomable, and I wish
to thank all members of it, for helping, supporting, and enduring this research project.
My father, Robert Löwstedt, passed away during the time I was working on it. His
passing and absence have left a gaping hole in my life. His love, patience, tolerance and wise
guidance, his care for precision and detail, and his adventurous sense of curiosity, all
contributed to make it possible, and so this book is dedicated to his memory.
My elder sister, Debbie Löwstedt, who died previously, played a different but equally
enabling role in my development. Her personality, her moral sense, her voice of balance,
fairness and reason, and her affections for the Vietnamese people during the 1970s, and the
black South Africans during the 1980s, have served this project and me both as inspiration
and as role model.
This investigation started its existence in Vienna, Austria, to which I had emigrated
from my native Sweden in 1984 as a refugee from compulsory military service and a
university student in search of academic philosophy that would be relevant and interesting to
 19

me. At first it was merely meant to be a short chapter on South African apartheid’s many
parallels with the Greek and Roman structures and practices of domination in Egypt. That
chapter first came into being in the mid-1990s and was intended to be part of a book on
ancient Egyptian philosophical, scientific and ethical thought and its historical, political, and
social contexts, a book which I hope to finish in the near future.
I was teaching a Webster University course in Vienna, which included study trips to
South Africa, on apartheid in 1998, while I was working on that book project, and I advised
one of my students, Nisreen Bathish, to write a term paper on parallels between apartheid
South Africa and the Palestinian territories under Israeli rule. She found more than I expected.
We then discussed the issues further and decided to jointly write an academic article on the
wider subject, comparing all three societies as apartheid societies. In the meantime, much due
to the teaching assignments in political science and history that I had taken over, my research
interests were slowly drifting away from philosophy/anthropology and more into politics,
sociology, and history. In 1999 we were not very far into the apartheid project, when the
opportunity arose to present a paper at an academic conference on the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission which coincided with the study trip. We put together as much
as we could in order to meet a tight deadline, and ended up with a 28-page paper, which we
presented at the conference in Johannesburg. That paper carries the same title as this
investigation. I have left many of her and my passages from that paper unaltered here. Ms.
Bathish and I also worked together on the IPI Intifada Report, a media freedom violations
report on attacks and intentional obstacles against media coverage of the Palestinian Uprising
that began in 2000. This report was published by the International Press Institute, a global
press freedom/media ethics organization with which I worked between 1994 and 2005, and
where she did an internship in late 2000.1 We both also felt that apartheid as a major form of
oppression and war, and as exemplified by Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt as well as South
Africa, were issues that needed some more in-depth research and theoretical work. Ms.
Bathish then became more involved with her dominant interests, film and media, and started
to work as a producer for Reuters Television in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. In 2003, she started to work more generally with the Middle East, also covering
the US-led war in Iraq and other themes, and she has unfortunately not had the time or
inclination to be the co-author of this book. It was understandably more important for her to
witness the ongoing invasions, occupations, resistance and uprisings in the region first-hand
and to record them accurately. But she continued to contribute to the project sporadically and
remained one my main sources of assistance to the manuscript throughout its long gestation
period. For this, as well as for the important part Ms. Bathish played for the impetus to the
project, I am of course also very grateful.
Since the publication of our paper, Binyamin Netanyahu was ousted in Israeli elections
by Ehud Barak, Barak by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert succeeded Sharon, and now, ironically,
Netanyahu has taken over again as the new prime minister of Israel. Since then, the Second
Intifada broke out and continued, the EU doubled in size and the Euro currency unit was born,
the internet became a major mass medium, 9/11 took place, the ‘war on terror’ started, the
Palestinian writer, academic, and activist Edward Said died, Palestinian President Yassir
Arafat died and was replaced by Mahmoud Abbas and, parliamentarily, their Fatah party by
Hamas, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fell, and the Americans dug in there, as well as in Afghanistan
and elsewhere. Israel used to be the greatest military power in the Middle East, but today, it is

1
See Bathish, N. & Löwstedt: Apartheid – Ancient, Past and Present, 1999; Bathish, N. et al: IPI Intifada Report:
Press Freedom Violations in Israel and Palestine, September 29, 2000 - September 28, 2004, 5October 19, 2004.
The previous version of this book appeared under the title: Apartheid – Ancient, Past and Present: Systematic
and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, updated 6th
edition, 2011 (1st edition 2006). Website addresses of these and all other online sources are provided in the
bibliography along with full bibliographical details.
20

the USA, which, in the meantime, has switched from Clinton’s to Bush’s to Obama’s
presidencies. Yet, militarily, Israel is stronger than ever. The mainstream, militant Hamas was
very nearly crushed by the Israelis and announced a unilateral ceasefire in August 2004. Israel
did not respond in kind. Hamas was then elected to form a government in the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories in 2006, but, apparently due to US and Israeli interventions, the Islamist
party ended up as an enemy of the Fatah party, to whom President Abbas, also democratically
elected, belongs. Israel fought four short wars, one against Lebanon and three against Gaza.
Meanwhile, a wave of popular democratic and undemocratic revolutions swept over North
Africa and parts of southwest Asia, and it may yet raise new opposition against undemocratic
Israeli rule and practice in Egypt’s eastern neighbor. After all these momentous changes,
however, very little has happened with regard to the oppression and war to which Palestinians
and Israelis are subjected continuously by the Israeli apartheid elites and their allies,
instruments, robots, and collaborators. The executive rule of Netanyahu and his Likud-led
regimes at the beginning and end of the 17-year-period during which I wrote this book show
and symbolize both the circularity and the static nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
I believe I can safely say that the system of human rights violations in Israel/Palestine
has not changed at all. In retrospect it made much sense for me to continue the project without
making any major changes to the structure of the manuscript at any point amid these historic
changes. Observations, analyses, and accusations of apartheid being perpetrated by Israel,
carried out by other researchers and, especially, by activists against apartheid around the
world, however, have mounted during this time, and thus the resistance against the system has
changed. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners have played crucial roles in this development: the
South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, who has been condemning Israeli
apartheid vociferously and courageously since the 1980s, when he was still busy helping to
peacefully defeat apartheid in his own home country, and the former US president, Jimmy
Carter. Since the middle of the last decade, with the publication of Carter’s 2006 book,
‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’, with Pappe’s ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, also in
2006, and perhaps even more with the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur’s,
John Dugard’s, recommendation in February 2007 that the charge against Israel for
perpetrating apartheid be considered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the morally,
legally, and intellectually authoritative critique of Israeli apartheid has become impossible to
dismiss or ignore. A follow-up on Dugard’s recommendation, commissioned by the Human
Sciences Research Council of South Africa, is ‘Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Re-
assessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories under International
Law’, edited by Virginia Tilley, and released in a preliminary version in 2009. This is a report
authored by an international team of legal experts, and it comes to the same basic conclusions
and recommendations as Dugard, namely that Israel is guilty of apartheid, a crime against
humanity, and Israel should be charged with the crime in the top courts by all other members
of the international community, who are in fact obligated under international law to do so.
Along with Tutu, Dugard is also involved in the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which found
Israel guilty of apartheid and other crimes against all Palestinians (i.e. not just those under
direct military occupation) as well as the rest of humanity in 2011. Three years after Dugard’s
report, his successor as UN Rapporteur on Palestine and Russell Tribunal colleague, Princeton
law professor Richard Falk, came to the same conclusions.2 The critique and the criticism of

2
Carter: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, 2006 (see more on this book below, especially in Chapter II.9.3);
Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006; Dugard: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of
Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, 2007 (see Section III.2 below); Tilley (ed.):
Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Re-assessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories under International Law, 2009 (see footnotes 5, 13 and 20 below); Falk: Report of the Special
Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, 2010 and 2014;
N.N.: The Russell Tribunal on Palestine, Cape Town Session: Summary of Findings, 2011; The Russell Tribunal
on Palestine: Findings of the South African Session, 2011. (The Russell Tribunal is a civil society initiative to
 21

Israeli apartheid has thus become an urgent international legal matter.

From a theoretical as well as a moral point of view, of course, I feel vindicated. But
the ICJ does not make binding rulings. It has no executive power to carry out its ‘advisory
opinions’. And even a positive outcome, such as that which was achieved by the ICJ against
Israel’s West Bank separation barrier in 2004, would almost certainly also be more or less
ignored by Israel and would also be vetoed from becoming a UN Security Council issue by
the greatest military power in the Middle East, the USA. Not only is the implementation of the
ICJ ruling not guaranteed, its non-implementation is also practically predetermined in this
case. But such a ruling would still put Israel and its presently but not perpetually dominant
patron on the defensive, and it might also eventually lead to UN sanctions, such as those
against apartheid South Africa, i.e. this could indeed be one of the beginnings of the end of
apartheid and of the armed conflict in Israel and Palestine.
Still, the task of uncovering and exposing Israeli apartheid, and thus, hopefully, to
contribute to its downfall, is only one aspect of the purpose of this book from its very
beginnings. I wish to assist South Africa’s departed, still suffering, and yet unborn victims of
apartheid too, especially by attempting to counteract a kind of forgetfulness, which is
sometimes highly unnatural, often even a conscious or targeted kind of forgetfulness,
especially among the ex-elites and their former allies, in the case of South African apartheid.
There are still perpetrators who should be brought to justice. There are still millions of victims
who deserve reparations. There are still profiteers, domestic and foreign, from South African
apartheid who should be paying back to the sources and generators of their profits, not only
for moral reasons but for legal ones, as well. Some elements of apartheid have mutated,
changed appearance, and continue to thrive. Today, in this regard, there is epiapartheid, in
South Africa and beyond. ‘Epiapartheid’ possibly even describes South Africa today better
than ‘post-apartheid’ does, at least in the realms of the impunity for serious crimes, the
economy, land ownership, and with regard to femicide and other kinds of violence, and
perhaps also in additional social and cultural realms. Political and civil rights have finally
been gained and guaranteed, but social and economic rights, property, and many important
forms of decision-making have not.
Finally I wish to assist in the quest for knowledge about systematic human rights
violations in general and for indications how best to avoid their recurrence and to stop the
continuous ones. My inclusion of ancient apartheid here is motivated by what I perceive as a
need for historical revision of certain aspects of the late ancient era in the eastern
Mediterranean region (though much progress has been made by other researchers since I
started working on this book), and a need to end persistent epiapartheid phenomena, such as
femicide and apartheid symbolisms, in ‘Egypt’ (a Greek name, of which the country is still
full) and elsewhere today, as well as a need for a structurally useful third point of reference
and comparison for both of the modern apartheid societies, and for other forms of oppression.

point out injustices and make recommendations based on international law and moral decency when
governments are too self-serving or too afraid to do so. It has earlier investigated and published
recommendations on the Vietnam War and on the 1980s ‘Dirty War’ in Latin America.) My sincere apologies to
Virginia Tilley and to the reader for only using the 2009 version of her text, which was published in a new
version as a book in 2012 (see bibliography). These investigations along with Davis, U.: Apartheid Israel, 2003,
Cook: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, 2006, Kovel: Overcoming
Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, 2007, Mearsheimer & Walt: The Israel Lobby
and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2007, and many others (see also Tutu in the bibliography, and White: Analyses of
Israeli Apartheid Are Ever More Crucial, 2013, for additional instances), comprise a formidable array of charges
of illegal and unjust practices by Israel and Israelis against Palestinians from the points of view of international
and Israeli law as well as morality. See Löwstedt: The Beginnings of a Strong, Pro-Palestinian Position in the
West? 2007 for a critical review of Carter 2006 and Mearsheimer & Walt 2007, which are the only two of the
works mentioned in this footnote that do not explicitly accuse Israel of perpetrating apartheid presently or in the
past, or, in Carter’s case: only of apartheid in the territories occupied since 1967, although they both do criticize
Israel strongly for heading towards apartheid.
22

Aside from great literature, reports, communications, and investigations which came
before this book and from which I have learned much, I am indebted to the Core Faculty
Research and Service Project Review Panel at Webster University in Vienna for a research
grant awarded for this project. My gratitude also goes to the Austrian Ministry of Science and
Traffic (Österreichisches Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr, Michaela
Lindinger) and to Voest-Alpine Industrieanlagen-bau GmbH., Linz, for small grants
sponsoring the presentation of Ms. Bathish’s and my paper at the Johannesburg conference in
1999.
For their invaluable initiatives and assistance with the Webster Vienna and Wits South
Africa/Austria course study trips and student exchange programs from 1997 to 1999, without
which this investigation would not have come about, I would like to thank my colleagues at
Webster University in Vienna, in particular Dr. William Fulton, Professor Sam Hocking, Dr.
Maria-Regina Kecht, Dr. Arthur Hirsh, Dr. Elizabeth Orthner-Chopin, and all my students at
Webster, and at Wits: especially Professor Katherine Munro, whose untiring enthusiasm and
wealth of initiatives were essential in getting me and the Webster exchange students to South
Africa in the first place, and also all the Webster and Wits exchange students, as well as
Candice Perlman, Patrick Phelane, Abel Baloyi, Sibusiso Mazibuko (RIP) and Morongoa
Machete and their son, Kagif; elsewhere in Johannesburg: Keith, Huntley and Kim Munro,
Raymond and Jean Louw, Nokwazi Gumbi, Miriam Makeba (RIP), and Angie Kapelianis; at
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): Terry February, Faizal Randera, Hugh
Lewin, Thulani Grenville-Grey, Lavinia Browne, and Desmond Tutu; elsewhere in Cape
Town: Emma Thomasson, and Moegsien Williams; and of course all the other students,
speakers, interviewees and hosts involved.
Along with Professor Munro, I organized and led the Webster-Wits student and lecture
exchange in 1998 and 1999, and the knowledge, experience and insights gathered during this
period are an important foundation for this book. I had decided at an early stage to make the
TRC and human rights violations during the apartheid era the focus of the Webster study trips
to South Africa and of the associated Webster University courses, and to a large extent, the
inspiration to write this book came from experience gathered from the associated courses,
study trips, and, in general, from the wonderful people of South Africa.
In 2004 I received a UNDP (United Nations Development Program) sponsorship for a
six-month period as consultant to the media and information program at Miftah (‘Key’) – the
Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, a human rights
organization based in Ramallah and Jerusalem. Again, my focus here – this time at the
interface of intergovernmental and non-governmental initiatives – would be human rights in
general, but especially human rights violations and related problems regarding the mass
media, the rights to information and education, freedom of expression, marginalization of
knowledge, objectivity, fairness, and balance. I had earlier visited Palestinian refugee camps
in Lebanon and met and befriended Palestinians, both refugees and non-refugees, in Austria
and elsewhere, also during an earlier visit to the West Bank in September 2004. I am in debt
for the generosity towards me shown by the people at the UNDP, Miftah, and elsewhere, who
made my work in Palestine possible and enriching, especially by Rami Bathish, Mounir
Kleibo, Hanan Ashrawi and Lily Feidy. It has enabled me to personally experience full-blown
apartheid first-hand for the first time. Not that apartheid is a pleasurable experience. It most
certainly is not. Oppressor and oppressed are both suffering, their very souls often contorted
and cold from fear, confusion, and hatred. But I have not lost hope in humanity. If only
between cracks, it keeps shining through or breaking through whatever walls may be erected
in order to separate people. I have had the privilege of meeting and getting to know fantastic
people who have taught me much about justice and self-sacrifice, especially among
Palestinians and oppositional Jews. My time in Palestine in general has taught me and
inspired me tremendously and helped me add more than mere scholarly and second- or third-
hand experience to the Israeli-Palestinian aspect, which naturally became the most
 23

voluminous part of this project. I would also like to thank my fabulous colleagues during my
half-year UNDP term in Palestine: Husam Madhoun, Mousa Qous, Labib Nasir, Muath al-
Bakri, Mohammed Mosleh, Nahed Abu Sneineh, Dolly Nammour, Nadia El Rashidi, and
Natalie Mikhail at Miftah Jerusalem, as well as Muhammad Yaghi, Wafa’ Abdel Rahman,
Ruham Nimri, Rana Malki, Margo Sabella and all the others at Miftah Ramallah, and, more
widely, the incredibly friendly, hospitable, and resilient Palestinian people, in Palestine and
elsewhere.
I joined the faculty at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank in March 2005. For the
privilege and honor of teaching and learning with great students and colleagues, I owe much
gratitude to Aref Hijjawi, Abdul Karim Barghouthi, Nadim Mseis, Fayzeh Mohammed, the
Department of Cultural Studies and Philosophy, the Faculty of Arts, and, last but not least, to
my students at Bir Zeit.
My return to South Africa for the first conference on African Information Ethics in
Tshwane (formerly Pretoria) in February 2007 was due to Professors Jamel Ben Abdeljelil,
Franz Wimmer, Johannes Britz, and Rafael Capurro, and to the sponsors of the conference,
including the South African government and UNESCO. I am very grateful for this opportunity
and for meeting with great minds and personalities at and around this important conference, as
well as for catching glimpses of a new and dynamic South Africa, more than three quarters of
a decade (of writing on apartheid) after my previous visit.
Special thanks are due to all of my students and my colleagues over the years at
Webster University in Vienna and Geneva, especially Benjamin Fasching-Gray and Charlotta
Larsson at Webster Vienna, and to Christopher Schlemmbach at the University of Vienna.
The latter three read the whole manuscript at different stages of completion, including
footnotes, with amazing patience and care and contributed immensely with constructive and
useful criticism, suggestions, comments, and occasionally with disagreement, which on some
issues has lasted, but so have our friendships, which I continue to value immensely.
Moreover, I am very grateful for Matt Wuerker’s generous offer to let me use his
cartoon/maps (for the CD cover) which masterfully capture elite and settler arrogance and the
brutal decimation, displacement, and expropriation of indigenous people in South Africa, the
USA, and Israel/Palestine.
Much appreciated help came from members of the Palestinian refugee rights group,
the Al-Awda e-group (www.al-awda.org), from the members of the interdisciplinary, yet
egyptologically focused, ‘Assmann Seminar’, and from the Viennese Society for Intercultural
Philosophy (Wiener Gesellschaft für Interkulturelle Philosophie), both affiliated with the
University of Vienna, as well as from Rami and Amal A. Bathish, in Ramallah and Jerusalem
also from Emile and Hanan Ashrawi, Nisreen, Rock and Clelia Bathish, Labib Nasir, Rana
Malki, George Birdseed, Basem Al-Khoury, Mohamed Bhabha, Walid Batrawi, Nisreen Abu-
Zayyad, Dima Khalidi, Amahl Bishara, Peter Lagerqvist, Zahra Khalidi, Natasha Khalidi, and
my landlord, landlady, and neighbors (I am so sorry I forgot their names, except Ghada) in al-
Masyoun, a beautiful part of Ramallah.
I would like to thank all involved in my attempt to gain tenure at the department of
political science at the University of Vienna with an earlier version of this investigation in
2012-2013. Despite my disappointment over the decision of a commission voting against me,
I gained valuable personal experience, as well as extensive expert criticism to vastly improve
this book. Thanks especially to Renate Kraft-Knoll at the Office of the Dean of the Social
Sciences, to the Dean, Rudolf Richter, to my Gutachter (readers): Richard A. Falk, Karin
Blomqvist, Virginia Tilley, to the commission chairperson, Ulrich Brand, and to all the other
commissioners, especially Johannes Pollak of the Institute for Advanced Studies (Institut für
höhere Studien) and Webster University Vienna.
Special thanks, also, to the Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie und kritische
Anthropologie in Vienna, especially to Cornelius Zehetner and to Stefan Lutschinger, and also
to Paul Yankey, Kristoffer Larsson, Sonia al-Dulayme, Nader, Myassa, Tyma, Sufian and
24

Yasser Kraitt, Lynne Kieran (RIP), Emily Cooper (RIP), Marion Fennicks-Phipps (RIP),
Nomasonto Mzimela Buchmann, Paula Abrams-Hourani and Women in Black in Vienna,
Peter Melvyn (RIP) and the Jewish Voice for Peace in Austria, the One Democratic State
(ODS) group, including Samir Abed Rabbo, Oren Ben-Dor, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Gilad Atzmon,
Yoav Bar Haifawi, Sabine Stöhr, Christa Ortmann, Amos Zukerman, Rachel Lever, Ofra
Yeshua-Lyth, Mohamad Saleh, Ian Portman, Yvonne Baur, Ghada Karmi, Norton Mezvinsky,
Husain Aljazzar, Gabi Weber, Blake Alcott, Elias Davidsson, and to Nicola del Vecchio, Fritz
Edlinger, Tyma Kraitt and International, Oliver Hashemizadeh, Peter Leidenmühler and Dar
al-Janub in Vienna, Said Khadra and Palästinaforum Wien, Salman Abu Sitta, Dejana Popic,
Alana Kazykhan, Nyaradzo Chimhandamba, Fatma Elshhati, Miho Seki, Floria Springer, Ivan
Čulo, Annelies Guisset, Israa Doghman, Maryvelma O’Neil, Yogesh Tyagi, Thomas
Muttwill, Axel Maireder, Alia Rayyan, Joharah Baker, Omar Karmi, Rachel Coen, Martin
Bernal (RIP), Max Haller, Sven-Eric Liedman, Håkan Törnebohm (RIP), Eva-Lena Dahl, Bo
Lindberg, Ingemar Nilsson, Lennart Olausson, Håkan Thörn, Sven Lindqvist, Claire Elmquist,
Per Stenelius, Nils Grafö, Lennart Andersson, Ziauddin Sardar, James Bowen, Silvia Zaszlos,
Maksud Djavadov, Julia Valsky, Ulli Pölzl, Magda Abu-Fadil, Janina Struk, Tim Gopsill,
Brian Whitaker, to everybody at Biblioteca Alexandrina, especially Mostafa El-Abbadi and
Tuula Athen, to Sonia and Zahra Dabbous at the American University in Cairo, and to Lydia
Wazir-Staubmann, Peter Horn, Gudrun Harrer, Sibongile Mzimela, Baruch Wolski, Sulaiman
Alwahid, Nora Sasvari, Nisreen Mirza, Troy Blacklaws, Sandya Gain, Ramalakshmi
Lakshmanan, Stephanie Mautner Markhof, Ulrike Gamsjäger, Christian Neugebauer, Alina
Grigorescu, Karla Bavoljak, Reena Varghese, Kristina Ahlinder, Niklas Werklund, Issa
Mansaray, Kawther Salam, Mazin Elfehaid, Catherine Powers, Marta Srokosz, Barbara
Trionfi, Ömer Oguz, Marcello Scarone, Lydia El-Khouri, Peter Goff, Diana Orlova,
Christiane Klint, Michael Kudlak, Eva Maria Grabmair, Susanne Winklehner, Peter Gerlich,
Kai Hafez, Vladimir Ivkovic, Sigrid Stangl, Alain Kanyinda, Michael Benedikt (RIP), Salah
Musa, John Patillo-Hess, Wadie Abunassar, Uri Strauss, Naomi Sakr, Johnny Clegg, Anca
Lucian, Thabisile Hlatshwayo-Moleah, Marilia Nelson, Erwin Ringel (RIP), Erich Fried
(RIP), Christoph Jaber, LSP (the Last Standing Poet), Christopher Beer, Captain Eddie
Mohammad, Idrottsföreningen Kamraterna Göteborg, Selma Tankovic, Mosaed, Monika and
Ammar Elfehaid, Katharina List, Ana Valjak, Rumiana Dimitrova, Josef Gelernter, Izvor
Moralic, Lavdim Ismaili, Lhotzky’s Literaturbuffet, Elisabeth Knass, Holger Lang, Kata
Cserveny, Caitlin Spencer, Philipp Conrad, Sandra Kreisler, Fangni Wang, Veii, Peter
Donelan, Stefan Szwarga (RIP), Martin Vonbrüll, Kimus Maximus, Hilary Claggett, Anne
Beech, Natalie Sasser, Karin Kail, Avi Shlaim, Ran Greenstein, Tom Butterly, Phyllis Ressler,
Tammy Rosso, Timothy Young, Manuela Pyringer, Ilginay Göbüt, Arturo Cruz-Esparza,
Irene Stöckl, and Glenn W. Leaper. Many others have contributed in some way or another to
this investigation. To list more of them would be even more cumbersome for the reader.
Although not mentioned by name here, they are not forgotten and my gratitude pertains to
them as well. Any mistakes in this text are of course my sole responsibility, and impulses for
improvements are also of course very welcome: [email protected].
Finally, in having this text published free of charge and online in several earlier
editions, I wish to reach as many readers as possible. Unfortunately, many book publishers,
especially university presses on whom I concentrated my attempts, have turned down my
book proposals. If they replied at all, they referred to the length of the manuscript. I do
appreciate the high printing costs associated with a text of this magnitude. But two replied
with an additional explanation or warning to me that there is currently a widespread fear of
being accused of anti-Semitism among publishers confronted with decisions on whether to
publish criticism of Israel or not. All I can do here is to refer, without bitterness or
satisfaction, to Chapter II.9.3 and footnote 207 below.

Vienna, September 2014

 25

I. The State of Apartheid and the Apartheid States

1. The Big Picture: Human Rights Violations and Racism

The Afrikaans term ‘apartheid’, which originally means ‘apartness’ or ‘separateness’,
has become a globally used, household word for racist, systematic and grave human rights
violations. There is some irony in this, since South Africa’s all-white National Party (NP),
which ruled the country continuously from 1948 until 1994, seems to have coined the term to
veil or mask the numerous oppressive and violent aspects of its policies and practices. It
claimed, for instance, that racial separation would be beneficial to all racial groups in the
country. Those 46 years have become known and universally repudiated as ‘the era of
apartheid’ in South Africa and the phenomenon, ‘apartheid’, has now gained the kind of
notoriety otherwise reserved for undemocratic, oppressive and destructive societies such as
Germany (and most of the rest of Europe) under the rule of Adolf Hitler, Italy under Benito
Mussolini, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Uganda under Idi Amin, the USA under the uniquely
destructive ideology of ‘manifest destiny’, or the Soviet Union under the Communist party.
The concept of separateness in itself does not necessarily imply that any group is or
will be favored over any other. After all, segregation per se of racial groups was supported by
some South African Blacks. In the past, moreover, a wide range of natural conditions have
separated human beings, which has led to natural and cultural differences between them. The
distinctive characteristic of apartheid and of other kinds of oppressive segregation is that
political, economic, social, and even geographic conditions are created consciously and
systematically in order to forcibly separate groups, almost invariably to the benefit – at least
the short-term benefit – of at least one of the groups, but never, or only accidentally, to the
benefit of all of them.3
‘Apartheid’ is without a doubt the most successful Afrikaans word outside South
Africa. It has found its way into practically every other language, although not with its
originally intended overt meaning: racial separation to the benefit of all those involved, with
its merely implied understanding that separateness should especially be to the benefit of the

3
Lester: From Colonization to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa, 1996: 87ff. Without
segregation, many South African Blacks may indeed not have been able to keep so many of their cultural
traditions – including language – and proud resistant attitudes in defiance of Whites and their cultures. Of course,
this was not part of most of the Whites’ plans or expectations. The indigenous culture was supposed (by the
leading white intellectuals as well as by the analphabetic soldiers and settlers and almost everyone in-between) to
just fade away, due merely to being in the proximity of ‘superior’ white culture. For just one prominent example
of this deceptive and self-deceptive eurocentric attitude in a prominent philosopher and intellectual commonly
considered ‘humanist’, see Jaspers: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, 1949: 69, 88. On Manifest Destiny,
the belief, especially during the 19th century, that the USA (usually meaning the Anglo-Saxon race) is destined to
expand across the American continent, see Horsman: Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American
Racial Anglo-Saxonism, 1981. According to Mandela: No Easy Walk to Freedom, 2002 (1965): 60, there was in
South Africa until the 1960s never any ‘serious or responsible leader’ among Blacks who ‘…ever accepted
segregation, separation, or the partition of this country in any shape or form’. Similar to black South African
separation advocates, who then multiplied under white encouragement, pressure and terror as the Bantustans
were created during the 1970s and ‘80s, the physical separation of races was favored, at least for a while, by a
black US emancipationist like Malcolm X, or by the US ‘Nation of Islam’ leader Louis Farrakhan. See Posner:
Hundreds of Thousands of Blacks Mass in Capital, 1995; Mbakwe: A Powerful Fighter for Freedom – Malcolm
X, 1993; X & Haley (Contributor): The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965. I believe separatism became a more
important force among black Americans than among black South Africans because the former (although they are
and were more numerous than black South Africans) faced even more genocidal forces than the latter did, but
that difference is gradual and multidimensional rather than absolute. On this as well as other more or less
different acts and policies of racist discrimination in the USA and South Africa, see Section I.4 below. On the
interpretation and the reception of the term and the concept of ‘apartheid’, see also Bishara, Azmi: Calling a
Spade a Spade, 2001.
26

‘worthiest’ or ‘superior’ racial group. It appears that the world outside South Africa, by not
translating ‘apartheid’ and insisting on the use of the Afrikaans word, made it a pejorative
term, and expressed solidarity with the victims of apartheid. (Who ever heard of the
‘Separateness Regime’ of South Africa?) This apparent, yet actually only moral or strategic
untranslatability, however, also made the phenomenon of South African apartheid seem more
unique than it really was. In this sense, the word can easily be confused with the concept. And
so, although the term ‘apartheid’ was in fact increasingly also applied to describe racial
oppression and discrimination outside South Africa, it was only applied loosely, and for
many, probably most people, apartheid was only or only essentially a South African
phenomenon. Nevertheless, it has a generic meaning in international law, at least since 1976.
And what European descendants did in South Africa has a lot in common with what European
descendants and others have done (and are still doing) elsewhere in the world. In this first part
of three of this investigation I wish to apply it more rigorously, to provide a definition of
apartheid, by means of which comparisons can be shown to be close to or distant from the
South African phenomenon – and to and from each other irrespectively of South Africa – in
rough, yet at least in principle measurable, degrees. Here I will also attempt to place the
phenomenon of apartheid in political, sociological, epistemological, and legal contexts, and to
identify the milestones in the historical developments of three apartheid societies central to
this entire book: Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa and modern Israel.
Still commonly referred to, the concept of apartheid, the denotation of the word, has
drifted away from its original lexical meaning to denote outright physically repressive,
economically exploitative and ideologically racist segregation, not only in South Africa, and
not only against non-Whites or Blacks.4 In this investigation, I use the term ‘racism’ to
encompass both violent and oppressive practices, acts, policies, and thoughts directed against
more or less arbitrarily constructed groups of people, based on their real or imagined
biological or cultural heritage, their appearance, cultural identity, religion, language, and
relations of production.5
4
The United Nations’ International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid
(1973, entered into force in 1976) describes the latter in general terms as: ‘inhuman acts committed for the
purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of
persons and systematically oppressing them’. Moreover, it states that the crime of apartheid ‘shall include similar
policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa’ (The Office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 1973, Article 2). As I shall argue here, this Convention is
indeed applicable to present-day Israel as are many other aspects of international law, conventions and treaties,
which, incidentally, Israel and its closest allies routinely violate and ignore, whether they are signatories to them
or not. They include the Charter of the United Nations (1945: Article 55), the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (1948: Article 2 and many others), the International Convention for Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination (1965), the International Criminal Court Statutes (1998: Article 7), and many others. Israel,
Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand did not sign the 1973 Convention. (Not signing,
however, does not cancel or exempt these countries from the Convention which is now, of course, international
law.) So, those are the only countries who do not wish that the crime of apartheid be either suppressed or
punished, or both. See Tilley (ed.): 48-52; footnote 854 below, and Section I.4 below, which deals with a wide
variety of uses of the term ‘apartheid’ for oppression and conflict outside South Africa, aside from Israel and
Graeco-Roman Egypt. On the UN and apartheid, see Reddy: United Nations and the African National Congress:
Partners in the Struggle against Apartheid, 2012.
5
In the first four editions of this book I used the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnicism’, mainly because of what I see
as the difficulty of many Americans, western Europeans and others to understand how one can speak of an Arab
or Jewish ‘race’, or of a Croat, Serb, or Bosnian ‘race’, and due also to the complication that ‘race’ is a biological
term with a universally accepted meaning (as a more narrow category of genetic difference than sub-species),
although it is useless for biologically categorizing existing humans. Virginia Tilley has shown in her ‘Mestizaje
and the “Ethnicization” of Race in Latin America’ (in Spickard (ed.): Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the
World, 2005) that ‘ethnicity’ has largely served the purposes of enabling politicians and others to gloss over
tension and deflect attention from political issues involving race relations and racism by ‘ethnicizing’ them, i.e.
by redefining, re-delineating, and thus often splitting up or dissolving the targeted racial group as a multitude of
‘ethnicities’ with numerous overlaps. Since there are no races, in this new pseudo-logic, there is no racism,
although the state and powerful groups in civil society simultaneously continue racist attitudes, behavior and
 27

The members of a racial group, or better, of an actually or potentially ‘racialized’

group, thus normally share at least one characteristic – biological or cultural, material or
mental, real or imagined – which other people, who compete against them, do not share with
them.6 The fact that human ‘races’ are now seen scientifically as imagined entities that do not
correspond to the complex reality of human biological and cultural diversity does not make
racism any less important than it was when racial division of the human species was generally
seen as a scientifically proven fact, i.e. until around sixty years ago. As we will see below in a
great variety of examples, the many indicative statements that are part of an oppressive
ideology pay scant regard to reality. In the course of this investigation, we will encounter
racism frequently, both in its culturalistic and biologistic forms.
This study focuses on three apartheid societies in the current and popular sense of
oppression, exploitation, and racist violence. It does not define or understand apartheid in the
way that the NP did. Instead, this investigation analyzes the phenomenon of apartheid as a
form of systematic oppression and war. In my opinion, it is wise to follow the current global
and jurisprudential usage of the term ‘apartheid’, rather than its suspect elitist and white
supremacist beginnings within the ideology of the NP. My investigation also offers a partly
new conceptual framework for a social scientific study of the racist, grave human rights
violations against a society’s indigenous majority by a de facto invading minority plus
descendants and immigrants deemed part of that minority, based upon nine structures, which
together constitute my proposed definition of apartheid – its own specific forms of violence,
repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education, language, and thought.
I will argue here that apartheid systems in Graeco-Roman Egypt and in modern Israel
have more in common with apartheid in South Africa than do any other societies’ systematic
and gross human rights violations that have been compared to it. Many of those comparisons,
done by others and in some cases continued by myself, twenty-one in numbers, will be dealt
with in some detail. They include, most importantly, the treatment of indigenous peoples in
the crusaders’ Kingdom of Jerusalem, Guatemala, Bolivia, Liberia, and Rhodesia, but also the
USA (both against Blacks and Native Americans), Nazi Germany (against Jews, Roma, and
others), Australia, New Zealand, Ireland from the Middle Ages until 1921 and Northern
Ireland since then, Hong Kong, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan under Taliban rule, Tibet under
Chinese rule, South Vietnam under US military occupation, Kosovo and Bosnia under Serb
rule, the whole world under white domination and white rule, and others still. As we shall see,

policies. The ethnicized discourse, at least in the form of Latin American mestizaje, encompassing both
indigenous and mixed-race Latin Americans (like the ‘Coloureds’ of South Africa), has of course ‘…abysmally
failed to ameliorate enduring racial hierarchies, indigenous political marginalization and poverty, and indigenous
resentment’ (Tilley 2005: 65). I am very grateful for Tilley’s insight and also for my wife, Kim Cooper, arguing
similarly. Biological race, at least in the way we encounter it in daily life, is largely the result of artificial
selection and elimination of animals. The artificial selection and elimination of groups of people has obviously
not (yet) led to racial differences between modern humans of the same anatomical and physiological magnitudes
as those between breeds of dogs. But the danger remains and will remain. That is another reason why I
introduced a partly new terminology in the sixth edition of this investigation. See also footnotes 13 and 98
below.
6
Steve Fenton makes a sociological distinction between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, the latter being the preferable
analytic term, with ‘real’ or ‘material’ as well as ‘symbolic’ aspects. Fenton nonetheless holds ‘race’ and
‘racism’ to be indispensable terms for sociology, but in his case only because of their symbolic importance. See
Fenton: Ethnicity: Racism, Class and Culture, 1999: 2ff. In my partly contrasting approach, ‘race’ is indeed only
symbolic and not material, i.e. when applied to any existing human groups and individuals, but racism is more
than that. Symbols do not kill, but racism does. See Spickard: Race, Nation, Identity and Power: Thinking
Comparatively about Ethnic Systems, in Spickard (ed.) 2005: 12 on the verb, ‘racializing’, as capturing the issue
at hand, an active and dynamic phenomenon, better than the noun, ‘race’. See also Hall, S.: The Work of
Representation, 1997. The question of who racializes whom in this account becomes crucial and its answer a
function of power along with disregard or lack of solidarity. Powerful racists generally racialize themselves, their
kin, friends and collaborators, as well as the Others. To distinguish between race and ethnicity, on the other hand,
according to Spickard, is to ‘…give in to pseudoscientific racists by adopting their terminology’ (ibid.). I now
(see previous footnote) believe Spickard is right.
28

‘apartheid’ can be a more or less justified label for many of the conditions and practices under
certain circumstances and for certain time periods in each of the latter histories, as well as for
many other, similar time periods in other societies, but I also hope to show that it is even
better, and even more properly, applied to each of the three central subjects of this
investigation. Graeco-Roman Egypt, in particular, manifests the longest life span of all
apartheid societies of which I am aware. Israel seems eager to continue along the lines of that
relative ‘success’ of apartheid and perhaps even to outdo it by the end of this millennium. But
I will argue that this is an increasingly remote possibility. It is in my view much more likely
that, when once but a memory, apartheid Israel will not even have been an apartheid society
that lasted as long as white-ruled South Africa.
The wider concept of racist, systematic and gross human rights violations, in my
understanding, consists of colonialism, apartheid and genocide on the one hand, and of
discrimination against minorities in ‘self-rule’ situations – whether undemocratic or not – on
the other. An example of the latter, among countless others, would be the widespread, deeply
entrenched, and systematic discrimination against people of Asian, African, and Afro-
Caribbean descent in present-day Britain, another would be that against people of North and
West African or Afro-Caribbean descent currently in France.7
This kind of human rights violations could also be seen as one starting point of many
for a continuous spectrum of other, i.e. of non-racist forms of ‘domestic’ oppression and
repression – within a society, a family, or an individual – as explained or studied by, for
example, Marxism, gender theory, and psychoanalysis. When a racist society is a class society
to the same extent as it is racist, as in all the Western Hemisphere slave societies where almost
all the slaves were black, or in King Leopold’s Congo 1885-1908, another genocidal slave
society, then the many classist aspects will complicate the colonialist-apartheid-genocide
spectrum, with rapidly varying combinations. But the defining characteristics will hold.
Obviously, an oppressive society can also be global, and the use of the term ‘domestic’
may be justified for such a situation as well. In this era of globalization, there are in fact
‘domestic’ laws, rules, policies and practices, especially corporate ones, being developed and
more or less implemented for the whole world, in any case regardless of borders between
nation states. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World
Bank, three of the leading institutions of an already de facto world state, are to a considerable
extent instruments of the USA and the other western state powers, but they are also
instruments of big, and on the margins even of small businesses, legal and illegal. They are all
part of a system designed to keep the already wealthy and powerful organizations and nations,
especially (in) the USA and its closest allies, wealthy and powerful, in relative as well as
absolute terms. The majority of the world’s population, however, is kept virtually powerless
and struggling most of the time to make ends meet. Their basic human rights to life, security,
private spheres, education, leisure time, freedom of religion, speech, media, association, etc.,
are violated continuously, and increasingly, in a global context.8 What I tentatively call
‘domestic’ human rights violations can therefore also exist on transnational levels.
The four racist systems in my model, colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and domestic
racism, on the other hand, all have something to do with the construction of ‘foreigners’, but
unlike in domestic racism when the newcomers or simultaneous migrants are turned into
foreigners, I will deal here mainly with racism against indigenous people, people foreign in
their own home country. Especially genocide and apartheid do this to indigenous people. Not
all genocides are in focus here, but mainly the genocides of indigenous people. This does not
mean, for example, that I will ignore the Nazi and related genocides against Jews. On the
7
Fenton 1999: 203-211; Pilkington: Racial Disadvantage and Ethnic Diversity in Britain, 2002; freundinnen und
freunde der klassenlosen gesellschaft (eds.): Rauchzeichen aus den Banlieues: Reflexionen zur Revolte in den
französischen Vorstädten, 22006
8
Ellwood: The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, 2001: 27-37; Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism, 2008 (2007): 163, 273
 29

contrary, millions of Jews were indigenous in the countries where they were interned and
murdered, hundreds of thousands in Germany alone.
In the reality of social life, however, racist oppression is hardly ever separable from
domestic oppression. People are sometimes, perhaps even often, oppressed because of their
race, their economic class and their sex at the same time. Most of the time, racist human rights
violations could involve at least one of these two other main categories. In my opinion, poor
Palestinian girls and women and poor black South African girls and women are among the
most violated large groups of people in the world with regard to human rights during this last
half-century.
The decisive differences within the loose conceptual framework proposed here for the
study of apartheid, is whether a majority or a minority of people is oppressive – only a society
where a racial minority is oppressive will be referred to as ‘apartheid’ – and secondly, the
recent geographic origins of the populations under study. Only a society where the oppressive
racial minority has invaded the country in some manner and subjugated the indigenous people
will be referred to as ‘apartheid’. Obviously, both of these criteria are imprecise, and they will
have to be sharpened.
One example of a disputed majority/minority question is the state of Israel, where the
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (or ‘Israeli Arabs’, as Israel and its allies like to call them)
now make up a mere 20 percent of the seven or so million people. Yet, there are over eight
million other Palestinians, some under Israeli military occupation and/or under Israeli military
siege outside the state of Israel, i.e. in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and most of them
refugees due to the establishment and the expansion of the state of Israel. Thus the
Palestinians are in fact the majority, that is, in comparison with the Israeli Jews. There are
almost twice as many Palestinians as there are Israeli Jews, and international law (still)
recognizes all of these people as Palestinians. Because of its own ‘Law of Return’, however,
Israel has a potential majority of Jews, which it is trying frantically to mobilize through
immigration, re-definitions of Jewishness, and naturalization. I shall argue that the ‘Law of
Return’ is a racist law, an apartheid law, as long as it remains exclusively for the benefit of
Jews. And so it does. Palestinians chased out of Palestine, including what is today the state of
Israel, have through a United Nations resolution been given the right to return, and the right to
compensation for their losses by the state of Israel, which, however, refuses to act upon it.
Israeli law thus contradicts international law and promotes ethnic cleansing, in particular
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in favor of Jews.
Theoretically speaking, Israel could slip from apartheid into domestic oppression
and/or genocide, from minority to majority rule soon, because it is presently engaged in
something tantamount to ethnic cleansing as well as energetic efforts to encourage and entice,
and as we saw to some extent even to force Jews and other non-Arabs, or at least non-
Palestinian Arabs (the two latter groups as an alternative racial underclass to replace the
troublesome natives), to immigrate to Israel and, especially, to the illegal settlements in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, and to become Israeli citizens there, whilst Israeli
authorities, paramilitary and civilian groups collectively, indiscriminately, illegally, and
brutally pressure Palestinians, indigenous inhabitants of the land, to leave. Many Jews abroad
(and many non-Jews too) are supporting this practice, for instance with massive financial or
military aid, but the Palestinian resistance is also formidable and it is also receiving aid,
though only very little compared to what the Israeli Zionists are receiving.
But it is not only support and money that counts, and particularly with regard to the
majority/minority question they do not count at all. The Palestinians clearly still warrant being
labeled the ‘majority’ in terms of the conflict between them and the Israeli Jews. Since the
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Israeli Jews have in fact never been a majority in
relation to the Palestinians. The Jewish state owes its Jewishness to the fact that nearly nine-
tenths of all Palestinians are not allowed to vote in their home country, to elect the
government that determines their fate more than any other government does. The ‘Law of
30

Return’ is illegitimate from the perspective of international law and from the perspective of
secular morality as well as within any religious ethic other than the Jewish one, and the latter
only if it is interpreted in a Zionist, i.e. an ethnocentric or racist manner.
The state of Israel’s ‘Law of Return’, therefore, is part and parcel of a crime against
humanity. Likewise, the discriminatory use of the institution of citizenship coupled with
military occupation and its denial of citizenship and citizens’ rights (and even basic human
rights) to the vast majority of indigenous Palestinians by the Jewish state are from this
perspective also part of a crime against humanity, but additionally they amount to some very
convenient window-dressing, intended to create false impressions, especially the one that
Jews are already a majority and Palestinians a minority, and that Israel is a democratic state,
while attempting by means of ethnic cleansing and racist repopulation to turn these lies into
reality on the ground. Once the indigenous population has been transformed into a ‘safe’
minority, like Native Americans in the USA or Canada, or the Aborigines in Australia,
democracy shall truly flourish in Israel, as it allegedly does in Europe, North America, or
Australia. From this perspective, Israel is just going through some hard times. At any time
since 1967, however, democracy that really counts could have been introduced for the
Palestinians presently under military occupation, but apparently the Israeli elites and their
powerful allies do not wish to make this reality, at least not until at least a couple of million
more of them have left, been expelled or killed, and then replaced by Jews and/or other non-
Palestinians from abroad, if the current decision-makers, above all the Israeli and US elites,
get their way. Then, the Palestinians could never win nor possibly even swing an Israeli
election.
As an alternative to continued ethnic cleansing, a more South African-like ‘Bantustan’
solution is being pursued by ‘moderate Israelis’ (actually just another faction of Zionists), and
by the American elites in particular. This, as we will see, became particularly clear in the 1993
Oslo Agreement, as well as later, in the 2000 Camp David negotiations and in the
implementation of the ‘Roadmap’ for ‘Peace’ after 2003. Since the vast majority of
Palestinians under Israeli occupation refuses to leave the Occupied Territories, despite
systematic state as well as civilian terrorism against them, a non-viable Palestinian ‘state’,
uncannily similar to the nominally independent ‘Homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’ of South African
Blacks, is to be set up at the end of this process. The natives are to be isolated, surrounded
three-dimensionally, contained, and self-policed, on separated fragments of land, or in
prisons, that will be almost hermetically sealed: a non-solution to the armed conflict, and a
recipe for further disaster, in my opinion. I will attempt to explicate the reasons why in
Chapter II.3.3 and Section III.6.
A problem remains, however, with the label, ‘indigenous’, in Palestine as well as in
Graeco-Roman Egypt. There were Greeks in Egypt before Alexander’s conquest and Jews in
Palestine before militant Zionism. In South Africa, on the other hand, there were no Whites
living in the country when the white invasion of 1652 took place.
In Egypt as well as Palestine, however, I am referring to very small groups of people.
There were 24,000 Jews in all of Palestine in 1881, and most likely even less Greeks in Egypt
before 332 BCE. Here, nevertheless, indigenousness becomes relativized, and these people
and their in situ descendants should be considered as more indigenous than the invaders.
Nonetheless, they were mostly showered with unfair privileges once the invasion was
complete, and thus they were also turned against people equally indigenous or more
indigenous than them. The difference with South Africa is also not as great as it may seem.
All human beings originate in Africa, and thus the Whites have been coming home to the
south of the mother continent since 1652. In this sense, they are as indigenous to South Africa
as a Siberian reindeer-herder is, i.e. not very much, yet still not totally or absolutely un-
African. Indigenousness should therefore be seen as a relative rather than an absolute
attribute. But that is by no means a reason to dismiss it as a political category entirely.
Egyptians in general were more indigenous to Egypt than the Greeks and Romans were,
 31

Blacks to South Africa than Whites, and Palestinians to Palestine than European Jews.
The question of Jewish origins is of course also a hotly debated one. In any case, it is
clear that many, perhaps most, people classified as ‘Jews’ in Israel and elsewhere have no
ancestors who ever lived in Historic Palestine. I will save detailed discussion of this thorny
issue until Chapters II.7.3 and II.9.3. With my definitions of majority and minority, as well as
of recent geographic origins, I will eventually claim that Israel qualifies as an apartheid
society in the wide sense, i.e. in the same broad way that South Africa under white rule did
until 1994 and that Egypt did under Greek and Roman rule. As can be gleaned already from
these two examples of concepts central to my definitions, racism shares a great deal of
structural features and numerous overlaps with domestic oppression as a whole, and I will
make no attempt to separate those concepts in a philosophically satisfactory fashion. If I were
able to do that, I would already be applying that elusive scientific theory of human rights and
human rights violations that could judge the relative importance of each kind of oppressive
system, and, hopefully, also provide scientific clues on how to eliminate or minimize human
rights violations.
Though perhaps not very helpful in this regard, it is my position that enhancement of
power and wealth are the main motivating factors behind apartheid and that concentrations of
power and wealth are (at least short-term) consequences of it. Power and wealth, moreover,
are interdependent. You cannot really have one without the other. A third important
motivating factor is racial hatred. It is common in apartheid, perhaps even necessary, and
perhaps even as important as power or wealth, but I am, unfortunately, unable to determine
this conclusively. For example, even when South African Blacks were commonly resigned to
white rule (or at least to non-violent resistance against that rule), especially during the first six
decades of the 20th century, the Afrikaners, in particular, would still keep alive and rekindle
their (inaccurate, exaggerated and mostly invented) myths of savage bloodbaths of civilized
and peaceful white settlers perpetrated by the Zulus and other black warriors during the 19th
century.9 For the Afrikaner elites it was of paramount importance to keep up and maintain the
racial hatred of Whites against Blacks. In the final analysis, power, wealth, and hatred
(wishing to annihilate the enemy) as goals may also be considered the main motivational
foundations or functions of the three main apartheid elites, the chief politicians, the big
business people, and the armed forces, respectively. Unfortunately, the lack of a grand theory
of human rights and human rights violations prevents me from following up systematically on
that possible clue, i.e. on that triple correspondence, in this investigation. There are of course
additional elites, including cultural, religious, and academic elites, but they are almost
constantly overshadowed by the big three in militarized and politicized societies such as
apartheid societies.
This first part of my inquiry into apartheid does, however, look into aspects of the
framework and some of the theoretical conditions for such a grand theory, although its future
existence is far from guaranteed. In reference to Chela Sandoval, another great social thinker
and activist for the downtrodden, Angela Y. Davis, regards the critique of ‘race, class and sex’
as one beginning of emancipation.10 A theory of ‘social dominance’ somewhat differently
emphasizes hierarchies of gender, age and ‘arbitrary sets’. Ethnicity, race, class, tribe, and
9
Keegan: Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order, 1996: 12, 192ff. Stark examples of this
myth are the bas-reliefs in the gigantic, conceptually and architecturally Nazi-styled ‘Voortrekker Monument’,
erected with the aid of German architects in the 1930s outside Pretoria. During the (in South Africa) relatively
peaceful ‘30s, the reliefs were apparently conceived and created to strongly reinforce (mainly white) people with
the outrageous, but at that time mainstream, prejudice of the utter lack of trustworthiness of black people and of
their dangerous, violent streaks. Ross: A Concise History of South Africa, 1999: 42. Of course there were also
exceptions to the black ‘resignation’ towards white rule. During the 1920s, for example, massacres with even
more victims than in Sharpeville 1960 (see Chapter II.1.2) took place, due to white greed and brutality and black
resistance. See Mandela 2002 (1965): 135.
10
Davis, A.: Foreword, in Sandoval: Methodology of the Oppressed, 2000: xi. See also Davis, A.: Women, Race
and Class, 1983; hooks: Intersections: Race, Sex and Class, 1997
32

nation belong to the ‘arbitrary sets’ and are, according to this theory, developed only in human
populations that have achieved a sustained production of economic surplus.11
The multidisciplinary scholar and profound critic of eurocentric historiography, Martin
Bernal, went a step further and emphasized urgency in this matter. He called ‘European
racism…by far the greatest social problem in the world today’.12 I agree with Bernal, provided
that ‘racism’ not only refer to violence, oppression, and discrimination according to (real or
imagined) biological differences but also according to (real or imagined) cultural, i.e.
acquired and/or specifically human differences, for instance, to language or religion.
I am aware that it sounds strange today if one speaks of an Arab race and a Jewish
race, or a Serb race and a Croatian race, instead of the respective ethnicities. Yet, a mere few
decades ago Zionist intellectuals “…commonly used the term to speak of Jews and Jewish
interests in Palestine. The Memorandum of Association of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in
Article 2(c) cites one objective of the JNF as being to ‘benefit, directly or indirectly, those of
Jewish race or descendancy’.” Moreover, the trick of exchanging ‘race’ for ‘ethnicity’ or
‘nationality’, ‘nation’ or even ‘nation-state’ has since long been used by states that seek to
defuse racial tension without addressing the needs of the victimized races, often indigenous
peoples suffering under the domination and control of conquering elites of European or
mixed-European origin and a more or less racist state. Lastly, ‘race’ is already part of
international law, especially early post-World War II resolutions, declarations, conventions,
and treaties, which are fundamental to international law and very frequently employ the term.
States that practice racism much or frequently or continuously, such as apartheid South Africa
or Israel, obviously have a strong interest in derailing the legal efforts against them, by
refraining from using ‘race’ and therefore instead sanitize and defuse their own legal and
diplomatic language with euphemistic uses of ‘ethnicity’, ‘nationality’, or even ‘those to
whom the Law of Return does not apply’. I hesitated a long time before deciding to use a
biological term (‘race’) in contexts where it is not applicable, but, thanks especially to the
writings of political scientist Virginia Tilley and her colleagues, I have come to the conclusion
that it would now be less difficult, less costly, and less dangerous if biologists stopped using
the term than if international law stopped using it.13

11
Sidanius & Pratto: Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression, 1999. Yet
another approach to the main kinds of oppression in humans emphasizes anthropocentrism and speciesism.
Analogous to ethnocentrism and racism in some regards, the former two are also both arrogant and devaluing
stances, not against other humans, but against non-human animals. Anthropocentrism is characterized by
ignorance of other animals’ needs and desires. Speciesism is stronger. It includes hate and contempt towards
other forms of life. For contributions to the debate on these issues, see Regan: The Case for Animal Rights,
1985: 13-26; Warren: Difficulties with the Strong Animal Rights Position, 1987: 163-173; Callicott & Overholt:
Traditional American Indian Attitudes toward Nature, 1993: 57-78; Guha: Radical American Environmentalism
and Wilderness Preservation, 1989: 71-83; Löwstedt: Kultur oder Evolution? Eine Anthropologische
Philosophie, 1995: 21-23, 52-56.
12
Bernal & Moore (ed.): Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics, 2001: 75, 218. On
Bernal’s predecessors on this issue, see footnote 127 below. Bernal, who dealt mainly with racism of Whites
against Africans and descendants of Africans, was keenly aware of the arbitrariness inherent to the application of
the concept of race to human beings (ibid: 92; see also footnote 98 below), which in the end makes his concept
of racism roughly equal to mine. See, further, Kossek: Preface, Counter-Racisms, 1997.
13
See Tilley (ed.) 2009: 153-157, (quote: 157) and footnote 5 above. With regard to the perseverance of racial
thinking in human biology: A research paper on the genetic near-identity of Palestinians and Middle Eastern
Jews that was published in the esteemed academic research journal, Human Immunology, was ‘withdrawn’ after
publication in 2001, an unheard-of contradiction in terms in research publishing. Subscribers to the journal were
actually instructed by the editor to rip out the pages containing the article, ‘The Origin of Palestinians and their
Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations’, whose lead author is the previously well-respected
Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, professor at Complutensa University in Madrid. The journal’s editor, Nicole Susio-Foca
of Columbia University in New York, said she was forced to ‘repudiate’ the article after an avalanche of
complaints about its ‘extreme political writing’. The article was taken away from Human Immunology’s website,
and subsequent letters from the editorial department to libraries, universities and other subscribers around the
world asked them to ignore or ‘preferably to physically remove the relevant pages’. Moreover, Arnaiz-Villena
 33

I have therefore chosen to also employ ‘racism’ as my label for the greatest social
problem today, and I will also use ‘racism’ rather than ‘ethnocentrism’ because ‘racism’, as
Bernal and others have pointed out, presuppose power, whereas ‘ethnocentrism’ does not.
Under ‘European’, in the quote from Bernal, one should of course not only refer to people in
the northwest extremity of the Eurasian continent (and not to all of us, either) but also
understand the now traditional – overwhelmingly white and male – political, economic and
military elites of North and South America, Southern Africa, Oceania and elsewhere.
A generalized and consistent theory of human rights and human rights violations, I
believe, is now needed more than ever. Among other things, it should be able to solve the
following apparent paradox: On the one hand, both class- and gender-based oppression, both
classism and sexism, would fit in under the broad definition of racism, proposed above. They
both invoke real and imagined, cultural and biological differences between unevenly
powerful, competing groups of people. On the other hand, to take just one example of racism,
an apartheid society is a class society par excellence, with very strong patriarchal and
repressive aspects. Racism and ‘domestic’ oppression are thus parts of each other, which is of
course impossible from the powerful perspective of analytical logic.
My investigation will not resolve this paradox. I merely wish to draw attention to it
and to some of the other problems inherent in attempts to develop a general theory of human
rights or oppression. The theory of ‘arbitrary sets’, cited above, does not seem able to solve
the paradox either. In my view, it makes an unwarranted categorical distinction between
biological and cultural dominance by distinguishing gender and age on the one hand from
arbitrary sets, on the other, and thus to some extent it overlooks the numerous and indeed
essentially arbitrary elements of gender and ageism. The distinction therefore invites
confusions of sex with gender, and of age with ageism.
Perhaps human rights as a whole must be thought over and thought differently. Maybe
the current understandings of ‘race’, ‘economic class’ and ‘gender’ do not employ precise
enough concepts for a general and improved theory of human rights or of human rights
violations. It is also possible that ‘war and oppression’ or ‘human rights violations’ are not the
concepts that are ideally used for the territory of a general theory of racism, sexism, classism,
etc. Unfortunately, I will not be able to pursue these basic theoretical issues further in this
investigation.
An important, additional kind of problem for any general theory of war and oppression
is that oppression and wars continue to exist today. Their perpetrators have learned to
skillfully wipe their tracks and derail or distract investigators as well as opponents. One
example of this activity, which we will look at in some detail, is the Israeli society’s effort to
make its legal system as different as possible from the South African apartheid laws,
apparently only for cosmetic reasons of public relations, because the reality on the ground is

was fired from the board of the journal. In fact, the bulk of the article confirmed and corroborated earlier
research findings that there is nothing special about genes of Jews. In doing so, however, the article also
explicitly challenged the powerful claims that Jews are a unique, chosen people and that Judaism is a religion
which can only be inherited, but not adopted. See McKie: Journal Axes Gene Research on Jews and Palestinians,
2001; Kovel 2007: 29. On the various origins of European Jews, see footnotes 738-748 below. On the almost
entirely racialized human genetics in Israel, an ideological and scientifically unfruitful form of human genetics
that has unfortunately spread over the world through US and other (publishing and sponsoring) channels to
propagate the Zionist notion of Jewish genetic uniqueness on extremely shaky or entirely invented grounds, see
Sand: The Invention of the Jewish People 2009 (2008): 272-280. Throughout this book, I deliberately avoid
usage of the ideologically loaded and imprecisely used terms, ‘anti-semitic’, ‘Anti-Semite’ and ‘anti-semitism’.
This decision does not mean that I will not mention this racism, nor that I condone or wish to belittle or deny this
racism in any way. I will employ more precise and less confusing expressions, such as ‘anti-Jewish’ or ‘racist
and anti-Jewish’ or ‘Judeophobia’, instead of ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘anti-semitism’, etc. On the selective, one-sided,
pars pro toto, biased, ideological, and pro-Israeli use of the latter terms in general parlance, which would, among
other things, conveniently make anti-Arab racism a contradiction in terms, see Herman.: Anti-Semitism, 2002.
See also N.N.: “Wer Kritik an Israel verbietet, zwingt mich, in einem Apartheidstaat zu leben”: Michel
Warschawski spricht in Wien, 2003; Plitnick: Reclaiming Anti-Semitism, 2003 and Chapter II.9.3 below.
34

obviously very similar, but Israel does not wish to be accused of apartheid, due to the
illegality of apartheid and the notoriety of South African apartheid as well as to its eventual
and dramatic failure.14 A further motivation might well be that investigations into Israeli
apartheid could successfully be derailed by getting caught up and entangled in relatively
superficial differences such as those of legal texts and even legal structures. As we shall see in
Chapters II.2.3 and II.4.3 respectively, the Israeli elites have successfully banned interfaith –
i.e. interracial – marriage, and they have minimized Palestinian land ownership in relative and
absolute terms even more successfully than the South African apartheid elites were ever
capable of minimizing black land ownership. And the Israelis did this without formally
involving the legal machinery of the state, unlike the South African elites.
The problem whether these Israeli kinds of discrimination should be called ‘apartheid’
issues or not, however, is one that I hope to solve with a definite, affirmative answer in the
course of this investigation. Although a strong state, which discriminates against the
indigenous majority, is a necessary precondition for apartheid, it is not always a sufficient
one. Neither apartheid nor racism in a wide sense needs the state or the law to support it with
regard to every aspect of the human rights violations that define apartheid. Another example
of this basic characteristic is that coercion and physical violence in all apartheid societies are
often practiced, not only by state employees, but also by vigilante and paramilitary individuals
and groups, in particular by armed frontier settlers.15
A further difference between South Africa and Israel is that South Africa was
conquered by the barrel of the gun, whereas a large portion of what today is Israel was given
in 1948 to the Jews by the United Nations and the British, who had ruled it as a colony up to
that point, though more than half of what is today Israeli-controlled territory was later
conquered with military force. The UN-granted independence of a Jewish state, one of the few
elements of international law to which Israel adheres, however, is also in my view a
superficial difference from the total illegitimacy of white supremacist rule in South Africa,
mainly because Palestinians and Arabs had no voice at all in the UN at the time of the birth of
the modern state of Israel, nor were they ever asked. They were invaded and subsequently
entirely ignored. Moreover, Israel has not yet fulfilled all the preconditions set by the UN for
being allowed independence. In particular, it has not yet created a democratic Constitution.
Instead, it has racist laws that heap privileges on Jews and discriminate against non-Jews. And
it has ignored and violated so many additional prescriptions of international law so blatantly
and for so long that it amounts to a small wonder that the UN has not expelled or suspended
Israel from membership. (Only the backing by the USA, the EU and EU member states, and to
some extent the Soviet Union, has enabled Israel to continue these affronts against the
international community and against humanity for so long.) The establishment of Israel
therefore amounts to a de facto invasion by foreigners. One group of foreigners handed over
the land and the political power to another, without even asking the indigenous people, who
are also the majority, what they thought and felt about this. Egypt under Greek rule represents

14
Bowen: Hafrada Is the Zionist Form of Apartheid, 2006; Peteet: Beyond Compare, 2009. Despite our differing
terminologies, Bowen’s and Peteet’s conception is very similar to mine. They prefer using a Hebrew term
(‘hafrada’=separation), for the Israeli system of ‘grand apartheid’, i.e. the confiscation of Palestinian land, and
the discrimination against those Palestinians who will not leave. (I prefer keeping the Afrikaans word in order to
emphasize the similarities as well as the internationally illegal character of the Israeli racist enterprise. But,
separately, I also wish to point out marginal differences between the Israeli and South African forms of ‘grand
apartheid’, e.g. the slightly different roles of the states. So, obviously, at least to some extent, the choice of label
is a mere matter of taste.) Like me, Bowen also situates the South African and Israeli versions of systematic and
gross human rights violations against the indigenous peoples between genocide and exploitative colonialism. See
Catron: Apartheid is a Crime, Not an Analogy, 2012, on Zionist attempts to confuse the issue at hand and to bog
it down with inessentialities.
15
Cf. Fredrickson: Racism: A Short History, 2002: 4: ‘…racism does not require the full and explicit support of
the state and the law.’ This is a very simple but, in my opinion, crucial insight, especially necessary for the
understanding of apartheid, but also for genocide and for domestic kinds of racism.
 35

a scenario much more similar to modern Israel than to South Africa in this regard. The
country was taken over by the Macedonians and Greeks, also from earlier, colonialist
occupiers, in their case from the Persians.
In summary, these three apartheid societies share being so-called ‘civilized societies’.
They all had strong, centralized states with bureaucracies and taxation. They all built cities.
They all knew and used the inventions of phonographic writing, metallurgy, the wheel, the
sail, money, scientific research, and more. These are all inventions, which only go back 5,000-
6,000 years. I believe human societies began with the appearance of our genus, homo, some
2.6 million years ago, but I am not aware of any earlier apartheid societies (than 332 BCE
(Before the Christian Era)), or of any that do not share these basic characteristics. This sets
apartheid societies apart from the vast majority of human societies. Then, they are also
different from the vast majority of civilized societies. They are countries, to some extent even
‘civilizations’ in their own right (though the root meaning of ‘civil’ may be overstretched by
such strong states as apartheid states), where the land was conquered by force or mainly by
force by an invading group of people who shared much with each other but little with the
indigenous, conquered, and oppressed group of people, who remained the majority. My
definition of apartheid is at the same time an analysis of these kinds of human rights
violations. The second part of this book is the evidence that provides an empirical
underpinning for the use of the concept of apartheid for Graeco-Roman Egypt, for South
Africa under white rule, and for modern Israel and Palestine under Israeli control.
In the course of this first part I will point to the desirability of a powerful general
theory of human rights violations (war and oppression), especially of one that takes the – in
my opinion so far underestimated – role of racism into account.16 That underestimation is not
necessarily one that covers all aspects. In concrete individual cases, the awareness of racism
may sometimes be much greater than that of classism or sexism. Yet in the theoretical realm,
racism is not yet the object of such powerful theoretical systems of explanation as Marxism or
feminism. As a result of that, ‘racism’ is sometimes misunderstood as only genocidal racism,
as the pathologically hateful beliefs of Nazis, neo-Nazis and their likes. Despite ambitious,
and to some extent admirable and brave attempts to uncover some of the apparently
murderous foundations of ‘western’ civilization, domination, and power in this way, they may
end up inadvertently and unfairly marginalizing forms of racism that are not immediately
lethal, and considering anything apart from murderous racist hate to be explainable as natural
territoriality, class struggle, or the battle of the sexes, or as something else that is not
essentially racist. In my opinion, a neo-Nazi who still has not made his first kill is nowhere

16
An opposite and pessimistic outlook can be found in US philosopher Richard Rorty’s post-modernist essay,
‘The End of Leninism, Havel and Social Hope’, 1998: 239: ‘We shall have to get over the hope for a successor to
Marxist theory, a general theory of oppression which will provide a fulcrum that lets us topple racial, economic,
and gender injustice simultaneously.’ It is unclear what Rorty means exactly by ‘simultaneously’, but I see it as
being a rather inclusive term in his context, which would justify my calling his idea ‘pessimistic’. Marxism, of
course, never was as general a theory of oppression as many came to believe. (See, for instance, footnote 18
below.) By overemphasizing economic injustice in particular, it effectively – and to some extent probably
unconsciously – marginalized other kinds of injustice. Radical feminist theory seems to do the same in favor of
gender issues. (See Chapman: The Feminist Perspective, 1995: 113.) An improved theory of racism should be
careful not to perpetuate this theoretically self-centred trend. Not only if it understands itself as a successor to
Marxist theory: it must be more differentiating and less reductionist than that. To cite just one example of
reductionism, exaggerating the importance of racism, or rather, overlooking the importance of economic
injustice: in an otherwise excellent treatment of the insidious and in many ways very special kinds of racism
perpetrated against middle-class Blacks in the USA, author Ellis Cose mentions different kinds of discrimination
in that country beside racism, including sexism, ageism, and discrimination of people due to their sexual
orientation. In this context, however, he entirely forgets about economic discrimination and exploitation (of
employees) and state discrimination against non-citizens in particular, but also against citizens, as well as the
many mixed forms of oppression that exist between those forms, often also involving the forms that he does
mention. See Cose: The Rage of a Privileged Class, 1993: 8f; and, in general, Bonnett: Anti-racism, 2000: esp.
162-167.
36

near as bad as, for example, one of South Africa’s apartheid prime ministers, for instance
Hendrik Verwoerd.
Alternatively, racism may be misunderstood behavioristically as something that can
only be harbored in individuals, agencies or laws, but not in epistemologically ‘fuzzier’
phenomena, for instance in society, groups, or informal institutions, such as ‘the mainstream
mass media’.17 Although I sympathize with the strict epistemology of such an approach, I
believe that it often ends up as reductionism, e.g. as behaviorism or positivism, and,
inadvertently or not, as trivializing or denying racism, especially structural racism, where it
exists and makes a difference. Without generalizations, social science will become trivial, yet
with constructs too airy it may also become meaningless or useless. The most important rule
should in my view thus be not to over-generalize.
My wish for a general theory of human rights violations, however, is in no way a
simultaneous sentence to political passivity until such a theory exists. A system of human
rights violations can of course be resisted (and abolished or defeated) without any theoretical
understanding of what it ‘really’ is. This may even have been the case in most of the
successful social and political revolutions in history. It matters infinitely much more to get rid
of evil than to understand it. Raising consciousness about systematic human rights violations
may indeed help, even immensely, and perhaps it is always helpful, but it is not always
necessary.

2. The Theoretical Context: Colonialism, Apartheid, and Genocide

We will return to the question of what human rights are or might be, but for now it
should be pointed out that racism cannot be reduced to a form of domestic oppression, nor is it
fully explainable with existing theories of oppression. For one thing, the role played by a
powerful state, independent of the dominant economic class (or the male gender), is still not
sufficiently incorporated into Marxist (or gender) theory. This is crucial not only for the
understanding of racism, but for political science and for social science as a whole. 18 Yet even
if there were a satisfactory theory of the state, it would still not make existing theories of
oppression sufficient to understand racism. Something else is also needed.
In my view, one useful starting point may be provided by combining population
biology, demographics and sociology. Racism itself usually incorporates an element of what I
call ‘eliminationism’, a kind of Social Darwinist belief in the inevitability of a certain kind of
biological competition between the reified racial groups, i.e. between racially defined groups
of people. This competition is seen as a matter of death or survival with no further alternatives
available, except, perhaps, some rather volatile compromises. Genocide and apartheid even
explicate, (attempt to) carry out and justify programs or policies that are of an unmistakably

17
Magiros: Foucaults Beitrag zur Rassismustheorie, 1995. On racism as an overwhelmingly ‘western’
phenomenon, i.e. as a mainly and originally white, male, western European or North American, Christian
(Protestant and Roman Catholic) phenomenon, see Fredrickson 2002: 10ff. On contemporary racism as a
‘complex, structural phenomenon’, present at all levels in the mainstream mass media, especially in the reporting
of news, throughout the European Union, see Ter Wal: Racism and Cultural Diversity in the Mass Media: An
Overview of Research and Examples of Good Practice in the EU Member States, 1995-2000, 2002. Although
this report focuses on racism and carefully stays away from sweeping statements, it also points out commendable
anti-racist practices and attitudes in the media and does not rule out the possibility that things may actually have
improved in recent years.
18
The lack of a general theory of the state could even be considered the main deficit in Marxist as well as in
feminist political science. Among other things, many Marxists failed to predict or even perceive state oppression
as a problem in Communist or socialist societies. However, major efforts within both the feminist and the
Marxist traditions are now long underway, at least in the discipline of political science, in order to improve the
situation. See Taylor, G,: Marxism, 1995: 248-267; Marsh: The Convergence between Theories of the State,
1995: 268-287.
 37

social Darwinist, i.e. eliminationist, character. Colonialism is somewhat ‘milder’. In my

impressionistic quantification of demographic competition (see Section I.4 below), racist
genocide takes place when a racist majority becomes a totality or a racist minority becomes a
majority, i.e. more than 50 percent of a population. Apartheid manifests a roughly 5 to 50
percent racist dominant minority and colonialism the same kind of minority at less than 5
percent. Colonialism does not necessarily condemn people to death because of their ethnic
identity or racial classification, but it does in general condemn them to miserable lives in
servitude and poverty. In this way, they are also statistically destined to both a shorter life
expectancy and a lower quality of life. Apartheid does the same to those members of the
conquered indigenous population who are not condemned (by the elites) to die immediately.
Colonialism and the ‘peaceful’ aspects of apartheid are therefore actually volatile compromise
solutions to the Darwinian conflict. But if there is any enforced deviation from the
demographic equilibrium in an apartheid society, it is almost certain to be in favor of those in
power, i.e. of the oppressive racial minority. As we shall see, this is so because of the primary
role of violence in apartheid as well as in colonialism, which in both cases is dependent on the
military superiority of the invading racial minority. This superiority is a powerful condition,
but it is also one that cannot last forever.
To say that apartheid is nothing but a combination of genocide and colonialism is to
miss some of its most basic features. I will attempt to show that it is fundamentally different
from colonialism as well as genocide, that there are plenty of qualitative differences, although
there are also numerous instances of overlapping, i.e. of quantitative and gradual differences.
With my understanding of apartheid, it is theoretically, morally, and legally located between
colonialism and genocide. This also means that a colonial society does not develop seamlessly
into a genocidal one. There has to be at least an idea, among the killers, of compatriot civilian
settlers moving in, while the indigenous are being killed off. This might be planned as a
transitory phase and might only last for a very short while, but, nonetheless, societies like the
USA and Australia were at least to some extent apartheid societies after the white invasions
but before the Native Americans or the Aborigines became minorities, i.e. before these
societies became fully-fledged genocidal societies.
I thus depart a little from the internationally accepted definition of genocide, namely,
the destruction of a group of people ‘in whole or in part’. My definition encompasses ‘in
whole or in part, making that group a minority where they were earlier a majority, or making
the perpetrators a totality where they were earlier a mere majority’. It is therefore a slightly
narrower definition of genocide than the one used in international law. The reason for this is
that I believe the majority/minority relationship is crucial in power relationships, in politics
especially in this era of majoritarian democracies, but also due to military considerations,
especially as we look backwards in history. The more primitive the military technology, the
more important the numbers of fighters on the battlefield will be, at least generally, although
there are of course many additional factors that have helped define military success over time,
just as there are also other factors than election victories, or majority backing, that help define
political success in majoritarian democracies.
As will be seen in the following, apartheid has often been misunderstood as a special
case of colonialism.19 In a contrasting approach, I will try to define it as a distinct and no less
important society-wide form of systematic human rights violations than colonialism. The
reasons for misunderstanding apartheid in the way indicated, on the other hand, are easy to
follow.

19
For example, Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth, 2001 (1961): 40. See Chapter I.8 below for a theoretical
critique of the post-colonialist and settler colonial paradigms and models of explanation. Although I am not
happy to go against such a hero of humanist emancipation as Fanon, nobody is perfect, and he is just a little
unspecific and inaccurate in this regard, i.e. by subsuming apartheid under colonialism. To me the two are
separate, yet still closely related, and so the difference between Fanon’s and my approaches are in the end not so
great after all.
38

The end of apartheid in South Africa appears to have been the last link in a chain of
events in Africa after World War II, a development that saw the end of European colonies, of
direct and formal European political rule on the continent. This investigation, however, will
show that the apartheid society in South Africa could have been perpetuated for decades, if
not centuries longer. From 1910 onwards its fate was not necessarily tied to that of the
European colonies in Africa – and neither is that of modern Israel to the fate of European
colonies in the Middle East (though, as we shall see, maybe to US- and European-based neo-
colonialism).
Indigenous nationalism and ideologies of national liberation, demographic dynamics,
the development of international law, and the global discreditation and criminalization of
racism all played important roles in making South African apartheid relatively shortlived, and
the same factors are also likely to make Israeli apartheid shortlived. In fact, modern Israel
only appeared as the ‘west’ was winding down its own old-fashioned blatantly racist and
undemocratic colonialism and its support for apartheid societies in Asia, Africa, and
elsewhere. The repercussions of South Africa’s apartheid system are in any case expected to
last for a long time, probably longer than the colonialist (though not necessarily the neo-
colonialist) legacy in Africa. The demographic factor plays a particularly important role here.
Europeans have settled and ruled supreme in South Africa for longer and in greater absolute
and relative numbers than anywhere else on the continent, except in Egypt during late ancient
times.
Furthermore, South Africa under white rule was at times a colony – of the
Netherlands, the Dutch East India Trading Company and the British Empire – and Egypt was
degraded to a corresponding provincial status under Roman rule. Typical apartheid societies
as I understand them, however, are generally independent and sovereign countries, which the
de facto invading racial minorities consider to be their homes. This applies to Greek-ruled
Egypt as well as to independent South Africa or independent parts of it under white rule, and
to modern Israel since its creation in 1948. Colonies, on the contrary, are of course never
independent and the sense of home (if any) in the colony for the conqueror is tempered by the
important fact that the colonializers are always formally welcome back home to the
motherland after having served it in the colony.
Since modern Israel – alone among my three prime examples of apartheid – was never
a colony of a Jewish-European motherland nor a Jewish colony in any other way, it is not
surprisingly the least colonialist and in more than one way, arguably, the most genocidal of
the three. In any case, its combination of killings and expulsions, i.e. its ethnic cleansing of
the indigenous inhabitants, has created a huge majority of Jews in the state of Israel, although
there are (still) only about half as many Israeli Jews as there are Palestinians, most of the latter
now being refugees, their refugee status determined alone by the establishment and expansion
of the state of Israel.20 South African Whites, as well as Greeks and Romans in Egypt, were

20
Herman: Israel’s Approved Ethnic Cleansing, Part 1, Making “Facts on the Ground”, 2001; Pappe 2006;
Pappe: Palestine 2007: Genocide in Gaza, Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank, 2007, see also Chapters II.1.3 and
2.3 below. Tilley (ed.) 2009: 120 argues that Israel is guilty of colonialism, which is nowadays prohibited under
international law, drawing especially on the principles of ‘the rights of peoples to self-determination and the
prohibition of annexation’. However, while arguments for the presence of systematic colonialism in Israeli
policy and practice take up 32 pages in the report, the arguments for identifying systematic apartheid in Israeli
policy and practice take up 125 pages in the same report. Apartheid is not just prohibited under international law;
it is a crime against humanity under international law. It is therefore obvious from this investigation (as well as
from mine) that ‘apartheid’ explains and represents Israeli overall achievements, intentions, policies and
practices more accurately than ‘colonialism’ does. Tilley et al. do, however, in my opinion, play down genocidal
aspects of both South African and Israeli apartheid. Pre-1948 white supremacist developments in South Africa
are largely left out of the account, and referred to as ‘almost three hundred years of colonial oppression’ (169),
whereas genocidal aspects of Israeli ethnic cleansing measures are in my view downplayed by the report in a
structural way. Genocide, especially large-scale massacres, but also cultural and linguistic genocide, does not get
its own section next to apartheid and colonialism. See further, Chapter II.1.3 below. Nonetheless, the charges of
 39

also always minorities. Very much like the Israelis, the South African Whites and the Greeks
in Egypt also cooked the books to make themselves appear to be majorities, also mainly
through the extremely selective and racist use of the institution of citizenship, which was
denied many or almost all of the indigenous. (See Chapters II.2.3 and II.3.3 below.)
Yet, it is notoriously difficult to compare instances of genocide, or of other crimes
against humanity. Israel has achieved a kind of genocide in relative terms within both Israel
and Historic Palestine, although, so far, it expelled many more people than it killed. The
Palestinian refugees and their descendants number over 4.5 million, the people killed by or
because of Israel include over 265,000 Palestinians and more than 120,000 citizens of
neighboring countries. In addition, at least hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of
Palestinians and other Arabs have been permanently disabled or wounded. (See Chapter
II.1.3, below.) Millions have fled, been forcibly expelled, lost their property and are in many
other ways condemned to poverty, a significantly shorter life expectancy and a much lower
quality of life.
In absolute numbers, however, the Whites in South Africa appear to be the most
murderous so far, probably approaching four million victims over its 350 years of apartheid in
the wide sense, one and a half million of whom were directly or indirectly killed alone during
the last 34 years of white supremacist rule. Nevertheless, there are now nearly four times as
many black South Africans as there are Palestinians. Therefore, absolute numbers are not
good indicators for what constitutes genocide. To ask who has suffered more in general, then,
is also ungrateful to the victims and indeed pointless. Graeco-Roman Egypt, on the other
hand, was unique in achieving the demise of a great civilization, wiping out the language,
religion, scripts and other cultural aspects of ancient Egypt. After this had been achieved, it
took almost 1,500 years before the Egyptian script was deciphered, read and understood again
– ironically, mainly by Europeans. We have no idea, however, how many Egyptians were
killed by the European invaders and their descendants, allies and collaborators, although we
know there must have been many. The uprisings in Alexandria and all over the rest of Egypt
are very similar to those in South Africa under apartheid and in Palestine/Israel today. South
African Whites also indirectly and directly achieved the same kind of ‘cultural cleansing’ as
the one in Egypt upon several indigenous Khoisan groups, coupled with physical genocide
and inadvertently spread diseases, though not upon the larger Bantu-speaking groups. The
cultures of the latter, however, were changed beyond recognition. For hundreds of thousands
of Palestinian refugees, the term ‘cultural cleansing’ also applies. The razing of their homes
and of whole villages by Israeli invaders, who then renamed and restructured the Palestinian
physical and cultural landscape, again beyond recognition, also warrant being considered
crimes against humanity. Those Palestinians who were left behind in Israel were then forced
to become Israeli citizens. They were compelled to learn and use the Hebrew language and to
assimilate with Jewish culture, to the point where they are now themselves adopting Hebrew
names, just in order to get jobs, which are hard to come by for people with Arab names in
Israel today, or even to keep their jobs. At this stage, it obviously becomes impossible, at least
in practice, to determine which apartheid system was the cruelest, the most oppressive, the
most destructive, or even, the more genocidal one.21

physical genocide and Israel’s culpability thereof are well covered in this report. The charge of genocide is so-to-
speak made in practice but not in principle, i.e. it is made in footnotes, but not in chapter headings.
21
Cilliers: On Derrida and Apartheid, 1998: “Slaughter and brutality is not measured on a scale so that one can
talk about ‘bad’ brutality, ‘worse’ brutality and ‘ultimate’ brutality. Nor is racism.” (85) Yet, obviously,
murdering one child is not as bad as murdering ten thousand children, especially if the same motivation applies
in both crimes. Crimes against humanity may not be easily measured, but there are in my opinion no compelling
reasons for them to be declared totally incommensurable, or incommensurable in principle, either. See Dugard:
Israelis Adopt what South Africans Dropped, 2006 and Löwstedt: Comparing Israeli Oppression with South
African Apartheid, 2005. As Fredrickson proposes, part of the problem could perhaps be solved with a
distinction between two incommensurable concepts of racism, one racism of exploitation and one of
extermination. See Fredrickson 2002: 9, and footnote 231 below. Corpses, money, taxes, work-hours,
40

Nevertheless, it is mostly the Palestinians who are restraining Israeli attempts at ethnic
cleansing, and they are the ones keeping Historic Palestine in a state of apartheid rather than
genocide plus expulsion, which are the Zionist ‘solutions’ to the conflict. This does not mean
that Palestinians are collectively upholding systematic oppression in the form of apartheid.
They are merely trying to prevent it from getting worse. If the Palestinian refugees were to
accept citizenship in third countries, and abandon their refugee camps and UN refugee status,
then Zionism, the cynical and brutal program of judaizing and de-arabizing Palestine, will
have won, apartheid will be over, and the de facto genocide of the Palestinian people an
inescapable fact.
Sovereignty, independence, denial of citizenship, and physical violence are not the
whole story when it comes to separating apartheid theoretically from genocide and
colonialism. The economy of an apartheid country also differs greatly from that of a colony.
Whereas a colony is generally dependent on a single or very few export commodities (usually
raw materials), an independent and sovereign apartheid country will exhibit a varied economy
with a high degree of diversification of both production and international trade and with vast
resources set aside for science and technology, especially war technology. An apartheid
economy is usually isolated within its immediate region. The typical apartheid state is
surrounded by countries that host refugees and freedom fighters in exile (and their
descendants) due to its privileged minority’s invasion, and it is often or even constantly at war
with these countries. Moreover, there are commonly cultural, kinship and other strong ties
between the victims of apartheid and the indigenous people in the neighboring countries. All
of this precludes or hinders short-distance international trade between the neighbors and the
apartheid country, which is often further stymied by sanctions and boycotts; the economy
therefore usually has to be self-sufficient, or nearly so, in order for the apartheid state to
survive economically. Nonetheless, international trade is also commonly kept vigorous by the
powerful mother countries of the invading minorities and their many allies, for Egypt during
late antiquity by Greece and Rome, for apartheid South Africa by Britain and western Europe,
and, towards the end of its sway, increasingly by the USA, Israel, and Taiwan, and for Israel
itself by Europe, the USA, and some other strategic allies and trading partners, including
apartheid South Africa until its demise in the 1990s. But the international trade of an apartheid
country is overwhelmingly long-distance trade, and not with neighboring countries.
Finally, the cultures of an apartheid society, both the elite culture and the culture of the
majority, also differ from that of the minority’s country of origin to a much larger extent than
the dominant cultures in a colony do. The descendants of Dutch invaders in South Africa
speak Afrikaans, not Dutch. Most of the Jewish immigrants and invaders of Palestine and
their descendants speak Hebrew as a first language, not any Indo-European language, and not
Yiddish. The Greek oppressors in Egypt spoke restored, ancient Attic Greek, not the more
modern koine Greek of their immediate ancestors and of their newly-conquered subjects,
including the Egyptians. Moreover, any apartheid elite culture is essentially ‘de-secularized’
in comparison with the relatively secularized cultures from which it originated. It seemingly
needs to invoke supernatural explanations and justifications in order to make its specifically
apartheid acts of war and oppression seem understandable and even sensible, both to the
perpetrating class and to that of the surviving victims (whom it will thus try to goad into going

expropriated land, etc., are things that can be quantified rather easily, at least in principle. There are, however,
possible problems with Fredrickson’s distinction, as well. Even in the Nazi death camps, the corpses of
exterminated victims were exploited for gold tooth fillings, hair, and skin, among other things. Cultured land and
animals, as well as houses and other artifacts, not to mention money and other kinds of abstract property, were
stolen and taken over by racist murderers throughout history. Thus, in the vast majority of cases, one might not
be able to make the distinction between exterminative and exploitative racism other than in abstract theory, i.e. it
might be of little or no use to the empirical study of concrete cases, and therefore also of little or no use to the
administration of law and justice, and perhaps even to ethics. (On hundreds of Palestinians adopting Hebrew
names in order to find work or not to lose work in Israel, see Chapter II.8.3 below.)
 41

back to work, once the violence has subsided). The culture of the indigenous majority, on the
other hand, is characterized in a much more direct manner by the struggle. It is constantly
under threat of disappearing under apartheid conditions, which sometimes also happens, not
least because the oppressive minorities often want exactly that. This can be seen clearly, for
instance, in the renaming of the entire geography of the apartheid country in the language and
other symbolisms of the dominant invaders’ culture. My three examples, then, were or are
essentially apartheid societies in all three of these broad aspects, politically, economically and
culturally.
As indicated, there is in my view nevertheless a potentially continuous spectrum from
purely colonial to purely apartheid societies. There are still a few official Arabic place names
inside the state of Israel. Moreover, both types of oppression entail keeping a majority of
members of the conquered indigenous majority alive, as opposed to genocide. But the
spectrum continues from apartheid into partial genocide. Only total genocide is a purely
Darwinian binary situation of death or survival of entire societies, but apartheid is never very
far removed.
Two of my three main examples, South Africa and Egypt, were colonies at times that I
will treat as apartheid eras, dependent on huge, centralized empires with faraway capitals. In
these instances, though, the changes in sovereignty status were, in general terms, superficial
changes, at least from the perspective of the vast majority of the inhabitants. The people of
Greek and Dutch origin remained the majority within the privileged, oppressive European
minority in the province and colony that were created by the Romans and the British,
respectively. Greek and Dutch remained official languages as opposed to the indigenous
majority languages. This underscores the fact that the basic features of the original apartheid
societies remained intact. On the surface, things certainly changed. The European minorities
even fought each other – also involving many members of the indigenous majority in the
fighting – for control over the countries, and then the immensely centralized executive power
moved abroad. Yet for the indigenous majority Africans, a majority of Greek and Dutch
descendants within the oppressive minority, respectively, continued to exploit and oppress
them. The British did introduce a very limited kind of democracy in the Cape and Natal
colonies, tacitly designed to keep Africans powerless, but still giving a few of them the vote –
namely, the ones rich enough to have an interest in perpetuating the system. However, this
privilege for a tiny number of Blacks was later revoked.22 Similarly, after centuries of Roman
rule, the Romans introduced Roman citizenship for almost all non-slave inhabitants of the
Empire. That removed an important institution of privilege for Europeans, i.e. for Greeks and
Romans and possibly also for Gallic and Thracian mercenaries and their descendants, in
Egypt. Yet the economic and social class system that replaced citizenship brought the
Europeans new, crucial privileges. And for the overwhelming majority of Africans in these
two countries, things indeed remained the same throughout the entire period of European
minority domination and rule.
In the beginning, South Africa under Dutch rule was mainly a service station for ships
trading with or plundering Asia and East Africa, with an economy dependent on a hinterland
agricultural slave society. It became increasingly independent of the Netherlands. Most of the
time, it was not even run according to directives from the Dutch government, but to a larger
extent by orders from the Dutch East India Company. The latter had been given the power by
the government to wage wars, make peace, and run military and naval operations as it saw fit,
in Africa as well as in Asia. For all practical purposes it had become a state in itself. Due to its
remote location, moreover, the appointed Dutch elite in the Cape Colony was largely running
its own affairs.
The culture and language of the white settlers in South Africa differed increasingly
from those of the mother country, and they started calling themselves ‘Afrikaners’ and their

22
Iliffe: Africans: The History of a Continent, 1995: 177-179
42

language ‘Afrikaans’ rather than Dutch. In this sense, white-ruled South Africa (initially only
the Cape peninsula) was a colony from 1652 when Whites first settled. It then gradually
developed apartheid features but, of course, it became more of a colony again from 1806 as it
became British. The 19th century Afrikaner republics, Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and
Natalia, and the independent South Africa from 1910 to 1994 were clear-cut (though
relatively short-lived) apartheid societies in my wide sense, lasting only a number of decades
or less. The Dutch and British colonies, on the other hand, were hybrid phenomena,
somewhere in between colonies and apartheid societies. More accurately, they could be
described as essentially apartheid societies with colonial veneers. They had a colonialist
surface structure, but an apartheid deep structure. They did not have independence, but they
had large numbers of invader settlers.23 The same applies to Egypt under Roman rule, where
Greeks were also a majority among Europeans, remaining privileged in ways directly
comparable to the Afrikaners under the British.
The differences between an apartheid society and a colony manifest themselves further
in the apartheid society being generally more violent – much due to paranoid tendencies
within the ruling minority and also because it wants to make room for immigrants of its own
choice in order to boost its own numbers and to further increase its military, political and
economic power, in many cases, moreover, because there are genocidal attitudes and practices
originating from the racialized elites. As we shall see, much apartheid violence is also
‘exported’ to areas outside the apartheid state’s borders, often containing refugees and
liberation fighters. This puts less financial strains on the apartheid state than civil wars
normally do. These are outbursts and cycles of violence in apartheid that are not duplicated in
colonialized societies. Apartheid is therefore more extreme in terms of exploitation,
repopulation policies, land confiscation, forced removals and ideology. The oppressive
minority is larger than it is in colonies, and it cannot expect or even hope for the mother
country or countries to help out in a time of crisis. It would not even be welcome, in large
groups of migrants, in its countries of origin, in case it really faced ‘being driven into the
sea’24 by the indigenous militants and would have to flee or emigrate on a large scale. This
goes for the Greeks in Egypt, for the Dutch (and many other European) descendants in South
Africa, and for the Ashkenazi as well as the Sephardic Jews in modern Israel. In each of the
two latter cases, we are talking about several million people, in Egypt several hundreds of
thousands. They would not be taken in en masse willingly by anyone, whether in Europe or
elsewhere. Moreover, since the oppressive minority is larger, the control and surveillance
established by the apartheid elites, their security forces, and their many settlers, paramilitaries,
and mercenaries or equivalent is far greater than it is in a colony. Therefore, the political,
social, and economic pressures on the oppressed majority in an apartheid society can be (and
are) increased in comparison with colonies.
‘Proper’ apartheid states are themselves aggressively colonialist in both attitude and

23
Lester 1996: 15ff; Fredrickson: White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African
History, 1981: 18
24
For example, in 2001, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s foreign policy adviser, Daniel Ayalon, told
reporters at a press conference that “We are not fans at all of a military solution although...if they hold us at
gunpoint and tell us ‘Give us what we want or else we will keep shooting,’ they will never stop shooting until
they drive us into the sea…” (N.N.: Palestinians Would Exploit Weakness - Israeli Official, August 16, 2001).
Similarly, in an interview with the Russian magazine, New Times, the Israeli ex-prime minister, Binyamin
Netanyahu, talks about a political movement under Yasser Arafat “having the slogans ‘Death to Israel! And Cast
the Jews into the Sea!’”, also without citing any specific sources. Pumpyansky: Binyamin Netanyahu: “The End
of History”? It’s Rubbish, 2002. There is in fact plenty of macabre irony in the claim that the Arabs want to
throw the Jews into the sea, an irony that has not been lost on the Palestinians. In 1948, many Palestinian
civilians were literally pushed into the Mediterranean, where they perished. With land routes cut off by Zionist
forces, tens of thousands of refugees from the Palestinian city of Jaffa and neighboring villages tried to flee by
boat to Lebanon, Gaza and Egypt in choppy waters. Scores of Palestinians were thus drowned. See Pappe 2006:
103; Sohl: Implementing the Right of Return, 2002.
 43

behavior. Greek-ruled Egypt established numerous colonies to the east, north (even in the
Greek motherlands) and west. Dutch and British soldiers, as well as Dutch, Afrikaner and
British farmers from the Cape gradually invaded land to the north and east and often added it
to the growing white political entity gradually, as well. (Aside from that, the Afrikaners also
set up the independent apartheid republics of Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natalia in
order to escape British rule during the 19th century.) Modern South Africa occupied and
colonialized Namibia. And Israel has displayed colonialist streaks in the territories it
conquered in the 1948 war, in southern Lebanon, Syria (the Golan Heights), Egypt (the Sinai
peninsula), and most of all in the currently partly ‘self-governing’, previously, until 1967,
Jordanian and Egyptian territories, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza. Today’s Israel within the
1967 borders is an apartheid society, although most of the oppressed majority has been
expropriated and expelled, whereas the Palestinians who stayed have become a minority.
However, the Palestinian refugees outside Historic Palestine are still Palestinian under
international law, which should be consulted over Israeli law from the perspective of scientific
objectivity and neutrality. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, however, Israeli presence is
both colonialism and apartheid, with some additional genocidal policies and practices. Nearly
25 percent of the population in those territories now consists of illegal Jewish settlers,
currently some 500,000 of them.
The invasions are sporadic, discontinuous and sometimes reversed. Just as Israeli
troops invaded Lebanon in 1982 and (almost) vacated it in 2000 after 18 years of military
occupation and destruction, the British administration of South Africa annexed Transorangia,
the area between the Gariep (formerly ‘Orange’) and Vaal rivers (including Lesotho) in 1848,
but withdrew in 1852-54. They would not return for decades. The Israelis returned shortly to
(the south of) Lebanon in 2006, killed over 1,300 people there, mostly civilians, destroyed the
whole country’s infrastructure through bombings of civilian targets, and threatened to return
soon again. After 28 years of military occupation of the West Bank, the Israeli forces also
withdrew from some towns there, and there, too, they were back again, in most of the so-
called ‘Palestinian Autonomous Areas’, within a decade.
The aftermath of apartheid is also different from that of colonies: liberation and
democratization in particular must (in both a moral and a politically constraining sense)
involve tolerance and integration of the descendants of the invaders and oppressors. After
colonialism, however, the colonializers formally and easily withdraw. As can be observed in
the liberated South Africa thus far, land and business ownership remains to a very large extent
in the old hands of the formerly ruling racial minority, leaving behind a legacy of apartheid
that lingers far beyond its formal and official demise. I prefer calling this ‘epiapartheid’ to
‘neo-apartheid’, on a par with ‘neo-colonialism’, because I see more continuity between
apartheid and its legacy.
Unlike colonialism, apartheid can never be a mere chapter in the history of a society. It
is invariably a traumatic process that changes a society beyond recognition. I am not denying
that colonialization under special circumstances can be equally traumatic, but in most cases,
especially when it was short and relatively undramatic, it became a much more manageable
burden to bear for subsequent generations. Colonialist invasions, in particular, can be more or
less bloody and destructive, and the extension of the temporal length of colonialism also
makes it accumulates destructivity, at the very least in the cultural spheres, as we shall see
with regard to Ireland under British rule. I distinguish ‘colonialization’ of inhabited land from
‘colonization’ of uninhabited and unclaimed land.
The equally close proximity of apartheid to genocide is partly due to the simple fact
that the oppressed and impoverished indigenous majority in an apartheid society will multiply
faster than the privileged majority will, and to the fact that this becomes a challenge and a
threat to the power of the privileged racial minority. Even in the era of weapons of mass
destruction, and weapons of mass distraction, power still resides in population numbers,
though less than ever before in terms of military power. Electoral power and consumer power
44

are increasingly taking over from the battlefields of yore. My sections on apartheid ‘Violence’
and ‘Repopulation’ in Part II below will deal with the reasons behind this as well as the forms
that genocidal or near-genocidal behavior takes. In order to manage apartheid, the ruling elites
will thus time and again employ measures to ‘cull’ the indigenous. They will also do so for
related reasons, e.g. to make space for privileged immigrants, and/or as punishment for and
deterrence against uprisings and other kinds of resistance, etc. On the whole, indigenous
human lives are not worth much, if anything at all, to those in power. Unlike essentially
genocidal societies, however, the elites will let an indigenous majority stay alive, certainly for
reasons of profit-making – they find ways of making the majority work for them – and in the
cases of South Africa and modern Israel, also because of a potentially threatening world
public opinion, which could turn into intervention. In a few cases, moreover, they might not
have the military or political means to bring about ethnic cleansing or genocide, and in others
they may feel that they might not have enough immigrants readily available to fill the spaces
left empty by ethnically cleansing the indigenous. International sanctions due to
(internationally perceived) gross human rights violations, especially those enforced by United
Nations mandates, have made it increasingly difficult for apartheid in recent years, in spite of
one of apartheid’s main licenses to continue existing in the 20th and 21st centuries – state
sovereignty, ironically also guaranteed by that strange hybrid phenomenon, the United
Nations.
The triptych colonialism-apartheid-genocide is to a large extent a function of relative
population numbers, demographic dynamics, and population policy: In colonialism the class
of racial oppressors in situ is the smallest and it is also kept at a minimum (by the colonial
power). The most basic principle here is not to replace the natives or to steal and settle in their
land, but to keep a colonial economic output at a maximum for reasons of profit. In times of
crisis for the colonial power, the colonies can also supply cannon fodder, i.e. soldiers, such as
in the world wars of the 20th century. For example, France used over half a million African
soldiers and another half million soldiers from its other overseas colonies to fight the German
and Austro-Hungarian empires in World War I. One quarter of the soldiers from the French
colonies were killed in this war, most of them African. Altogether, an estimated 300,000
Africans died for France during the world wars, many of them conscripts. They were often
sent on dangerous missions, because, as one white French military commander put it, they
were ‘…less sensitive to pain because their nervous systems were not as highly developed…’
as those of their European colleagues! Afterwards, however, the efforts of Africans were
played down in French history books, school textbooks, military victory parades, and war
memorials. As an additional slap in the face, France stopped paying pensions to its African
war veterans after their countries had gained independence from it. The victors of World War
II did liberate the world from some forms and practices of racism, but it entrenched others.
The British also used many soldiers from their African colonies, especially in World War II.
On the whole, Africa can be said to have suffered more from colonialism than other victims of
that scourge, at least in the so-called ‘Old World’. The Romans, for instance, built
infrastructure and encouraged trade in Britain, as the British would also do in India, two
millennia later. And due to reasons such as this, colonialism is indeed not as harsh as genocide
or apartheid. With the limited exceptions of South Africa, Rhodesia and Kenya, where they
had brought in many white settlers, the British would however chiefly make sure that
colonialized Africans created or contributed to profits for the British which were generally not
reinvested into the African economies. The same goes for the other European colonies in
Africa.25
25
Boateng: Dying for Britain and France, for Nothing, 2010 (quote); Tattersall: Africa’s Old Soldiers Feel
Forgotten by France, 2004; Ajayi: The Unfinished Business: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery and
Colonialism in Africa, 2000. In the so-called ‘post-colonial’ Africa, around 90 percent of Africa’s intellectual
output is produced in European languages. Not even a single treaty between Europe and Africa exists in any
African language. See wa Thiong’o: A People without Memory Are in Danger of Losing Their Soul, 2003.
 45

It is easy to fall into two traps regarding colonialism: Firstly, colonialism may seem
less friendly than apartheid since the invaders are all state-employed in full-blown
colonialism; they are either soldiers or undemocratic state administrators. They often come in
uniforms and they are overwhelmingly male. In apartheid, however, they are accompanied by
civilians. But these civilians are not nice. They are brought in to replace natives, to repopulate
the land, and they are often at the forefront of the invasions, especially in its later stages, often
or always armed by the state, which actually makes them non-civilians, and occasionally used
by the state as pawns, as well. In the Dutch Cape Colony, in the western hemisphere, and in
Australia, and elsewhere, they were responsible for genocide on several occasions. Secondly,
apartheid states, as we shall see, are often successful at exporting their apartheid wars, South
Africa to Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique, Israel to Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. And so,
apartheid (26,000 killed within South Africa’s borders 1960-1994) seems less bloody than
colonialist-style adventures by the apartheid state itself (over a million and a half killed by
apartheid wars in neighboring countries during the same time period). But, these apartheid
wars are not saving the indigenous populations of the apartheid states. The apartheid elites are
often mainly targeting refugees from the apartheid society, such as the ANC cadres in Angola
and Mozambique, or the PLO in Lebanon. Colonialists aim to make wars and armed conflict
as short as possible, while apartheid is more of a continuous war, and therefore bloodier as
well as more destructive, in terms of both nature and culture.
In apartheid, furthermore, the oppressors represent a sizeable minority, sometimes, as
in the case of the Israeli Jews, striving to become a majority, whether for reasons of racial
hatred, or of racial fear, or both. Here, longer-term profits also come into the picture. The
oppressors, moreover, have come to stay and regard the country as theirs, in both a belonging
and a possessive sense. In their eyes, they belong to it, and it belongs to them. As opposed to
colonialism there is also, as mentioned, necessarily a civil, or at least a semi-civil society
among the oppressors. They are not all formally state employees, although they (at least the
adult males) may all be armed, organized and used by the apartheid state in a military or
paramilitary fashion.
In genocide, finally, the oppressors constitute either a majority or a minority, in either
case striving to become a totality, or at least a larger majority. Profits made out of the
disappearing racial group, and what it leaves behind, appear as altogether secondary to hate,
except perhaps profits made from the land conquered thus. Genocide is often accompanied by
the more or less forced import of a newly subjugated race, such as the African slaves into the
Caribbean and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, or the import of Asian slaves and
laborers into the (Dutch) Cape Colony (simultaneously with the eradication of Khoikhoi and
San peoples) and the (British) Natal Colony in South Africa, or the use of prisoners of war
from the eastern front in the Nazi forced labor camps.
All three of these practices – colonialism, apartheid and genocide – are racist crimes
against humanity, in effect as well as in intent. They do not happen by accident, they are not
originally well-meant with regard to the indigenous populations, and they are not ‘mistakes’,
which, as we shall see, is often claimed afterwards by the perpetrators, their descendants and
apologists. There are also strong continuities between the three forms of invader racism.
Often, perhaps even mostly, a genocide starts off as a colony, then develops into a transitional
state of apartheid, and finally into genocide. This development took place throughout North
America, most of South America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
With this in mind, I will attempt to reach beyond contemporary postcolonial theory in
order to analyze and describe apartheid more accurately. In the Conclusions of this

Similar to but not entirely identical with my general conception of racism as a continuum is the following:
“...from unofficial but pervasive social discrimination at one end of the spectrum to genocide at the other, with
government-sanctioned segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, forced deportation (or ‘ethnic cleansing’),
and enslavement among the other variations on the theme.” Fredrickson 2002: 9.
46

investigation, I will also reflect on possible outlines for future Truth and Reconciliation
Commissions (TRCs) and the chances for justice to be served in societies that have
experienced traumatic conflict brought about by such human rights violations, especially with
regard to present-day Palestine/Israel.

3. Apartheid in the Narrow Sense (South Africa 1948-1994)

In one of the most consulted histories of South Africa, Leonard Thompson summed up
apartheid in that country from 1948 onwards, as follows:

The National party government applied apartheid in a plethora of laws

and executive actions. At the heart of the apartheid system were four
ideas. First, the population of South Africa comprised four ‘racial
groups’ – White, Coloured, Indian, and African – each with its own
inherent culture. Second, Whites, as the civilized race, were entitled to
have absolute control over the state. Third, white interests should
prevail over black interests; the state was not obliged to provide equal
facilities for the subordinate races. [Fourth, t]he white racial group
formed a single nation, with Afrikaans- and English-speaking
components, while Africans belonged to several (eventually ten)
distinct nations or potential nations – a formula that made the white
nation the largest in the country.26

Nearly all of these features are present in practice in each of my other two main
examples of apartheid in the wide sense, albeit with different contingent factors, i.e. races or
ethnic groups and numbers. Exchange ‘White’ for ‘Greek’ (and later ‘Roman’) and ‘Jew’,
respectively; exchange ‘Black’ for ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Palestinian’ respectively; exchange
‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’ for the intermediate races who were originally brought in for both
unpaid and underpaid manual work in both Egypt and Israel, and you have summed up
apartheid there, too. One could even go one step further, and exchange ‘Afrikaner’ for ‘Greek’
and ‘British’ for ‘Roman’ in Egypt. On this second level of comparative analysis, however,
there is no counterpart in Israel, not yet at least. One can, however, at least imagine a future
(horror) scenario, say in the aftermath of a major nuclear or biochemical war, in which the US
empire establishes direct rule over the much of the Middle East, like the Romans did over the
eastern Mediterranean and the British over southern Africa, and continues Jewish privileges in
Palestine, like the Romans did for Greeks in Egypt and the British for Afrikaners in South
Africa.
Only Thompson’s fourth feature is a 20th and 21st century one. There is no parallel that
I am aware of to that in Graeco-Roman Egypt, simply because there was no international law
demanding, or international lip service being paid to, the idea and the trappings of
‘democracy’ at that time. With modern Israel, however, a hypocritical and seeming
democracy – amazingly similar to the South African model – has been construed with the aid
of even more ethnic cleansing, making Jews an 80 percent majority in the state of Israel, while
twice as many Palestinians are scattered around the world or locked inside ‘autonomous areas’
under Israeli military occupation and emergency rule, with no possibility of voting against the

26
Thompson, L.: A History of South Africa, 1990: 190. In fact, both Zulu and Xhosa are mother languages of
many more people in South Africa than is either Afrikaans or English. There is a direct parallel from the South
African attempt to make the white race appear the most populous race to contrafactual Israeli and complicit
western denials that UN-registered Palestinian refugees outside Historic Palestine, who are nearly a majority of
Palestinians, are Palestinians at all. This is denied, actually more often ignored, because Palestinians are thus
objectively shown to be vastly superior to Israeli Jews in numbers, and that, in turn, explains why the Israeli
elites are actually vehemently opposed to true democracy. See footnote 319 below.
 47

‘security forces’ which are, most of the time, involved in a variety of activities that are aimed
at decimating the number of Palestinians in Palestine on a daily basis. An exceptionally high
Palestinian birth rate and various kinds of resistance, most of them non-violent, almost all of
them legal, are providing antidotes at this moment in time. Jewish settlers in those same areas,
however, do have the vote as well as a whole range of rights and legal and illegal privileges –
including their being supplied free of charge with weapons and ammunition by the Israeli
army – on account of their race alone. All of these rights and privileges are denied
Palestinians, who have lived there much longer, and who are suffering much more, much
worse, and much more illegal violence from the hands of exactly these paramilitary settlers as
well as of the army itself.
The illusion of a functioning and even dynamic democracy was further enhanced by
Israel’s frequent changes of government between cabinets led by the mainstream Labor and
Likud parties. On the surface, these parties resemble a western-style couple of liberal/social
democrat and conservative parties, yet they are crucially united, not only in coalition
governments, but also more importantly in their central and overall Zionist policy of
continued apartheid, of continued systematic and gross human rights violations.27 The
addition of the Kadima party to the fold of ‘mainstream’ parties in 2006 changed nothing in
this regard. Kadima, formed by the former Likud prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has situated
itself between Likud and Labor, especially with regard to policies directed against the
Palestinians, in territorial terms: somewhere between the ambitions of and claims to a Greater
Israel and a Much Greater Israel.
South Africa, on the other hand, was ruled by a single party throughout its post-1948
apartheid period. The National Party was, however, also the winner of periodic, ‘democratic’
elections. In South Africa, all Blacks, up to three quarters of the total population, were
excluded from such elections. They were not allowed to vote or run for public office at all.
Indians and Coloureds were only given an inferior vote to their own separate parliamentary
chamber in 1983. The plan to eventually give the vote to a small minority of South African
Blacks (namely, those not locked up in Bantustans) during the 1970s and ‘80s failed long
before reaching Israel’s current level of success with Bantustan policies. Similarly, a minority
of Palestinians, less than a ninth, have been given the vote in Israel, namely those who are
still, and despite continued discrimination and oppression, residents in the land conquered
(and received from the ‘West’ and its reluctant servant, the ‘United Nations’) before 1967.
Members of the Palestinian nineteen percent of the Israeli electorate are allowed to vote, to
run for office and even to form political parties. They are barred, however, from forming
political parties that ‘do not support the Jewish character of the state of Israel’. In effect, this
rule may be used for charging people with calling for the introduction of democracy (in the
Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories). Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are also forced to

27
Hass: In Afrikaans, Separation is Called ‘Apartheid’, 2000: ‘[T]he Likud and the Labor governments…have
different views only as regards the size of the Palestinian enclaves and the territorial continuity between them.’
(25) Amira Hass is the first and so far only Jewish journalist to live permanently in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. She has lived in Gaza and in Ramallah on the West Bank. Her courageous and insightful reporting
earned her among other things the distinction of becoming an International Press Institute ‘Press Freedom Hero’
in 2000, and of receiving the UNESCO/Guillermo Camo World Press Freedom Prize for 2003. See further
Kudlak: IPI Report, 50 Press Freedom Heroes, 2000. On the essentially indistinguishable racist and Zionist
ideologies of Labor and Likud, see also N.N.: Interview With Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How To End The
War Of 1948, November 8, 2002, and Levy: Tell the Truth, Shimon, 2002, in which the author, a former aide of
Nobel Peace laureate Shimon Peres’, accuses his former boss, at that time Labor Party foreign minister in prime
minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud-led coalition government, of hypocrisy and legal complicity in war crimes and
terrorist activities perpetrated by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians. On the war-mongering of the Israeli
‘right’ and ‘left’, along with the US Israel lobby that led to the US-led war in Iraq, see Mearsheimer & Walt
2007: 233-243. On the armament of settlers by the Israeli army, see N.N.: Factbox: Jewish Settlements on
Middle East Road Map, June 9, 2003, which cites the Israeli anti-settlement organizations, Peace Now and
B’Tselem.
48

carry identity cards that identify them as ‘Arabs’, and they are practically unable to marry
Jews at all or live together with Palestinians from the territories occupied in 1967 (many of
whom were refugees from Israel ‘proper’). They are also excluded from practicing a whole
range of professions (see Chapter II.5.3, below) and face many additional kinds of
discrimination and oppressive segregation.
There are some additional features that Thompson overlooked in the quoted passage.
Firstly, apartheid is not only carried out by the state, but to a large extent also by the
(privileged minority) business community and beyond that, by (the privileged minority) ‘civil
society’ at large. When not celebrated as ‘pioneers’, white South African farmers, both before
and after 1948 – often heavily armed by the army and with many other paramilitary
characteristics – were routinely referred to as ‘civilians’ by their government and closest
allies, but in reality they were far from civil, and the adult males among them were better
referred to as extensions and in many cases even as instruments of state power. The same
applies to the 550,000 illegal Jewish settlers in Palestine today. But white civil society in
apartheid South Africa and Jewish civil society in modern Israel kept voting apartheid regimes
into office. Businesspeople kept up discrimination and even invented new kinds of
exploitation and discrimination in order to increase their profits from indigenous labor and
natural resources and to keep the least needed and the many totally ignored natives more
securely locked away under increasingly atrocious circumstances.
My theoretical move away from considering apartheid as an essentially state
phenomenon is a close reflection of the recent development of political science. Originally an
academic discipline to study state and government, its object of study has widened
progressively since the 1950s. The subsequent arrivals in mainstream political science of new
theoretical and research paradigms – such as behaviorism, rational choice theory, feminism,
political psychology, discourse theory and cosmopolitanism – have led to a progressive
widening of the concept of politics, increasingly and now commonly seen as the field of
power relationships, formal and informal, state-related, semi-civilian and civilian.28
‘Apartheid’ itself came about before the new kind(s) of political science, but that does not
mean that it has to be understood within the old narrow perspective of a political science that
is outdated today. On the contrary, it can in my opinion only be understood better by political
scientists endorsing the internal advances of the discipline during the last half-century.
Apartheid should be studied in its own right, and not only with regard to statehood.
Even more importantly, apartheid is about greed and exploitation. Unfair market
competition is one of its hallmarks. The system will certainly not work without the active
support from the overwhelming majority of the privileged minority, including many of the
important private business owners and many from the elite race working classes. A few
corrupt and/or extorted members of the oppressed majority also seem to be needed to keep it
running. The racist immigration and citizenship policies, as well as the legal or practical bans
on interracial sexual relations and marriage – all of which were present in South Africa in one
form or another before 1948 – were only implied by Thompson in this context. He also failed
to mention the racist hierarchy, that Coloureds and Indians were ranked above Africans and
below Whites, which led to hostilities and divisions between these groups, again closely
mirrored by equivalent situations in and around Graeco-Roman Egypt and modern Israel.
Most importantly, he overlooked the most basic feature of apartheid, so obvious to him that it,
apparently, became unconscious: Apartheid is founded on the military superiority of the
invading minority and its self-defined and privileged members and not only on the armaments
but on the use of them, too. Thus, the proximity to and frequent overlaps with genocidal

28
Stoker: Introduction, 1995:4ff. One of the main reasons behind this development is of course the relative loss
of power of states and the relative growth of corporate power and corporate/state networks worldwide, especially
since the 1970s. See Klein 2008 (2007). I will expand on my methods of gathering and organizing knowledge
about apartheid in the methodology chapter, below.
 49

behavior by the privileged minorities is, in effect, downplayed by Thompson’s description of

South African apartheid in the narrow sense.
There is, however, another dimension to apartheid, which Thompson does point out
succinctly. From the very beginning, apartheid was: ‘...an inconsistent, contradictory hybrid of
two competing ideas. It set out complete economic segregation of Africans in their reserves as
an ultimate goal but qualified it by stressing the need to satisfy white farming and
manufacturing interests.’29 To that he might have added the white interest in black service
professionals, e.g. domestic workers, servants, or prostitutes. In a nutshell: the indigenous
racial majority was needed by the apartheid elites to do the dirty work, although the latter did
not want members of the former group anywhere in the vicinity. This is a basic contradiction,
or at least a very challenging tension, which has led every apartheid society so far to collapse
– with the notable, but thus far comparatively short-lived exception of Israel.
The elite race needs the conquered racial majority as a construction. The borders
between the racial groups in an apartheid society are not unlike borders between nation-states.
They are ultimately based on arbitrary decisions by the holders of power, seeking to advance
their own interests. In fact, the construction of Otherness, by apartheid as well as colonialist
elites, changes incessantly, even more than borders do.30 But, on the other hand, the elite races
in both kinds of societies also seem to need to destroy the indigenous group on a symbolic
level, at least to some extent. We can see this for instance in the attempts at linguistic and
cultural genocide by apartheid invaders and their descendants. As we shall see in Section II.9,
they perceive a need (and it is necessary for apartheid to function) to dehumanize, or at least
to ‘sub-humanize’, the conquered majority population. And its race is therefore possibly most
of all an effect of the resistant self-representation of that racialized majority, which takes place
nonetheless.
Yet another instance of apartheid’s inner tension, related to the previous ones and no
less crippling to apartheid societies, is the continuous resentment and physical resistance by
the subjugated indigenous majority. That resistance takes many forms, active as well as
passive, violent as well as non-violent, efficient as well as unefficient, productive as well as
destructive, and this all contributes to making the upkeep of apartheid very expensive indeed.
As the Palestinian-American intellectual, Edward Said, observed soon after the outbreak of
the Second Intifada:

Fanciful ideas of Israeli power today as embodied in the people who

like Sharon are at best a postponement, and a bloody one at that, of the
inevitable realization that apartheid can only work if two peoples
accept the notion of separation with inferiority that the strong imposes
on the weak. But since that is not the case (and has never happened in
history), it will always be unlikely that people will cheerfully accept
their enslavement. Why are Israelis en masse fooling themselves into
thinking that it will work in so small an area and so historically
saturated a geography as Palestine’s?31

29
Thompson, L. 1990: 185. A similar point is made with regard to Egypt under Greek rule in Huß: Ägypten in
hellenistischer Zeit: 332-30 v. Chr., 2001: 217, and with regard to Israel in Kovel 2007: 105f.
30
Greenstein: Genealogies of Conflict: Class, Identity, and State in Palestine/Israel and South Africa, 1995: 4.
Under the influence of the vastly different trajectories of Palestine/Israel and South Africa from the year 1994,
Greenstein argues that the existing tool of understanding apartheid, the ‘settler colonial model’, is rendered
‘useless’ for social scientific prediction (ibid.). I concur but would merely like to add that an improved
theoretical model, perhaps following my concept of apartheid, perhaps not, may yet render apartheid
developments predictable. In my view, and in hindsight, the changes in Palestine/Israel in 1993-1994 only
entrenched a Bantustan system, as opposed to South Africa, which dumped the Bantustan system and many other
crucial apartheid phenomena (but not all) in the same year, making South Africa a more progressive society than
Israel/Palestine at that time. See Chapters II.3.3 and II.4.3 below.
31
Said: Where Is Israel Going? 2001
50

Even South African apartheid, with its very formal and legalistic definition of
apartheid, which the National Party defined and kept redefining from the 1940s until the
1990s, must not be reduced to a phenomenon contained in the state apparatus. To do so would
be to exonerate the business community and other members and institutions of civil society, as
well as all the numerous foreign beneficiaries and supporters, from any responsibility
whatsoever for apartheid human rights violations. With regard to de facto criminal liabilities,
this is unfortunately already the case. Today, the only way to receive justice regarding most of
apartheid’s perpetrators in South Africa is through the civil court systems, i.e. through suing
for damages, because the Whites really only gave up political power in exchange for amnesty
from the post-apartheid justice system. Due to the huge profits made under apartheid by
apartheid perpetrators, they, and not their victims, however, have better chances in civil
courts, because they can afford clever lawyers and teams of lawyers, and due to the fact that
South Africa’s justice system is still largely made up of judges and other powerful people who
were appointed during the apartheid era, but mainly because of the precedent-setting de facto
amnesty extended to them by the lack of criminal liability for committing this particular crime
against humanity. Moreover, the victims of apartheid also have the rest of the state against
them, too, as South Africa is today reluctant to scare away foreign investors. Economic
globalization, the big fish eating the small fish, presently works very much in favor of
apartheid impunity.
When in early September 2001 the United Nations World Conference against Racism
failed to condemn Israel for apartheid, despite an overwhelming majority of delegates in favor
of such a condemnation, mainly because of intense pressure from Israel and the USA, a small,
but widely unnoticed fault was contained in the wording that made Israel an apartheid state.
As I shall attempt to show, Israel is indeed an apartheid state, but many crucial upholders of
Israeli apartheid practices and apartheid institutions, even more than in South Africa, would
have been left unmentioned in such a condemnation, and thus, by implication, entirely beyond
the reach of criminal courts and criminal justice. (See Section III.2, below.) A strong and
sovereign state is indeed necessary for apartheid to function, but it is certainly not sufficient.
To view apartheid as essentially a kind of state-run oppression will in my opinion also
obstruct any structural understanding of the phenomenon. Apartheid is both a process and a
system that is and should be studied by the academic disciplines of government or political
science, but equally also by sociology, and, I may add, by humanities such as history,
psychology and philosophy. ‘Political sociology’ may be the most accurate label for what I
am attempting to accomplish here,32 but the style of research, the terminology, and the
methodology are certainly more those of contemporary political science. First and foremost,
this book should not be read as historiography, but rather as an attempt to conduct a structured
investigation into systematic and gross human rights violations.
To conclude the argument so far: apartheid in the narrow sense obviously contains
countless unique aspects. However, the same, basic structural features can be found
elsewhere, or at other times. South Africa itself, for example, displayed all those features at
earlier stages of white rule and white domination in the country, i.e. before ‘apartheid’ in the
NP sense became an explicit government priority. And so do modern Israel as well as Graeco-
Roman Egypt. We will now take a closer look at systems of human rights violations in other
countries that have been compared, especially since the 1980s with its global mobilization
against it, to apartheid in South Africa, starting with genocidal societies, then turning to closer
apartheid parallels, i.e. to apartheid societies as I understand them, then to colonialized
societies, and finally to more adventurous, yet distant and tenuous parallels.

32
See Faulks: Political Sociology: A Critical Introduction, 2000; Kloby: Inequality, Power and Development:
The Task of Political Sociology, 1998
 51

4. Apartheid Compared
Modern Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt are frequently compared to apartheid South
Africa, but there are many other societies that also come close to it in a structural sense. This
chapter will deal with those other comparisons and will locate them in terms of structural
distance from South African apartheid. The situation until the 1960s in the southeastern states
in the USA, especially, has systematically been likened with apartheid in South Africa. This is
not an unprovoked comparison, but in my view rather distant from the closest parallels. In this
section I will look at a range of structural similarities, in several different cases, but also, and
equally importantly, at some of the most important differences. In the spirit of international
law, which considers partial as well as total elimination of a people to be genocide, I will
differentiate between genocidal, apartheid, colonialist and other societies, keeping in mind
that this conceptualization is rather a question of more or less than of absolute categories. As a
demographic rule of thumb for a basic understanding of the following comparisons, but not in
absolute terms, the main perpetrators of genocide are or become more than half of an entire
(not necessarily national) population, the main perpetrators of apartheid are between five and
fifty percent of the entire population (within the apartheid state plus the expelled indigenous
population), and the main perpetrators of colonialism are less than five percent of the entire
population in the colony (again including the expelled indigenous people). A society can thus
go through a development from colonialism to apartheid to genocide, something that has often
taken place in reality, as we shall see presently. The demographic rule of thumb should not be
used in a reductionist way, however. There are of course many other determinants of whether
a society will descend into colonialism, apartheid, or genocide.
Throughout the 20th century, the historically unique developments in South Africa
have confounded political theorists and others by proving to be exceptions from otherwise
global trends. For instance, while race in apartheid South Africa remained more decisive (and
divisive) than economic class, the Marxist tenet of the centrality of class struggle for social
development was effectively suspended. Ever since the repeal of the apartheid laws during the
1980s and 1990s, however, Marxism could be seen as vindicated ‘in the last resort’. From that
perspective, the highly artificial racist class society of South Africa is now increasingly in the
process of being replaced by a normal capitalist class society. 33 But there is much more to
racism than just being a freak phenomenon in an isolated corner of the world.

Comparisons with Genocidal Societies:

‘Life Is All Right in America, If You’re All White in America’34
The same Marxist analysis in this regard could, for example, be applied to the USA
from 1863 (abolition of slavery) and 1964 (outlawing of racial segregation), respectively. The
much-resented signposts ‘Whites Only’ were in fact as widespread throughout the American
South until the 1960s as they were in South Africa until the 1990s. So-called ‘petty apartheid’,
the racially segregated access to such every-day details in life as toilets, water fountains,
hospitals, park benches, restaurants, elevators, post office entrances, etc., was quite possibly
taken further by racist state authorities in the USA and South Africa than in any other

33
Lester 1996: 2ff. See also Ato Quayson’s Introduction to Mandela 2002 (1965) for ‘significant echoes’ of the
struggle against South African apartheid in ‘…Palestine and Ireland…various micro-minority struggles in
various parts of Africa and Latin America. They [the echoes] are even pertinent for thinking through the
persistent sense of injustice felt by African Americans and Australian Aborigines…’ (ix).
34
Sondheim: America, from West Side Story (Motion Picture Version), 1957 (1956). The quoted line does not
appear in the stage version of the song.
52

country.35 In both countries, millions of Blacks were systematically excluded from facilities,
comforts and privileges as well as from the exercise of basic human rights. The US laws of
segregation between Blacks and Whites, the non-violent struggle against them and the violent
white backlash and reaction to that struggle in themselves also manifest strong parallels to
South African developments, especially as many formative events in this regard took place
around the same time – in the 1950s and ‘60s – partly in interaction with each other, partly
inspired by decolonialization efforts and achievements around the world, and to a large extent
spontaneously.36
The USA, South Africa, and Brazil are among the most extreme classist and racist
societies in the world at present, and they all share a similar recent history, consisting of
centuries of extremely violent race relations, including racist slavery, genocide, ethnic
cleansing, apartheid and colonialism. The parallels between the former two countries are even
compelling to social science with regard to the organizations of the resistance against racism
and their leading personalities. The deeply religious and Christian ANC leader, Albert Luthuli
(recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960), and the anti-apartheid activist and Anglican
Archbishop, Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize in 1984), could indeed be compared to the
American, deeply religious and Baptist Christian civil rights movement leader, Martin Luther
King Jr. (Nobel Peace Prize in 1964). On the other hand, the more militant South African
liberation fighters, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko, along with at least one of their
Palestinian counterparts, Marwan Barghouthi37, and Nelson Mandela (who received the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1993 despite or rather because he had been the founder and first head of the
militant, armed wing of a major anti-racist political resistance movement) could all be
usefully compared with the Black American resistance activist, Malcolm X – the latter five at
least with regard to strategies of resistance against racist oppression. The harsh incarcerations
and/or violent deaths (Luthuli, King Jr., Sobukwe, Biko and X) of all of these freedom
fighters are also worth noting. Unlike white leaders, black leaders suffered exceptionally high
assassination and silencing rates during the 20th century.
The stark visual contrast between the light-skinned (so-called ‘white’) oppressors and
the dark-skinned (‘black’, ‘brown’, ‘red’ and ‘yellow’) victims was more similar in the USA
to South Africa than to either of my other two prime examples of apartheid. Graeco-Roman
Egypt was also a society where Europeans and descendants of Europeans oppressed
indigenous Africans, but the latter belonged to the northernmost Africans, whereas the former
were some of the southernmost Europeans. Apartheid in Egypt was in this regard closer to
present-day apartheid in areas under Israeli rule: it is not easy to tell from a distance if

35
Cell: The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in Southern Africa and the
American South, 1982. I believe this distinction (‘The Highest Stage’) can be explained with the absolute and
relative wealth of the USA from 1877 and of South Africa from around 1910. But Israel and other contemporary
examples of rich apartheid or otherwise racist states lack petty apartheid because (apparently) they do not wish to
be accused of racist segregation or apartheid, which in the meantime has become internationally and globally
unpopular and discredited as well as crimes against humanity under international law. See, however, Chapter
II.6.3 below on some rather less systematic and less extensive examples of Israeli petty apartheid.
36
Borstelmann: Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and South Africa in the Early Cold War, 1992;
Bullard, Grigsby III, & Lee (Eds.): Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy, 1994
37
See Barghouthi, M.: Marwan Barghouthi v. Israel: Fatah Leader Presents Charge Sheet against His Captors,
2002, in which the Palestinian politician and activist, himself under prosecution by the State of Israel for
allegedly planning terrorist acts, defiantly charges the State of Israel back on 54 counts of crimes against
Palestinians, including the ‘creation of separate reserves and Bantustans’, ‘torture’, ‘exploitation of labor’,
‘colonialism’, ‘apartheid’, and ‘genocide’, i.e. fully in line with the results of my investigation. Much like Robert
Sobukwe, who was probably considered the most dangerous anti-apartheid leader by South African authorities
during the tumultuous 1960s, and who died in 1978 after having been held by apartheid ‘justice’ for many years
in different degrees of isolation, Barghouthi in early 2004 faced at least six months added to an already served
full year in isolation. See N.N.: Uprising Leader to Remain Isolated in Israel Jail, January 26, 2004. His trial
finally ended on May 20 of that year, when he was sentenced to life in jail after being found guilty by Israel of
masterminding five Israeli civilian deaths. Williams, D.: Israel Court Convicts Palestinian Uprising Leader, 2004
 53

someone is or is not a member of the privileged group. Nevertheless, in the last resort, when
it comes down to, for instance, random shootings of the usual suspects – i.e. members of the
oppressed racial group – in the streets, geographic location (e.g. with regard to a military or
police roadblock) and clothes are probably a great deal more important than skin color or any
other aspects of a person’s purely natural appearance for the purposes of racial identification,
even in South Africa and the USA. Racist segregation, not ethnicity or bi- or multiracial
populations or skin color or hair texture, is the essence of apartheid. In the end, skin color
remains much more important to the upholders of apartheid (and of genocide and other kinds
of racism) than to anyone else, and more for ideological reasons than for anything else. If, for
instance, black people had been the first to systematically develop firearms, the apartheid
societies of the last half-millennium might well have been mainly Blacks oppressing White
people.
The consequences of the formal abolition of South African apartheid have also been
compared in depth to the effects of the formal abolition of slavery in the USA. The losses
initially suffered by the important capital owners (all white) were covered in new and
different ways and their dominance over workers and their families, as well as elite control
over the unemployed people, continued. Thus, economic gains did not materialize for the
‘liberated’ populations, except for a few individuals and for tiny groups of Blacks. In a
nutshell: mainly racist oppression was replaced by mainly classist oppression, but the
beneficiaries of the oppression and its victims have so far largely remained the same or they
have been closely related, in both countries. There are exceptions, but there were always
exceptions, as we shall see, at least in all apartheid societies. 38 The election of Kenyan-
American Barack Obama for president of the USA in 2008 should in my opinion be seen as
that for now: an exception. It is, of course, also a public relations exercise by an electorate
tired of being seen, understood and criticized as the worst warmonger and polluter in the
world. Collectively, it realized that the world would rather see someone like Michael Jordan,
Eddie Murphy, Martin Luther King Jr., or Denzel Washington than yet another Bush, Bush-
clone, or Bush-puppet in the White House. Obama’s election, however, also represents a wide
range of more positive phenomena as well, including an apparently decisive break with
something that has been called ‘global apartheid’ (see below), and a milestone in the
achievements of men of color, and of non-Whites in general, something making its mark on
global history.
The white invader and settler elites and their descendants in both South Africa and the
USA were predominantly from Northwest Europe, and most of them were Protestant
Christians, and to a large extent they were and still are contemporaries. These commonalities
accounts for many parallels in the histories of the two countries. But this is more an accident
than anything else in the structural context; it does not necessarily tell us much about the
essential characteristics of apartheid. Not only Northwest Europeans, not only Europeans, not
only Whites, not only Protestants, not only Christians, not only people during the last few
centuries, not only people with biblical religions, and not only religious people are
perpetrators of apartheid. Unfortunately, apartheid is a much more common phenomenon than
that.
The Blacks in the USA and in the preceding North American colonies, however, were,
except on a local level, always a minority, as opposed to Blacks in South Africa. (The
maximum was an estimated 19 percent Blacks in the USA at the height of slave imports
around 1790 CE.) That is an essential difference. Furthermore, the black Americans were not
indigenous to the country when the Whites first invaded it. Until recently, Blacks were only

38
Depelchin: From the End of Slavery to the End of Apartheid: Toward a Radical Break in African History?
1996, 85-97; Blackmon: Slavery by another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War
to World War II, 2009 (2008). See also Section II.3 below for more examples.
54

brought to America by force.39 That is a second essential difference.

The treatment of black South Africans by Whites is sometimes (or mostly?) more
similar to the treatment of Native Americans than of imported Africans and black Americans
by Whites in America. Not only are Blacks in South Africa native to their country in the same
way that Native Americans are to theirs. Not only did the white invaders and immigrants
become the elites in both countries. Moreover, for instance, the genocides of Khoisan, and the
brutal herding of Bantu-speakers on to ‘reserves’ or ‘homelands’, have close parallels to the
physical and cultural genocides of the indigenous people and cultures and the ‘Indian
reservations’ in the USA and in the preceding European colonies on that territory. The
concept of ‘manifest destiny’, the imagined, allegedly divinely ordained, and allegedly
manifestly obvious, destiny of the Whites to conquer the entire continent and banish its
wilderness, both wild animals and wild people, is very similar to Afrikaner ideology, and it
has inspired the same kinds of crimes. But US racism against natives is even more aggressive
than apartheid in terms of human rights violations, violence, land theft, and ideology. For
example, the Zulu, winners of the 1879 Battle of Isandhlwana, though not without their own
problems currently and historically, are so far much luckier than the Lakota, co-winners of the
1876 Battle of Little Big Horn. After all, Zulu is now the most spoken language at home in
South Africa and an official language of the country; it is even making inways into South
African English; the current president, Jacob Zuma, is Zulu, too. In contrast, there are no
Native American languages that have become official languages of the USA, and none have
influenced American English, and no Native American has ever been president of the USA.
Yet, the Lakota are not dead. Their culture is a survivor to this day, though they and it are still
fighting for survival.
The Blacks in the USA, on the other hand, have much in common with the Asian
slaves and Asian indentured laborers who were shipped by Whites to South Africa and with
the descendants of these people. In each case, the oppressed masses were brought by force to
another continent by perpetrators from a third continent, and, for centuries, the economy of
each country, or colony, was based on their unpaid, later underpaid, and often brutally forced,
labor. In each case, and in the same way, three continents (Europe, America and Africa in the
first case, Europe, Africa and South Asia in the second) were involved in the slave industry.
And the perpetrators were closely related, culturally, politically, religiously, and probably also
genetically. The victims, on the other hand, were far-flung yet systematically and often
similarly robbed of their humanity, e.g. of their languages and cultures, as well as their
property, possessions, and in many instances, their lives.
After being freed from slavery in the mid-19th century, in both countries, the Blacks in
the USA and the descendants of Asian slaves in South Africa remained poor and oppressed.
Their miserable situation could only really be matched by that of the indigenous people.
Coincidentally, in each of the countries the descendants of those slaves and imported

39
See Reilly: Race and Racism, 2003: 140; Finnegan: Common Cause, 1995, and Fredrickson 1981: xviii, 239,
who, in this context, does not mention the last condition (Blacks not being indigenous to the USA). Mandy: A
City Divided: Johannesburg and Soweto, 1984: 84, additionally refers to the following two differences: Blacks in
the US were more influenced by white culture than Blacks in South Africa were. Language, music, and other
aspects of African secular culture as well as religion were in fact systematically stolen from all Blacks taken
from Africa to North America and were thrown away. Blacks in the US were also formally equal to Whites after
1863, and were thereafter ‘denied opportunities only by legal subterfuge or extra-legal community pressure.’
(ibid.) Nelson Mandela also refers to the latter difference: ‘the conditions in which Martin Luther King struggled
were totally different from my own: the United States was a democracy with constitutional guarantees of equal
rights that protected nonviolent protest (though there was still prejudice against blacks); South Africa was a
police state with a constitution that enshrined inequality and an army that responded to nonviolence with force.’
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, 1995 (1994): 520f. It should be added
that the US army in fact ‘responded to nonviolence with force’ quite frequently, especially against Native
Americans domestically, but also against black Americans, white Americans, and many others, domestically and
internationally. And it still does so today.
 55

indentured laborers, including also mixed-race (black and white) people according to the
American so-called ‘one-drop’ rule (one drop of black blood is enough to make you black),
now make up around thirteen percent of the total population.
But here, in the crucial realm of demography, the similarity between the indigenous
groups, between South African Blacks and Native Americans in the USA, breaks down
completely. After over half a century of both absolute and relative growth, more than three
quarters of South Africa’s population today is black, whereas Native Americans have by now
been made to dwindle to one percent of the US population.40
This important difference in the demographic development of the oppressed
indigenous racial groups in South Africa and the USA thus highlights the most dramatic
phenomenological difference between apartheid and genocide. South Africa under white rule
was essentially apartheid; the USA under white rule was (and to some extent still is)
essentially genocidal, in the cultural as well as the physical sense. The USA today has one de
facto official language for over 300 million people. Since 1994, South Africa, with only a
seventh of that population number and a disproportionally small state budget, has eleven
official languages. At least in terms of culture, South Africa is much more liberated from
white supremacy than the USA is. Nonetheless, there are obviously overlapping zones
between genocide and apartheid, as well. Millions of Southern African Blacks were killed and
from 1652 until 1994 South Africa under white rule only had one or two official languages,
European languages (while African languages died out or were killed off), on the one hand,
and there are still some Native Americans alive and some Native Americans languages spoken
today, on the other.
The book most similar to mine is perhaps ‘White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History’, by George Fredrickson, who is well aware of the
demographic discrepancies in his comparison, but does not consider them as important as I
do. The difference between us in this regard, however, is not of a fundamental nature. I have
nothing in principle against labeling some of the conditions imposed upon Black and Native
Americans ‘apartheid’, and I believe that Fredrickson’s work is both very good and important
for the understanding of racism, war and oppression in general, on the one hand, and for the
understanding of unique US and South African developments on the other. But I also believe
it can be argued convincingly that there are even closer structural parallels than the USA to
white supremacy in South Africa, namely in Graeco-Roman Egypt and in modern Israel, and
also in some additional societies which we shall look at presently. Writing in 1981, when
South African apartheid was still officially (but mostly unofficially) being defended and aided
by the dominant US and UK elites, Fredrickson commendably took pre-1948 developments in

40
Fenton 1999: 41; Churchill: Suppression of Indigenous Sovereignty in 20th Century United States, 1997. On
the strong parallels between US mistreatment of Native Americans and Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, see
also Carter 2006: 27f. In Canada, a similarly genocidal society, the present combined population of indigenous
people or ‘Native Canadians’, American Indians and Inuit, is also only around four percent of the present total of
35 million inhabitants. Like in apartheid South Africa, there are two official languages, European languages,
honoring and aiding the two waves of white invaders into the country. And the invaders and immigrants and their
descendants, the speakers of those two languages, have had a tense interrelationship through the ages. In
Hawai’i, which was conquered by Whites much later but more overwhelmingly, the indigenous have only
survived due to intermarriage with incoming groups, and there are still 18 percent people with part Hawai’ian
ancestry left of the total population in the archipelago today. Fenton 1999: 41. On Manifest Destiny, see
Horsman 1981. The genocide of Native Americans was probably most destructive, however, during the first
century after Columbus stumbled upon America. An estimated 70 to 90 percent of all Native Americans had
died, mostly from White-borne diseases, by the end of the sixteenth century. See Reilly 2003: 129, and Gilbert &
Reynolds: Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present, 22008 (2004): 263, which calls the USA ‘the
most obvious comparison’ with South Africa under white rule, notes the demographic difference, but puts it all
down to disease rather than genocide. On some of the many parallels – including internationally illegal land
expropriation, creation of native reservations, official lies, broken promises, genocides, and ethnic cleansing of
indigenous populations – between the US white elites and the modern Israeli Jewish elites (with US elite
support), see also McCabe: What Indians And Palestinians Share, 2005; Jabotinsky: The Iron Wall, 2002 (1923).
56

South Africa into consideration, and referred to them quite accurately with his more
unspecified title (‘Supremacy’ instead of ‘Apartheid’).
His was also, however, a more diachronic perspective than the relatively synchronic
perspective that I have chosen. His analysis is more about the process and the causal chains
within it; mine is more about the structure or system and the interdependence and interactions
between constituents of that system.41 He writes history, and I write political science and
political sociology. In my view his is a different but equally valid perspective. But my
investigation does not marginalize process or change. In Section II.2 below, for instance, we
will look in depth at apartheid’s crucial demographic dynamics. Apartheid is apparently
perpetrated in different forms, which may indeed often depend on the different sequences of
realization of the system, though (in my view) more likely they depend on the different
historical, socio-economic, and geopolitical contexts. It can also be seen as elite attempts to
optimize an unstable dynamic equilibrium between ethnic cleansing, exploitation, and control
from the side of the oppressors, on the one hand, and resistance by the primary victims, on the
other. Finally, in Part III, below, we will also take a look at apartheid from an eagle-eyed
macro-perspective with an emphasis on its aftermath.
In any event, I believe one should not study any instance of apartheid without looking
at the wider historical and social contexts. For white South Africans, genocide of the
indigenous people partly became an option as it had taken place with full impunity in the
western hemisphere and elsewhere. Racism in South Africa and the USA are certainly not
unrelated to each other. The brutal oppression, exploitation and/or murders of scores of
millions of Blacks with impunity by Whites in the USA and South Africa, the overwhelming
(and obviously intentional) failures to redress those crimes sufficiently or to achieve long-
term reconciliation have kept the two racial groups in both countries interlocked in an often
distrustful and largely separated relationship. The cultures do overlap much, especially since
the 1960s in the USA and since the 1990s in South Africa, but in each country one can still
usually tell immediately, without asking, what skin color a person has, merely by talking to
the person on the telephone. And, in general, those overlaps are still mainly on white terms,
most ostensibly in and with the use of the English language (although the dialects and accents
of English spoken by each racial group are generally very conspicuous), but more essentially
by means of the deep immersion in the culture that comes with it, a eurocentric, capitalist, and
militaristic culture that still equates ‘white’ with good, pure, and superior, and ‘black’ with

41
Fredrickson 1981; Churchill: Perversions of Justice, 1993; Cox: Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social
Dynamics, 1970 (1948): 355ff; Hodge, Struckman & Dorland Trust: Cultural Bases of Racism and Group
Oppression: An Examination of Traditional “Western” Concepts, Values and Institutional Structures Which
Support Racism, Sexism and Elitism, 1975: 12ff; Indigenous Watch, no date. The systematic oppression and
genocide of the cultures of Black slaves in the USA reached more extreme dimensions than that of Asian forced
laborers in South Africa. Many of the descendants of the latter are still Muslims, whereas African religions,
languages, and almost all other African cultural traditions, were systematically and successfully forbidden and
eventually exterminated by Whites in the USA. White slave-owners and their employees in the Caribbean and in
South America were not quite as ruthless nor as systematic as the Whites in North America with regard to their
similar attempts at cultural genocide against the black slaves, although the Latin American elites certainly also
tried and often succeeded in several regards. Moreover, there is no South African parallel known to me of the
notorious Mississippi state law of 1823, which explicitly prohibited the teaching of reading and writing to
Blacks. Aside from that, the brutality of the ocean crossings was probably also more accentuated in the
transatlantic case, where an estimated ten to twenty percent of the total number of kidnapped Africans died
during the ocean crossings alone. (Many more, of course, were killed during capture, captivity, escape, re-
capture, or work). Much of this apparent difference in brutality between the USA and South Africa can probably
be explained by the enormous size of the business venture and the extremely impersonal nature of contacts
between slaves, on the one hand, and slaver employers and employees, on the other, in the transatlantic case.
However, that background does not negate any of the personal and institutional responsibilities of the people,
companies, and states that built, supported and perpetuated the system, and profited from it. See footnote 858
below on this unresolved and contentious issue. See also N.N.: Black History Timeline: Change and Challenge,
2003.
 57

evil, impure, and inferior; and also with the persistent statistical condemnation of people with
dark skin color to institutional – though nowadays formally and officially invisible –
oppression and economic hardship.
Even the first elections of black presidents in these two countries (within the short
space of 14 years) can do but so much to change this statistical situation. In South Africa, we
know, the change has been to ease and abolish important aspects of the oppression in the
political and social realms whilst achieving comparatively little against the economic hardship
so far. In the USA, emancipation, the civil rights movement, and other kinds of black
empowerment initiatives have done much for Blacks, but racial equality is still only a partial
reality, and for the general treatment of Native Americans by the dominant white elites to this
day, ‘genocide’ is the only term that can be truthfully or accurately used.

Ethnic Cleansing from the South: Australia and New Zealand

Not only was race more important than class in South Africa. Along with Australia
and New Zealand, South Africa also stands out as a prominent exception to the ‘North-South
Divide’ of rich or ‘developed’ countries on the one hand, and poor or ‘underdeveloped’ or
‘developing’ countries, on the other. It is, for example, a frequently overlooked fact that the
electric power station in Johannesburg in 1914 was the largest and most modern one in the
world.42 In fact, ever since the industrialization of South Africa over a century ago, it has been
one of the richest and technologically most advanced countries in the world. The first ever
open-heart surgery on a human patient was performed there in 1967. Only a few years later,
the NP government (with the help of Israel) procured the country’s first nuclear weapons, less
than 30 years after these most advanced weapons of mass destruction were first invented in
the USA.
Australia and New Zealand were also conquered by Whites, also mainly Protestant
Christians, through violent invasion, systematic ethnic cleansing, racist discrimination, and
institutionalized theft of land and resources. In both what is today South Africa and Australia,
the southernmost indigenous groups – the Tasmanians like the Khoikhoi in the Cape – were
exterminated by a combination of killings and diseases. The invasions carried out by the
people from the far north of the other hemisphere started in the southern extremities of the
continents. And they were no doubt most destructive there. Naturally, the northern European
conquerors were most interested in and likely to easily adapt to land and climate similar to
what they had known in Europe. And so, to the detriment of the Tasmanians and the Khoikhoi
especially, the land the Whites coveted most would be in the temperate southern green tips of
the relatively hot and dry continents of Africa and Australia.
The Aboriginal people of Australia were reduced from one hundred to two percent of
the entire population in the space of two centuries; they were ethnically cleansed from and
dispossessed of their ancestral lands in a period of time comparable to their fellow native
victims in the Western Hemisphere. The indigenous Maori still make up around ten percent of
New Zealand’s population, yet here, too, the English invasion was devastating. Hundreds of
thousands of native Australians and New Zealanders were killed directly or indirectly by the
white invaders and land thieves. An estimated million aboriginal people alive at the time of
the first white invasions at the end of the eighteenth century have dwindled to a present
70,000.
After having seen their land stolen, re-appropriated, and to a large extent either
destroyed or altered beyond recognition, and renamed, the remaining Aboriginal population
still suffers from grossly discriminatory treatment by Whites in the realms of police policy
and practice, health care, housing, and access to education, to name but a few. In the year
2002, median household incomes for Aborigines were around half the level of other
Australians, and their life expectancy 19 years shorter than that of Australian Whites, not least

42
Iliffe 1995: 274
58

because they received 25 percent less state health care per person than Whites did. Infant and
maternal mortality, two of the most important indicators of a population’s health, were at least
three times higher for Aborigines than for non-indigenous people.
At present, native Australian languages are also suffering the fastest rate of language
extinction in the world, with Native American languages in the USA in second place. In my
view, at least in terms of culture and diversity, these are the two most urgent ongoing large-
scale genocides in the world today, taking place in two of the world’s richest countries. The
Aborigines were only allowed to participate in Australian elections from 1962, only three
decades before Blacks were finally allowed to vote in South Africa. The 400,000 remaining
Aborigines are the poorest, most unemployed, and most imprisoned racial group in Australia
today, not least because of racist police practices, but also because of the stubborn refusal, by
the white governments and the white majorities who elected them, to redress or even admit
the wrongs done to the indigenous.43
Once white supremacy had been established, the white elites on the southwestern
Pacific Rim also flourished economically and technologically, like the ones in South Africa.
Both Pacific Rim countries, however, had low initial population densities and were conquered
relatively quickly. Neither of them achieved the high degrees of concentration of wealth or
power, or the military and technological prowess that South Africa did. Being islands, they
also lacked immediate threats from neighboring countries with apartheid refugees and ties to
the oppressed, expropriated, exploited, and murdered indigenous people. During the course of
colonialism, moreover, Britain had obviously also learned – the hard way – from its own,
older former colonies, the USA and South Africa, not to let its colonialists empower and arm
themselves so much that they would become or feel enabled to secede from the mother
country. And so, the relatively new colonies of Australia and New Zealand never declared
independence from Britain, although there were some futile attempts along those lines. More
importantly, from the theoretical perspective, the Whites soon became an overwhelming
majority in both Australia and New Zealand, as in the USA or Canada, where the white elites
were, not only with regard to origin, strategies, methods, and numbers, similarly genocidal in
their treatment of the people whose land they invaded and stole.44

43
Pilger: The New Rulers of the World, 2003 (2002): 172ff; Taylor, R.: Aborigines Still Australia’s Worst-off –
Report, 2007; Spencer: Race and Ethnicity: Culture, Identity and Representation, 2006: 136-168; Dunham:
Australia Top “Hot Spot” for Vanishing Languages, 2007; Diamond: The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and
Future of the Human Animal, 1993 (1992); N.N.: Aborigines Riot after Death of Teen, February 16, 2004. On
February 13, 2008, the newly elected Australian prime minister. Kevin Rudd, apologized for some of the harm
done to the Aborigines, in particular for the ‘stolen generations’ of mixed-race children stolen by the government
from their black mothers, but not explicitly for genocide or land theft. Time will tell if action will follow words,
and if the more contentious issues will ever be dealt with. See Ali: It’s Official: Australia Has a Conscience,
2008. See Vlazna: What Do Israel and Australia Have in Common? 2014, on parallels between ‘…Israel’s
apartheid policies…’ against Palestinians and white mistreatment of indigenous people in Australia today.
44
Stone, B.: Genocide in Australia: Report Details Crimes Against Aborigines, 1999; Fenton 1999: 41ff; Pilger:
Australia: Apartheid? 2002. The latter article considers the racist attitudes towards and the ethnic cleansing and
genocide of the Aborigines, but restricts its one-to-one comparison with South Africa to the following paragraph:
“Andrea Durbach, formerly of Cape Town and now a prominent human rights advocate in Sydney, said she did
not believe the horrors of apartheid South Africa would ever be reproduced in Australia. ‘What may be coming is
not as crude,’ she said. ‘The language is not as crude. It’s much more subtle; it’s much more consensual.’” In
terms of cultural and linguistic genocide, however, the ‘horrors of apartheid South Africa’ were arguably
surpassed by Australia. But Durbach is almost certainly restricting her comparison to South Africa from 1948 to
1994, i.e. to apartheid in a narrow sense. During that time and since then, Australia does not match South Africa
in terms of the horrors of racism, though racist crimes and structural racism against the indigenous Australians
do persist. See further Pilger 2003 (2002): 12, 195f; Pilger: In John Howard’s Backyard, 2002, in which the
author comes out even more directly in favor of using ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ to describe white treatment of
Blacks in Australia since the first invasion. See also N.N.: Australia Police Use Aborigines’ Photos as Targets,
July 7, 2003; Fenton 1999: 40f; N.N.: The Report of the Regional Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of Australia,
New Zealand, Canada, Hawaii and the United States, on the World Conference against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held at Sydney, Australia, 2001. Only the USA, Canada,
 59

Third Reich Racism

The South African NP had close ties with the ruling National Socialist German
Workers’ (Nazi) Party and openly supported it, but the former were not yet in power when
World War II broke out. The slightly less racist Union Party, which had strong ties with
Britain, formed the government at the time, and South Africa, a dominion of the British
Empire though largely independent, joined the war on the allied side against Nazi Germany,
although there was strong support for the Nazis, especially among the Afrikaners. After the
war, however, the NP unexpectedly won the 1948 all-White elections – they were to stay in
government until 1994. Already in their first few years in power, the NP freed and
rehabilitated South African Nazi supporters, some of whom had been incarcerated, including
prime minister- and president-to-be John Vorster; and it (re-)introduced racist laws and covert
operations reminiscent of Hitler’s ‘master race’ policies. Indeed, the racist regimes of the
Third Reich and South Africa are commonly considered the worst outgrowths of white
racism.

Like Nazism, apartheid is conventionally presented as an aberration in

European history. In fact, it was part of the worldwide expansion of
Europe, the globalizing process that replaced the populations of North
and South America, Australia and New Zealand with immigrant
Europeans, and transferred other people’s land and wealth to
European descendants.45

It is no wonder that old Nazi and apartheid stalwarts felt similarly betrayed by their
western brethren after their regimes had fallen. They were victims of hypocrisy (though they
often forgot the victims of their own crimes against humanity in the process). The Germans
and white South Africans only did what British and other (especially French, Belgian, Dutch
and Iberian) Whites had recently done elsewhere in the world. The ideology was also
strikingly similar in the two ‘betrayed’ cases. Winners rewrite history, but oppressors do so
even more; they rewrite the very writing of history. In order to elevate themselves above other
people to superhuman or divine status, racialized elites sometimes construct or re-construct
religion and science. The centuries-old Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church idea of the white

Australia and New Zealand voted against a nonbinding declaration of indigenous rights passed by the UN
General Assembly in 2007. The genocidal societies’ governments said the declaration gives ‘excessive property
and legal powers’ to the indigenous people. See Worsnip: U.N. Assembly Backs Indigenous Peoples’ Rights,
2007.
45
Armah: Liberating Mandela’s Memory, 2011: 76. See also Mandela 1995 (1994): 110ff. Incidentally, Israel
got along quite well with Vorster during his time as head of government and state in the 1960s and ‘70s. See
McGreal: Brothers in Arms – Israel’s Secret Pact with Pretoria (Israel and Apartheid: Part 2), 2006. The 1935
law forbidding intermarriage between Germans and Jews has very few parallels in world history aside from
Graeco-Roman, South African and US laws, and an Israeli parallel in institutional practice. See N.N.: Nuremberg
Laws, August 17, 2009. Handicapped or disabled people, and other carriers of what the Nazi state decided to
consider ‘hereditary degeneracy’, were also prohibited altogether from marrying from 1935 onwards. See
Finkelstein, M.: The Other Victims, 2000. Already in 1933, an order was circulated forbidding Germans to marry
‘Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring’. By 1938, a “person could be judged as having too much ‘Gypsy
blood’ to be allowed to live if two of the individual’s eight great-grandparents were even part Gypsy.” Miller, S.:
The Road to Porrajmos: the Gypsy Holocaust, no date; see also Section II.2 below. See Kaufman: Kristallnacht,
2003: 318, for a likening of apartheid South Africa with Nazi Germany prior to the Second World War, and
Mandela 2002 (1965): 30 for a likening of South Africa’s National Party government with the Nazi government
of Germany. I agree with Kaufman that racial groups were targeted in pre-war Nazi Germany like in apartheid
Africa, but not an indigenous majority. Additionally, however, there were very strong classist and political
dimensions to early Nazi oppression. ‘If a Jew landed in a concentration camp from 1934 to 1938 it was because
he or she was a labor official, or a Communist, or a socialist or an anarchist – categories into which…many did
fit.’ Kovel 2007: 76f. It was only later, during the war, that millions, including one-and-a-half million Jewish
children, would be murdered, as members of a race alone.
60

invaders being ‘God’s Chosen People’46 – which of course goes back to the millennia-old
Judaic Biblical idea, if not even further – was mirrored in the Nazi notion of Aryans or
Germans being ‘Nature’s Chosen People’, the very prematurely supposed pinnacle of Nature,
i.e. the be-all and end-all of natural selection. This notion is reflected in the infamous concepts
of Endsieg (final victory) and Endlösung (final solution, i.e. genocide of the Jews). The Nazis
thus stole the idea from the Bible and its believers, but did not credit its creators. There is
plenty of profound and macabre irony in this. The Nazis accused the Jews of anything and
everything, unfairly and unjustly. But this idea, the idea of belonging to the Chosen People
(who have the right to destroy other peoples), was not often if ever criticized by the Nazis.
Jews were not accused of being ethnocentric or racist, but rather of being subhuman and/or
plain evil. The idea was thus stolen, yet also reworked, unlike the pious South African
version. The Nazis, however, were not the first to give the idea a secularized twist. Europeans
before them had been devising, preaching or half-consciously believed the same or similar
theories, often referred to as ‘scientific racism’ at the very least since the early 19th century
CE. Especially anthropology and biology, but also the whole range of social sciences and the
humanities, were systematically misused and distorted, even invented to a great extent, in
order for racist Whites in Germany, in modern South Africa, as well as in western Europe, in
North America and elsewhere, to earnestly and systematically attempt to prove this
preposterous theory, namely, that Nature, rather than God, has chosen white people, or
Aryans, or western Europeans, or even Germans, for ultimate glory and is quite content with
her choice.47
Again, as Whites were quickly to become in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, the
German Nazis and their fellow travelers, who had after all voted Hitler into power, were a
majority against their preferred victims – the ‘retarded’ and ‘handicapped’, the Jews, the Slavs
(both within the German Reich and eventually throughout its conquered Lebensraum), the
Roma and Sinti (‘Gypsies’), the Communists, anarchists, socialists, liberals, and the
homosexuals.48 Nazi ideology was also partly and loosely based on an irrational anti-
46
Mandela 1995 (1994): 111. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, the qualification ‘divine’ for designating people was
formally reserved for the royal families who were absolute rulers. However, many other members of the Greek
upper classes also appear to have considered themselves divine or superhuman, as opposed to how they
considered other people, including, especially, the indigenous Egyptians. See Chapter II.9.1 below. Moreover,
the general trend in Egypt during this era was the ‘de-secularization’ of society, which reached a peak during the
Graeco-Roman era and could be correlated with the increasing degree of oppression. Assmann: Ma`at,
Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im Alten Ägypten, 1995 (1990): 9, 287f; Assmann: Religion und kulturelles
Gedächtnis, 2000b: 204; Green: Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture, 1998 (1989): 183;
Gehrke: Geschichte des Hellenismus, 1990: 78ff; Kemp: How Religious were the Ancient Egyptians? 1995: 25-
54. See also Chapters II.9.1-2 below. On Israeli and Zionist attempts at qualifying Jews and Jews only for
superhuman status, see Kovel 2007: 19ff. and Chapter II.9.3 below.
47
Hardt & Negri: Empire, 2000: 125f; Gould: The Mismeasure of Man, 1981; Bernal 1991 (1987): 189ff; Allen,
W.: A Novel Form of Government: Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism, 1986: 243, 255. On the idea of a human
population being God’s Chosen People, see also Section II.9 below.
48
One could just as easily have started this list with Jews, Slavs, Communists, or with Soviet citizens. Twenty-
seven million Soviet citizens were killed in Hitler’s war. Many of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis
were the victims of unprecedented industrialized mass murder. There are several dimensions to evil. People with
certain mental and physical disabilities, however, were the first group to be slaughtered systematically by the
Nazis. For further arguments in favor of mentioning first the ‘handicapped’ and ‘retarded’ as victims of the
Nazis, see Ofstad: Vårt Förakt för Svaghet: Nazismens Normer och Värderingar – och Våra Egna (‘Our
Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values – and Our Own’), 1987 and Finkelstein, N.: The Holocaust
Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 22003: 73, 75. For arguments placing Nazi
genocides squarely within an already quite well-established western European tradition and thus contradicting an
often falsely assumed uniqueness in kind and absolute incomparability, see Lindqvist: Exterminate All the
Brutes! One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, 1998 (1992). The
title of this book refers to a central statement in Joseph Conrad’s novel, ‘The Heart of Darkness’, and reflects a
common attitude about the supreme goal of white or European civilization among Belgian colonialists in the
Congo around the last but one turn of the century, during which around ten million Congolese lost their lives
mainly due to white policies and practices, and among many other white colonialists and their supporters during
 61

immigrant platform, which referred to racial ‘immigration’, or rather ‘infiltration’, that had
presumably gone on since the Middle Ages at the latest, whereas South African Whites would
mostly rather forget about who had immigrated in what temporal order to what had become
their country.
It should be re-emphasized that Nazi Germany – like the USA, Australia and New
Zealand, the USA with regard to its indigenous population as well as its imported one 49 – was
essentially a genocidal system, whereas South Africa was essentially apartheid. There are,
however, also many instances of overlapping between these two realms of systematic human
rights violations. As we shall see, especially South Africa and modern Israel display many
documented genocidal features, genocidal under valid international law, although they are (so
far) basically and substantially ‘only’ apartheid systems, i.e. second-rate – but by no means
last-rate – crimes against humanity. The USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and
Colombia are all genocidal societies that quickly developed from an initial colonialism, over a
very short period of apartheid, and then into true, and devastating, genocide.
The very successful genocides of indigenous populations in countries such as these are
not only racist genocides, but also examples of many (though not only) foragers and
pastoralists, i.e. nomads, being exterminated and displaced by agricultural peoples, i.e.
settlers. In my opinion, this is the most common form of genocide with regard to socio-
economic systems throughout human history. I have elsewhere referred to its destructive
practices, driving ideologies, and attempted justifications as ‘agrocentrism’, something that

the pre-Nazi era. Although the Germans were not quite as genocidal in deed as their western neighbors, Britain,
France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, had been until the Second World War, they did practice genocide before
the Nazi era, namely from 1904 to 1908 in Tanzania and in South West Africa (today’s Namibia), especially
during the 1904 slaughter of an estimated 65,000 members of Namibia’s rebellious and heroic Herero people.
See Zimmerer & Zeller (eds.): Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 2003; Hull: Military Culture and the
Production of “Final Solutions” in the Colonies, 2003. One could of course here also easily go further back in
history and point out the genocides carried out by western Europeans and their descendants in the Western
Hemisphere and elsewhere as inspiration to and precursors of German colonial as well as Nazi crimes.
According to Churchill 2001: 214, Hitler did indeed “explicitly anchor his concept of [L]ebensraumpolitik
(‘politics of living space’) directly upon U.S. practice against American Indians.” Moreover, according to
Finkelstein, N. 22003: 145, the Nazi sterilization legislation also explicitly invoked the US precedent of forced
sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans, many of them simply because they were black. Other inspirations
for the Nazis included ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato (see Chapter II.9.1) and the Stalinist classist
purges in the Soviet Union. See also Podur: Letter to a Zionist, 2003. These remarks are not meant to trivialize
Nazi crimes against humanity, on the contrary, they are ultimately meant to help us understand them in order to
contribute towards preventing anything similar from ever happening again. See Finkelstein, N. 22003: 41ff on the
vain attempts by ‘Holocaust’ fanatics and zealots to attempt to prove the uniqueness of the ‘Holocaust’ and its
alleged mystic incomparability with other crimes. Yes, it was unique. But so is every other genocide. And
history knows a lot of genocide.
49
With a mere one percent minority left of the current total US population, and an estimated mere 16 to 42
percent of the number of indigenous American people who had been alive when the Whites first landed on North
American shores, Native Americans were finally given some rights and privileges during the course of the 20 th
century. For instance, they were now finally allowed to leave the reservations, to vote, etc. By then, Whites and
other non-indigenous groups had long made up a crushing majority in the US. See footnotes 40-41 above. The
result was a broken nation of broken people, victims of a singularly extensive genocide (or series of genocides)
who simply will not be able to bounce back. During the last few centuries, nearly half of all languages of the
indigenous North Americans have become or been made extinct. See John: Native American Families, 41998
(1988): 382f; Churchill 1997. The Nazis, if successful in the Second World War, might have done something
similar with their victims, i.e. left tiny minorities of Jews, Roma, Sinti, Slavs and others alive, e.g. for
propaganda and research purposes. Based upon some knowledge that we do have of senselessly brutal
experiments, often designed to prove some kind of genetic or organic inferiority of the victims, one shudders at
the thought of what kinds of research that might have been. Fredrickson 2002: 4, and Churchill 2001: 214, assign
part of the blame for the origin of Nazi practices and thought to the older obsession with race purity and to racial
discrimination in the USA and the preceding and co-existent western European colonies in the Americas,
respectively. See also footnote 48 above. Tilley (ed.) 2009: 192 states that genocide is not an overall apartheid
policy, neither in South Africa nor in Israel, though the report repeatedly hints that there are some aspects of
genocide that seem to take place under apartheid.
62

probably goes back to the first agricultural revolutions.50 In recent centuries, the oppression of
nomads and perceived nomads by settled populations or settlers persist in new forms with
genocides of Khoikhoi pastoralists in South Africa or with the exterminations of Roma and
Jews by the Nazis, and with the treatment of Bedouins in the Jewish and Arab worlds, as well
as the current treatment of Roma in Europe, of Sami people in Scandinavia, and of the Inuit in
North America, among many other examples. Racism, however, also always plays a central
role in all of these crimes. (Agrocentrism could also be seen as a form of racism, but that is
not the theme here.) We turn now to the somewhat less genocidal instances of comparisons of
destruction and oppression elsewhere with apartheid South Africa.

Comparisons with Other Apartheid Societies:

From Zimbabwe to Rhodesia, and Forwards Again
In 1890, Cecil Rhodes and his British ‘pioneer column’ invaded and conquered the
land that had been the Empire of Zimbabwe during the European Middle Ages. In less than
one hundred years, the Whites caused havoc in the country. It still has not recovered.
Old Zimbabwe had dwarfed all contemporary European states in both size and
importance at that time. It had become powerful and wealthy due to gold and ivory exports,
which were mostly traded across the Indian Ocean. Arab traders, Indians and even the
Chinese had sent ships (to the coasts of present-day Tanzania and Mozambique) to trade
directly with Zimbabwe prior to the Portuguese destruction of the extensive Indian Ocean
trade networks in the 16th century, and their replacement by a eurocentric one.
Today, Zimbabwe has an ethnic Shona majority, an Ndbele minority, as well as other
smaller minorities, including Whites, who, statistically speaking, are disproportionately
wealthy, as elsewhere in the world. The historical background is complicated, yet typical for
unstable countries in the world today. The indigenous South African 19th-century Zulu Wars
were prompted by white (Dutch and British) invasions of the South African Cape regions and
northwards, by Bantu migrations in the opposite direction, and by white European and (illegal
and covert) US American ‘slave raids’, i.e. large-scale, organized kidnappings of people, in
what is today Mozambique, as well as the Afrikaner invasions of the lands that would become
Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Zulu Wars and multi-pronged white invasions led to
further turmoil in the Munhumatapa state, which covered almost all of present-day Zimbabwe,
when the Ndebele people fled their homes and migrated northwards, partly out of what is
today South Africa, and subjugated the Shona, who had inhabited Zimbabwe since ancient
times.
Half a century later, Rhodes, an English diamond magnate who came to economic and
political power in South Africa, turned on the former Zimbabwe in search of gold, and also in
order to counteract and pre-empt German expansionism on the colonialized continent. The
new British colony was named after its creator, and later split into Northern Rhodesia, which
was to become Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia, which is now, again, known as Zimbabwe.
Only a little gold was found in Rhodesia by the British (it seems that most of it was mined
during ancient Zimbabwean times), and they instead started to settle on the land and to use it
for commercial farming above all, but also for mining other minerals, a certain amount of
industrialization, and for hunting, fun, and games, as well as for almost whatever else the
oppressors wished to use the land.
As in South Africa, Rhodesia’s neighbor in the south, the Whites seized most of the
arable land, much of the cattle, and forced, directly and indirectly, many or most of the

50
Löwstedt: Die verheerenden Folgen des Agro- und Eurozentrismus Charles Darwins, 1998. See Löwstedt 1995
on the historical and structural culture clash between societies that work with stone and fire against those that
also work with ceramics and the domestication of plants and animals and their essentially different forms of
territoriality, dimensionality, language, forms of explanation, etc. See also footnote 117 below.
 63

indigenous to become sharecroppers, labor tenants, or migrant miners. They also demanded
colonial taxes as well as periodic unpaid labor, i.e. part-time slave labor, from the indigenous
people. The cities and towns were segregated racially, into White, Indian, Coloured and Black
zones, just as in South Africa. Only servants and ‘garden boys’ were allowed into the plush
white areas, and they had to carry passbooks with official racial and professional
identification, as well.
There was both initial resistance to the conquest and several subsequent uprisings
against the British, but none of them ultimately successful. As British decolonialization in
Africa gathered steam, the Southern Rhodesian Whites, who numbered around a quarter
million at the most, felt bold enough to declare independence from Britain in 1965, as
‘Rhodesia’. (Tens of millions of white Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians never
worked up such an audacity.) An estimated six and a half million indigenous Africans in
Rhodesia were now facing even more severe human rights violations under an even more
discriminatory system than colonialism, i.e. even more similar to that of Rhodesia’s main
remaining ally, South Africa.
After having cut their formal ties with Mother England, white Rhodesians faced a
corresponding, new situation. Yet, they had support not only from South Africa, but also from
the USA, and in many ways also continued support from Britain and the rest of the west.
Then, the liberation war erupted, nevertheless, and even intensified as Mozambique gained
independence from Portuguese rule and joined on the side of the liberation forces in 1975.
The war was concluded in 1979 with a negotiated settlement, as in South Africa fifteen years
later. Zimbabwe became an independent state again in 1980. Britain promised to compensate
white settlers for the land they had together stolen from the indigenous people, but the former
colonial ruler has so far to live up to its promise, as do many of the white settlers who
challenged the 1979 peace agreement in courts in order for them to hold on to the land, thus
violating the British-brokered peace agreement. As elsewhere in the world, the Whites had
largely stolen collectively owned indigenous land. Between 2000 and 2002, in events marred
by controversy and by violence (yet very little of it compared to violence accompanying the
initial white land grab), the Zimbabwean government took back 11 million hectares of land
from white farmers, without any compensation paid. The land restitution issues that now
(superficially) seem to divide white and black Zimbabweans more than ever are issues that are
also widely expected to rise to prominence in South African domestic politics soon.51
Independent Rhodesia was an apartheid society. But it was short-lived, and during its
15-year life span it never achieved the degree of forced separation between racial groups and
entrenched discrimination of the indigenous majority that South Africa did. Furthermore,
Rhodesia had a very small invading racial group, never even attaining four percent of the total
population. In this sense, it remained much more of a colony in its form of oppression, even
after ‘independence’. That form was basically a buffer zone role for South Africa’s far more
influential and powerful apartheid elites, and thus much less independent and less isolated
than the main three apartheid societies dealt with in this book. Finally, the Rhodesian state
never became a world political, economic, or military power, as did all three of the main
examples of apartheid in this investigation.

Spanish Mayhem in Guatemala

Leftover fragments of the Mayan civilization, older than Spain’s, can still be found in
southern Mexico, Belize, and in Guatemala where the Mayans still make up the majority of
the population. Guatemala was created from the invasion and conquest by Spanish
51
Iliffe 1995: 54f, 101ff, 191ff; N.N.: Political History: Zimbabwe, 1998; Marindo, Ravai: Death Colonized:
Historical Adult Mortality in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 1999; Martin & Johnson: The Struggle for Zimbabwe,
1981; Reader: Africa: A Biography of the Continent, 1998 (1997): 468ff; Esipisu: S.Africa Urges UK to Help
Zimbabwe White Farmers, 2002. On the land restitution issues in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and elsewhere in
southern Africa, see also Chapter II.4.2 below.
64

adventurers 500 years ago, and has been suffering severely from theirs and many of their
descendants’ presence ever since. The Mayan civilization had already seen a steep decline of
cities and population numbers over a period of several centuries, but it was subsequently
nearly completely annihilated by the Spanish invaders. Out of at least hundreds or thousands
of Mayan books that still existed when the Spanish arrived, only four remain. The rest was
destroyed along with other cultural, natural and human resources in a centuries-long frenzy of
greed and racist and religiously intolerant violence. Not many immigrants have added to the
foreign presence of the privileged minority of people of Spanish descent, whose independence
from Spain and then from Mexico led to a society that has also been compared in detail to
apartheid in South Africa. Unlike the ideal of strict racial segregation pursued in South Africa
and other creations by northern Europeans, the elites in Latin America were mainly mixed-
race, Spanish and Native. Nevertheless, the lack of invader ‘blood’ was synonymous with lack
of privilege here as well. As in South Africa, the most indigenous people were the most alien
to the state, a state that was created by people of western European descent and supported
mainly by outsiders who were also western Europeans or descendants of western Europeans.
And that state discriminated against the indigenous people and their cultures in all areas of
public life.
Forced labor was imposed on the indigenous people until 1944. Around that time,
during the 1930s and ‘40s, some democratic reforms for the benefit of the indigenous people
were also introduced, but most of them were withdrawn after a coup by Guatemalan military
officers with US assistance in 1954. A bloody civil conflict ensued and did not end until the
late 1990s. More than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996, and
the killing still goes on, in particular political assassinations of human rights workers
attempting to clarify facts about atrocities committed before 1996. Human rights groups
seeking to bring military officials and others to justice are still being targeted by a slew of
death threats and lethal attacks, which many believe originate from elements within the army.
Young indigenous women are also still being raped and then murdered, apparently also often
by current and former members of the country’s armed forces, in what may also be
attributable to an apartheid legacy but more likely has genocidally racist characteristics (see
Section II.1 below).
In numerous ways similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South
Africa, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification concluded in its 1999 final
report that between 93 and 97 percent of severe human rights violations during that conflict
had been perpetrated by the racial elite’s armed forces and state paramilitaries, i.e. by the
oppressive racial minority. The human rights violations investigated included killings,
disappearances, and rapes. The report also stated that the counter-insurgency of 1981-1983
amounted to ‘genocide’ of the indigenous Mayans, nearly 200,000 of them were killed, and
that the USA had financed, trained, equipped, and encouraged some of the Guatemalan forces
responsible for the atrocities. The commission recommended reparations for families of
victims, and this is slowly being implemented by the new Guatemalan governments. But the
US government has so far ignored or refused to act upon this recommendation, although
President Bill Clinton in 1999 did admit that the USA had ‘wronged’ Guatemala. Admitting
responsibility, on the other hand, would of course open up legal liabilities of the US elites,
similar to the annoying legal difficulties stemming from the even more devastating genocides
and injustices that the USA has wrought upon its own indigenous peoples.
In today’s Guatemala, still, the indigenous life expectancy is 45, whereas non-natives
(ethnic Europeans and mixed-race people) can expect to live for an average of 61 years, a
sixteen-year difference. The infant mortality rate of indigenous people is still twice that of
non-natives. The UN says Guatemala still has one of the most skewed land ownership
percentages in the world; an estimated 65 percent of all agricultural land in Guatemala is
 65

owned by just two percent of the population.52

Aside from the short-lived exception of the fledgling Sandinista government in
neighboring Nicaragua during the 1980s, the Guatemalan apartheid elites were surrounded by
regimes similar and friendly to theirs. Right-wing, pro-US, and mostly fascist and racist
regimes have since long formed a transnational system of oppression of the indigenous
peoples and of others in Central America, many or most aspects of which reach beyond that
immediate region into North and South America, and the world. (In the immediately
neighboring Caribbean region, on the other hand, the indigenous were first exploited and
decimated, subsequently wiped out of existence, and then a forcibly imported racial majority
was oppressed and exploited.)
The Guatemalan geo-political situation is thus principally different from the South
African, the Israeli, and the Graeco-Roman apartheid societies, which are characterized by
geopolitical isolation within their regions, by neighboring countries hostile to the ruling elites
(if the former are independent countries), and by matching elite attitudes and collective
behavior in the apartheid country that sometimes or often amounts to collective political,
military, and social paranoia (see Part II, Introduction, below). Nevertheless, many right-wing
Guatemalans were and are probably rather paranoid about Communism in nearby Cuba and
elsewhere in Latin America.
Furthermore, like Rhodesia, Guatemala was never a military, political or economic
power on the global or even regional scale ever since the time that the land was first invaded
and stolen by the Europeans. South Africa was also a lightweight in the Cold War, but
nowhere near as light as Guatemala. (After all, apartheid South Africa had its own nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons, as well as its racial elite from Germanic countries (as
opposed to Spain), its phenomenal economic strength, stemming especially from the diamond
and gold industries, and still more crucial strategic Cold War characteristics.) Despite these
important differences, Guatemala seems to me to have more in common with apartheid South
Africa (and with Graeco-Roman Egypt and modern Israel) than any of the other societies
52
Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico: Guatemala: Memory of Silence (Summarised Translation), 1999;
Maher (senior editor): The Europa World Year Book, 2001: 1804ff. (Article ‘Guatemala’); Haviland: Cultural
Anthropology, 51987: 401-404; Ellwood 2001: 15; Daniel: Fifty Years On, Coup Memories Fade in Guatemala,
2004; Brosnan: Guatemala Court Annuls Rights Convictions, 2002; N.N.: US-Guatemala: Clinton Admits US
Military Aid Was Wrong, March 11, 1999. Since Clinton never offered an apology, Guatemala has no way of
demanding compensation from its mighty northern neighbor. In a country like Colombia, on the other hand, the
Native Americans have now been reduced to 2.5 percent of the population. It is therefore much better described
as ‘genocidal’ than as ‘apartheid’. See Abultaif: Colombian Tribes Hold Rally against ‘Genocide’, 2001. See
Finkelstein, N. 22003: 146 and Zunes: The United States, Israel, and the Possible Attack on Iran, 2006 on the
Israeli government’s military aid for the Guatemalan government during the war. Colombia has also been
compared to apartheid Israel, mainly in terms of the two countries’ governments fighting wars for the USA,
displacing millions of indigenous people, murdering hundreds of thousands more, legitimizing state terrorism in
terms of a fight against terrorism, and refusing to solve or even recognize the basic problems behind the
violence. See Mondragon: The South American Israel, 2003. See Steinsleger: Israel in Colombia: Death Do We
Impart, 2008, on Israeli training of Colombian death squads and paramilitaries. Brazil, similar to Colombia, is
probably about to see the extinction of its native population soon, as it is already down to less than just one
percent of the total population. See Fenton 1999: 41. In Peru, the indigenous are also severely marginalized,
although they still amount to 33 percent of the population. See Mellado: Peru Party Seeks to Reclaim Power for
Native People, 2002. On Guatemala, see also North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) editors: An
Interview with Rigoberta Menchu, 1996, where the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate refers to ‘apartheid
in Guatemala’ in previous years. See Valji: Race, Citizenship and Violence in Transitioning Societies: A
Guatemalan Case Study, 2004, for a good comparison between Guatemala and South Africa, which considers
Guatemala less liberated from racist white domination than South Africa. Not until December 2001 was there a
first compensation to victims when an equivalent of $1.8 million was paid to families of 226 men, women and
children massacred by soldiers and paramilitaries in the village of Las Dos Erres in 1982. Brosnan: Guatemala
Compensates Wartime Massacre Survivors, 2001. See also: Brosnan: Guatemalan Human Rights Worker Shot
Dead, 2002. On femicide in Guatemala, see footnote 351 below. On the huge numerical imbalances in the racial
identities of the perpetrators and victims of gross human rights violations in apartheid societies in general, and
Israel/Palestine in particular, see Section III.4 below.
66

considered in this chapter do, except perhaps for the now following society: Outremer. In the
formal sense of my definition of apartheid (see Chapter I.7 below) Guatemala is even more of
an apartheid society than Rhodesia is, mainly because of its larger oppressive racial minority,
around 40 percent of the entire population today, and its much longer period of formal
political independence.53

Overboard in Outremer: The Crusaders’ Kingdom of Jerusalem

Beginning in 1096 CE, racist and sectarian Roman Catholic fanatics from western
Europe arrived by land and by sea to invade Palestine and adjacent regions in order to ‘win
back’ the country where Jesus of Nazareth was born and killed. (It had been under Christian
rule for a few centuries under West and then East Roman rule.) The scene was set now by
Pope Urban II, who promised divine forgiveness of all kinds of sins for crusaders, and by a
host of new militant monastic ideologues, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached
holy war against Muslims. Many of the leading crusaders were warrior monks, organized in
military orders, known as the Templars, the Hospitalers, and the Teutonic Knights, and bound
by chastity vows and other strict rules. Yet again – after having been Imperial Rome’s
compulsory and extremely brutally enforced state religion and having become Vatican state
policy – the supposed religion of loving the enemy became the religion of suppressing,
exploiting, hating, and annihilating the enemy. And not for the last time.
In what was to last nearly 200 years, a kingdom consisting of more or less connected
feudal fiefdoms, also involving satellite Latin principalities, was set up in today’s
Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, as well as in parts of Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt, by
Roman Catholic elites, mainly from what is today France, England, Italy, and Germany, but
also from Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and
elsewhere in Europe. ‘Outremer’ is French and means ‘Oversea’. Often, crusaders in general
were referred to by the local Arabic-speakers as ‘Franks’. Crusades also took place in eastern
Europe, southern France, and especially on the Iberian peninsula, where they manifested
themselves as wholesale ethnic cleansing of Moors and Arabs, i.e. of Muslims and Jews, as
they did in the Holy Land and elsewhere. In Palestine, the main target of the Roman Catholic
crusades, there was a colonialist aspect in much of the behavior of the westerners, but it was
even more genocide, and mostly apartheid.
Especially Muslims were ethnically cleansed by the crusaders, but so were Palestinian
and European Jews, and even Palestinian and Egyptian Christians. The politically most
important of the fiefdoms was Jerusalem, which was the capital of most of the conquered
territory most of the time, though the indigenous people and their neighboring allies, also

53
Furthermore, due to the high percentage of people of European descent and the manner in which they
established themselves, Guatemala is also closer to a genocidal society than Rhodesia – an essentially colonialist
atrocity with an apartheid veneer towards the end of its existence. Also very similar in this regard to Guatemala
is Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. There, too, a
minority of Whites has dominated a sixty percent indigenous majority. For 500 years, the indigenous had been
denied jobs and education. Until the 1950s, most of them were virtual slaves in mines or on plantations. Until
very recently, they were poorly represented politically, and indigenous lawmakers, slowly growing in numbers,
were still unable to address Congress in their native languages. In 2002, Evo Morales, similar to Nelson
Mandela, became the first indigenous person to contest presidential elections. He lost the first election, but
gained 21 percent of the vote, which was widely seen as an encouraging sign by the oppressed majority
indigenous groups. See Jones: Bolivia’s Indians Win Long-Awaited Political Voice, 2002. But in 2005, Morales
won the presidential elections with an absolute majority after three years of worsening neo-liberal concentration
of wealth and power. He is since then the first head of state or government in Bolivia who comes from the
indigenous majority since the white invasion half a millennium ago. See Gordon, G.: Evo Morales Becomes
Bolivia’s Next President, Now His Real Challenge Begins, 2005. Whatever Morales’ legacy will be, it is a
turning point: ‘…the history of Bolivia is a history whose essential elements revolve around the relationship
between the indigenous peoples of the land and the descendants of the Spanish invaders. It is a study in
discrimination based on ethnic origin and class; traditional religion and Catholicism; and the people of Bolivia
and its northern neighbor [the USA].’ Jacobs: Grassroots Rising: The Story of Evo Morales, 2010
 67

mainly Arabs and Muslims, won the city back twice before the westerners finally withdrew.
Other crusader-held cities such as Akka (in coastal, pre-1948 Palestine) and Damietta in
Egypt served as the Christian kingdom’s de facto capitals during these periods.
The crusades have been interpreted mainly as the results of religious fanaticism, zeal
and intolerance, but I believe western European racism against Arabs, Turks, and Kurds, i.e.
against Muslims, Jews, and Christians, played a substantial, and often dominant, role in the
making of the crusades as well as of Outremer. This can be confirmed by a closer look at the
crusaders’ treatment of Jews and Arab Christians.
On many occasions Palestinian Christians were targeted along with Muslims, and so
were Palestinian Jews, all of whom must have looked rather alike to the invaders, and all of
whom had Arabic as a mother language. Moreover, crusaders murdered many Jews,
Hungarians and other people (some Christian) considered non-Christian in Europe, usually
whilst marching through the continent on their way to the Holy Land.
Of course, Arab Christians did not recognize the Pope in Rome as their leader or as a
divine appointee – they were Greek-Orthodox, Jacobites, Georgian, Armenian, Nestorians,
Melkites, and Coptics – and so sectarianism within Christianity, but especially on the side of
the relatively and absolutely intolerant Roman Catholics, also played a role. Aside from both
of these important factors, a temporary population surge in western Europe along with the
missionary nature of both Christianity and Islam, and the violence with which both religions
spread, also played important roles in enabling the crusades. It was only after the Byzantine
emperor had called for western European military aid against the Seljuk Turks whose militant
expansionism had progressively shrunk the Byzantine Empire that the crusades actually got
off the ground. Yet, Palestine was not part of the Byzantine direct worries any more, and the
exceptional cruelty of the crusaders would set new standards, becoming a source of
embarrassment, worry, fear, and horror for the Byzantines and for Arab Christians, until
today.
The motivation as well as the behavior and ideology of the crusaders and the many
semi-civilian settlers and pilgrims who came with them to Palestine have confounded many
historians and others, but especially the native populations. On their way south in 1098, the
crusaders destroyed, plundered and conquered whole towns, cities and countries, including
Ma’ara in Syria. After a protracted siege of their town, around 10,000 Arab and Turkish
inhabitants were massacred by the crusaders, despite previous assurances by the invaders that
their lives would be spared. The Christian soldiers then proceeded to eat human meat, i.e.
Muslim men, women and children. Men and women were boiled. Children were barbequed on
spits. It is unknown if this was done only due to food shortage, but it appears that it was not.
Racial hatred also played a considerable role, so much so that one of the crusaders who
participated in the carnage, Albert d’Aix, a historian, implied that eating Arabs and Turks was
in any event preferable to eating dogs.
Similarly, when the crusaders first conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they killed nearly
every Muslim and every Jew in the city. Although we are now fairly certain that they
exaggerated slightly, contemporary sources stated that there was no street in the city in which
one did not wade ankle-deep in blood, guts, hacked-off heads, limbs and other body-parts
after that conquest. (On this particular occasion Palestinian Christians were spared, yet
probably only inadvertently, as the Muslim and Jewish defenders of the Holy City had
expelled the remaining indigenous Christians prior to the crusader onslaught, fearing that they
might betray their Arab brethren. Many indigenous Christians had also fled out of fear of the
crusaders. Thus, there were no Christian Palestinians left in the city for the crusaders to
massacre on this occasion.)54

54
Maalouf: Der Heilige Krieg der Barbaren: Die Kreuzzüge aus der Sicht der Araber, 32003 (1983): 54f; 66ff.
One possible attempt at an excuse for the cannibalism at Ma’ara would be that the crusaders might have heard
from Muslims that dogs are unclean, i.e. unedible to them like pigs, and believed them. But it seems a bit
68

After the 1099 bloodbath, Muslims and Jews were legally forbidden by the crusaders
from entering Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third
holiest site, were turned into a church and warehouse for the Templars. There were plans and
even a futile attempt to go on and conquer Mecca. But many crusaders returned home to
Europe after the conquest of Palestine, and Jerusalem turned into a ghost town. Indigenous
Christians were then made less underprivileged than other indigenous people. In order to
bring them back into the conquered towns and cities, the new rulers largely exempted them
from discriminatory taxes and prohibitions, but they were never to achieve equal status with
the Europeans in court. They were also slowly allowed back into Jerusalem by the new racial
elite.
Non-Christians, on the other hand, were forced to dress differently from Christians.
They were not allowed to carry weapons or ride horses. The majority Muslims, especially,
were forced to pay extra taxes and were given the lowest status in legal courts.
Yet, the western Europeans are not to blame for introducing these kinds of oppression
into Palestine. All of these forms of discrimination, save genocide, had previously been
practiced by Muslims against non-Muslims, including Christians. But the Christians now went
a couple of steps further. Through violence and intimidation all non-Christians were banished
from cities and areas perceived to be of religious or strategic importance, including Jerusalem.
The ruling Muslims had previously not banned non-Muslims from their holiest sites. It should
not be forgotten in this context, that the empire(s) of Rome had initially made Christianity a
brutally enforced, compulsory state religion long before the advent of Islam, in Palestine as
elsewhere, and that Islam was therefore ostensibly less intolerant than the European, state-
backed version of Christianity, even if state-backed Islam also discriminated against non-
converts.55
Salah ad-Din (Saladin) and his forces liberated Jerusalem from western European rule
88 years after the initial crusader victory. By 1243, fourteen years after having retaken the
holy city by means of threats and negotiations, the European Christians appear to have
become more civilized, as they expelled all the Muslims from Jerusalem rather than killing
them all. However, they still expelled the Muslims in breach of the very treaty by which they
had regained the city from Muslim rule, and thus again horrified the indigenous population.56
In fact they did something very similar to what Israel is doing in the same city today: a
slow, mainly bureaucratic, but all the same, a relentless and brutal kind of ethnic cleansing of
indigenous people. Again, Muslims are the main victims, but also Palestinian Christians and
other non-Jews, and even some Jews, are being targeted today.
The crusaders’ conquest of Bilbeis in Egypt in 1168 was followed by another
wholesale massacre of Muslim and Christian men, women and children, for no known reason.
Usually communities that put up resistance were massacred by the crusaders, but Bilbeis had

contrived to me. Since the crusaders hated the Muslims and Arabs so much, it appears far-fetched to assume that
they would trust Muslims and Arabs as to what meat would be edible. Secondly, Muslims would hardly have
told them that human meat was fit for consumption. From 1112, Jerusalem actually became a more secular state
than any of the contemporary Christian states in Europe, according to Armstrong, K.: A History of Jerusalem:
One City, Three Faiths, 1997 (1996): 280. This would rhyme well with my thesis here that the crusades were
racially as well as religiously motivated, at least from this point in time onwards.
55
Riley-Smith: Gründung und Verwaltung der lateinischen Siedlungen in der Levante, 2007: 89ff.
56
Read: The Templars, 1999: 218. That civilizing process (in the most basic meaning of the term) had no doubt
been initiated by Salah ad-Din, who spared all of Jerusalem’s inhabitants – even letting many of them go rather
than enslaving them – when he conquered it from Latin rule in 1187, after a bloody siege. During Jerusalem’s
second term as capital of a Roman Catholic kingdom, it was under conditions by treaty between the Latins and
the Muslims. Those conditions, previously demanded by Muslim negotiators, included tolerance of Muslims and
Jews, i.e. until 1243, when the Latins broke the treaty. During this era, Cairo and Baghdad were the economic,
financial, trade, political, technological, cultural, and spiritual centers of the so-called ‘old’ world, and Europe
was only part of the periphery. As such, it received more from the center in terms of culture and technology than
it gave back.
 69

surrendered without a fight. Similarly, when the crusaders reconquered the Palestinian city of
Nablus in 1242, they killed many of the inhabitants, Muslim and Christian alike. The historian
of the Templars, Piers Paul Read, refers to the crusader, James of Vitry, who was the Bishop
of Acre (Akka) and who reported to the Pope that ‘…the indigenous Christians so loathed the
Latins [the western Europeans in Outremer] that they would rather be ruled by Muslims.’ The
same is valid for Christian Palestinians today, under the rule of a new set of western invaders.
Race thus turned out to be the priority with regard to victimization, not religion. James, who
was one of very few missionaries among the crusaders, nevertheless wanted the crusade to
continue. Among the reasons why there were so few missionaries seems to have been that
Turks, Kurds and Arabs, whether Muslims or Christians, as well as Jews, were mostly or
always seen by the crusaders as beyond redemption, or simply as entirely dehumanized
obstacles to the aggressive repopulation of Palestine with western European population
segments.57
There are explicit references to Outremer as an ‘apartheid’ society by crusade
historians Joshua Prawer and Raymond C. Smail.58 The following quote from Prawer,
referring to the status of the worst-off Europeans in the kingdom, who were not serfs as they
would have been back in Europe, to me sums up a typical, and indeed almost defining,
apartheid situation: ‘Though hierarchic, it was a society of free men, where even the poorest
and most destitute were not only free [i.e. not serfs] but enjoyed a higher legal standing than
the richest among the conquered native population’.59 As in the USA during the era of
pioneers and slavery and later, as in apartheid South Africa, and elsewhere, economic class
was not the main dividing force in this society, and neither was religion. Race was.
The crusader kingdom can thus be compared in structure, if not in detail, with
apartheid South Africa, as well as with the other main example of apartheid in the modern
world, i.e. with modern Israel. According to the Israeli intellectual, Uri Avnery, ‘…every
Arab child learns this history and compares us with them’, i.e. Israelis or Zionists with the
crusaders.60 The main street in Arab east Jerusalem is Salah ad-Din Street.
We have in each case the invasion by western Europeans of a place outside Europe,
and brutal subjugation of and systematic discrimination against the indigenous majority. In
each case there are independent states run by invaders, who claim the country as theirs by
divine right, and who carry out and profit from the oppression, but so does a considerable
population of semi-civilian western settlers, visitors, and a group of local collaborators and
neutrals.
Joshua Prawer, the Israeli crusade historian who referred to the Kingdom of Jerusalem
as an apartheid society, also made comparisons between the crusaders and the Zionists,
coming up with what he considered an important difference: Whereas, according to him,
crusaders hardly worked the land, but rather exploited native peasants, Israelis work the land
themselves. Importantly, however, this is actually at most a gradual difference. There were
(privileged) civilian settlers and agricultural workers of the same race as the new racial elites
in Outremer and apartheid South Africa as well as in modern Israel. And there have been and
are many Palestinians and third ethnicities working the land in Israel, often under conditions
of severe exploitation by the Jewish owners and controllers of the land. In fact, there were
hardly any Jews in the Palestinian countryside in 1947. Prawer’s interpretation of medieval
history thus appears to have been wishful thinking (‘Zionists are not as bad as the crusaders’)

57
Maalouf 32003 (1983): 184; Read 1999: 217, quote 212; Prawer: Social Classes in the Crusader States: the
“Minorities”, 1985: 61
58
Prawer: The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, 1973; Smail: Crusading
Warfare 1097-1153, 1995, both cited in Riley-Smith 2007: 91
59
Prawer 1973: 504, quoted in Read 1999: 129. For a more comprehensive definition of apartheid, see Section
I.7. below.
60
Avnery: Salaam or Salami: Israeli Unilateralism and Peace, 2005. Jimmy Carter tells of Syrian then-president
Hafez al-Assad emphasizing the same point to him during negotiations. See Carter 2006: 79f.
70

as well as a twisted justification of present-day ethnic cleansing on his part.61

One of the most striking similarities to me is the likeness between civilian and semi-
civilian Jews, whether settlers or visitors, in the occupied West Bank today, and the following
description of Catholic Christian westerners and their situation in almost exactly the same
places nine centuries ago:

[T]he distinction between pilgrim and crusader remained imprecise. These

not only prayed [in Jerusalem], but set out on a tour of various shrines of
Judaea and Samaria [today’s West Bank] which a familiarity with the
Scriptures and indifference to historicity made a theme park of the…religion.
. . . Because of the nature of the terrain and the disaffection of the Muslims
among the inhabitants, the route was no safer than it had been in the days of
the Good Samaritan. From the moment when they landed at Jaffa or
Caesarea, the pilgrims were vulnerable to attack by Saracen marauders and
Bedouin brigands…62

There are also similarities, and indeed identities, when it comes to ideology. With time
apartheid, colonialist, and even genocidal invaders using their fantasy invariably attempt to
convince themselves and others, including of course the indigenous people, that it is
(somehow) beneficial for the indigenous people just to be exposed to the culture, the
absolutely superior culture, of the invaders.63
The Biblical invasion of Cana’an by the ancient Jews, as described in the Old
Testament’s Book of Joshua and elsewhere, is a tale of divinely sanctioned ethnic cleansing
and genocide of the Cana’anites by the invading Israelites (probably untrue, but that is not of
importance here). We will take a look at the importance of this story for the modern state of
Israel in Chapter II.9.3. The modern Israelis, however, are not the first to use this legend as
inspiration and justification for ethnic cleansing. The white South Africans did so (see
Chapter II.9.2), as did the crusaders. It is ironic that Jews in medieval Palestine – who saw
themselves as the descendants of the ancient Israelites – would be murdered systematically by
people who identified themselves with the same ancient Israelites that Jews saw as their
ancestors.64 And it is doubly ironic that contemporary Zionists, including a prime minister of
Israel, have used this ideology which has cost the lives of so many of their forebears, and in
some cases possibly of their own ancestors.
As any other apartheid society, the kingdom of Jerusalem displayed diversified

61
Pappe 2006: 30; N.N.: Joshua Prawer, August 23, 2007. The latter article mentions Ronnie Ellenblum, another
Israeli crusader historian, who has challenged Prawer’s notion of the extreme urbanization of Latin settlers. It
also quotes Ziad J. Asali, who considers Zionism ‘the heir – albeit illegitimate – of the Crusader movement’, and
who writes that Prawer ‘recognized the extent of the similarity in the individual and social experience of
Crusaders and Zionists. Rather than studying the comparison and denying its validity, he [Prawer] chose to study
the Crusader’s experience as if it were a historical model which could be completely analyzed and dissected in
order to benefit from its experience and avoid its mistakes.’ Asali: Zionist Studies of the Crusade Movement,
1992. The most obvious conclusion from Prawer’s interpretation would of course be that modern Zionists should
continue to expel or kill and replace the Palestinian farmers and other workers rather than exploit their work in
order not to eventually lose control over the land and the people. Moreover, according to N.N.: Joshua Prawer,
no date, ‘Prawer was a key contributor to Israeli government policy’. He may therefore have influenced Israeli
decision-makers, including the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and other government ministers,
to follow the genocidal US model of ‘handling’ natives rather than the crusader and South African apartheid
models – models that eventually failed. But it is also necessary here to re-emphasize the gradual nature of the
differences between ethnic cleansing (or genocide) and apartheid. Both Outremer and South Africa also had
many genocidal features. The USA also has many apartheid features, and it had even more in the past. And Israel
is still, despite Prawer and many other ethnic cleansing practitioners and advocates like him, more of an
apartheid society than a genocidal one.
62
Read 1999: 90
63
Löwstedt: Selling Colonialism, 2005
64
Read 1999: 216
 71

production and trade. Unlike colonies and ex-colonies, which are typically made economically
dependent on a very small number of export commodities by the colonial or neocolonial
power and thus strong dependence upon it, apartheid societies, even small ones such as this,
always developed strong economies when given enough time and stability to do so. After the
kingdom had introduced a feudal European-style economy, based on land-rents and taxes on
local (native) agricultural production and trade, the port and city of Akka gradually became a
world center of commerce and trade, comparable at the time with Constantinople or
Alexandria (though not with Baghdad or Cairo). The Muslim world offered commodities that
Europe came to demand increasingly from now on, including sugar, dyes, spices, and slaves.
The pilgrim and soldier traffic from and to Europe was also huge and very lucrative. Religious
fanatics, tourists, and others from western Europe came for redemption as well as for
adventure, power, and profit. The annual revenue of the city of Akka to the kings of Jerusalem
even came to exceed the state budget of England, one of western Europe’s chief powers at the
time.65
Modern Israel, the latest, the most advanced, and hopefully the last, apartheid society,
repeats aspects of the nine centuries older crusader kingdom in terms of military and
paramilitary strategy, sometimes in quite a close manner, especially when it comes to the
Palestinian territories conquered in 1967. Just like the Israelis started building settlement
islands and/or military bases in between the conquered Arab communities after two decades
of running a sovereign state, the crusaders also started building fortresses and castles
throughout Palestine, and especially around Jerusalem in the 1120s, also two decades after an
initial explosion of ethnic cleansing that resulted in apartheid statehood. There seems to be
more than mere coincidences linking the two societies.

A line of fortified churches and monastaries also encircled Jerusalem

at Ma’ale Adumin, on the Jericho road, Hebron, Bethany, Nabi
Samwil, al-Birah, and Ramallah. The Crusaders were not breaking
down the barrier of hatred that now existed between Western
Christianity and Islam but erecting massive stone walls against their
neighbors. Their states became artificial Western enclaves that
remained alien and inimical to the region. They were military states,
poised aggressively and constantly ready to strike.66

As for the differences with regard to white-ruled South Africa, they are comparatively
few, and only of a gradual nature. The kingdom of Jerusalem lasted less than two centuries,
from 1099 until 1291, and it lost its capital twice for long spells during that time, 1187-1229
and from 1244 until the end. Altogether, Jerusalem was a Christian capital for only 103 years.
Apartheid South Africa lasted almost twice as long as this kingdom and had a great deal more
territorial contiguity and political stability. (Cape Town was in the white supremacists’ hands
from 1652 until at least 1994, and once any other site perceived as important by the Whites
had been conquered, it remained in white hands until 1994, and longer, as well.) Obviously,
the military superiority of the invading forces was not as daunting as in South Africa, or in
Israel at present, or as in Egypt under Greek and Roman rule. The military edge of the

65
Ibid: 210-215
66
Armstrong, K. 1997 (1996): 285. See also ibid: 412, 421. Most of these are sites of some of many more illegal
Israeli settlements today. As many as half of Israel’s 550,000 illegal settlers on occupied Palestinian territory are
situated mainly on hilltops in a semi-circle around east Jerusalem, just like the crusader fortresses, thus ‘…poised
aggressively…’ at all times against the non-invader presence in the city. Furthermore, Armstrong’s mention of
the western invaders ‘erecting massive stone walls’ against the indigenous Palestinian majority ring almost
prophetic with regard to Israeli prime minister Sharon’s infamous and equally illegal ‘apartheid wall’, erected
after Armstrong’s book was published. (On the apartheid wall, see Chapter II.6.3 below.) But so does the rest of
this quote. It reveals some of the most obvious and strongest parallels between two different apartheid societies
in the same land.
72

crusaders was based on the fanaticism of the warrior-monks rather than on technology, as the
Arab world was more advanced technologically in general than western Europe was.
According to an Arab historian at the time, Osama Ibn Munqidh, the crusaders’ only military
advantages were their ‘courage’ and their ‘willingness to fight’. (Other factors that allowed
the Latins military success during this period included the lack of unity in the Arab and
Muslim so-called ‘worlds’, and Latin uses of these divisions.)67
Another difference, as noted above, is that the imported settlers were generally
confined to the cities. The invader caste was not as present geographically or socially as in the
more modern apartheid societies, and therefore there was less apartheid elite control over the
indigenous majority, which was, in turn, able to organize resistance successfully. Only with
the aid of outsiders, i.e. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian forces from outside the occupied areas,
however, did liberation finally come about. Salah ad-Din, for example, was a Kurd from
Tikrit in present-day Iraq. Similarly, it was the Arabians who militarily liberated Graeco-
Roman Egypt after a millennium of apartheid as well as Palestine from related colonial-
provincial rule (and finally let Jews back into the city after the Byzantine ban on Jews in
Jerusalem). South Africa was liberated, or at least liberated to a considerable extent, in a
different way, less militarily, but also with the aid of outsiders. Palestine today does not
appear likely to become liberated in a much different way. It also needs and has outsiders
assisting its cause, although we have so far been able to achieve very little against the almost
continuous expansion of Israel.
The Arabs also resisted the crusaders culturally, and the extent of this resistance is
another difference between crusader and South African (as well as Graeco-Roman and Israeli)
apartheid. Many Latins learned Arabic, but the number of Arabs in the Kingdom of Jerusalem
who learned European languages was very small. With mostly valid reasons, the culture of the
invaders was perceived by the indigenous as barbaric, and assimilation with them was
probably seen as treason quite frequently. Indigenous South Africans learned Afrikaans and
English, Egyptians learned Greek (and Latin), and Palestinians learn Hebrew (and English).
However, partly due to these conditions, western Europe may be seen as the long-term winner
of the crusading wars, despite its obvious military loss in Palestine, and the Arabs (and Turks,
Kurds, and Jews) as the long-term losers.
In a way similar to Vietnam with regard to the USA since the 1970s, or to KwaZulu
with regard to the British Empire in 1879, the invaders were successfully fought off, the
homeland was liberated, but at such a high price that the victors of the war would eventually
lose in the wider, more globalized conflict. Vietnam finally had to succumb to capitalism and
other western values and institutions – largely due to global US economic and media power –
and KwaZulu eventually had to accept British imperial rule, just as the Arab and Muslim
cultures have reluctantly been giving in to western domination during the last two centuries
especially, but almost continuously since the 14th century. The Lebanese historian, Amin
Maalouf, argues cogently that late Medieval Europe was immeasurably enriched by Arab and
Muslim culture, science, and technology (and socially enriched by such phenomena as
hygiene and chivalry) during and following the crusades, whereas the Arab and Muslim
worlds closed themselves in as a result of the traumatic experience, becoming increasingly
introspective and self-occupied. The additional trauma of the temporarily overlapping and
equally brutal Mongol invasions, which were partly coordinated with the crusaders’ warfare
on Arabs and Islam (and others), accentuated the closing-in of the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Just as the crusaders killed everyone in Jerusalem in 1099, the Mongols killed everyone in the

67
Quoted in Maalouf 32003 (1983): 54. On some of the important Latin alliances with Muslim leaders: 102ff. On
the lack of Muslim or Arab unity: 74ff. See also Hillenbrand: Ankunft im Vorderen Orient, 2007: 33, according
to whom the enmities between various conflicting Muslim powers were largely behind the initial military success
of the crusaders.
 73

city when they conquered Baghdad in 1258.68

In the year 2000, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, apologized for
the crusades, a basically unprovoked 200-year long attack on innocent people by his
predecessors and his organization. Seven years later, this apology was denounced as political
correctness run amok, ironically by a Jew, Bernard Lewis, who was one of the chief neo-
conservative ideologues behind the present US-led war in Iraq, another war that manifests
disturbing signs of being part of a holy war against Muslims waged by some of the western
elites. For Lewis, and many others like him, it was apparently acceptable or even
commendable that ignorant western European racists and fanatics murdered large numbers of
European and Palestinian Jews, presumably since they murdered even more Muslims and
since they conquered a coveted piece of mainly Muslim land in the process, a piece of land
that he sees as best controlled by ‘western culture’ and western weapons.69

Invasions, Segregation and Discrimination in Liberia

A further example of apartheid was the West African state of Liberia under the control
of the so-called ‘Americo-Liberians’, the descendants of American slaves and freeborn
American Blacks, from 1847 until 1980. Starting off already in 1821 with Cape Mesurado and
what was to become the capital, Monrovia, Liberia was at first very similar to early white-
ruled South Africa in that it was a colony run by a powerful North Atlantic country and
organization, a colony which later turned into an independent apartheid state. Liberia,
however, was not started by the invariably ‘black’ Americo-Liberians, but by white American
men, who on the one hand included mostly abolitionists, liberals, evangelicals, and Qakers,
but also slave-owners who did not want any free Blacks in America. The abolitionists, many
of them also racist against Blacks, wished the freed slaves well in Africa, but they also
generally did not want free Blacks to live among them in America. At the time, a tenth of all
Blacks in the USA were non-slaves, and there was resentment about their competition
amongst the white working classes, and about their physical existence by slave-owners and
pro-slavery advocates, who saw these ‘free’ Blacks as threats, as dangerous and radical anti-
slavery activists behind several recent bloody slave revolts in the USA as well as in Haiti and
elsewhere. The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, also known
as the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, played roughly the same
almost defining role that the Dutch East India Company would do in South Africa (see
Chapter I.9.2, below), except that the former was racist against its own colonialist and

68
Maalouf 32003 (1983): 279ff. I believe a close and unbiased, global look at the influence of media products on
people’s perception of the Vietnam War is likely to yield that the globally dominant view today is that the
Americans were somehow the good guys and the Vietnamese, defending their own country from anti-democratic
invaders targeting millions of innocent indigenous civilians with weapons of mass destruction, the bad. See
footnote 849. On KwaZulu, see Chapters II.1.1-2 below. Similarly, there are in western European languages
often unfortunately still positive undertones to the use of the word ‘crusade’ and its many derivatives, e.g.
‘crusading for human rights’.
69
Carrol: Pope Says Sorry for Sins of Church, 2000; Weisberg: Neo-cons have Been Consigned to History,
2007. The latter suggests that American neo-conservatives today hope that their Iraq war might be viewed
favorably – in 900 years’ time! Lewis’ judgment was made public at a speech to the American Enterprise
Institute and its driving forces, the then US vice-president, Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne. According to
Weisberg, who attended the annual party of the institute, which included the presentation of an award to Lewis,
the latter’s attack on the dead Pope drew applause from the gathered neo-cons. The other half of the double
entendre relating to the title of Weisberg’s article refers to the utter lack of self-criticism within the neo-
conservative movement. After four years of bloodshed in Iraq and a majority of the US population strongly
opposed to continuation of the war, its instigators appeared blissfully unaware of having done anything wrong,
and due to this blatant lack of reflection, morality, and humanity, their ideology appeared destined for the
scrapheap of history. See also footnote 758 below. Another militant Zionist ideologue who sympathizes and even
identifies with the crusaders is the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, who has come out strongly in favor of further
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine in recent years. See Kovel 2007: 186; Pappe: Out of the Frame:
The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel, 2010: 17f, 20f, 38f.
74

apartheid agents. Later on, the ACS was increasingly taken over by other white Americans
who also used it and wanted to use it as a foreign policy resource, i.e. as an imperialist tool
against other non-Whites, until its demise in 1919. Blacks were not allowed membership in
the organization.
The ACS was backed by influential Americans, such as George Washington’s nephew
Bushrod Washington, an Associate Supreme Court Justice, and US presidents James Monroe
(in whose honor Liberia’s capital was named) and Abraham Lincoln. It raised large sums,
including US tax money, to send between 10,000 and 19,000 free American Blacks to Cape
Mesurado between 1821 and 1867, similar to how the Dutch had sent French Protestant
survivors (of Catholic pogroms) to the Cape of Good Hope, to how the Greeks sent Jews from
Palestine to Egypt during Ptolemaic times, to how European anti-Semites sent Jews to
Palestine and Israel since the early 20th century, or to how Christian and Jewish Zionists and
others today also send Jews to Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories (see Chapter
II.9.3, below). Generally, they were not directly coerced to go, but they were frequently
rewarded for doing so. During the mid-19th century, the US navy also intercepted slave
transports in the Atlantic Ocean to free slaves, mainly bound for Cuba and Brazil, and would
settle some 6,000 of the liberated slaves as well as some 300 Caribbeans in Liberia. These
people would come to occupy an intermediary position in the Liberian racial apartheid
hierarchy, above the majority native Liberians, but below the elite black Americans who
outnumbered them two or three to one, like the Indians in South Africa, or the many migrant
victims of globalization in Israel.
Having faced and still facing some of the worst racism in human history in North
America, many Blacks there were happy to ‘go back’ to West Africa, from where many of
their ancestors had originally been kidnapped and sold. Still, the vast majority of free US
Blacks did not support the ACS. There were around 200,000 free (and some 1.8 million
enslaved) Blacks in the USA in the early 1820s. Having been forcibly stripped of their
African cultural and religious identities over the previous generations, US Blacks mostly
wanted to stay in the country, economy, and society that they, and in many cases their
ancestors, had largely built, in the only place they knew and could know as home.
The following quote grossly misrepresents South Africa as having arrived at apartheid
later than Liberia and unfairly gives the impression that only Afrikaners, and not at all the
British, are to blame for apartheid in South Africa. As we shall see, there were in fact laws
against interracial marriage, and even laws permitting genocide of indigenous Africans in
South Africa long before Liberia, and urban segregation of races, among other racist
measures, was introduced by the British to South Africa from 1828 onwards. But the quote
still draws perceptive parallels between Liberia and South Africa, emphasizing the violent
essence of apartheid as well.

As early as the middle of the 19th century, long before apartheid was
instituted in southern Africa by the Afrikaners, it had been invented
and made flesh by the rulers of Liberia – descendants of black slaves.
In the small, bigoted world of Monrovia, an ordinance was instituted
forbidding close contacts with the local population, particularly
intermarriage. To this end, the government in Monrovia allocated to
each tribe (there are 16 of them) a territory where they were allowed
to live – not unlike the typical ‘homelands’ created for Africans
decades later by the white racists from Pretoria. All who spoke out
against this were severely punished. The chiefs of unsubmissive tribes
 75

were eliminated on the spot, the rebellious population murdered or

imprisoned, its villages destroyed, its crops set afire.70

Therefore, this was a true, full-blown apartheid society, and the black Americans and
people of black American descent who practiced apartheid in Liberia were and are, ironically,
guilty of perpetrating the very same crime against humanity that many Whites perpetrated
against Blacks in South Africa until 1994, or that many Jews in Israel/Palestine since around
1947 have committed until today. They are guilty of a crime that, as we have seen, has been
compared extensively with some of the crimes carried out against Blacks in America. The first
Liberian elections were held in 1848, but the rights to citizenship and to vote were only
extended to the indigenous African majority population 56 and 98 years later, respectively.
Other kinds of discrimination against the vast indigenous majority persisted for decades after
that. Forced labor, for example, was extracted from the natives until the 1970s. Like the
Whites in South Africa, Black Americans in Liberia also saw, or at least portrayed themselves
as being on a mission to civilize and westernize Africans and to convert them to Protestant
Christianity. The long-dominant True Whig political party and an exclusively male and
secretive Freemasonry were also important power factors in apartheid Liberia, like the
National Party and the exclusively male and secretive Afrikaner Broederbond (see Chapter
II.9.2 below) in apartheid South Africa. From 1821 until 1847, Liberia was a US colony in
Africa, with white American governors until 1842, but thereafter, from 1847 until 1980, for a
period of 133 years, it was an independent, apartheid state with a black racist, dominant,
invading minority that never exceeded five percent of the entire population of the country, one
that was often crucially backed by western money and guns, just like apartheid South Africa
and Israel, and similarly, nonetheless, principally left to its own devices.
The epiapartheid violence and the conflict were still reverberating in Liberia very
recently as exemplified by the International Criminal Court 2012 indictments and fifty year
jail sentence against Charles Taylor, a partly Americo-Liberian warlord who was also
president of the country between 1997 and 2003, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Repeatedly and continuously torn to pieces since nearly 200 years by apartheid, civil wars,
and outsider manipulations by the European colonial powers as well as the USA, and by the
Firestone car tire company, and others, Liberia is still one of the poorest countries in the world
today. 85 percent of the Liberia’s population lives below the international poverty line. The
election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, of indigenous ancestry though culturally Americo-Liberian,
for president in 2005 in the freest and fairest elections in Liberian history, is a signal and
symbol of hope that the country is finally liberating itself of apartheid. English, however,
remains the only official language, the nation’s official flag mainly represents the American
origins of one Liberian in twenty, and native Liberians remain underrepresented in other
ways, too.
Invasion, strangely, came last for the Americo-Liberian elites, as opposed to South
Africa, Guatemala, Rhodesia, the kingdom of Jerusalem, and most of Israel/Palestine. At first,
it was still a de facto invasion, since US Whites had made the initial land ‘purchase’, at
gunpoint, from a local African chief, and then gave the colony to the American Blacks, who
had been intentionally and completely excluded from the planning, implementation, and
administration of the colonializing process. That is perhaps unique for an apartheid society:
that the apartheid elite is so weak, and indeed uninvolved, initially. After independence,
however, Liberia expanded like Israel or South Africa, i.e. through militant and military
expansionism, and with a racist ideology to match. Vastly superior militarily, the Americo-
Liberians used rifles and even received some military assistance from the USA, whereas the

70
Kapuscinski: Slaves of Freedom (extract from ‘The Shadow of the Sun’), 2001. One should perhaps even
compare the tribal territories of Liberia to Native American reservations and Palestinian enclaves rather than to
South African Homelands, but all comparisons seem apt and useful.
76

indigenous Africans used muskets and bows and arrows in armed confrontations. The initial
apartheid society in Liberia, then, was a kind of apartheid that is mostly close to colonialism,
rather than genocide. Instead of enslaving the indigenous in the way their own brethren had
been, and still were enslaved, the Americo-Liberians would often rent them out as migrant
unskilled labor, especially to Liberia’s European colony neighbors. Apartheid developed out
of a de facto invasion and was preceded by a short period of colonialism. This is perhaps most
similar to Ptolemaic Egypt (in which the elite Greeks took over Egypt from the previous
occupiers, the Persians), and secondly to modern Israel (who took over Palestine from the
British) as well as to British South Africa 1806-1910 (who took parts of it from the Dutch).
Liberia spread along the coast, around 800 kilometers, and then from the coastal region
inland, around 200 kilometers, invading indigenous lands, in similar ways to South Africa or
Israel, i.e. in opportunistic fits and starts.
In other ways, Liberian apartheid society is more similar to Guatemala, where a mixed
Spanish-Native class dominated the entirely indigenous majority. Some of the black
Americans in Liberia had white ancestors, mainly male American slave-owners who had often
forced slave women to have sex with them. This had made their skin color slightly, but often
noticeably, paler than that of the indigenous Africans. But more crucially, the lack of invader
‘blood’ was made synonymous with lack of privilege. Skin color would then become a less
important marker of race than cultural difference in Liberia, but, still, some forty invader
families, all of them with roots in the USA, came to dominate the country for over a century.
Like Guatemala and Rhodesia, but unlike South Africa, Israel, and Ptolemaic Egypt, Liberia
was also always a military lightweight on the global stage, in fact, the lightest of them all.
The scale of Liberia’s apartheid, moreover, is smaller than that of any of the other
apartheid societies dealt with in any depth in the course of this investigation. There are only
some tens of thousands of apartheid perpetrators in all of Liberia’s history, but millions each
in South Africa, Israel, Graeco-Roman Egypt, Outremer and Guatemala, and hundreds of
thousands in Rhodesia. Liberia’s economy was also lightweight enough to resemble a colonial
economy rather than a typical apartheid one. It was largely dependent on rubber and iron ore
exports during the 20th century.71
As we look deeper into the case of the Liberian apartheid elite, there are some further
interesting parallels between them and apartheid elites elsewhere. It may indeed feel difficult
to hold American Blacks responsible for apartheid in Liberia, since they had previously been
victims of such horrific crimes in America and to some extent possibly even manipulated by
immensely powerful Whites in the USA to become racist rulers themselves, just as it feels
hard to blame European Jews for apartheid in Palestine, since they had previously been
victims of such horrific crimes in Europe and have been (and still are) being manipulated by
very powerful western, islamophobic (often right-wing Christian), anti-Arab racists to fight a
similar kind of proxy war on one of the front lines of the ongoing, perceived clash of
civilizations.
But we are all responsible for our own actions. And the indigenous apartheid victims
of Liberia and Palestine certainly did not deserve to be killed, dispossessed and displaced. To
consider and call Liberia a ‘colonialist’ or ‘settler colonialist’ tragedy or atrocity is therefore
misleading, since it, whether implicitly or explicitly, would only allow one to place the
ultimate blame on the responsible North Atlantic elites who sent them there, but not on the

71
Iliffe 1995: 155-157, 191, 207, 253; American Memory/Library of Congress: History of Liberia: A Time Line,
1998; N.N.: Maps of Liberia 1830 to 1870, no date; Mitter Duva: The Lone Star: The Story of Liberia, no date.
In one autobiographical account, an authoritarian Americo-Liberian tells his nephew in 1943: ‘Whites took every
little bit of Africa except our little country here. God planted us here. That’s why Liberia is God’s land. . . We’re
God’s chosen people too.’ Dennis & Dennis: Slaves to Racism: An Unbroken Chain from America to Liberia,
2008: 9f. In 1943 every single country in Africa except Liberia (and Ethiopia since ridding itself of the Italian
invaders in 1941) was in fact either under European colonial rule or under European-descendant rule (South
Africa).
 77

even more responsible local black Americans who were not forced to go there or to oppress or
kill the indigenous people or on any of their descendants in Liberia, i.e. on people who are in
my view responsible for apartheid, which is a crime far worse than colonialism under
international law.

Comparisons with Colonialist Societies:

British Destruction in Ireland
Northern Ireland, a British-imposed construction of six counties, re-creating and re-
delineating the province of Ulster in 1920 so as to ensure the existence of a privileged, pro-
British, Protestant and anti-Irish majority, has also been compared with South African
political and economic apartheid and can also be likened with the Israeli creation of a
privileged Jewish majority within the borders (and lately: the Apartheid Wall or ‘separation
barrier’) of the state of Israel. Previously, all of Ireland had suffered from centuries of
imposed English or British apartheid in a way more similar to South Africa and Graeco-
Roman Egypt, i.e. with a relatively small invader minority caste.
England first invaded Ireland in 1169, i.e. at the height of crusader power and
demographic increases in crusader countries, of which England was one of the main ones.
Although the Irish were not Pagans, infidels or heretics in the eyes of the Catholic Church in
Rome, they would soon be seen as such by the English. In the 14th century, in the small
toehold that the English had established on the island since the first invasion, the English
government at the same time exacerbated oppression and prevented English settlers from
integrating with the locals by outlawing the Irish language and also by making intermarriage
and trade between British and Irish people illegal. The authorities even prohibited the settlers
from wearing Irish dress and hairstyles and banned Irish poetry, music, and games.
From a contextual as well as interpretive point of view, though in no way as a
justification or legitimization, it should be added here that the original English people
themselves had previously been subjected to three waves of intense invader minority rule
within the short space of six centuries, by Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans, each of them
speakers of languages alien to the original British Celtic languages. In other words, the people
of what was to become England had themselves suffered apartheid rule, land theft,
oppression, segregation, and exploitation to such a large extent that the previous Celtic-
Roman British culture had ceased to exist as a result. Three times apartheid by new invaders
in a relatively short period of time thus had the end-effect of genocide, perhaps especially
cultural genocide. There are hardly any Celtic place names left in England today. This is an
even more complete cultural genocide than that of the Native Americans in the USA. In this
sense, the conquest of Ireland could also be seen as a continuation of very destructive
conquests of the eastern British Isles by mainly Germanic peoples since 1,500 years or so. The
English elites, now consisting of a mix of all these races (also including leftovers from the
preceding Roman intermezzo) with the latest wave of invaders atop and the Celtic element
soon reduced to but a memory, would then continue invader minority rule policies, i.e.
colonial and apartheid policies, on numerous occasions exacerbated by genocides, in the
Americas, especially North America, in Australia and New Zealand, in large parts of Africa,
India, and elsewhere, starting off with this appalling record, however, in Palestine (along with
French and other European crusaders), as we have just seen, and in Ireland.
At the end of the 16th century, the English, now Protestant, started bringing in settlers
in large numbers, in order to partly replace the ‘rude, beastly, ignorant, cruel and unruly
infidels’, as the English would now refer to the Irish. In the following century, Oliver
Cromwell, the Puritan republican dictator, overran the island with his troops, killing one
quarter of the country’s indigenous Catholics. Many innocent women and children were
massacred along with resistance fighters, whole communities forcibly moved to reservations.
At the end of the 17th century, already, the indigenous Catholic majority of Northern Ireland
78

owned less than five percent of the land. In the rest of Ireland it owned 14 percent. The Irish
were relentlessly being pushed back to the less fertile land, as well. At this time, the Irish were
closer to genocidal extinction than at any other time.
The reviled ‘Penal Laws’, introduced in 1692, barred Catholics, i.e. the indigenous
people, from teaching, buying land, voting, working in public service, in government, in
parliament, or in the military, and from practicing the legal profession. The laws also severely
restricted Catholic land ownership in other ways and limited education for Catholics. Most of
these racist laws were not repealed until 1829, i.e. after the British had taken over or imposed
similar laws in South Africa and elsewhere. But even after that, the conflict continued, for
instance due to many members of the vast Catholic majority remaining landless and
impoverished tenants to Protestant landlords, similar to what South Africans are experiencing
at present (economic apartheid and land apartheid), and of course due to continued foreign
British oppressive long-distance rule. The ‘potato famine’ of 1845 cut the already relatively
small Irish population by two million through emigration and starvation (one million each)
and fuelled further resentment against the many English absentee landlords who levied high
taxes or leases on ‘their’ indigenous farm workers, many of whom might otherwise have been
able to survive and stay. Similar to the ancient Egyptian language under Graeco-Roman rule
and the Khoisan languages in white-ruled South Africa, linguistic genocide was almost
achieved by the British oppressors, with a little help through further anglification from the
USA in latter times, but today the indigenous language is enjoying a remarkable comeback.
Several uprisings by the indigenous were put down with brutal force throughout the period of
British rule. But independence was finally won in 1921 for most of the island, not least due to
pressure on Britain from the new hegemon, the USA, where an Irish lobby had come to exert
influence on foreign policy.72
As in Israel/Palestine, there are still enormous unsolved issues which continue to haunt
Ireland. Belfast has walls similar to the infamous apartheid wall in the West Bank, one main
difference being that the much shorter and less tall Belfast walls, the so-called ‘peace walls’,
separate Catholics from Protestants, the two opposed races, the Irish and the British, whereas
Israel’s wall largely separates Palestinians from Palestinians and from Palestinian land. And
the interethnic violence continues in Ireland, mainly because of overdue British sovereignty
over the North, although the violence seems to have been contained significantly in recent
years. In the third part of this investigation, we will take a look at some of the lessons that can
be learned from peacemaking in Northern Ireland.
As for the differences, it is crucial to point out that Ireland under racist English and
British rule was never independent of London. It was therefore always much more of a colony
or an oppressed province than a fully-fledged apartheid society under minority English or
British rule, with its own independent state. Northern Ireland, moreover, still has a Protestant
majority, although the Catholic portion is growing constantly and at the beginning of this
century made up around 43.8 percent of the entire population, against 53.1 percent
Protestants.73 As mentioned above, Northern Ireland does correspond to the internationally

72
See Smedley: The Origins of Racism in England and Spain, 2003 (1993): 66f, quote: 67; N.N.: History of the
Conflict: A Sinn Féin Education Publication, 2006; N.N.: Factbox: Roots of the Northern Irish Conflict, July 9,
2002; Ericson: Reconciliation and the Search for a Shared Moral Landscape: An Exploration Based upon a Study
of Northern Ireland and South Africa, 2001; Fredrickson 1981: 13ff.
73
Richardson: Catholics Close Gap in N.Ireland Census, 2002. On the strong links and similarities between the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Palestinian militancy, on the one hand, and between Zionist militants and
Northern Irish loyalists, see Richardson: N.Irish Rivals See Links with Middle East Conflict, 2003; Roddy: Irish
Jews – Sitting Shiva on a Dying Way? 2003. Apparently, Palestine under British colonial rule, in a transitory
way supported in its undemocratic aspects by Zionists, was frequently compared by the occupiers to Northern
Ireland or ‘Ulster’, as some Protestants prefer to call it. See Reynolds: Conspiracy on Palestine, 1941: 52, which
refers to a Sir Ronald Storrs who calls Palestine ‘a Jewish Ulster’, with the Jews in the role of the Protestant
British and the Palestinians in the role of the Catholic Irish. See also Reynolds: The Pawns in Palestine, 1941:
42; and N.N.: Editor’s Introduction: 5, all in N.N. (ed.): British Imperialism & The Palestine Crisis, 1989.
 79

recognized state of Israel as well as the de facto Israel in this regard. The Palestinians with
Israeli citizenship in Israel, who resemble the Catholics in Northern Ireland, are also
oppressed. They do only make up 19 percent of the population, but their numbers are also
growing. In Historic Palestine, very similar to Northern Ireland in this regard, non-Jews will
soon be a majority again, which is probably the main reason behind recent renewed ethnic
cleansing and racist repopulation measures from the Israeli side. Yet, since the Palestinian
state does not (yet) exist; since the Irish are Christian, white, and European, as opposed to
most Palestinians; and since the Palestinian minority with Israeli citizenship is in relative
terms less than half that of the Northern Irish Catholic one, the Irish are now in a much
stronger position than the Palestinians to make demands on their previous and present
tormentors. The Palestinians, however, have United Nations mandates for self-determination,
restitution, and right of return, which the Northern Irish Catholics, including descendants,
lack. Most importantly, the Northern Irish Catholics and their descendants still suffer racist
discrimination, economic exploitation, and colonialist as well as apartheid violence, but not
even nearly to the same extent that the Palestinians do. And in general, too: although the Irish
have experienced apartheid and even genocidal treatment under the British, they have mostly
been victims of colonialist crimes.

Drug Dealers versus Squatters in Hong Kong

During the first half of the 19th century, the British Empire discovered a lucrative
means of short-term profit-making: buying opium grown in British India, shipping it to
eastern China, and selling it there. There may also have been long-term calculations involving
an induced breakdown of society and government in China in the plans of the British elites.
The Chinese government resisted the state-backed British drug dealers, which resulted in two
wars between China and Britain, the so-called ‘Opium Wars’, during the 1840s. Britain won
these wars due to its weapons of mass destruction (the British navy’s uniquely long-range
cannons which enabled the British to win all the battles, killing large numbers of Chinese
soldiers and civilians without losing a single soldier of their own), and aside from continuing
its very profitable sale to Chinese people of opiates – the most addictive drugs known to
mankind – it gained strategically invaluable territory at the mouth of the Pearl River. British
and American drug dealers, traders, and merchants moved in on the conquered land, and the
colony would soon become a prosperous ‘free trade’ haven for these kinds of people and their
associates. It has remained so to this day, although the drugs have since been banned
officially.
As in all other colonies, the victorious British remained a tiny minority dominating a
huge indigenous population, which was largely impoverished and lacked social, civil and
political rights, as well as citizenship and many other human rights, until the return of the
colony to Chinese rule in 1997, and even afterwards. One undemocratic, authoritarian state
capitalist ruler has now been exchanged for another one. But at least, the new one is less
ignorant, more legitimate from a moral perspective, and culturally more similar to the subjects
of the authoritarianisms. China also has a so far vastly superior record over Britain with
regard to international law and treaties. Like in South Africa since 1994, the political power
has been returned to indigenous people although land ownership and economic power is still
largely in white hands.
Prosperity had actually spread a great deal, however, during the last couple of decades
as Hong Kong became a vanguard global city, and Chinese middlemen had in fact been
involved in the initially dominant opium trade from the beginning. Already in the late 19th
century, the number of wealthy Chinese families in the city outnumbered the small number of
western families. And so Hong Kong may well have been more classist and less racist in this
regard than most colonies in Africa and elsewhere. But for the poor, there was and is no
difference. There is not much in either appearance or essence that separates Mongkok or
North Point, squatter shantytowns of Hong Kong, from the ‘townships’ of Soweto, Alexandra,
80

Mamelodi, or Gugulethu in apartheid (and partly also in epiapartheid) South Africa. Giant
reserves of cheap labor, of expendable people, are constants in systematic racist crimes
against humanity. And today, the racism is still there. Notwithstanding the 1990s revolutions
that did away with legalized racist privilege, minority Whites (especially British Whites) are
statistically much richer and still have many more informal privileges than the indigenous
people do, in Hong Kong as in South Africa.
Again, however, Hong Kong was never independent, and in this important respect
unlike South Africa and other true apartheid societies. (Some aspects of independence did
appear under and after British rule, but not enough to make Hong Kong more than a colony.)
And it never had a large number of Whites, either. Today, a mere 0.3 percent of the
population of Hong Kong is white. A few decades ago it was around one percent, but hardly
ever more than that. This is typical for colonial societies, in which large civilian settlements
preceded or followed by ethnic cleansing are not necessary ingredients, as opposed to
apartheid societies.74

Soviet Oppression at Home and Abroad

The parallels with the Soviet Union could also, at first, be argued convincingly. Both
apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union created a giant state apparatus and undertook
massive social engineering programs, including forced removals of millions of people, whole
segments of the population. Millions of people, who in one way or another stood in the way of
the raisons d’état, or simply innocent bystanders, were killed by zealot vigilantes as well as
by state-employed people. These costly adventures – in financial as well as human terms –
were made possible only by industrialization, the advent of which nearly coincided in the two
countries at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Moreover, both states, it
has been argued, were rendered obsolete by further industrialization. In each case, the
development of an increasingly dominant globalized capitalist economy – in which both
countries were increasingly becoming enmeshed due to circumstances ultimately beyond their
own control – demanded a state with less expenditure and less state intervention and control
of markets.75
Indeed, only half a year lies between the demise of the apartheid laws in South Africa
and the end of the Soviet Union. South Africa and the former Soviet republics are at present
also facing very similar restructuring problems manifesting themselves primarily as high
unemployment, large informal economies, high crime-rates, and lingering structural and
practical difficulties with adapting to globalized capitalism.
There are substantial differences between apartheid South Africa and the Soviet
Union, as well. Their governments were on opposite ends of the Cold War political-
74
Wong: Hong Kong Growing as Part of China: A Historical Perspective, 1998; Knowles: Making Whiteness:
British Lifestyle Migrants in Hong Kong, 2005. Hong Kong has also been compared to colonialist aspects of
apartheid Israel, most notably by Israel’s Labor Party leader, Amir Peretz. He suggested that Israel’s settlements
in the West Bank (illegal under international law) be ‘leased’ from the Palestinians, as most of Hong Kong’s
territory, the so-called ‘New Territories’, was leased from China for 99 years in 1898. An Israeli critic of the
suggestion, Meron Benvenisti, noted: ‘It is impossible to give any more fitting expression to the colonialist
nature of the annexation of parts of the West [Bank] than the example of the takeover by the British Empire…of
parts of the hapless Chinese Empire. Indeed, the inventors of the Hong Kong paradigm identified the similarity:
robber capitalism that operates under the auspices of military power against an impotent rival, the bullying
takeover of land and water resources while displacing the natives, and making huge profits…’ Quoted in
Barghouti, O.: The Israeli Elections: A Decisive Vote for Apartheid, 2006. I believe the worst poverty I have
ever witnessed personally and up close was in these four places: South Africa (which I have visited and where I
have worked repeatedly since 1998), Hong Kong (where I lived 1974-1976), Shatila (a Palestinian refugee camp
in Beirut, Lebanon) and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (where I visited and lived, respectively, 2004-
2005). In all four cases, it is to a very large extent, I would even say mainly, poverty imposed and wrought by
European expatriates upon non-European, indigenous majorities.
75
Iliffe 1995: 282ff; For the Soviet Union, see Castells: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,
Volume III, End of Millennium, 22000: 1-69.
 81

ideological scale, South Africa was a right-wing dictatorship, the Soviet Union a left-wing
dictatorship, and they were almost at war against each other in Angola and Mozambique,
whose anti-colonialist and anti-apartheid movements and independent governments were
supported by the Soviets. The latter also supported the African National Congress (ANC), the
main South African resistance movement, in its struggle against apartheid, though not as
much as the ANC would have liked and nowhere near as much as the ANC’s African allies
did. At home, the Soviet elites appear to have targeted certain ethnic minorities as well as
economic and cultural groups with genocide, war, discrimination and oppression, but their
system of oppression was not racist in kind. If anything it was an imperialist and colonialist
kind of oppression, also outside Soviet borders, in other Warsaw Pact countries, and in other
more or less invaded countries, such as Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Another, much less non-
African Communist country, Cuba, has a much better track record in Africa, including large
human, political, and material sacrifices made in the struggles against apartheid and
colonialism, in end-effect possibly bringing more benefits to Africa than any North Atlantic
country has ever done.76 Lastly, the Soviet Communist Party was often supported by a
majority at home, not least due to covert and overt attacks on the country by the western
superpowers (Britain, USA, France and, most of all, Germany) but also because of its own
state-sponsored intimidation, terror, and propaganda – tools that were also employed to a great
extent but were unable to triumph in forcing a similar near-consensus in South Africa, partly
because, it should be added, South Africa did have a far higher degree and a more obvious
kind of exploitation and overt discrimination than the Soviet Union ever did.

Comparisons with Other Kinds of Societies:

Taliban ‘Gender Apartheid’
Another society sometimes labeled ‘apartheid’ was (most of) Afghanistan under
Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001. The targeted victims here were primarily women, who were
separated not only from men outside of their families but also from each other and from
society at large. This is how a journalist put it: ‘Women were subjected to a dire form of
gender apartheid under the Taliban. They could not attend school, were forbidden from
leaving their homes without a male relative and some were beaten for exposing an ankle or
too much of their wrists from under their head-to-toe veils.’77 This example of systematic
human rights violations takes us further away from the common-sense understanding of race
and racism. Yet, obviously, women are biologically different from men. And that difference is
in many ways greater than the biological differences between races. Gender and sexism, race
and racism, however, are in reality exclusively about culture. They are man-made forms of
oppression. They are not natural, since gender and race are cultural (i.e. political and
ideological) constructions.
The Taliban oppression of women was to a large extent about slavery, i.e. about
unpaid, and thus socially devalued, housework and childrearing, which are actually important
parts of a global phenomenon that has always accompanied human societies, or at least
societies that use money: patriarchy, i.e. male sexism. In Afghanistan under the Taliban,

76
Mandela 1995 (1994): 289ff. Apparently, the Soviet Union, a major diamond producer, was so weak
economically that it also felt forced to come to terms with the white South Africans due to the worldwide price
and market controls established and imposed by the giant South African diamond corporation, De Beers. See
Duodu: The Oppenheimer Conundrum, 2000: 30f. Most of the ANC’s African allies were poor, newly
independent, and militarily weak countries, conditions that made their assistance insufficient, especially when
compared to the already militarily superior South African government’s even more powerful military allies, the
USA, the UK, and Israel, in particular. On Communist Cuba in Africa, and the self-identification of Cuba as an
African country, see Mandela & Castro: Look How Far We Slaves Have Come! South Africa and Cuba in
Today’s World, 1991.
77
Pleming: Afghan Women Push for End to Gender Apartheid, 2001
82

however, this form of oppression went one step further. Women were not allowed to work for
pay at all. The extent of the state-led oppression to which women were subjected in
Afghanistan is perhaps, as we shall see in Chapter II.3.1, unparalleled in human history since
the ancient Greeks, who treated their women similarly, and who might even have brought
some of the most extreme patriarchal modes of oppression to Afghanistan in the wake of
Alexander’s conquest, after which Greeks stayed in power and ruled Afghans for centuries. In
any event, as in South African apartheid, there was in Taliban rule the imposition of strict
legal, social, economic, political, and even geographical separation between population
groups that were biologically and pseudo-biologically defined, as well as discrimination
against the country’s majority.
‘Gender apartheid’, however, is different from South African as well as all other kinds
of apartheid, in which the oppressed racial group, consisting of both men and women, earned
money, though hardly ever enough of it. Moreover, women and men are equally indigenous to
Afghanistan. There was no invading racial minority behind this kind of ‘apartheid’, although a
few Taliban leaders, who appear to have joined the movement after it gained power, seem to
have been foreigners (among them, mainly Pakistanis and Arabs). In South Africa prior to
1652, furthermore, Blacks ruled sovereign political and economic entities, unchallenged by
other races, enjoying power and privileges. There is no evidence that I am aware of to that
effect for women in Afghanistan. The women certainly did not rule the country when the
Taliban took over power. The languages of the country and much of the culture in general also
remained the same after the Taliban had won.
In real apartheid, people are ethnically cleansed and replaced: politically, economically
and physically, and new power is ultimately established by invaders from afar. Indigenous
culture is also replaced by the settlers’ culture, including their language(s). Physical and
political geography is largely or even entirely renamed. In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, on the
other hand, old power was extended. After Islamism was introduced and successful, US-
backed resistance against invading foreigners (Soviet troops) had led to their ouster, the
country was full of weapons and violence, and the Taliban became the only apparent
guarantee for law and order. Lastly, there was no crucial demographic dynamic in
Afghanistan like the one in South Africa, where Whites produced fewer children the richer
they became, and Blacks produced more children the poorer they became. This dynamic was
one of the main factors that would eventually bring down apartheid in South Africa, and a
corresponding development might well eventually have precisely the same consequences for
the Israeli version of apartheid.78 ‘Gender apartheid’ thus seems to have less to do with South
African apartheid than any of the forms of oppression we have encountered so far, and in my
view the term ‘apartheid’ should not be used at all for this phenomenon.

Environmental and Global ‘Apartheid’

Recently, a global kind of apartheid – so-called ‘environmental apartheid’ – has
become a further focus of attention. Here, so-called ‘First World’ corporate networks and
states profit from ‘artificially’ low (i.e. not purely market-induced) raw material prices, move
their most polluting industries to the developing countries in the so-called ‘Third World’,
export their most toxic waste to be dumped there, and steal ‘the very basis and processes of
life’ legally through patent enforcement from ‘Third World’ farmer communities.79 Instances
of most constituent parts of apartheid are indeed present in some form or other in this
phenomenon. They include racist practices such as structural violence, repopulation activities,
land appropriation, exploitation, differential access, and racist ideologies.
78
Ibid. See also N.N.: Gender Apartheid, no date. See Section II.2 below on the demographic dimensions of
apartheid.
79
Shiva: The World on the Edge, 2000, 112-129, quotes: 113ff, 119. See also Shiva: Deconstructing Market
Access: Whose Market, Whose Access? 2002; Commey: Biopiracy: The New Scramble for Africa, 2003: 12-17;
Jere-Malanda: Biopiracy: Neem: The Wonder Tree, 2003: 18.
 83

Yet, there is no invasion in a military sense, and therefore not necessarily any direct or
physical violence. Furthermore, the land is bought or leased – though cheaply and often
illegally – rather than directly stolen, and only very little of it needs to be bought or leased, for
factories and waste dumps (if legal), anyway. A great deal more of the land, however, is of
course affected ecologically. The repopulation activities are narrowed down to a few on-site
First World corporate executives and engineers, who are perceived by those on the very top,
in their First World corporate headquarters, as necessary to control and oversee operations and
to keep certain advanced technologies and other secrets unavailable to industrial spies from
competing corporations, not to mention the indigenous people. The population activities are
therefore actually much more similar to colonialism than to apartheid. The oppression
personnel is frequently moved in and out of the crime scenes. The (apparently rather heavy)
involvement of strong First World nation-states in furthering and even encouraging this kind
of activity is also colonial or neo-colonial oppression, but not apartheid.
The independence of transnational corporations and corporation networks as opposed
to governments, and their increasing usurpation of traditional governmental practices,
especially in the developing countries, do however exhibit aspects of apartheid, though in an
entirely new form. This could indeed be called ‘neo-apartheid’, the structural legacy of
apartheid at a new, globalized level of capitalist, perhaps even historical development, but not
apartheid per se, not even in my proposed wide sense, which presupposes a relatively strong
and sovereign state. Once corporations have become stronger than states – and on some
indications this is already the case on a global scale80 – politics changes appearance and
content radically. For instance, democracy and inclusive human rights become increasingly
hollow, are eventually emptied of contents and replaced by proprietors’, investors’, and
shareholders’ exclusive rights and privileges.
Under these new conditions, continuity with earlier phenomena should neither be
erased nor over-stretched. ‘Neo-apartheid’ would be a good label for this new kind of
systematic human rights violations, although the term is now already being used to describe
present-day Israel.81 ‘Neo-apartheid’ would in my opinion be a more apt label for the new
kind of systematic human rights violations, since it presupposes a relatively weak state (on the
receiving end) and relatively strong privately-owned companies, or networks of such
companies, in a way similar to the concept of ‘neo-colonialism’, and also since Israel’s system
of apartheid, as I will try to argue here, is nothing new at all in a structural sense.
Some of the features of ‘environmental apartheid’, however, are not as new as they
may appear to be at first sight. For example, the Dutch East India Company was in many ways
a typical transnational capitalist enterprise and empire, and it worked so well, in capitalist
terms, due to the existence of a globalized capitalist (though not yet industrial or
postindustrial) economy, already from the 17th century onwards. On the other hand, the Dutch
government might have been able to rein in the Company if it wished to, something which
appears less likely in a similar situation today. Contemporary examples would be the uses of
wage-slavery by transnational corporations based in the North Atlantic zone. The
governments of this area seem almost powerless to do anything against the deeply immoral
practices of these companies in developing countries which would have been criminal and
would have caused an outcry if they had taken place in the home countries. Other examples
would include pollution, sweatshops, or child labor.
At the opening of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, the second South
African epiapartheid president, Thabo Mbeki, called for an end to ‘global apartheid’, in which
a ‘…rich minority enjoys unprecedented levels of consumption, comfort and prosperity, while
a poor majority enjoys daily hardship, suffering, dehumanisation…’ Similarly the authors,
Salih Booker and William Minter, argue that “…today’s international political economy – in

80
Ellwood 2001: 55ff.
81
See, for instance, footnote 880 below.
84

which undemocratic institutions systematically generate economic inequality – should be

described as ‘global apartheid’…” although the authors also wisely caution against drawing
the parallels with South Africa too closely.82
This idea can be traced back to an impassioned plea against ‘global apartheid’ by the
anthropologist, William A. Haviland, who was the first author to my knowledge to use the
expression in pointing out the persistent, extremely unequal distribution of economic,
military, and political power between Whites and non-Whites of the world. I believe the
importance of this issue can hardly be overemphasized.83
Poor countries may have democratic systems, but the great powers in the North
Atlantic, who decide more of their populations’ destinies than the developing countries’ own
governments (and intergovernmental organizations) do, are entirely out of reach for these
populations. In this sense there is an exclusive democracy for a privileged minority of the
world’s population whose own elected officials run the world in conjunction with groups of
unelected powerful people, just like the white minority’s exclusive democracy in apartheid
South Africa.
In what is probably the most sophisticated theory of ‘global apartheid’, a somewhat
different conception devised specifically to better understand international migration, racial
conflict and ethnic nationalism after the Cold War, sociologist Anthony Richmond
differentiates two defining social dimensions or ‘elementary processes’ at work:
superordination-subordination and separation-integration. Here, apartheid appears to be the
most extremely antisocial way of handling a multi-ethnic population. Thus, genocide is left
out of the theoretical picture, as opposed to my approach. The ideological justifications of
new legislation in most countries, facing increases in both immigration and internal migration,
are very similar to South African apartheid attitudes, as Richmond points out: “As well as
explicit racism and claims to ‘superiority’, they include an obligation to limit intertribal
conflict, the need to preserve ethnic identity, expressions of religious fanaticism, the defence
of existing cultural and social institutions, state security, the maintenance of law and order,
preservation of economic privilege and the need to regulate and manage population
movements.”84 Although perhaps implied, there is no explicit continuous spectrum from
apartheid to genocide in this model, as far as I can determine. There is separation, segregation,
and discrimination in Richmond’s account, but not necessarily invasion or downright theft.
Racism may be seen as a crime against humanity, but apartheid – in the mainstream, anti-NP
meaning of the term – is always a severe crime against humanity, with aspects that should not
be overlooked.
The cited sources all fail to make a systematic differentiation between racisms of
different kinds, as I have attempted to do here. Again, there is in their brands of ‘global
apartheid’ neither any kind of independence from the motherlands of the invaders (as in South
Africa, Greek-ruled Egypt, Outremer, Guatemala, Liberia, Rhodesia or modern Israel), or
effective state sovereignty (except in Richmond’s theory, which deals with oppressed non-
indigenous minorities, as opposed to apartheid, as I understand it, which always oppresses the
indigenous majorities), nor direct physical violence or military invasion necessarily involved.
Furthermore, as apartheid is a crime against humanity, the criminals are identifiable (even if
82
Schuettler: Mbeki Slams “Global Apartheid” at Pre-Summit Gala, 2002; Macdonald: End “Global Apartheid”
Call Heralds Earth Summit, 2002; Booker & Minter: Global Apartheid, 2001: 11-17
83
Haviland 51987: 405-407. See also Lake & Reynolds: Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s
Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, 2008. Steve Biko, in I Write What I Like, 2004
(1978): 78, earlier made the same point without using the ‘apartheid’ label: ‘[T]here is no doubt that the black-
white power struggle in South Africa is but a microcosm of the global confrontation between the Third World
and the rich white nations of the world…’ The piece from which this quote was lifted, ‘White Racism and Black
Consciousness’, was written already in 1971, and originally published in van der Merwe and Welsh (eds.):
Student Perspectives on South Africa, 1972. Before Biko, Jean-Paul Sartre, in Fanon 2001 (1961): 22, also wrote
something equivalent without using the apartheid label. See also footnotes 851 and 896 below.
84
Richmond: Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism and the New World Order, 1994: xiff, 206ff.
 85

they have yet to be delivered to justice, in almost every single case). But in ‘global apartheid’,
lacking a world state and an effective global rule of law, there are no clear-cut hierarchies of
responsibility or (even potential) accountability.
It is therefore better described as ‘neo-apartheid’, as I argued above, if the Afrikaans
word must be used at all. Nevertheless, if the definition of the phenomenon is stretched back
five centuries, ‘global apartheid’ might indeed be a useful approximate term for white
subjugation of other people. One could say that this process has genocidal, apartheid,
colonialist, neo-colonialist and neo-apartheid features, and that, out of all these labels for
different kinds of racist human rights violations, ‘global apartheid’ perhaps sums up the
situation in the best way, since it is ‘in the middle’ of the spectrum of severity from the
perspective of the victims. It is neither as harsh as genocide nor as ‘mild’ as colonialism. Yet,
essential features of apartheid are still missing, as indicated. ‘Global white racism’, ‘global
white hegemony’, or even ‘global white supremacy’ would therefore be more accurate labels.
The terms ‘elitism’ and ‘plutocracy’ also come to mind readily, especially since neither race
nor ethnicity are mentioned explicitly by Mbeki or by Booker and Minter, and since there are
indeed exceptions to white dominance, though hardly enough of them from an egalitarian
point of view. White men invented intercontinental warfare, and, to some extent, they are still
practicing it, though the dominant forms of this warfare, especially the neo-colonialist forms,
are infinitely subtler and less clear-cut in racial terms today than when it started, several
centuries ago.85

Postmodern Racism
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have narrowed and, to some extent, sharpened the
focus on this issue with their concept of a worldwide scourge of ‘postmodern racism’:

[R]acism has not receded but actually progressed in the contemporary

world, both in extent and in intensity. It appears to have declined only
because its form and strategies have changed. If we take the
Manichaean divisions and rigid exclusionary practices (in South
Africa, in the colonial city, in the southeastern United States, or in
Palestine) as the paradigm of modern racisms, we must now ask what
is the postmodern form of racism and what are its strategies in today’s
imperial society.86

The basic idea is not new. It goes back to distinctions made between ‘traditional’ and
‘new’ racism, and between ‘blatant’ and ‘subtle’ racism.87 But I will confine my discussion
here to Hardt and Negri’s conception.
One of the main differences between modern and postmodern racism, aside from the
uneven playing fields of the global market, is explained by Hardt and Negri as one based on
justifications by means of ‘biology’ and ‘culture’, respectively. Thus, modern racism,
epitomized here as apartheid, is rigid and essentialist with its postulated genetic differences,
whereas postmodern racism is through and through ‘culturalist’ in character. The latter is,
moreover, contingent, flexible, and a result of free competition, ‘a kind of market meritocracy

85
See, for example, Pilger: Modern Times Are Upside Down – An Invasion Is Not News; Licence to Lie Takes
You to the Movies, New Statesman, 2013.
86
Hardt & Negri 2000: 191 (emphasis in the original)
87
Miles, R.: Racism, 1989. For an astute analysis of ongoing ‘postmodern imperialism’ by the western powers in
Africa, containing patronizing claims of philanthropy coupled with arrogant racism, see Mbeki: Is Africa There
for the Taking? 2012. Especially among contemporary British and US politicians and academics, the former
South African president investigates the ‘postmodern world’ as a new means of self-identification for the most
powerful states and economies in the world, and bad news for the rest of the world, in particular for Africa,
which is deemed ‘modern’ or ‘premodern’ in the same discourse and thus disqualified from any important
decision-making, even in its own internal affairs.
86

of culture’.88 At first glance, there is much speaking for this distinction. It shows, among other
things, how racism has adapted to and continues to thrive under globalized capitalism, but its
theoretical context still runs the risk of overemphasizing differences between the postulated
two kinds of racism, modern and postmodern.
It is in my opinion symptomatic that Hardt and Negri fail to mention racist genocide in
this context, most conspicuously Nazi crimes, the genocides of Native Americans or the de
facto genocides due to the racist system of transatlantic slavery. (Why should they not be part
of the ‘paradigm of modern racisms’?) The reason for that failure seems to be that it would be
very hard to defend their view of current ‘postmodern’ racist practices, due to globalized
capitalism, surpassing – ‘both in extent and in intensity’ – possibly the three most horrific
racist crimes in human history. All of the latter were in fact ‘essentialist’, ‘blatant’,
‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, as opposed to ‘postmodern’. Perhaps postmodern racism will
eventually prove even worse, even more extensive and intense than those genocides, but, as
far as I can determine, there are as yet neither any strong indications nor any strong counter-
indications for such a disaster to take place. In either case, Hardt and Negri’s judgment
appears to be premature.
I will argue that ‘biology’- and ‘culture’-based racisms are both morally and
scientifically wrong. Racist ‘justifications’ are, in fact, nothing but transparent and feeble
excuses. They all represent instances of ideology, in the original meaning of that term: false
consciousness. Racism is therefore the more extensive concept here. Modernity and
postmodernity may indeed be seen as different strategies of racism, in this case of the
overwhelmingly white elites that have dominated most of the world during recent centuries.
But racism is much older than modernity, and in the course of this investigation we will find
many apparently postmodern attributes of it in Graeco-Roman Egypt and elsewhere, i.e.
during time periods that are commonly considered pre-modern rather than post-modern. The
culturalist, ‘subtle’, ‘new’, and ‘postmodern’ attributes of Greek and Roman racism towards
Egyptians between 332 BCE and 642 CE were in fact the dominant ones, though not the only
ones, as we shall see in Part II of this investigation. Racism is also older than capitalism itself,
of which Hardt and Negri sometimes seem to consider it a mere subcategory. 89 On a global
scale – possibly due chiefly to the initially unpredictable growth of the Atlantic system of
racist slavery – it may never have been such an important part of class identity before
capitalism, but racism does go back much further, as will become evident below. Finally,
South African racism stopped being mainly a biologism with the conclusion of the Second
World War. Like elsewhere in the world: after Nazi ideology had become seriously
discredited in Europe in 1945, the ideology of the NP and all other white supremacists became
immensely more culturalist in its racism. It remained so throughout the period of apartheid in
a narrow sense, especially in official statements intended for the outside world, but also in
state ideology intended for domestic use. ‘Biological’ racism, however, was also still being
sponsored by the apartheid state and by other elements within apartheid society, though in a
less obvious and more clandestine manner. (See Chapter II.9.2 below. In Israel, on the other
hand, biologically racist statements about Palestinians and Arabs by Jewish statesmen and
religious authorities have possibly increased in recent years, thus possibly signifying a swing
of the pendulum back to more racism now that the terrible costs of World War II racism are

88
Hardt & Negri 2000: 193
89
Ibid: 124f; see also Fredrickson 2002: 4f. For more nuanced views of the complexities associated with the
definition of capitalism and the possible application of the term to Egypt in the late Roman period, see footnote
504 below. It should be emphasized in the present context that capitalism (or fully-fledged proto-capitalism) was
actually not developed in Egypt until centuries after Alexander’s conquest and the accession of Ptolemy I, i.e.
until long after the establishment of widespread racism and apartheid in Egypt. On culturalist racism, i.e. ‘post-
modern’ racism in Hardt & Negri’s conception, appearing already in ancient Greece, see Bakaoukas: Tribalism
& Racism among the Ancient Greeks: A Weberian Perspective, 2005; Isaac: The Invention of Racism in
Classical Antiquity, 2004, and Chapter II.9.1 below.
 87

fading in living memories; see Chapters II.9.3 and III.1 below. The loss of the Auschwitz
survivor generation does not bode well for Israel’s immediate future.) The decisive
implementation of apartheid in the narrow sense in South Africa, i.e. the entire post-world war
period, was therefore officially postmodern, at least in its international attempt at justification,
and not, as Hardt and Negri appear to claim, modern.
Interesting and alarming as the issue of a postmodern de facto global white hegemony
is, it is not the subject of this investigation. Yet, we will not only be dealing with modern
racism here, but also with premodern – e.g. the Graeco-Roman, chiefly culturally founded –
racism, and with aspects of postmodern racism that also directly pertain to traditional, as it
were, apartheid societies. An instance of that is the use and abuse of third racial groups –
imported laborers who, a priori, belong neither with the dominant invader race nor with the
subdued indigenous majority – in underpaid or unpaid menial or service professions in
present-day Israel, which have perfectly matching counterparts in Graeco-Roman Egypt and
South Africa. We will return to a critical look at postmodernism and postcolonialism in
Chapter I.8 below.
Although I am claiming here that genocide, in a general sense, is worse than apartheid,
which, in its turn, is worse than colonialism, there are relativities attached to this claim. Firstly
there is the time factor. A colonialist situation that persists for 800 years, such as that in
Ireland, may as a whole be seen as worse than a short-lived apartheid society, such as
Rhodesia, which lasted less than a century at the most, and only fifteen years at the very least.
Secondly, there is the label factor. There are colonialist tendencies of Rhodesian apartheid
society, in which genocide occurred, yet only rarely, and strong apartheid tendencies of
British colonialism in Ireland, which also went further into genocide on several occasions.
The spectral characteristics of the details in all three kinds of racism treated here must not be
jettisoned in favor of simplistic or essentialistic reduction, but the positioning of apartheid in
the middle, between genocide and colonialism, appears to hold in every single case. South
Africa under white control, though apartheid most of the time since 1652, also experienced
several periods of genocide and of colonialism. Thirdly, the levels of violence must also be
regarded in a multi-dimensional way. Violence can be direct or indirect, physical or structural,
lethal or non-lethal, directly lethal or indirectly lethal, etc. There are also great differences in
how much violent resistance against racism takes place. Obviously a genocide that reduces a
population by 51 percent is not as bad as a genocide that reduces the same population by 100
percent. But aside from such simple comparisons, it quickly becomes difficult, though not
necessarily impossible, to compare racist crimes. The spectrum of increasingly damaging
racist crimes against humanity, from colonialism to apartheid to genocide, should therefore on
occasion be seen as an impressionistic evaluation rather than a quantifiable hypothesis. Yet,
there are also quantifiable aspects inherent to the spectrum. We must not stop counting
individuals killed and quantities of land or other valuables stolen by oppressors. Holocaust
reparations, for instance, have shown how and why such investigations are not only
instrumental to justice for individual victims of racism but also augment justice in more direct
ways, by punishing the perpetrators or their descendants, especially the biological
descendants, but not only them. By taking a little, not too much, from the descendants of
perpetrators, a balance is often restored, and reconciliation brought closer. And ‘descendants’
should not be defined in too narrow terms. For example: as an income tax-paying resident of
Austria, I have had to pay, indirectly, for the holocaust, through Austria’s holocaust reparation
funds, even though my relatives might also have been victimized, and my other relatives were
either neutral (Swedish) or fighting Nazi Germany (British and American; more on my family
history in the methodology section below). I am fine with that arrangement, however, since I
have also indirectly profited from Nazi slave labor and Nazi theft, from Jewish, Slavic, Roma
and other victims; some of the thus ‘created’ wealth went into the state coffers of Austria after
the second world war, and Austria is where I have resided since 1984, i.e. during most of my
88

life so far.90
Back to the theme of apartheid: as gathered from the outlined examples (and there are
many others still, as some of my footnotes explore): the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Nazi
Germany, Rhodesia, Guatemala, Outremer, Liberia, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Soviet Union,
Afghanistan, environmental and global ‘apartheid’, are all indeed comparable to South
African apartheid, and in form and content at times also quite close to systematic human
rights violations elsewhere. I shall argue, however, with a much wider range of sources to
back up my claim, that there are two other parallels, each of which comes a great deal closer.

5. Apartheid in the Wide Sense: A Preliminary Definition

Throughout this investigation, I will compare the South African apartheid system as
well as the oppressive structures in South Africa which preceded and influenced it, with Egypt
under Greek and Roman rule, from 332 BCE continuously until 642 CE, on the one hand, and
with Israel since 1948 and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967, on the other. Both
of these latter three societies have repeatedly been compared to apartheid South Africa in
sweeping terms. What I wish to do with this book is to provide an analysis to investigate those
generalizations, without shying away from the differences. What the parallels of Graeco-
Roman Egypt and modern Israel91 (there are nearly twice as many Palestinians as there are
Israeli Jews92) pre-eminently share with South Africa is the presence of an oppressive racial

90
See Sartre in Fanon 2001 (1961): 21f. for a similar argument making all European men who had been
‘…accorded human status…’ (due to the exploitation of non-Europeans) responsible for colonialism and related
atrocities.
91
As opposed to, for instance, Nazi Germany, USA, Australia, New Zealand and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless,
Whites were once a minority in America, Australia and New Zealand, too; that is, in comparison to the
indigenous populations. During these short, early periods of generally pre-colonialized society, I believe, the
oppressive behavior of Whites were similar to that of the oppressive apartheid minorities studied here, though
generally more genocidal in character as well as in ultimate consequence. With regard to Blacks however, the
Whites were always a majority in the western European colonies on the North American mainland as well as in
the independent USA.
92
As I already indicated: if one would count all the Palestinians in refugee camps in Palestinian ‘autonomous’
areas and in the re-occupied Palestinian territories, in the adjoining countries Lebanon, Syria and Jordan,
together with the ‘Israeli Arabs’ – 19 percent of the Israeli population – and the Palestinian non-refugees in this
area, then the Israeli Jews are still a racial minority in the immediate area. Within the wider geographical,
political and strategic context of the mainly Arab and Muslim Middle East, the Israeli Jews are, of course, a tiny
minority, and in a very similar situation to South African Whites in the Southern African region (see Reinhart:
Mideast Apartheid? Peace? 2000) or to late antiquity Greeks and Romans in the North African and Southwest
Asian regions. Surrounded by some 250 million Arabs, Israel still only has around 5 million Jews, whereas there
are around 10 million Palestinians (including ‘Israeli Arabs’), most of them refugees. See Carter 2006: 59. After
World War II and, even more, after the Cold War, there has been increasing international pressure on
governments to democratize. With regard to that, it has been the policy of Israel to turn its system of oppression
of a majority into one of a minority – by immigration, migrant labor and ethnic cleansing, i.e. apartheid,
genocidal and expulsion policies – even though exploitation of indigenous labor will not necessarily be as
profitable any more. It is a typical (and desperate) apartheid strategy that was also attempted, though
unsuccessfully, by the government of P.W. Botha in South Africa (1978-1989). Less recently, however, it was
applied much more successfully by Whites in the Americas, in Australia and elsewhere. But in those cases, it
was also less apartheid than genocide. Expulsion and migrant labor were not applied to the indigenous to a great
extent, perhaps mainly since there were then even fewer international enforcement pressures with regard to
human rights standards than there are now. It may seem easy or even inevitable to assign structural blame to
democracy for the gross human rights violations perpetrated by Israel and South Africa in this instance. To
introduce democracy they had to expel or eliminate enough members of the indigenous majority, in order to
transform it into a minority. But it is in fact the current, elitist international system, largely imposed on the rest of
the world by the western powers, which only allows democracy within nation-states (and not transnationally),
and which values citizens’ rights so much more than human rights, that is to blame, not democracy per se. See
Iliffe 1995: 283f; and Chapters II.2.2-3, 3.2-3, and 5.3 below.
 89

minority.93 (This is not to say that oppressive racial majorities elsewhere do not at times act in
similar ways to the way an apartheid regime or elite does. Most conspicuously, that was the
case in the USA94, but in each of the first three examples in the previous section, i.e. also in
Australia-New Zealand and in Nazi Germany, we saw examples of that.) I believe that the
three main cases of my investigation, South Africa, Israel and Egypt, share the domination by
a racial minority, and certain other basic traits that systematically set them apart from cases of
majoritarian oppression. ‘Minoritarian’ racist oppression, moreover, has some paranoid and
violent features that may be entirely absent from majority-ruled societies. It is of course
essentially undemocratic, though some democratic aspects can and do exist as well, in fact
they do occur in all three of these apartheid societies, if only in marginal ways, i.e. for the
elites only or nearly so, which do not nearly qualify them as democratic societies.
Another basic trait is the (relative) geographic origin of the oppressive minority. It
turns out that, somewhere along the timeline of historical events, this group successfully
invaded the country, whether it actually used force against the (relatively) indigenous majority
or just explicitly or even implicitly threatened to do so.
A preliminary definition of an apartheid society would be a society where an
oppressive, economically exploitative and ideologically racist, de facto invading racial
minority is in power, with or without the rule of law. The last condition is important, since it
enables us to extend the concept of apartheid to practices such as the discrimination against
non-Whites and bans on interracial marriage, which both go back to the very first white
settlements in South Africa.
Obviously, South Africa in 1947 has more in common with South Africa in, say, 1967
than with any other country at any time. In the course of this investigation, we will witness
how several racist laws, policies, and practices developed continuously towards the 1948
‘solution’, and also how many others were firmly in place before then. As Nelson Rolihlahla
Mandela says in his autobiography: ‘Apartheid was a new term but an old idea. . . .What had
been more or less de facto was to become relentlessly de jure.’95 He was 29 years old when
apartheid in the narrow sense was introduced in his country, but he (and others before him,
including the founders of the African National Congress) had already started fighting
apartheid in the wide sense long before. All essential aspects of apartheid had in fact existed
in South Africa prior to 1948. Only the comprehensive system of laws and practices and the
name for this prioritized and overriding government policy were not yet there.
My first preliminary definition would include most colonies in world history, so there
are some additional characteristics that my three examples will have to share if apartheid is to
be systematically distinguished from colonialism. As mentioned above, they are all, at least

93
Further recent examples of oppressive racial minorities in regions without state- or even provincial status,
among many others, would be the Serbs from 1989 to 1999 under President Milosevic’s leadership in Kosovo,
and the Serbs in Bosnia (where the majority Muslims still control a minority of the territory today), as well as the
British in Ireland and the Chinese in Tibet. On Kosovo and Bosnia, see F.F.: Die Etablierung eines Apartheid-
Systems: Im Kosovo wenden die Serben die gleiche Strategie an wie zuvor in Bosnien, 1999; Lane: TRB From
Washington: Trouble Spot, 1998; N.N.: Bosnian Leaders Strike Deal on Equal Ethnic Rights, 2002. Serbia has
also been compared in detail with Israel, especially with regard to state violence with impunity: see Ron:
Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, 2003. The comparison with apartheid was used
explicitly against Milosevic in his trial at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, when the first witness, Kosovo
Albanian Mahmut Bakalli, testified. See Roche & Levene: First Witness Confronts Defiant Milosevic, 2002.
Similar to both Kosovo and Northern Ireland is the situation in Tibet. See N.N.: Tibetans at Racism Meet Accuse
China of Apartheid, 2001.
94
Cf. Massey & Denton: American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, 1993.
95
Mandela 1995 (1994): 111. Yet it never became completely relentless, as we observed with regard to
Thompson. Most Whites were too ‘rational’ in the economic sense to let their maids, gardeners, etc. travel for
hours every day to and from areas designated for Blacks, so they let them stay on in servants’ quarters on their
‘white’ land, even if they did not have special permits, in order to bypass the laws of racial segregation.
90

during parts of the long time periods studied here, independent states.96 Moreover, in my three
chosen societies the oppressors came to the country to stay, they came to see it as their home
country. Unlike Whites in most European colonies in Africa, for example, the South African
Whites were not just waiting to be posted somewhere else by their European governments.
They indigenized themselves, but on their own terms and conditions, not those of the already
indigenous people. They settled to become indigenous, though separate from (and allegedly
superior to) the indigenous racial group already present at their arrival in the ‘new’ country.
Next, my three examples of apartheid were (are) among the world’s leaders in several,
if not all, different fields of military technology. At first glance, this may seem like a
contingent condition, but the power of apartheid elites is invariably based on considerable
military superiority over the conquered indigenous majority. And that superiority has had to
be based on the strategic, military, physical and psychological effectiveness of weapons,
rather than on numbers of soldiers or fighters.97 For example, both South Africa’s and Israel’s
apartheid arsenals ostensibly include(d) ABC (Atomic, Biological and Chemical) weapons,
although neither of the apartheid governments publicly admit(ted) it. Apartheid also requires a
throrough militarization and mobilization of society, culture, and ideology.
Lastly, in all of my cases, the oppressors and/or the vast majority of their recent
ancestors came from Europe. The Jews in modern Israel present but a qualified and limited
exception here, since Jews with European roots are a two-thirds majority among Jews in
Israel, and since only very few ‘Eastern’, i.e. non-European, Jews have ever made it into the
country’s elites. This must be seen as a contingent parallel, however. Just because Liberia’s
Americo-Liberian, black racial elite spoke English does not make them English. I do not see
apartheid as a necessarily European-based phenomenon. The Liberian example proves that it
is not, and I firmly believe that other (even more or entirely) non-European apartheid
societies, possibly the Mongol Khanates, for example, will do so, too.

96
South Africa or parts of it were Dutch and then British colonies during most of the time since Whites started
settling there in 1652. Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natalia, however, were independent Boer republics and
thus full-blown apartheid societies during parts of the 19th century, and all of South Africa achieved
independence, within the British Empire, in 1910 and remained a full-blown apartheid society in my wide sense
during the following 84 years. Egypt was a Roman province from 30 BCE until 642 CE, but prior to that an
independent Macedonian-ruled kingdom from 323 BCE until the Romans took over. This was a highly
developed state with high population density and high levels of control over the civil society as well as
industrialist and proto-capitalist economic features. See Part II below. Israel was independent throughout the
period under investigation. On the other hand, Israel has been treating the Palestinian territories occupied since
1967 as colonies, similarly to Namibia by the South Africans and many Southwest Asian, Southeast European,
Libyan and other territories by Egypt under Macedonian rule, for instance by confiscating land, using cheap
labor, and by denying the overwhelming indigenous majorities the right to vote or be part of any important
decision-making altogether.
97
See Section II.1 below. Thus, a country like Rhodesia does not rate with the three countries I decided to study,
although it shares a great deal more than just a border with South Africa, and generally fits inside my definition
of an apartheid society. To me, Rhodesia (see Section I.4 above, and footnotes 459 and 464 below), a country
with a one to five percent oppressive minority of mainly British origins, represents the sixth most obvious
example of apartheid in the wide sense proposed here, (after White-ruled South Africa, modern Israel, Graeco-
Roman Egypt, Outremer, Guatemala, but before Liberia and many other apartheid societies) though it was not a
world military power. I have also not yet compared my three main examples in much detail with independent
Brazil or Cuba (where the oppressed majorities, however, are not indigenous but were imported after the already
accomplished conquest of the countries and genocides of the indigenous people), nor with the Mongol-ruled
Khanates, nor with the various Saxon and Viking kingdoms in the British Isles and Normandy, where invading
racial elites also developed apartheid structures (see Sawyer: Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe, AD
700-1100, 1994 (1982): 98ff; Kapuscinski 2001; N.N.: Golden Horde, May 5, 2014; Ravillious: Ancient Britain
Had Apartheid-Like Society, Study Suggests, 2006; Thomas, Stumpf, & Härke: Integration versus Apartheid in
post-Roman Britain: A Response to Pattison, 2008). There are bound to be many other similar short-lived
apartheid societies throughout the world and throughout history, short-lived mainly due to the basic and
explosive inner tension within such societies, but also due to other factors such as less available capital (as we
shall see, apartheid is invariably very expensive), a smaller military advantage and, perhaps, less extremely racist
ideologies and attitudes within the conquering racial minority.
 91

With the additional three features, we have a wide definition of apartheid, but it will
not include any of the examples that I compared in some detail to South African apartheid
above (USA, Australia, New Zealand, Nazi Germany, Rhodesia, Guatemala, Outremer,
Liberia, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, the whole world), examples that
have been labeled ‘apartheid’ by others. In my view, it is therefore a meaningful, useful, well-
balanced, and tempered definition, neither too wide nor too narrow.
If only one of the conditions is missing, such as the absence of cutting-edge military
technology in Outremer, Guatemala, Liberia or Rhodesia, then I have nothing at all against the
use of the label ‘apartheid’ to describe that society. I even consider it very useful in such
cases, too. After all, the Whites in Guatemala and Rhodesia and the American Blacks in
Liberia were militarily still vastly superior to the indigenous groups that were defeated and
conquered by them. (In Outremer, the military superiority was temporary, and not
technological, and thus it was also a far less stable apartheid society and state than South
Africa was.) Similarly, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand may be seen as having been
apartheid societies, but only for very short periods, during the transition from colonial to
genocidal status, a transition that was very rapid in these cases. Several South American
countries, especially in the south of the continent, could probably be added to this group of
countries. However, an exaggerated essentialist attitude which would attempt to draw sharp
borders between genocide, apartheid, and colonialism, would in my opinion eventually be
found wanting.
Mine is also a definition that differs considerably from the one first constructed by an
extremely racist South African government and ruling party, which arrogantly made it the
label of its overall policy. With such a biased background to the term, one should in my
opinion be careful not to fall into the ideological traps (see my Preface above) that the NP
government and its elite white allies cleverly intended. In particular, it intended land theft,
oppression, and exploitation already well-established by 1948 to be considered pre-apartheid,
and part of the natural order of things. In the following two sections I will attempt to further
structure and deepen the wide definition of apartheid.

6. Differences and Similarities between Apartheid Societies

One of the most inessential differences between the different versions of it is the
nature of one of the linchpins of apartheid itself: the (official or unofficial) identification of
races or ethnic groups, at once so obvious and yet still lacking support in the world of facts. I
will not proceed to criticize the cultural construction of human races and ethnic groups since
this has been done so well by others. The propensity of humans to migrate and to interbreed
with members from other human groups are the most frequently cited sociobiological and
sociological reasons why genes are so remarkably spread out among human carriers. Almost
half of the volume of our bodies consists of legs, i.e. locomotion devices. With the continuous
technological development of artificial locomotion devices which have so far only led to
increased interaction, it seems that only successful non-discriminatory yet considerable spatial
segregation, over very many generations indeed, probably over tens of thousands of years –
for example through the establishment of isolated human colonies in outer space – could ever
lead to the formation of human races, comparable, for instance, to breeds of horses, cows,
pigs, cats and dogs.98

98
N.N.: Race Not Reflected in Genes, Study Finds, 2002; Appiah: There Are No Biological Races, 2000: 50-52;
Menozzi, Piazza (Contributor), Cavalli-Sforza: The History and Geography of Human Genes, 1994. A much
earlier statement against biological racism by UNESCO, endorsed by most prominent geneticists and physical
anthropologists in 1950, was not yet strong with compelling physical evidence, but pointed out the utter failure
with finding counter-evidence that white racist scientists had tried to muster (wasting enormous research
92

Racist ‘criteria’ will therefore always vary – i.e. since there are no such things as
human races or ethnic groups in any natural scientific sense. In South Africa there were for
example the notorious ‘pencil tests’: A representative of the race classification authorities
stuck a pencil in a person’s hair to determine whether s/he was black or Coloured. If the
pencil stayed, the person was to be classified and considered black. If it slid through the hair,
s/he was Coloured. More often it was of course the physical lightness of skin color that
decided a person’s race and standing in the inflexible social, political, economic and cultural
hierarchy. On some of these criteria, Mandela reflects:

The arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black from Coloured or

Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of
the same family were classified differently, all depending on whether
one child had a lighter or darker complexion. Where one was allowed
to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of
one’s hair or the size of one’s lips.99

Not least due to the consequences of such policies and practices and their profound
political contexts, racism reveals itself to be the most superficial judgment of a person’s
character and worth. In Israel, however, the religious confession of a given person (or of at
least one of his or her recent ancestors) often establishes his or her race. This may seem like a
more humane distinction. It is obviously not as superficial as skin-color or hair-texture or lip-
size racism. It introduces an element of choice. But it de-secularizes society and, moreover,
oppressively divides it within itself just the same, and it is therefore on the same level of
mismatch with reality as skin-color, lip-size, or hair-curl. People are born with these traits,
and, nowadays, into religions, too. It must never be forgotten that the reason or excuse for
cultural or purported racial difference is above all a distinction which, whether it is skin-color,
religion, mother language, upbringing, or other accidents, decides whether a person will be a
first-, second-, third- or even fourth-class citizen in an apartheid society. Furthermore,
religious confession is not and can never be a watertight criterion for dividing people into
groups, either. In Israel, agnostic or atheist Jews are counted among the privileged due to the
religion of their parents or grandparents and/or due to their mother language. Agnostic and
atheist Arabs under Israeli rule are being oppressed for the very same perverse reasons. At
times, the frequently changing Israeli state criterion of Jewishness has even been that the
person to be classified is ‘…declaring sincerely that he is a Jew’. Moreover, the traditional,
orthodox definition of Jewishness, and the official one in Israel from 1948 until 1970, namely,
that one has a Jewish mother, introduces a racial or at least biological criterion of ethnicity
through the back door, as it were. Since 1970, the most utilized official definition of a Jew by
the state of Israel is that of a person who has at least one Jewish grandparent.100 The explicit
argument for extending the traditional definition here is that if someone was Jewish enough
for the Nazis to murder, then s/he is Jewish enough for state-granted privileges in Israel. The
implicit argument is to encourage non-Arab immigration and gradual assimilation with the
Jewish state and society. The explicit argument crucially forgets, firstly that the Nazis were
neither Palestinian or Arab nor Muslim, and secondly that the Jewish state was not erected on
virgin soil. The implicit argument is that by thus extending ‘Jewishness’ by 200 percent, along
with other measures of demographic warfare, including a host of racist citizenship,
immigration and naturalization laws and policies, the high Palestinian birth rate can be
‘neutralized’ in order to keep the Jewish state Jewish. If ten million Palestinians were
suddenly to convert to Judaism, in ways in which recent European and American immigrants

resources and countless human lives) during preceding decades and centuries. See Gould 1981; Fredrickson
2002: 128.
99
Mandela 1995 (1994): 121f.
100
Cook 2006: 113, 199; Sand 2009 (2008): 286-288 (quote: 288)
 93

to Israel have converted, then the Jewish state would surely attempt to introduce radically new
criteria for Jewishness.
In the end, ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ criteria for racism are equally unfair and equally
oppressive. At times, it might even turn out impossible to separate the two. For instance,
racism is often manifested by the victims being described and treated by the racists as
‘underdeveloped’, ‘retarded’, or ‘child-like’. Essentially and unscientifically, this refers to
both organic and experiential immaturity, or to one of these only, or even more likely, to a
fuzzy mixture of both, whereby racists attempt to salvage their ‘arguments’ by means of
devious sidestepping and double standards.
I am not absolutely certain about which criteria were the crucial ones in Graeco-
Roman Egypt, but the body of evidence presented in Chapters II.6.1, II.7.1, II.8.1, and II.9.1,
below, suggests that they were mainly related to the mastery of the Greek language and other
Greek cultural peculiarities. The racist criteria there appear to have been more similar to
modern Israel than to South Africa, more cultural than biological, less based on visual criteria,
yet in effect no less oppressive. As we shall see, European (i.e. Greek or Roman) and to some
extent Jewish ethnicity in Graeco-Roman Egypt also had to be ‘proven’ by means of both
paternal and maternal ethnicity, in order to gain access, rights and privileges. In sum, the
criteria for racial distinctions are basically political, and they are fundamentally and
essentially excuses for oppression, discrimination and incrimination. In apartheid, then, the
indigenous people who make up the largest population group are systematically robbed of
their rights – including, sometimes, even their right to live – on arbitrary and largely invented
pre-texts.
Whether apartheid in a given society is constitutional or not, even whether it is
sanctioned by law or not, is another question that I do not consider essential for apartheid.
South Africa had a racist, apartheid constitution. Israel does not have a constitution, but ‘Basic
Laws’, one of which is an apartheid repopulation law, the so-called ‘Law of Return’ to Israel
of all Jews, or, implicitly, the immigration of as many Jews as possible. Additionally – to
some extent probably in order not to appear too much like South Africa – Israel has given
religious authorities and other non-state entities powers that effectively enforce apartheid. As
mentioned above, there is no possibility of civil, non-religious marriage in Israel, which
makes marriage between Jews and non-Jews practically impossible. Similarly, land ownership
is regulated by officially non-state authorities, which do not grant permission to own land to
non-Jews, even if they are Israeli citizens. (See Chapters II.2.3, 3.3, and 4.3 below). Both of
these were apartheid measures taken care of by the state in South Africa. On the other hand,
the Israeli state, its judiciary, laws and executive powers do enforce apartheid in many ways,
too. In fact, all three of my main examples of apartheid manifest a ‘plethora’ of apartheid
laws, as Thompson described it for South Africa. For instance, Israeli law also differentiates
‘citizens’ from ‘nationals’, the latter being Jews only, with more rights and privileges. 101
Again, the effects of all the widely divergent apartheid strategies under different conditions or
in different countries can be indistinguishable.
Most of the main differences between my points of comparison are of a quantitative or
geographic nature. Egypt was an apartheid society for 972 years, South Africa for 342 years,
and Israel, so far, for 65 years. This accounts for a number of peculiarities with each case.
Only in Egypt do we observe a kind of cultural genocide without much trace of physical
genocide. The Egyptian language, script, religion and culture (in a fairly wide sense) were all
gone by the end of the Roman period. In South Africa there was, in effect, physical genocide
of Khoisan peoples. To what extent it was intended, however, is hard to ascertain. As in the
Americas, diseases brought along by the invading Whites seem to have been even more fatal

101
Tilley (ed.) 2009: 161
94

than ‘ethnic cleansing’ was.102 Although genocide was even explicitly allowed by law and did
take place, geographic conditions contributed to make South Africa an example among many
for this kind of genocide. The indigenous populations of many Southern or Western
Hemisphere outposts suffered extinction or near-extinction from European conquest, e.g. the
Caribbean islands, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, Tasmania, and the Cape, partly due to their
relatively untested immune systems. Egyptians and Palestinians, on the other hand, were
much more resistant to the invaders’ diseases due to their ‘continental crossroads’ locations.
Low population density, moreover, was decisive for the establishment of a slave-labor-
based economy that lasted for nearly two hundred years in the Cape Colony. Such an
economy would not have worked in Egypt or Israel during the time periods that are under
consideration here. Both Palestine and Graeco-Roman Egypt had high population densities
with overwhelmingly settled populations when the invaders first arrived. There was no
shortage of labor. 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 worth
keeping in mind in this context: The Israelis have been much more successful than the South
African Whites or the Greeks and Romans were at ethnic cleansing in an apartheid context. A
mere 19 percent 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
percent 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
102
For example, the mighty Inca Empire was reduced from an estimated 32 million in 1520 to around 5 million
inhabitants in 1548, mainly due to massive measles epidemics originating with the Spanish conquistadors, but
also because of the Spanish wars of conquest, genocide, and expropriation. Ryan: Explorers Unearth Lost Inca
Stronghold in Peru, 2002. According to Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years, 1998 (1997): 78, around 95 percent of Native Americans, throughout the Americas, were
killed by diseases brought there by the Whites. See further Iliffe 1995: 124. The present epi- or post-apartheid
government in South Africa is doing a great deal to salvage fragments of the almost annihilated Khoisan
cultures. See, for instance, Sithole: South African San Bushmen Get New Lease for Survival, 1999, on the return
of land (an apartheid-era game reserve) to a San community, as well as Ross 1999: 5 on the recent renaming of
the Orange River to the Gariep River, which is the original Khoi name, and N.N.: !Xu, Khwe to Live On on
South African Radio, 2000. Yet, neither !Xu or Khwe nor any of the other Khoisan languages are among the
eleven official languages of the liberated South Africa. There simply are not enough people who speak or
understand them in order to make elevation to the rank of official language economically feasible. In
comparison, the European Union, with less than one official language per country, i.e. 23 official languages for
25 countries, has also failed to make many aboriginal western European languages official, e.g. Basque or
Samiti. But, along with Australia with a single language for a whole continent, the worst are North America,
with three official languages (English, Spanish and French) for a whole continent, and all three of those
languages stem from western Europe.
 95

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 and racist societies 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 collaborated, at least with the Greeks. 103 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. Apartheid South Africa and Israel are also both de-secularized
societies. Furthermore, the indigenous and foreign apartheid elites are always or almost
always men. There is a strongly patriarchal pattern in both the invader and the indigenous
systems of oppression.
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 percent 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
school texts, have been found in the country from only another century or so after that.104
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.105 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 on a global level. 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, especially Palestinian ones; if the world’s countries, transnational
corporations and trade blocs increased bilateral pressures on Israel by economic and other

103
They probably included the family of the last indigenous king. See Huß 2001: 213ff and Chapter II.9.1 below.
104
Morgan: Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, 1998: 42. See also Section III.6 below.
105
Iliffe 1995: 281-284
96

sanctions as they did on South Africa; if Israel’s only real nation-state ally, the USA, stopped
providing Israel with $3-5 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
in a methodological context 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 it 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, the Palestinian population growth, and the 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 merely 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, but also for
the ultimate goals of ascertaining responsibility and then seeking and administering justice.
The uses of studying systematic human rights violations in late antiquity are perhaps less
tangible at first sight. But Graeco-Roman Egypt is the longest-lasting apartheid society, as far
as I know, and thus an indication for how far apartheid can go. I also find Egypt a particularly
interesting case in point since the colonializers came from the two leading military powers of
their eras, European powers – Graeco-Roman is very often similar to Dutch-British – and the
oppressed racial majority was African, as in South Africa. Although more than a millennium
lies between these two societies, several of these contingent parallels are 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, genetically, or instinctively
oppressive or even that they invented oppression. For any kind of scientific anthropology,
2,500 years is but a moment in the development of such a complex, diversely and deeply
rooted phenomenon as oppression. For example, as noted above, civilizations have existed for
more than twice as long as that, humanity one thousand times longer. As will be discussed
below, certain Europeans, namely ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, may have invented
slave-labor-based economies – which play important roles for Classical Greece and Rome,
and thus indirectly for Graeco-Roman Egypt, as well as for and in South Africa – but to say
that they also invented all the basic phenomena that make up apartheid, would be to go too far
with the available facts. It would be overly extrapolative. In at least one important instance, it
would even be untrue. I consider apartheid, the systematic human rights violations against an
indigenous racial majority, to be possible only with superiority in the military technology
and/or capability of the racial minority, but we know that arms races started already with
Stone Age humans, before they moved out of Africa for the very first time.106 The uses of
military superiority and inferiority are therefore perhaps also much older problems than the
rest of apartheid.
Nevertheless, the extension of the label ‘apartheid’ to an ancient society is no doubt
significant for the purpose of understanding war and oppression, i.e. gross human rights
violations. Apartheid is not dependent on ‘modernity’ or ‘industrialization’ (imprecise terms

106
See, for example, Makris: The Human Story, 1985: 21ff.
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which have several severe semantic and philosophical problems), for example. And, as we
shall see, this is certainly not the first time that the label ‘apartheid’ has been extended to
Graeco-Roman Egypt. There were at least nine references from nine different authors to
‘apartheid’ in Graeco-Roman Egypt before I made the claim.
Another reason for choosing Graeco-Roman Egypt as a point of comparison is the
enormous, yet often exaggerated, influence that the ancient Greek and Roman cultures have
exerted upon Mediterranean, European, ‘western’, and world culture in general. Frequently,
perhaps even generally, this influence has been evaluated in positive terms, perhaps especially
vehemently in these days of searching for a common European identity within an emerging
European super state, a difficult ideological task since Europe is in fact the only part of the
world that calls itself a continent without being one, even in the geographic sense. What I
wish to do here is therefore also to draw attention to some of the elitist, ethnocentric, and
other violent aspects of these civilizations.107 But most of all, I have chosen to study Graeco-
Roman Egypt in parallel to South Africa and Israel due to the very strong structural affinities
between the systems of severe human rights violations employed by the very similar elites in
each of these countries, and the equally strong affinities in indigenous reactions to those
violations, if any, i.e. if the latter are not directly lethal.
To try to find out which two of my three main examples of apartheid represent the
closest parallels may be a fascinating endeavor, but in my opinion, it is an idle one. In sum, it
is impossible to say. Although apartheid Israel and South Africa are not only close in time but
also collaborated intensely with each other and with the same western superpowers, the
parallels between Graeco-Roman Egypt and South Africa are often even closer. In both of the
latter, for example, there were two very similar waves of European colonializers turning an
African country into and consolidating an apartheid society. In their apartheid roles, the
Greeks and the Dutch correspond very closely to each other, as do the Romans with the
British. On the other hand, the parallels between Graeco-Roman Egypt and Israel, which are
the closest in space, are also often closer structurally as well, e.g. both are relatively small
countries and neither had an initial slave-labor-based economy as South Africa did. That is the
case partly, perhaps mainly, because both Graeco-Roman Egypt and Israel, as opposed to
South Africa, are characterized by high population densities. There will be many more
examples of such bilateral parallels, along with the trilateral ones, of course, in the following,
but I do not think that there is much sense in trying to pick two of my three examples that are
closer to each other in an overall manner.
The reader might at times feel tempted to demand a systematic account of the
differences between my three main instances of apartheid. I am afraid that such an account
will not be provided by this investigation. Although it seems close at hand sometimes, I do not
believe that it is possible to systematically account for the differences. Aside from my loose
107
See Bernal: Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1: The Fabrication of
Ancient Greece 1785-1985, 1987, for a critique of ideological aspects of the Graeco-Roman civilization
becoming the model for European culture during the last couple of centuries to the detriment of the African and
Asian civilizations from which it (the Graeco-Roman one) really originated. Bernal’s book has become the
catalyst for a huge academic and public controversy, also with regard to, among other things, the roles of racism
and political correctness in history and historiography. For overviews of the still ongoing debates, see also
Binsbergen: The Continued Relevance of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena Thesis: Yes and No, 2009; Bernal:
Black Athena, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence, 2006; McCoskey: On Black Athena, Hippocratic Medicine,
and Roman Imperial Edicts: Egyptians and the Problem of Race in Classical Antiquity, 2004: 299-313;
Löwstedt: The Clash of Histories of Civilisations, 2002: 45f; Bernal & Moore (ed.) 2001; Berlinerblau: Heresy
in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals, 1999;
Howe: Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, 1999; Tzermias: Für eine Hellenistik mit Zukunft:
Plädoyer für die Überwindung der Krise des Humanismus, 1998; Binsbergen (ed.): Black Athena: Ten Years
After, 1997; Lefkowitz & Rogers (eds.): Black Athena Revisited, 1996 (a selective and overwhelmingly negative
critique and rejection of Bernal’s ideas); Bernal: Black Athena, Volume II: The Archaeological and
Documentary Evidence, 1991; Peradotto (ed.): The Challenge of Black Athena, 1989. See also footnote 499
below.
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distinctions between more and less important differences, only the similarities between
apartheid societies are systematic, as far as I have been able to establish.
South Africa’s apartheid system is of course historically unique, but in this
investigation I will point to what I believe are very strong indications suggesting that it is not
structurally unique. The introductory comparisons with the USA, Australia, New Zealand,
Nazi Germany, Rhodesia, Guatemala, Outremer, Liberia, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Soviet
Union and Afghanistan, and the whole modern and post-modern worlds should have brought
that point home already. In numerous regards they display direct parallels to the systematic
and gross human rights violations that existed and took place in South Africa under white
supremacist domination. In some instances they are correlated or even identical with the latter.
My three main examples will provide even closer parallels than these introductory parallels,
and the four among them that I also consider to be apartheid societies, i.e. Rhodesia,
Guatemala, Outremer, and Liberia. The same structural constraints – including invasion,
demographic relations and dynamics, racist discrimination against the indigenous people,
concomitant racist immigration practices and indigenous as well as invader patriarchy – will
for example make similar demographic wars develop within apartheid societies, wars in which
huge numbers of indigenous men (and others) get killed. This in turn leads to or amplifies
large-scale femicide, killings of independence-minded indigenous women (and others) by
indigenous people, but also by the apartheid system.
Occasionally, I will use the word apartheid in the narrow sense of the explicit political
programs or the officially admitted practices of South Africa’s National Party from 1948
onwards. Mainly, however, I will use apartheid in the wide, and now more commonly used
sense of ‘oppressive, racist segregation and exploitation by a de facto invading racial minority
and its descendants’. Except where indicated, the context will make it obvious which meaning
of the word ‘apartheid’ is intended.

7. Definition of Apartheid in the Wide Sense

My understanding and definition of apartheid alongside the empirical evidence
presented to support the accuracy of that definition constitute Part II, the main part of this
book. Apartheid can be summed up as a structured process of gross human rights violations,
perpetrated chiefly against a conquered racial majority by a relatively strong state and (weak
civil) society mainly controlled by an originally invading, racial minority and its descendants,
as well as other individuals, mainly immigrants, deemed part of an institutionalized racial
elite. That is the definition in a nutshell. In detail, the following nine categories together make
up the necessary and sufficient, i.e. defining characteristics of apartheid:

1. Violence: Apartheid is a state of war initiated by an invading (or de facto invading) racial
minority, which at least in the short term originates from non-neighboring localities. (In all
seven main instances of apartheid investigated here most if not all members of the invading
group originated from a different continent. But that is not a necessary condition. The
Americo-Liberians, moreover, are African in origin, like their victims. Many Jews in Israel
are from Asia or other parts of the Arab world. Thus, extra-continentality is conspicuous, but
to some extent an arbitrary condition.) The invading racial minority and its self-defined
descendants then continue to dominate the indigenous majority by means of their military
superiority and by their continuous threats and uses of violence. In order to dominate large
numbers of attacked, dispossessed, and resentful indigenous people, the racial elite constantly
sees itself forced to develop new, more effective and more lethal weapons. In relatively
successful apartheid societies, such as the three that are the focus of this study, the privileged
racial minority’s military technology and techniques are cutting-edge on a global scale, and
they all practice torture and physical as well as social and psychological harassment routinely
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against members of the indigenous communities. Members of the oppressed majority also
commit violent acts, which in some, though far from all, cases may be described and excused
as self-defense. On the other hand, the privileged minority in an apartheid society, or members
of it, should never be able to be totally exonerated for committing violent acts against
indigenous people on the grounds of self-defense. There could, however, be some mitigating
circumstances, though mostly there do not seem to be any such circumstances at all. Such
circumstances may even be considered for amnesty (granted to individuals only) in the service
of truth and reconciliation, but on the other hand justice must also be served in the resolution
of apartheid in order for true peace to take hold. The resistance against apartheid also commits
occasional crimes against humanity, e.g. by targeting innocent civilians, such as children, with
lethal force. But the crimes against humanity cannot all simply be put on an equal footing.
There are more kinds of crimes and much larger numbers of victims in all the crimes
perpetrated by the initiators and upholders of apartheid. Thus the violent crimes of apartheid
are mainly consequences of the initial invasion. That invasion is the original provocation. The
same goes for the third kind of apartheid violence, native-on-native, which is largely a
consequence of divide-and-rule (fragmentation) policies by the racial elite. Within this
category is demographic warfare, which from the perspective of physical violence mainly
consists of ‘femicide’, killings of women because they are women. Its background is in each
case a racist immigration and ethnic cleansing policy, pursued and practiced by the racial
apartheid elites and their allies. As we shall see: in Egypt there was (and is) female genital
mutilation; in South Africa there are still ‘witch’-burnings today, and in Palestine ‘honor
killings’. Although femicide in apartheid societies is carried out mainly by indigenous
perpetrators, responsibility should, according to my analysis, be shouldered by the individual
perpetrators, the indigenous society and its institutions (e.g. the Palestinian National
Authority, the African National Congress, the religious authorities, the ancient tribal or clan
authorities) and, crucially, also by the apartheid society’s racial elite, without whose existence
femicide might not exist either, certainly not to the same extent. After having initiated a
demographic race, racist immigration laws and practices, as well as racist physical and
structural violence amounting to ethnic cleansing, the apartheid elites can only be legally
countered with a high birth rate by the indigenous people. For most indigenous people,
especially for women, this is their only possible form of resistance against apartheid.
Palestinian and black South African birth rates are therefore among the highest in the world.
Both of these countries have seen a tenfold population increase over the last century (as
opposed to the whole world’s population, which ‘merely’ quadrupled over the last hundred
years), including members of both of the principal races, but especially of the indigenous
people. And indigenous women who do not marry early to produce more offspring are
sometimes directly punished, and occasionally murdered, for not doing so. The following
eight categories are also violent, though in a less direct manner. They are sometimes referred
to as ‘structural violence’.
2. Repopulation: Apartheid is also a continuation of depopulation, i.e. violence, including
forced expulsion, by other means, in particular by immigration policies and practices, birth
control measures and techniques, marriage laws, and marriage practices. It thus establishes a
sizeable, privileged racial minority, which constitutes a (somewhat) civil society separated
from the indigenous population, within the invaded and expropriated territories. If this
minority should develop into a majority, as in the USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere,
‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ obviously become more apt labels than ‘apartheid’. Yet,
some degree of ethnic cleansing is also necessary in apartheid, and genocidal events also take
place in each apartheid society. Statistically, as long as apartheid conditions exist, the
oppressed majority will exhibit a faster natural population growth, for a variety of compelling
reasons. This growth, however, is not in the interest of the oppressive minority in an apartheid
society. If it finds itself shrinking fast in relation to the racial majority, it finds and perceives
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itself fighting a losing battle in the demographic war, and will therefore often turn to genocide
or to more or less forced expulsions of large groups of indigenous people, as well as fostering,
or at least allowing, indigenous femicide. My main three examples of apartheid also manifest
the formation of a third racial group, comprising mixed-race descendants of the two main
racial groups, as well as imported foreigners from third countries. This last group of people,
imported to do exploitable work, is given rights and privileges that sometimes extend further
than those of the indigenous but are always a great deal more restricted than those of the
invading racial elite and its supposedly ‘pure-blooded’ descendants. Together, apartheid
violence and apartheid repopulation constitute ethnic cleansing.
3. Citizenship: This is a means to exclude all or portions of the indigenous population (and
often of imported labor) and any actual or potential allies of theirs from all kinds of rights and
benefits. Nowhere, in fact, is citizenship such an efficient tool of oppression as it is in
apartheid states. Many or most of the indigenous are often denied citizenship in their own
country by the apartheid state authorities, which are, somewhat ironically and irrationally, run
and staffed by the more recent arrivals to the country. In practice, however, there are always
exceptions, a few members of the oppressed majority who do obtain citizenship, though with
fewer rights and privileges than those of the citizens from the oppressive minority. It is the
power to bestow or withhold citizenship, which makes the independence of the apartheid state
a hallmark of apartheid itself. As opposed to colonies, apartheid countries are independent,
they are even very independent countries, if the expression be allowed, that stick out like sore
thumbs in their immediate vicinity. This independence, political independence, also has
profound consequences for the elite racial minority, which from now on has nowhere else to
go and is more or less forced (by its own action) to stay, come what may, in its adopted, and
conquered, home country.
4. Land: Apartheid entails land confiscation, land redistribution and forced removals, almost
without exception to the benefit of the invading racial minority. Usually, members of the
racial majority are forced on to barren and unfertile soils, where they must also try to survive
under impoverished and overcrowded conditions. There is also a strategic placement of
refugees and other persecuted indigenous individuals, families and communities in
Bantustans, reserves, homelands, and other geographic and political constructions, such as the
Palestinian Authority areas, in divided entities, cut off from each other and from independent
neighbors. The Bantustans of South Africa and Palestine are surrounded by the invaders and
their descendants. In advanced apartheid, there is even an, at least partially, imposed hierarchy
of Bantustans: Zululand was generally treated better than Bophuthatswana, the West Bank
cantons (so far) better than Gaza.
5. Work: Apartheid displays systematic exploitation of the indigenous class in the production
process and different pay or taxation for the same work depending on the elites’ (ultimately
arbitrary) definitions of races or ethnicities. Many apartheid societies are very rich, and this
often breeds an economic independence that can match their political independence. The fruits
of labor, the profits and the decision-making powers usually all end up with representatives of
the oppressive racial minority. Any kind of economic strength of the indigenous majority is
made impossible by the apartheid business elite, accompanied by intentional state measures
sometimes amounting to economic sabotage of attempts at indigenous economic and financial
independence. As in all capitalist economies, a large reserve ‘army’ of unemployed people is
created (by both state and civil society); only, in apartheid, the reservists are almost
exclusively indigenous and they comprise huge numbers, often 30 or even 40 percent of the in
situ indigenous population. The third-race workers are imported partly in order to keep the
indigenous reserve army of unemployed laborers large (in order to keep wages down), but
also in order to carry out work that the indigenous refuse to do (e.g. the Indian workers in
Natal to work on sugar plantations on which the indigenous Zulus refused to work) or are not
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likely to do efficiently (such as the collection of racist taxes in Graeco-Roman Egypt, which
was largely carried out by imported Jews).
6. Access: There is racially differentiated access to employment, food, water, health care,
emergency services, legal counsel, clean air, and other needs, including the need for leisure
activities, in each case ensuring superior access for the favored racial community.
7. Education: There are also different kinds of education offered and forced upon the
different racial groups. Interestingly, or ironically, more and especially superior education
usually leads members of the apartheid elites to less extremist positions, sometimes even to
their rejection, whereas members of the oppressed majority are mostly led to more ‘extremist’,
i.e. more oppositional, positions with increasing education. This is one of the reasons that so
many members of the indigenous racial majority are intentionally and systematically deprived
by the apartheid elites of an education altogether. Education is therefore another one of the
main battlefields of apartheid.
8. Language: Words, proper names, expressions, dialects, and entire languages are actively
prohibited, limited, allowed or promoted depending on their perceived racial origins and
affinities. A basic apartheid characteristic is the fact that only very few of the invaders and
their descendants ever learn the language(s) of the indigenous victims. Yet, if they do, they
are apparently more likely to be or become opposed to apartheid. The physical and political
geography of the invaded land is relentlessly renamed and recast in the language of apartheid
oppressors, so that the newcomers feel at home in the conquered territory and the indigenous
majority does not, even if many of the members of the latter have never been to another
country.
9. Thought: Finally, apartheid contains ideologies or ‘necessary illusions’108, chiefly aimed at
the elites in particular, and the societies at large in general, in order to convince the privileged
minorities that they are inherently superior and the indigenous majorities that they are
inherently inferior. Much of apartheid thought is shaped by typical war propaganda. The
enemy is dehumanized, de-legitimized, and demonized by both sides’ ideologies. Words and
other symbols are used to incite or provoke people to violence, but mostly so by the invaders
and their descendants. Aside from violence, thought is the only realm of apartheid in which
members of the indigenous majority perpetrate gross human rights violations against members
of the invader elite race majority. And, as with violence, most of this kind of gross human
rights violation is perpetrated by members of the elite race. All the other seven kinds of gross
human rights violations, i.e. numbers 2 through 8 above, are exclusive responsibilities of the
elite race. An essential feature of all apartheid ideologies, related to racism, dehumanization
and demonization of the Other, as well as incitement to violence, is ‘de-secularization’, a
reliance on alleged divine revelation as a source of information about the world and an
attempted legitimization of war, oppression, theft, and exploitation, on the one hand, and the
use of religion as an ‘opium’ for the oppressed people (including the potentially oppositional
members of the privileged minority, of which there always seem to be quite a few), on the

108
Chomsky: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, 1989. More recently, Chomsky has
argued that dictatorships and other undemocratic polities during the 20 th century in fact learned the most about
propaganda from democratic societies, in which elites can not control people by brute force accompanied by
formal, pre-publication censorship, and therefore have to control them, if at all, chiefly by means of propaganda.
And so, regardless of whether one looks at the democratic aspects – of which there actually are (and were) a few,
though restricted to the privileged racial minority and perhaps a few other groups – or the numerous
undemocratic aspects of apartheid South Africa, Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt, propaganda is always likely to
play a very important role in apartheid, as it does in genocidal and colonial societies. See Chomsky: Media
Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2002 (1991): 20f: ‘Propaganda is to a democracy what
the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.’ See also Chomsky: Escaping Orthodoxies, Barsamian Interviews
Chomsky, Part 3, 2000. Obviously, apartheid societies mainly use the bludgeon, but numerous indications
suggest that propaganda is also indispensable for the smooth functioning of interim as well as long-term
apartheid oppression, especially since the Second World War. See Section II.9 below.
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other. This is not an automatic feature that has an effect on the thought of every individual,
but it is an overall trend noticeable in, and characteristic of each apartheid society. In Egypt
itself, the trend of de-secularization started already long before apartheid, in 1500 BCE and it
continued for at least two thousand years, including the entire apartheid era during the second
of those millennia. However, only in South Africa, and only during the 20th century, do we
notice an opposite secularization process within an apartheid society. Nevertheless, this is
explainable through an exceptionally strong secularization trend on a global scale, against
which even the most pious white South Africans were powerless. Israel and Palestine, on the
other hand, have witnessed steadily intensifying de-secularization, the typical apartheid trend.
The Zionist system of propaganda, possibly the most expensive propaganda enterprise ever
undertaken, is outlined at the end of Chapter II.9.3. Other essentials within this category are
the comparatively large amounts of manipulated information, bias, misinformation, and
propaganda, as well as the unfree flow of information in apartheid societies. The apartheid
elites manage most of the information, manipulate much of it, and guard their control over it
jealously.
If only one of these nine categories is missing in a society where the other eight are
present, I would still call it ‘apartheid’. The most obvious examples are Egypt under imperial
Roman rule, in which the oppressive racial minority was always mainly of Greek descent, and
South Africa under imperial British or colonial Dutch rule, where the oppressive racial
minority was always mainly of Dutch descent. In both of these instances, my third category,
apartheid citizenship, was missing, since the countries were not independent during these
periods. Yet, there were other oppressive instances of the use of citizenship here: not as
oppressive, but still able to target the oppressed indigenous majority from Rome and London,
respectively. For instance, colonialized non-white members of the British Empire were never
given full British citizenship; they were never able to move to Britain whenever they wanted.
This still applied to the Hong Kong Chinese in the 1990s and will likely apply to Gibraltar
non-Whites in the future. In fact, they were hardly ever able to move there, unless their labor
or military services were strongly desired by the Crown or the country’s big business, and,
even then, they were often forced to go back to the colony or ex-colony later. I believe the
label ‘apartheid’ can still be useful even if two of the nine apartheid conditions are missing,
but that was never or hardly ever the case in the three apartheid societies that are the focus of
this investigation.
My definition is neither essentialist nor arbitrary. It is a flexible definition, the focus of
which may be allowed by the investigator to shift. Any (two) of the nine categories may in
practice be disregarded in case the whole system of oppression is in focus. Moreover, it is not
a reductionist definition. The demographic rule of thumb, for example, may be less useful in
case the two main populations are largely separated by natural means, e.g. mountain ranges,
deserts, or simply distances. In cases such as the USA or Australia under apartheid conditions,
the native majority was largely not even bothered or much aware of the invader race for such
reasons. (They often only became aware when it was already too late, and the transitory and
relatively short-lived colonial and apartheid states had already turned into genocide.) Another
example: the condition of independence, both political and economic, is obviously less
important for comparatively weak apartheid states such as Liberia or Guatemala.
In a racist society where one group of invaders oppresses another group, a group of
indigenous people, there are very likely genocidal (in a wide sense, including cultural and
linguistic genocide), and apartheid and colonial features. South Africa under white control
from 1652 until 1994, in my opinion, was mainly apartheid, roughly estimated: 75 percent,
but also colonial, around, say, 15 percent; and genocidal, say 10 percent. Israel from 1948
until the present is, in my estimation, so far less colonial (but not much) and more genocidal
(also not much), Egypt from 323 BCE until 642 AD more colonial and less genocidal.
Nonetheless, the basic underlying structure is the same. Without implying or requiring
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a Platonic, conceptual idealism, there is a kind of ‘ideal-type apartheid’, ‘model apartheid’, or

better: a ‘full-blown apartheid’, for instance observable 1910-1994 CE in South Africa (but
also 1839-1902 in the so-called ‘Boer republics’), as well as in Israel 1948 until the present, in
Ptolemaic Egypt (and its numerous colonies) 323-30 BCE, Rhodesia 1965-1979 CE,
Guatemala 1840-1996, Liberia 1847-1980, or in the kingdom of Jerusalem (and/or its
numerous satellites) 1099-1291, and it manifests itself in each of these societies with the
presence of all nine apartheid categories. Still, there will be genocidal as well as colonialist
features present in full-blown apartheid, too; but here, where all nine categories apply, is
where we get closest to a society that is 100 percent apartheid.

Ptolemaic Egypt 323-30 BCE 293

Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099-1291 CE 192
Guatemala 1840-1996 156
Liberia 1847-1980 133
South Africa 1910-1994 84
Israel 1948 until the present 66 (so far)
South African Boer republics 1839-1902 63
Rhodesia 1965-1980 15

Table 1. Success (measured in numbers of lifespan years) of some full-blown apartheid societies

Table 1 shows that apartheid can exist continuously in its full-blown form for
centuries, that apartheid is not a common, but still a recurring, event in world history, and
perhaps also that modern Israel is now likely to repeat dynamics of South African apartheid in
different ways, i.e. that Israeli apartheid is coming of age. On the other hand, it is in my
opinion unwise to over-emphasize full-blown apartheid. On the one hand, declarations of
independence, introductions of democracy, etc. are irreversible, revolutionary changes in the
history of a society; but, on the other hand, they also have aspects that are more arbitrary, and
in some cases they are even little more than formalities. Israel 1948, for example, has much
more in common with South Africa in 1652 than is shown in this table. They are both
invasions with concomitant ethnic cleansing and genocidal features. Guatemala also suffered
apartheid much longer than just the 156 years of the full-blown variety. Apartheid should
therefore be seen as much as possible in a context of colonialism (e.g. South Africa under
long-distance white rule: 1652-1839 and later) and, equally, in a context of genocide, e.g. the
eradication of Khoikhoi and San peoples in South Africa since the 17th century. I will refer to
a millennium of apartheid in Egypt and to 350 years of apartheid in South Africa, because the
colonial eras that are temporally adjacent to apartheid rule in both countries are so close to
apartheid conceptually, demographically, and practically that the overall apartheid label
remains apt, even if not strictly accurate. Greek and Dutch apartheid perpetrators, in
particular, were mainly rewarded by the new colonial powers (Rome and Britain) and
generally continued perpetrating it.

8. Beyond Settler Colonial, Postcolonial, and Postmodern Theory

The dawn of the 20th century had a single academically articulated or ‘scientific’
theory of systematic oppression: Marxism, the theory of class struggles. Soon, a theory of
systematic oppression, or ‘repression’, within the individual followed, Sigmund Freud’s (and
also Alfred Adler’s) psychoanalysis. The end of the century saw the emergence of feminism, a
powerful new theory of gender-based systematic oppression. Still conspicuously missing,
however, is a comprehensive theory of structured or systematic racist human rights violations,
104

the long-term effects of which are apparently becoming increasingly acute and obvious in the
rapidly globalizing world of the 21st century.
For instance, ten years after the formal ending of apartheid, South Africa remained the
country with the largest income differences in the world, with the possible exception of
Brazil, and those differences still basically run along race lines, in both South Africa and
Brazil.109 There are of course exceptions, but in general Blacks are poor and Whites are rich,
in both countries. Parallel to that: in 2007, Israel, the lone remaining apartheid country in the
world, had the largest gap between rich and poor in the industrialized world. The Israeli
pattern persisted five years later. And here, too, the difference was mainly between people
generally considered ‘non-Whites’ (Palestinians) and other people (now) generally considered
‘Whites’ (Jews). In 2013, Israel had the largest poverty rate in the industrialized world, 20.9
percent of the population.110
The continent of Africa may be considered the primary victim of racist human rights
violations historically, certainly during the last four hundred years. Not only the violence
against Africa or the oppression and ignorance of Africa, or of Blacks, or even of non-Whites,
however, might be better understood with the aid of such a theory, but racism against
whomever, perpetrated by whomever, wherever and whenever these phenomena persist or
crop up again or anew. With this investigation, I wish to contribute to the emergence of a
general theory of racism or at least to a kind of preliminary understanding of some of the main
problems involved.
‘Postcolonial theory’ attempts to explain and understand the closely related
phenomena of colonialization and de-colonialization, but the choice to use the label,
‘colonial’, as an overall characterization including any apartheid society fails to account for
the scene of the crime being understood, at home and abroad, as the home country of the
relatively large oppressive minority which consists of civilian as well as military invaders and
their descendants. It also disregards the presence of an independent economy and polity,
conditions that characterize apartheid societies, but never colonial ones. Nonetheless,
apartheid societies, such as South Africa or modern Israel, are usually considered part of
colonialism in the postcolonialist discourse. This is something that this investigation attempts
to counteract.

109
N.N.: Black Income in South Africa Nears Whites’, Still Lags, March 18, 2001. The article states that the
income disparities between the rich and the poor in South Africa at the time were only matched by those in
Brazil, where strong traditions of severe racist oppression, including racist slavery, also play significant roles.
(See, for example, Darlington: Brazil’s Blacks Battle Myth of “Racial Democracy”, 2001; Figueiredo: Brazil –
The Black Stake, 2003 on continued institutional racism in Brazil.) A small black elite emerging in South Africa
had more than doubled its income from 1996 to 2001, but apart from that the income differences in South Africa
were essentially racial differences. In 2001, the 11 percent white minority still earned 44 percent of the country’s
net income, whereas the 77 percent black majority earned only 43.4 percent. N.N. March 18, 2001 cites a study
by the University of South Africa (UNISA) as well as a World Bank report. See further, N.N.: Mbeki Says South
Africa is Still Two Nations, May 29, 2001. However, some of the blame for the situation today, for continued
economic apartheid, must be given to the numerous neoliberal policies of the post-apartheid (or epiapartheid),
ANC-led governments. From 1996 to 2002, for example, the average black household got 19 percent poorer,
while the average white household got 15 percent richer. See Ngwane: Sparks in the Township, 2003. Of course,
one could argue that the ANC had no choice in the matter: either adapt to globalized capitalism or go under.
There are, however, other important aspects to the socio-economic development of South Africa since apartheid.
According to the most cited research, Blacks have closed the gap to Whites in terms of income. Nevertheless,
inequality is increasing within racial groups, and the net effect is uncertain. Since 1970, black per capita income
rose from 3,000 to 8,000 Rand in constant 2000 prices. See Stoddard: S.Africa Intra-Race Disparities on the
Rise-Studies, 2004. Yet, the year 1970 represents the height (or close to it) of racial inequality in income. Other
apartheid years in which Blacks were better off financially than they are now could most probably be found. See
Chapter II.5.2 below. This does not mean apartheid was better than what South Africa has now: far from it. It
only means the (still mainly white male) plutocratic or plutomaniac global elites like(d) apartheid more than the
system in place in South Africa today.
110
Kovel 2007: 84; Bassok: Study: Income Inequality Growing Faster in Israel than in Other Developed Nations,
2012; Dattel & Feldman: Israel Has Highest Poverty Rate in the Developed World, OECD Report Shows, 2013.
 105

Strictly speaking, South Africa has actually been postcolonial, not since 1994, but
since 1910, at the very latest, when the Union of South Africa gained formal independence
and effective self-rule from Britain. In my understanding ‘apartheid’ also applies essentially to
the independent Afrikaner republics during the 19th century, and, moreover, to most aspects of
the Dutch and British colonies in South Africa. Of course, one could see apartheid as a violent
transition period from coloniality to post-coloniality. However, the fact that decolonialization
(more accurately: ‘de-apartheidization’) in South Africa, in the sense of equal rights for
indigenous people, immigrants, descendants of slaves, and invaders and their descendants,
was not even initiated formally until after 84 particularly traumatic years of intensifying
violence and oppression should be seen as more than just an anomaly in postcolonial theory,
which apparently wishes to include the research territory of the South African experience
under its umbrella. Postcolonial theory as it stands today, therefore, needs to be reformed, i.e.
restricted to its proper research territory, or even replaced. The reason is simply that apartheid
societies, whether understood in the wide or narrow sense, are essentially different from
colonialized ones.111 Moreover, they are not just independent countries; they are very or even
extremely independent countries, sticking out like sore thumbs amongst their immediate and
regional neighbors. That independence and difference from neighbors is political, economic,
and cultural in kind. This is certainly true for Israel, South Africa, Liberia and Outremer, but
slightly less so for Graeco-Roman Egypt, Rhodesia and Guatemala, who each bordered a
territory ruled by a government friendly (or in the colonial context: identical) to theirs.
The distinction between ‘settler’ and ‘non-settler’ colonies and the inclusion of
apartheid societies within the former category make up one attempt to solve the problem, but
it ends up confusing more than it explains with its attempt to salvage the dominance of the
concept of colony at all costs.112 Political and economic independence, the invaders’ attitude

111
For the concept of anomaly in ‘normal science’, see Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 21970: 52-
76. Although I hold colonies and apartheid societies to be essentially different, there are also inevitably grey
zones represented by, for instance, South Africa under British, or Egypt under Roman rule. In both of these
societies, however, the Dutch and Greek descendants, respectively, remained the majority of oppressive Whites,
whereas the Romans and the British mostly played official and customary colonial roles. Keeping the citizenship
of the mother country, the latter were also able to return home at any time or at least after their missions had been
completed. The vast majority of victims in all four societies, however, were indigenous Africans. There is not yet
a satisfactory general theory to account for the underlying racism which is at work here and in countless other
situations.
112
The overextended use of the concept of ‘colony’, and the fact that Ptolemaic Egypt remained independent of
Greece, Macedonia, and of all other countries, throughout its three centuries of existence, are the main reasons
why Roger Bagnall dismisses modern attempts to identify (and criticize) so-called ‘colonialist’ aspects of Greek-
ruled Egypt. In this regard, he and I are in full agreement. However, he unfortunately does not bring in South
Africa under white rule to anything but two footnotes and a parenthesis and stays away from even considering a
characterization of Greek-ruled Egypt as an apartheid society. Indeed, in contrast to his otherwise
methodologically solid work, Bagnall’s references to South Africa appear to be little more than unintegrated
afterthoughts. In the end, he calls the Graeco-Roman system of domination in Egypt ‘hierarchical’, thereby
conclusively confirming that a circle is indeed round. See Bagnall: Decolonizing Ptolemaic Egypt, 1997: 225-
241. Bagnall’s tautological conclusion is all the more disappointing since one of the editors of the same volume,
entitled ‘Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History and Historiography’, in his introduction points to no
less than five different modern sources who refer explicitly to ‘apartheid’ in Graeco-Roman Egypt. See footnote
142 below. See also Petraglia-Bahri: Introduction to Postcolonial Studies, 1996. I would not be entirely unhappy
with calling Egypt under Roman rule or the Cape Colony under Dutch or British rule ‘settler colonies’, but their
differences with Ptolemaic apartheid Egypt or the Boer apartheid republics or the apartheid Union or Republic of
South Africa may be severely over-stretched by situating them on the other side of the theoretical fence on the
side of colony, rather than apartheid. They are wholly or partly identical in spatial extension and adjacent in time
to each other, and they are in my terminology therefore better referred to as apartheid societies with colonial
veneers, an apartheid essence with a colonial appearance. For that same reason, the illegal Israeli settlements in
the West Bank should not be called ‘settler colonies’ if by colony we mean a form of society where an
indigenous majority is dominated by a small minority of invaders. The Israeli settlements are actually already far
from colonial, they are already much worse than colonial, part of an ethnic cleansing project, designed to
displace or annihilate entire indigenous communities or at most only employ a few indigenous individuals for
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towards the country as their home, and other ideological elements, as well as the issues of
more violence, more aggressive repopulation, more restrictive citizenship, more theft of land,
more exploitative work, and more restricted access characterize the concept of apartheid in
my understanding and all contribute to distinguishing it from colonialism. These are not just
quantitative differences. Unlike the economy of a colony, the economy of an apartheid
society, for example, is not underdeveloped and specialized on a single or a small number of
export commodities but diversified and highly developed, indeed helping to support and even
create political independence. This is a basic, essential, and structural difference between
apartheid and colonialism. Moreover, if there are much less than five percent of the dominant
race, and space to accommodate them, then colonialism does not have to be extreme. It can be
relatively peaceful and even involve no physical violence at all. Apartheid, on the other hand,
is always extreme: it typically entails a population share of five to fifty percent of a country,
who invariably arrive in a physically as well as structurally violent manner: invading,
replacing, expelling and killing large numbers of people.
Sometimes, however, it may still be hard to see the difference, perhaps especially from
the perspective of victims of recent apartheid and colonialism.

Unique as was the Apartheid regime, there was no feature of that evil
system that could not be duplicated in the experience of other parts of
black Africa. It was the racist colonial system that…made it possible
for a few settlers protected by the force of the colonial power to erect
such a system and operate it under neo-colonialism for so long
because the Western world chose to regard white South Africa as their
bulwark against the spread of communism. Another point to note is
that the evil system arose out of the contempt bred by the Atlantic
slave trade. The theology of the Dutch Reformed Church used to
justify and sustain apartheid arose from the Unfinished [sic] business
of the antislavery movement, and the failure to declare the Atlantic
trade and racist colonialism as a sin incompatible with the Biblical
notion of neighbourly love.113

The arguments delivered in this quote are of course not erroneous, but the other parts
of Africa that experienced the closest ‘duplicates’ were in fact themselves apartheid societies,
such as Rhodesia or Graeco-Roman Egypt, or mixtures between colonies and apartheid, e.g.
Kenya, Algeria and South West Africa. I would like to refer to this kind of society alone as
‘settler colony’. They all had sizeable (and white) civilian populations, i.e. settlers, yet no
political independence, except Rhodesia (from 1965 to 1980) and Greek-ruled Egypt, which
were both independent apartheid states, not colonies. The dependency on the European or
white superpowers, moreover, is treated rather monolithically in the quote above. It is

menial work. There is no place for an indigenous majority or even indigenous existence in the intent involved
here. More than a quarter of the total number of inhabitants of the West Bank today consists of illegal Jewish
settlers. That is even more than the portion of Whites in South Africa in 1948. The West Bank itself may
therefore be referred to as a colonial society, but the indigenous people are being replaced so quickly, i.e. their
turnover is accelerated and their land stolen, since the 1990s especially, that ‘apartheid’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’
have now become much more appropriate labels. See Chapters II.1.3, 2.3, and 5.3 below.
113
Ajayi 2001. Moreover, the two crimes against humanity mentioned in the last sentence are sins incompatible
with some central notions in every, or almost every, religion, and of course with secularized international law
and most systems of national law as well. Nonetheless, all three Biblical religions to some extent also approved
of or accepted slavery in their holy scriptures. Regarding the centrality of both class and race in this issue: in
1834 the British Parliament passed a bill to pay 23 million pounds (the equivalent of over 23 billion pounds at
the beginning of the 21st century) in damages for slavery, but not to the former slaves, who did not get a penny.
The former slave owners perversely received the money to cover their losses of income due to the abolition of
slavery. And in many cases their direct descendants today are therefore (this is less than two hundred years ago)
wealthy and otherwise privileged, while the direct descendants to the slaves are generally not wealthy, nor
privileged. Ibid.
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important in this context that Kenya in the 1950s, for example, was a great deal more
dependent on Britain than South Africa ever was. That was the time when British troops were
sent to Kenya to crush the indigenous Mau Mau rebellion against undemocratic, racist British
rule there. Nothing of the kind, e.g. Britain or the USA sending troops, could have happened
during, for instance, the Soweto uprising or the Palestinian Intifadas.114 Add to that the
political and legal implications of the sovereignty and strength of the state in South Africa,
and the concepts of colonialism and neo-colonialism (dependency of the former colony on the
economic power of the former colonialists) become even weaker in attempts to explain South
African apartheid. The racist aspects of everyday life, however, are not surprisingly very
similar for South Africa and African colonies during the same time period. The victims of
apartheid and those of colonialism do indeed have similar experiences, but the perpetrators are
different and act differently and for partly different reasons, as well. They are mainly civilian
in apartheid, and their actions are more exploitative, expropriative and destructive, and more
akin to genocide. Their cultural and ideological attitudes and actions are also very different
from those of colonialists. They attempt to justify their actions with claims of belonging to the
conquered land, even more than the indigenous people do. Colonialists do not belong to the
colonialized land, though some or even much of it may belong to them.
In my view, it is unfortunate that ‘Israeli Colonialism’ is still to be found as often as
‘Israeli Apartheid’ in literature critical of Israel: also because the former is an ambiguous
concept. There are two meanings from which the former term derives its persuasive power:
Israel and its settlements may be seen as a colony of imperialistic western, anti-islamic, anti-
Arab, pro-US, pro-European and/or pro-NATO interests, and secondly, the settlements may
be seen as colonies of an Israeli or Zionist state (or empire), centered within its 1948
borders. However, these two meanings contradict each other, at least at times. The
contradiction is crucially also of a potentially judicial nature. If colonialism is a crime, then
who is the criminal in this case? Israel or the west?
The theory of apartheid proposed here, in the context of a theory of racism, in the
context of a theory of oppression, does not have this ambiguity. Moreover, it defines the
criminals and the difference between them. Under already existing and valid international law,
the west, led by Britain and the USA, (the colonial and neo-colonial powers) was and is a
criminal, but only against South Africa, Israel and their neighbors and similar victims
elsewhere, whereas South Africa and Israel (the apartheid perpetrators) are criminals against
humanity, against all of us. The concept of ‘apartheid’ that I have proposed here is clearly and
comprehensively delineated, unambiguous, consistent, and, by means of its detailed
definition, testable. It is tested and found to hold for seven different societies in this volume
and remains testable in the future, for deeper investigations into the same societies studied
here as well as for others.115
114
Iliffe 1995: 235, 248. Of course, Britain and the USA aided and armed the apartheid states extensively during
the uprisings, but they did and do this covertly and quietly. From the geopolitical perspective, it is up to the
apartheid state to solve its own inner turmoil. On another interesting parallel, between French-ruled Algeria and
modern Israel, drawn by Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, himself, see N.N.: Sharon: “Wir Werden
Bleiben”, December 28, 2001. Sharon told the French president, Jacques Chirac, who fought for France against
the Algerians, that Israel is similar, but that the Israelis would not be massacred and expelled, a reference to
some of the privileged French Algerians who had been killed or felt (or were) forced to flee Algeria during or
after its liberation from French colonial rule, largely through their own doing or through that of their immediate
ancestors and other compatriot predecessors and contemporaries. (Sharon, of course, does not mention the latter
fact, nor that the French minority ruled and controlled Algeria undemocratically and brutally, with a large,
imported French civilian population, nor that they ruthlessly exploited the land and its indigenous population. On
the latter issues, see Fanon 2001 (1961); Iliffe 1995: 166f, 230, 246f.)
115
Veracini: The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation, 2013 works with a basic
distinction between colonial and settler colonial societies. It is similar to mine in that it is a dynamic theory,
which in Veracini’s case sees settler colonialism as something that ends itself when successful, i.e. the settlers
practice genocide or ethnic cleansing, and then they become ‘indigenized’, as in the USA, Canada, or Australia.
Veracini and I also both consider Israel’s form of oppression closer to genocide than to many forms of
108

It is also a theory about an actual crime against humanity, unlike colonialism. And
thus, from an activist point of view, it will also be easier to get things done against them, to
stop them and even to punish them, if apartheid perpetrators are identified, accused and then
proven to have practiced apartheid rather than colonialism or anything else. Even if not
epistemic, this is a reason to abandon the colonialist paradigm, at least for now (as long as
colonialism is not a crime against humanity), and allow for a conceptual analysis and
differentiation between colonialism and apartheid. In Immanuel Kant’s rendition, the primacy
of practical reason (meaning mainly moral reason) should apply here, too.
Consider, also, the following similarity between modern Israel, South Africa and
Graeco-Roman Egypt: Traveling is of course more common and much easier nowadays, and
many thousands of tourists come from all over the world to visit Israel every year. The Jewish
tourists and visitors are non-settlers, but they still act in accordance with apartheid principles
and laws in Israel, even to the point of considering the country as theirs more than the
Palestinians’, who lived and live there. One of the reasons behind this is that only Jews – two-
thirds of whom are not Israeli citizens today – have an automatic ‘right of return’ to Israel.
Israeli law thus backs and affords rights to these tourists more than it does to the indigenous
people. Greek and Roman settlers would of course more likely make a single trip from their
home countries to Egypt, and never go back. Still, they would also immediately and
automatically be considered ‘citizens’, whereas, perversely, the indigenous Egyptians were
called ‘aliens’. And there was a small tourism industry for rich people from Greece in Egypt,
already in classical antiquity. In South Africa, Blacks who had never been outside the country
suffered from discrimination with regard to ‘visits’ to cities, and were moreover turned into
aliens, and even forcibly moved to ‘Bantustans’ or ‘Homelands’ that were created on patches
of land that the Whites did not want anyway in the 1970s and ‘80s. Meanwhile, white
immigrants, tourists and other white visitors had an easy time entering, leaving, and re-
entering South Africa. Similar to Blacks in South Africa, Palestinians from the Occupied
Territories, many of whom were forcibly expelled from the state of Israel in 1948, need (and
are usually denied) permissions to enter and to work inside the state of Israel or in east
Jerusalem, which was illegally annexed by Israel in 1980. They are not allowed to enter or
work in their home country, and some of these Palestinians have not even been outside
Palestine once in their lives.
Thus, an apartheid society is much more than just a ‘settler colony’. It exploits like
colonialism (though more), but it also denies the humanity and even the existence of its
victims and exterminates like genocide (though less). Furthermore, it involves specific forms
of oppression that I have named ‘repopulation’ and ‘citizenship’, and a very different kind of
economy, all of which make a great difference. Settlers in colonies do not have these forms of
oppression at their disposal. At times, these forms of oppression actively strip the original

colonialism. But aside from that, mine has little in common with Veracini’s approach. My theory is dynamic in
the different sense that a given society can be apartheid, genocidal and colonialist at the same time, though in
different places, or in the same place at different times, and in different ways, but not in the same way, in the
same place, and at the same time. More accurately, an apartheid society can and does turn into colonialism and
genocide on certain occasions, on micro- as well as macro-levels. According to Veracini, Israel is relatively
successful at settler colonialism (in the sense of genocide and ethnic cleansing) inside its 1948 borders but
unsuccessful outside them, i.e. in the territories captured in 1967. In my view, however, Israel is still successful
in the latter case, although its expansion is slowing down. In less than 50 years, however, especially in the last 20
years or so, it has raised its population from zero to roughly a quarter of the total population of the occupied
territory, despite furious Palestinian population growth and other forms of (Palestinian and global) resistance.
Thanks to Petra Wild for an interesting discussion on this subject after her book presentation in Vienna, June 8,
2013. See Wild: Apartheid und ethnische Säuberung in Palästina: Der zionistische Siedlerkolonialismus in Wort
und Tat, 2013 for an excellent introduction to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in general, and to these aspects of
the conflict in particular. Settler colonial theory, in my view, is thus a good approximation, but does not critically
distinguish enough between the three, structurally and essentially different, outcomes of genocide, apartheid, and
colonialism. At least in Veracini’s approach, the theory of settler colonialism seems to present apartheid as
nothing but unsuccessfully perpetrated genocide.
 109

inhabitants of any rights at all, whereas civilian members of the invader caste are given all
kinds of sumptuous privileges by their own rule. As mentioned, the severity of human rights
violations in apartheid societies and the nature of the liberation processes also differ a great
deal from those of colonies, mainly due to the facts that most members of the oppressive
racial minorities have nowhere else to go (tending to make those liberation processes more
violent), that the relative sizes of the oppressive minorities differ considerably between
apartheid and colonial societies, and that a ruthlessly competitive population growth takes
place under apartheid, with specific, perhaps unique, forms of concomitant violence,
especially femicide among the indigenous people. Colonialized societies may also essentially
contain an element of competitive population growth (which may have been the case in
colonialized Africa during the 20th century) but certainly not to the temporally sustained and
great extent that we witness in apartheid.
Finally, African slaves settled in America, and Asian slaves in South Africa, and
although this was a wholly forced form of settlement, they should according to the
terminology of ‘settler colonialism’ be seen as part of the privileged race, which can hardly be
said to be anywhere near true. On many occasions and in many ways, these settlers suffer
even more than the indigenous people, though of course not necessarily so. The descendants
of Asian slaves and indentured Indian workers in South Africa, for example, ended up (as
‘Coloureds’) with intermediary racial status under South African apartheid, and this may well
also be said to be the case in some, though not very many, regards with the descendants of
African slaves in the Americas. This is precisely why Barack Obama’s election must be seen
as a bittersweet victory for African-Americans. In the terminology that makes Italian-
Americans, German-Americans, Swedish-Americans different since they are never referred to
as ‘European-Americans’, Obama is not African-American but Kenyan-American. His
ancestors, including his father, were not forced to come to America. True, Obama’s wife and
children are African-American, but the US electorate did not yet reward a descendant of
African slaves that built America or of indigenous people, nor a woman, with the presidency
itself. With the election of Obama, it continues to misrepresent and even misunderstand itself
as a nation of male immigrants, rather than a nation of four Is, a nation of Invaders,
Immigrants (legal and illegal), and Indigenous as well as kidnapped and Imported victims and
as of descendants of all of these.
Postcolonial theory is at times also, perhaps, somewhat uncritical of Marxist
explanations of the economic and political structures involved in racist oppression in its focus
on colonialism in culture (usually interpreted in a non-anthropological sense, and more in the
sense of elite culture), particularly in literature116. Thus, colonialism superficially appears to
be a specific ideological phenomenon, but in reality of course it has no less important
material, political and economic accompanying causes. The latter, however, are then often
tacitly assumed to be identical in principle with the colonial powers’ (and others’) structures
and acts of oppression at home. All colonial, apartheid and genocidal societies are class
societies, but the inverse does not hold. Not all class societies are racist. But that is beside the
point since there is domestic racism as well, which is not entirely included in the trinity of
colonialism, apartheid and genocide. (It really only comes partially into genocide.) There is,
however, no a priori condition that determines that class, or gender, is more important than
race; nor, of course, the opposite.
So if we accept that colonialism, apartheid, and genocide form a system that is not
reducible to class or gender conflict and that racism is not reducible to this trinity, either, we
come to the following typology of racist invasions. Not only the quantity, but the quality of
systematic human rights violations is apt to vary, chiefly between:

 Colonial, e.g. India, Palestine, Nigeria or Hong Kong under British rule, Equatorial

116
See, for example, Morrison: Theories of Post-Coloniality: Edward W. Said and W.B. Yeats, 1998.
110

Guinea under Spanish rule, England under Roman rule, ancient Egypt under Assyrian and
Persian rule, Indonesia under Dutch rule, Chechnya (or East Germany) under Soviet rule
(and control), or Brazil under Portuguese rule;
 Apartheid, e.g. white-ruled South Africa, Graeco-Roman Egypt, present-day Israel,
Outremer, Guatemala and Bolivia from soon after the conquest by the Spanish, Rhodesia,
independent Paraguay, Tunisia under Phoenician rule, Khanates under Mongol rule,
Liberia under the domination of Black Americans and their descendants, Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms in the British Isles prior to the Viking and Norman conquests, independent
Viking kingdoms in the British Isles and Normandy, early Norman England;
 Genocidal117, e.g. the Caribbean islands under European occupation in the 15th to 19th
centuries, Nazi Germany, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and other large parts of North and
South America, especially of the USA and of Canada, New Zealand and Australia,
especially Tasmania, Namibia under German and South African rule, Libya under Italian
rule, Brazil under Portuguese rule and since independence; Bosnia-Herzegovina in the
early and mid-1990s, Rwanda in May and June 1994;
 and Domestic settings.

Only the last one of these four would centrally involve the phenomena typically
117
Like apartheid, genocide is not only about physical violence. The German Nazi courts would condemn people
to ‘death through work’, a particularly brutal kind of slavery. Other economic dimensions of genocide include
the land and property confiscations for which genocide has often been perpetrated, as well as the infamous
collection and use of gold tooth fillings from Nazi gas chamber victims, of their skin for lampshades and soap, or
the British use of Tasmanian people’s skin for tobacco pouches, etc. Furthermore, Nazi and Japanese scientists
would use live humans as guinea pigs for excruciatingly painful ‘scientific’ experiments during the Second
World War, often leading to the slow death of the subject. The ideological and psychopathological dimensions of
genocide (repression, ethnocentrism, megalomania, dehumanization and demonization of the victims, sadism,
superiority and inferiority complexes, etc.) are additional common aspects of genocidal oppression. See
Diamond 1993 (1992): 276ff; Löwstedt: Über die Verdrängung der künstlichen Ausrottung im Darwinismus:
Ursachen, Vorläufer und Alternativen, 1998: 197-209. Tasmania ran the whole gamut from colony to apartheid
to genocide of the indigenous, carried out in tandem by the British settlers and the army. In 1803, the white
‘civilian’ settlers were brought in, and three years later, the systematic killings began. See Stone 1999.
Incidentally, the founder of modern evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, was a witness (first- or second-hand)
to this as well as to the genocide of Khoikhoi in the Cape Colony and the genocides of Native Americans in
Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. It is increasingly becoming clear that his theory of evolution was conceived and
formulated both to explain such events and to justify such practices, i.e. different varieties of artificial
elimination, invariably carried out by Whites against non-Whites, as well as natural selection, although the
former were played down and even repressed by him and by his followers. Instead, the birds and turtles of the
Galapagos Islands have been emphasized iconically and euphemistically as decisive for Darwin’s insights and
his formulation of the theory of evolution. See Desmond & Moore: Darwin, 1991: xxi, 141ff; Löwstedt 1998:
202ff. on the theoretical implications of downplaying and marginalizing elimination in favor of selection for both
anthropology and evolution theory. Indigenous inhabitants of every single country in the Western Hemisphere
have gone through prolonged horror and misery as a colonial and/or apartheid and/or genocidal society. Most of
them probably experienced and died from all three forms of racist human rights violations. For example,
Guatemala during the 1980s could fit in with genocidal as well as apartheid societies, with an estimated 200,000
of the oppressed indigenous Maya, Garifuna and Xinca being killed off quietly – i.e. without much fuss in
international relations or in the mass media – and mostly indiscriminately, by neo-fascists of mainly Spanish
stock, who in their turn depended crucially on support from the USA. See footnote 52 above, and further Miller,
T.C.: Guatemalans to Sue Top Lawmaker over Genocide, 2001; Chomsky: Year 501: The Conquest Continues,
1993; Herman & Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 1994 (1988):
73ff, 104ff. Racism against the indigenous majority remains a great problem in Guatemala today. The situation
there resembles South Africa, though the indigenous could currently to some extent even be considered to be
worse off in the Central American country. The United Nations has urged private and public institutions to
counteract discrimination (like in epi- or post-apartheid South Africa) by employing more members of
indigenous groups through introducing affirmative action programs and also to ‘...consider legislation that would
for the first time make racial discrimination a criminal offense. Such reforms have previously met opposition in a
country dominated by an economic elite that has historically exploited the Mayans as a source of cheap, and at
times forced, labor.’ Brosnan: Guatemala Must Remedy Inequality of Indians - UN, 2001
 111

studied and explained by Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist and many other theories. It
would also include majoritarian and racist, but non-genocidal human rights violations, such as
the use of imported slaves, indentured servants, or ‘guest workers’. There will of course also
be overlapping areas between genocide and domestic racist oppression, e.g. the systematic use
of slaves. There will in fact always be at least a possibility of mixed forms of systematic
human rights violations along with inevitable overlaps. Nevertheless, apartheid is closer to
genocide than colonialism is. Apartheid occupies an intermediate position, between the other
two, with regard to all basic aspects of the systematic human rights violations: violence,
population policies and practices, expropriation of territory and other kinds of private and
collective property, language and ideology, the severity of discrimination, exploitation of
labor, and the regulation of access according to race.
As opposed to being too uncritical of Marxism as ‘taking care of material oppression’,
on the other hand, any material aspects of oppression might be overlooked by postcolonial
theory altogether. This is a common temptation in the so-called ‘Information Age’, in which
the already very powerful new philosophical and social scientific traditions of discourse
theory and postmodernism allow us meaningful contact with the real world only through the
media of symbols or systems of symbols.118
The word ‘racism’, for example, has deplorably come to signify a state of mind or a
set of beliefs only, and mostly does not refer to processes, to acts of war and oppression, at all
– other than twists of science and logic, or verbal outbursts, of course. Earlier, the term
‘racialism’ used to refer more to oppressive practices, but that term has now become a less
used synonym for ‘racism’.119 In interaction with these new traditions, postcolonial theory has
also come to focus on symbols, rather than practices, of racism. This over-emphasis on
‘…meaning and mentality, ideology and culture…’ is, however, sometimes being lamented
with regard to racism and systematic human rights violations in South African historians,120
and I tend to agree with this criticism.
In this context, I believe it must be understood that postcolonial theory has tended to
focus on symbolism partly due to this being the area in which the current white elites offer the
least resistance. They are much more likely to admit that ‘mistakes’ have been made here,
among other things in order to deflect and avoid the more concrete and substantial demands
for material reparations – not to mention criminal liability – for any of the crimes against
humanity perpetrated by them and many of their ancestors, including colonialism,
neocolonialism, apartheid, genocide, and slavery. It is much easier and vastly preferable for
these elites to say ‘sorry’, and blame the mentalities and ideologies of yesteryear, rather than
to give the stolen land or artifacts back, to face criminal charges, or to pay reparations for
destruction wrought, lives taken, or for labor, culture, and nature exploited.
On the other hand, postcolonial theory has also been influenced to a large extent by
certain strands of Marxism, and much of that influence has no doubt been fruitful. Yet, some
aspects of the traditional Marxist-Leninist theory of colonialism, which include the distinction
between settler colonialism and non-settler colonialism, seem to have been less than useful to
characterize apartheid, as the following assessment, made on the eve of liberation from
political apartheid in South Africa, points out:

118
Petraglia-Bahri 1996; Howarth: Discourse Theory, 1995: 115-133. See Sardar: Postmodernism and the Other:
The New Imperialism of Western Culture, 1998 for a profound critique of further neo-imperialist and neo-
colonialist aspects of postmodernism. By locating the appearance of modernism in Europe at the beginning of the
age of ‘discovery’, the late Renaissance, the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, the advent of large banks,
the industrial revolution, capitalism, etc., postmodernism ends up like its chosen predecessor, modernism, as a
Eurocentric illusion. See footnote 125 below.
119
Race/Racism, in Bullock, Stallybrass & Trombley: Dictionary of Modern Thought, 1988 (1977): 714. There
are also various uses of ‘racialism’ as a technical term, e.g. in Fredrickson 2002: 153f, or in Miles, R. 1989: 53f.
120
Keegan 1996: vii
112

The concept of settler society is both useful and misleading in

understanding South Africa – or Northern Ireland or Israel – in its
historical context and in terms of the global political economy. ‘Settler
colonialism’ represents a refinement of the orthodox Leninist theory
of imperialism but also shares some of the crude generalizing of the
Marxist theory of colonialism that does not apply to specific cases. In
response to those deficiencies, the South African Communist Party
developed the concept of ‘colonialism of a special type,’ or ‘internal
colonialism,’ but this term also misses crucial distinctions in the
processes of decolonization. It, too, obscures the interdependence of
internal colonizer and colonized as well as the relative independence
of indigenous [i.e. white South African, Protestant Irish, and Jewish
Israeli] settlers from outside control. Nor can the traditional concepts
of colonial departure and subsequent neocolonial sovereignty explain
what is taking place in South Africa.121

It would actually make more sense – in classical Marxist, historical materialist, terms,
and not only there – to distinguish more sharply between colonialism and apartheid, rather
than subsuming apartheid under colonialism, and to concentrate more on racist practice than
on racist theory, discourse, or symbolism than it would be to follow Leninist theory to the
obscure conceptions and conclusions exemplified in the previous quote.122 But even so,
apartheid still cannot be explained adequately as a mere freak or fringe phenomenon among
class societies either.
Other broad aspects of postmodernism, its blanket protective attitude towards
minorities, its critique of truth, rejection of master narratives, and a related tendency towards
cultural and epistemological relativism, may all play commendable emancipatory roles, but
they may also work in the opposite way, for instance by making postmodernism a defense for
apartheid. As Truth and Reconciliation Commissions were formed in order to condemn and
deliver to justice apartheid perpetrators in countries like Guatemala and South Africa, much
was done by these perpetrators and their legal representatives and other supporters to mystify
and cover up their crimes in a perfectly postmodern manner, namely by claiming ethnic
minority protection privileges.123 For many centuries now, invader Europeans and
descendants of Europeans have claimed majority rights when they were in majority, as in the
USA or Australia, and even when they were not, as in South Africa, Guatemala and
Israel/Palestine. Now that democracy is spreading to areas where Europeans and some of their
descendants used to rule undemocratically, the descendants of those same people are claiming
special minority rights – in some cases democracy does not even look like majority rule any
longer – and post-modernism mysteriously appeared, at first in Europe and in North America,
in the nick of time, to back up such claims, in many cases with obscure pseudo-philosophical
ranting.124
121
Adam & Moodley: The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa, 1993, Chapter 1.
Colonialism, Communalism, and Democracy: South Africa in Comparative Perspective, The Global Relevance
of South Africa. See also Biko 2004 (1978): 54, who lashes out at the ‘twisted logic’ of ‘Class Theory’ which
attempts but cannot satisfactorily explain why skin color is ‘…the greatest single determinant for political action’
in apartheid South Africa.
122
See Liedman: Surdeg: En Personlig Bok om Idéer och Ideologier, 1980, for a more realistic re-evaluation and
reformulation of some valuable aspects of philosophical materialism, in particular its critique of deflective
idealistic ideologies from religion as opium for the people to the current liberal emphasis on civil and political
rights (to the detriment of social and economic rights) and much in-between.
123
Hardt & Negri 2000: 155f.
124
Hope: Great White Hope, 2003; Löwstedt: The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in the Public Sphere:
Postmodernism to the Rescue or a Case of Premature Self-Congratulation? 2012. Postmodernism also suffers
from something I like to refer to as ‘premature self-congratulation’. By calling itself an ‘ism’, yet labeling itself
in an entirely negative way – it is not modernism; it comes after modernism – it may never even get out of its
starting blocks and may remain locked in a fight with its predecessor forever. (The prematurity refers to the
 113

Taken together, colonialism, apartheid and genocide, in my opinion, comprise a subset

of class societies, though not exactly in the way that Marx understood the term. The
economically dominant classes, the slave- and landowners and capitalists, are in coalition with
the state and also with the rest of the privileged minority civil society in apartheid, and it
appears impossible to say which of these three is the more powerful entity in such a society. It
seems as if the apartheid elites are usually in a kind of dynamic equilibrium, sometimes
politicians are dominant, sometimes the military, sometimes the business elites, and
sometimes even the electorate, which consists exclusively of members of the racial elite
(South Africa until the 1980s), or of a very comfortable majority of racial elite members
(Israel since its inception), which, however, excludes an overwhelming majority of indigenous
people by denying them citizenship and the right to vote. And so, the apartheid state is much
more than just a tool for the economically dominant classes, i.e. for the slave-owners, land-
owners, and capitalists, although it may be seen as such on certain occasions.
Apart from remaining vague, postcolonial theory has also concentrated on recent
colonies, which may also give rise to one-sided views and even distort the real processes. The
reasons for this focus are compelling in one respect. Colonialized societies and societies in
general that have suffered from the last half-millennium of white or ‘western’ expansion
around the world, are facing the real possibility of cultural extinction, and rescue work is
urgently needed. On the other hand, phenomena central to oppression and racism such as
religion and religious hypocrisy – see Chapter II.9.1, below – are entirely different in the
mainly Pagan Graeco-Roman Egypt and colonies taken by Christians and Jews, respectively.
This may well be theoretically significant, although not recognized in current postcolonial
theory, which has restricted itself to the study and explanation of colonializing societies with
biblical – almost exclusively Christian – religions. It has also largely confined itself to
studying western European colonies, apartheid and genocidal societies of western European
origin during the last 400 years.
Postcolonial theory is thus eurocentric despite itself, one could even call it europhobic,
with an unhealthy fixation on Europe. The same applies to postmodernism. While manifestly
rejecting the values and consequences of modernity, it still considers modernity of prime
importance in history and human development. Another way of putting it: postmodernism
does not ignore modernity enough.
Modernity as a period of time is usually considered to follow the so-called ‘Middle
Ages’ in modernist as well as postmodernist historical thought. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing
press 1455, Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America 1492, Magellan’s circumnavigation of the
earth 1521, and, sometimes, Martin Luther’s Reformed Christian Church from 1517, are
usually considered the pivotal events here. From an anthropological point of view, however,
as I have argued at length elsewhere, none of these are very important events. Gutenberg was
predated by both Chinese and Koreans using moveable wooden and metal types many
centuries before the invention appeared in Europe, and, even more importantly, the ancient
Mesopotamians also used moveable metal and other types over three millennia from 3,200
BCE onwards with their cuneiform writing. Unfortunately, it needs to be reiterated that
Columbus did not discover America, the first Native Americans did, and so did the Vikings,

possibility that it may not even be an -ism.) It is, essentially, a backwards-looking movement. The most
promising attempts to rectify this situation, in my opinion, involve positing of and focusing on the concepts of
diversity (biodiversity and cultural diversity), and rights (especially human rights, but also children’s rights,
animal rights, individual rights, collective rights, etc.). See also, for example, McKee: The Public Sphere: An
Introduction, 2005: 214-216, and my methodological chapter below. On a somewhat different attack on the
postcolonialist paradigm, no doubt also in line with Kant’s primacy of ethics, see Dabashi: The Arab Spring: The
End of Postcolonialism, 2012. Dabashi sees the end of postcolonialism as ‘…finally beyond…’ liberation for the
ethnos in favor of ‘…the configuration of a planetary ethos’ (ibid: 16). Similar to my Chapter I.4 above, Dabashi
also holds it important ‘…to think horizontally…’ and compare Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim societies with
African, Latin American, etc. societies, rather than ‘…vertically…’, i.e. with regard to the West (ibid: 76).
114

among recent Eastern Hemisphere people. Magellan’s feat is more important but still not of
anthropologically important dimensions. If the planet had been smaller and drier, Alexander,
or the Mongols, or if just smaller, the Chinese, for example, might have been the first to travel
around it; if it had been bigger, it might have been the British, the Americans, or the Soviets.
But the essence of humanity would not have been different from what it is under any of those
circumstances. In a few millennia’s time, only the use of Indo-European languages is likely to
remain a living reminder of near-global European and European descendant hegemony. And a
few more millennia down the line; that may well also be gone.
The most important events in my view happened roughly 2.6 million years ago (when
humans first appeared and started their global conquest of the planet, with language, weapons
and tools arsenals, pictographic information and art, etc.), 26,000 years ago (when ceramics,
and later domestication of animals and plants, two-dimensional land tenure and ownership,
conventional signs, etc. were first initiated), 5,200 years ago (when civilizations: metallurgy,
(phonographic) writing, the wheel, the sail, cities, empires, etc. appeared), and 200 years ago
(when photography, and slightly later, sound recording, industrial uses of electricity, nuclear
power, solar power, the internet, etc. appeared). Of these I consider the last event of these four
the least important so far, and the first (2.6. million years ago) the most important, in fact
twice as important as any of the other major events. These, then, are my four axes of human
development and history (so far). Yet, the University where I teach, my history textbook at
high school in Sweden, and postmodernism, by its very name, all make 1500 CE the single
axis of history. (Webster University offers two world history courses: ‘World History until
1500’ and ‘World History since 1500’, now renamed ‘The World System sicne 1500.) There
is quite possibly a near-global consensus that 1500 CE is the time of the most important
changes in human history and development. Under closer inspection, however, the importance
of the beginning of modernity is mostly watered down to gradual differences, e.g.
‘…increasing rationalization, secularization, and individualization.’ Never problematized or
mentioned in this context are the facts that high levels of rationalization, secularization, and
individualization had existed elsewhere and before. Secularization, rationalization and
individualization must have existed, for example, in ancient Egypt as much as 5,000 years ago
as well during the last 500 years in the North Atlantic region and elsewhere (see Chapter
II.9.1 below on these issues).125
Due to reasons such as these, a more generalized, future theory might eventually lead
to a revised look at racism, oppression and elitism as a whole, perhaps even reinterpreting the
phenomena studied by psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism with a partially or entirely
new conceptual apparatus. Yet another dimension to such a theory could be the role of
oppression in societies that are not human, but which may be found in human societies as
well. There is, by the way, nothing that suggests that such a dimension would necessarily be
genetically fixed. It may, on the contrary, imply only socio-structural constraints that are also
present and active in human contexts. Anthropocentrism could certainly be as damaging as
eurocentrism.126
With this chapter, then, I wish to call for a radical change in terminology. I do not have
a theory to fully replace the post-colonialist and post-modernist understanding(s) of racism.
Especially the relationships between genocide, apartheid, and colonialism with domestic

125
The quote is from Siapera: Cultural Diversity and Global Media: The Mediation of Difference, 2010: 5, who
bases the opinion about the centrality of modernity on Max Weber, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Manuel
Castells, ibid: 5f. See Jaspers 1949 for yet another axis theory centering on 600 BCE. Buddha, Confucius, Lao-
Tzu, and the early Greek philosophers, among others, play the leading roles here. See Löwstedt 2012 for an
extended criticism of postmodernism. My (anti-postmodern) anthropological theory is available, so far, only in
German, in Löwstedt 1995. I hope to rewrite it in English soon. See Löwstedt & Daigle: Media Development,
Convergence, and Long-term Progress: A Stage-sequence Theory, 2014, for a criticism of media- and
communication-related aspects of postmodern interpretation.
126
See, for instance, de Waal: Peacemaking among Primates, 1989.
 115

racism are left almost fully unexplored in this book. But it is imperative that a terminology be
found that rhymes better with the facts than the inclusion of Israel and apartheid South Africa,
as well as the many other societies that constitute full-blown apartheid, under the umbrella
concept of ‘colonialism’. And it is equally important that we do not make a major
differentiation between modern, pre-modern, and postmodern apartheid. They are all
essentially the same.
In summary, racism appears to have been underestimated by most social theorists,
even by postmodernists and postcolonialists. The perhaps most important exception is W.E.B.
Dubois, who correctly predicted, over a century ago, that the main problem of the 20th century
would be the ‘…problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of
men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’.127 This problem and related
phenomena urgently need to be better understood, among other things due to corporate and
commercial-cultural globalization, to the concomitant hollowing of democracy, equality and
social justice, to the currently unprecedented rate of extinction of languages (see Section II.8,
below), as well as to the increasing intensity of interracial and interethnic relations and
conflicts that accompany social globalization, but also due to long existing racist power
relationships – local, national, regional and global. A general theory of racism, similar in
scope to the feminist theory of sexism, the Marxist theory of classism or the psychoanalytic
theory of individual repression, could help both to explain racism and to prevent it from
spreading, and perhaps even to defeat it where it already exists. Instead of speculating further,
however, we will now take a brief look at some of the basic facts and main historical events in
each of the three societies that we are now about to study.

9. The Historical Frameworks

1. Graeco-Roman Egypt
Graeco-Roman Egypt is by far the best-documented society of ancient times, and
exceptionally well documented for any society of the past. This is due to uniquely excellent
conditions from an archaeological and papyrological point of view, especially the dry air and
sand, which have preserved many otherwise fragile materials, such as papyrus, from
decomposition, but also due to its extensive (and often over-bearing) bureaucracies as well as
to the relatively widespread knowledge and practices of reading and writing.128
Egypt was added fairly peacefully to the Macedonian-Greek Empire in 332 BCE by
Alexander (‘the Great’) of Macedonia and his Macedonian and Greek forces. The ancient
Macedonians were a Greek-speaking people who neighbored the Greeks to the north and were
often, but far from always, considered ‘Greek’. The ancient Olympic Games, for example,
were only open for ‘Greek’ participants, not for Macedonians, except the Macedonian king
himself. I will mostly refer to the ancient Greeks and Macedonians together as ‘Greeks’.
There was never any serious conflict between them in Egypt.
At first, the Greeks were sometimes seen by the Egyptians as liberators, casting off the
yoke of Persian occupying forces who had ruled Egypt as a province of their empire, with

127
Quoted in Stone & Dennis: Introduction: Race against Time – The Ethnic Divide in the Twentieth Century,
2003: 1. The authors also mention Max Weber and Robert Ezra Park as important sociologists who did not
completely overlook the problem. Franz Boas, who played an important role in making anthropology a scientific
discipline, among other things by introducing cultural relativism as a methodological precept, should in my
opinion also be mentioned in this context. One might even say that Dubois’ characterization is an
underestimation as it leaves out Europe, which is to a very large extent the source of the problem. On the other
hand, Europe is not a continent, strictly speaking, and so, being an intelligent man as well as a visionary, Dubois
may have intended for it to be included in ‘Asia’. See also Lake & Reynolds 2008.
128
Bowman: Egypt after the Pharaohs, 1996 (1986): 7; Lewis, N.: Life in Egypt under Roman Rule, 1983: 1ff;
Bingen: Hellenistic Egypt: Monarchy, Society, Economy, Culture, 2007: 241
116

intervals, since 525. Persian dominance and oppression in Egypt had been of an unequivocally
colonial or provincial kind, with the Persian military and administrative staff usually kept at
minimum strength, and with few settlers. Combined, this vulnerability of the Persians in
numbers, their recent history of exploitation and subjugation of the indigenous people, and the
alliance of the powerful Greeks with the Egyptians, led to many native uprisings against
Persian rule, further resulting in retribution and oppression. The Greeks had been anti-Persian
for as long as anyone could remember, and Greek mercenaries at first greatly assisted
Egyptian rulers and leaders in liberation wars against the Persians. But Alexander’s invasion
was the first time that Greeks themselves assumed power over Egypt. The ultimately
destructive, oppressive and exploiting domination of Egypt by Greeks would later make
Persian rule almost appear benevolent. Alexander had himself proclaimed son of Amun – one
of the highest-ranking gods in Egypt – and divine ruler over Egypt by Egyptian priests. He
then moved on to conquer elsewhere. He only returned to Egypt as a corpse after his Asian
adventures, to be buried and worshipped there.
After the death of Alexander in 323, his empire split into parts, the most prized one
being Egypt. One of his top generals and most loyal followers, Ptolemy, a Macedonian like
Alexander, instated himself as god-king, a divine ruler, over Egypt and in one stroke declared
all the land to be crown land. His dynasty, the Ptolemies, then ruled the country without any
major interruptions until 30 BCE – lasting longer than any other dynasty of the many other
Greek-led kingdoms during this time, the so-called ‘Hellenistic’ era, and possibly also even
longer than any indigenous Egyptian dynasty. The Ptolemaic period manifests both material
wealth and political as well as military power of Egypt that were at times unrivalled in the
world. The other Macedonian generals and their descendants were not as successful as the
Ptolemies (although none of the Hellenistic kingdoms incorporated all of Old Greece). Indeed,
some present-day commentators do not wish to refer to Ptolemaic Egypt as a kingdom, but
only as an ‘Empire’. Nevertheless, Egypt was arguably even more powerful at other times, at
the very least during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1069 BCE) and during its period as the
economic hub of world trade (between China and the Atlantic) during the early second
millennium CE, but also probably during much of the sixth, fifth, fourth and third millennia
BCE.
Alexandria, the new capital of Egypt, was founded by Alexander himself according to
the ancient Greek historians, and it became the largest and most important city in the world
under Greek rule. Ptolemy made sure that Alexander was buried there and deified him and
created religious cults around Alexander’s and his own alleged divinity. Only towards the end
of this period was Egypt gradually eclipsed by the rising power of Rome, which developed
from a republic into the Roman Empire once Egypt had been conquered in 30 BCE by
Octavian, who then became the first Roman emperor, now calling himself Augustus, to be
obeyed and worshipped by Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and others.
‘Graeco-Roman Egypt’, 332 BCE-642 CE, is usually considered a historical unit. The
Greek civilians remained the bulk of the privileged class, since only relatively few Roman
civilians moved to Egypt, and Greek remained the first official language. Unlike other
provinces in the Roman Empire, Egypt kept its own currency and system of dating. Continuity
between Greek and Roman rule was much greater than the differences apparent in the short
transition to imperial Roman rule, especially for Egyptians, the vast majority of the
population.
According to Jean Bingen, an expert on the Ptolemaic era, there are two peculiarities
about society in Egypt during this time: ‘…the coexistence of two basically different complex
cultures in the same territory…’ and ‘…unequal relations of a privileged and dominant
minority and an autochthonous majority which has a lesser capacity to organise its own future,
this majority and this minority corresponding approximately to the two cultural groups
 117

[Greeks and Egyptians] in question.’129

Ptolemaic Egypt has also been characterized as ‘the most exploitative of all known
systems of oppression throughout antiquity’.130 The economic elite that profited from the
exploitation was almost identical with the political, military and social elites, i.e. the racial
elite.

In public life the Greeks and Macedonians formed the ruling class.
They were a closed circle to which natives gained access only
gradually and in very small numbers – and then usually only by the
difficult method of turning themselves culturally into Greeks.131

In terms of formal political rule, the Ptolemaic state was something in between an
absolute monarchy and a military dictatorship,132 but there was also a small free space for
well-off and (mis)educated Greek men, which could perhaps even be described as an open
society.133 Similarly, the South African and Israeli apartheid societies would later introduce
‘democracy’ at several levels, but mainly or only for the benefit of members of the dominant
race.
The apartheid state is a pluralist state to the extent that several different groups are
vying for power. But the main powerful groups are all peopled mainly and dominated by
members of the dominant race, as Bingen explains: “…the actual forces with which the
monarchy [as the single most important center of power] had to cope in the late Hellenistic
period [during which royal power was weakening]: the ‘Greek tycoons’, the condottieri, often
recent immigrants, the dynasties of high-ranking servants and officers.” In other words,
‘…Greek structures more or less outside his authority…’ challenged the Greek king of
Egypt.134 The pluralism of Egypt under Greek rule did not extend to incorporate any members
of the indigenous majority into real political power.
In the rigid, multi-layered class society of Ptolemaic Egypt, privilege was thus based
firstly and mainly on race.135 Just like in South Africa and Israel, immigration from the
European mother countries, Macedonia, Greece and later elsewhere, was encouraged and
subsidized by the Greek-led state. There were some poor Greeks too, similar to the white

129
Bingen 2007: 242 (quote). See also Parsons: City of the Sharp-nosed Fish, 2007: 61. On Ra-Kedet, the pre-
existing city at the site of Alexandria, see footnote 451 below.
130
Koch: Geschichte der ägyptischen Religion, 1993: 488. By means of war, military aggression, intimidation,
and diplomacy, the Ptolemies established colonies and controlled territories to the west, north, and east of Egypt:
in Cyrene (in present-day Libya), in Cyprus, in much of the Aegean, in parts of the Greek mainland and Asia
Minor, in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Mesopotamia and elsewhere. Neither they nor their Roman
successors, however, were ever able to defeat and conquer their southern neighbors in Kush and Meroe (in
present-day Sudan). This was also the country most connected with Egypt historically, culturally, and
geographically, as deserts surround the country to the west and east, and the Mediterranean Sea hinders contacts
to the north. Many of the Egyptian rebellions against European rule started from Sudan. Bowman 1996 (1986):
27ff; Hölbl: A History of the Ptolemaic Empire, 2001 (1994): 304ff. See also Huß 2001: 33ff.
131
Walbank: The Hellenistic World, 31992 (1981): 65
132
Weber: Dichtung und höfische Gesellschaft: Die Rezeption von Zeitgeschichte am Hof der ersten drei
Ptolemäer, 1993: 4, 23f.
133
Walbank 31992 (1981): 176ff; Green: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age: A Short History, 2007:
56f. As we shall see, the relatively open character of male Greek society in Egypt is paralleled in much of male
white South Africa as well as in much of present-day male Jewish Israel (and in much of the male Americo-
Liberian population in the Republic of Liberia, or the male European population in Outremer or Rhodesia). But
from the point of view of the entire society it is of course much more of a patriarchy and ethnocracy than a true
democracy.
134
Bingen 2007: 272. In this portion of his text, Bingen argues against including the Egyptian priests, the most
privileged, or least underprivileged, group of indigenous people, among the powerful elites of Ptolemaic Egypt,
an inclusion that was common among previous generations of historians of Ptolemaic Egypt.
135
Weber 1993: 22ff.
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underclass in South Africa or to many Ethiopian, Sephardic and other Jews in present-day
Israel.
A minor difference to modern South Africa was constituted by the fact that the Greeks
did allow more – though still only very few – exceptions to their version of apartheid.
Nonetheless, contacts between the physically segregated racial groups were regulated and
controlled.136 And the South Africans also seem to have been compelled to come up with

136
Weber 1993: 78, 154. One of the earliest proponents of the idea of Graeco-Roman Egypt as an apartheid
society was actually a classical archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South
Africa, namely Simon Davis. See Davis, S.: Race-relations in Ancient Egypt: Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, Roman,
1951: esp. 41ff. The idea slowly gained ground during the rest of the century and then became a ‘new orthodoxy’
according to Bagnall: Egypt in Late Antiquity, 1993: 231. Bagnall – who strangely uses the word ‘juxtaposition’
instead of ‘segregation’, ‘discriminatory segregation’ or ‘apartheid’ in this context – is apparently unhappy with
this new dominant view, to which there are still many exceptions. In the same vein as Bagnall, for example
Goudriaan: Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt, 1988, states “…there was no ‘apartheid’ in Ptolemaic Egypt”, referring
to his contention that we do not know of any Ptolemaic laws of oppressive segregation, although he has some
doubts as well and definitely considers early Roman Egypt an apartheid society, ibid: Preface and 119. In fact,
we do know of a law prohibiting interracial marriage in at least one city under Ptolemaic rule already (see
references in footnote 139), and I also intend to show in this investigation that nearly all the phenomena that
make up apartheid in my wide sense were present throughout the Graeco-Roman period. Apartheid in the narrow
sense, i.e. South Africa 1948-94, was of course an independent state and therefore more like Egypt under Greek
than under Roman rule. More recently, J.G. Manning (The Last Pharaohs: Egypt under the Ptolemies 305-30 BC,
2010: 49) claims that racism was no more present among the Greek rulers and elites of Ptolemaic Egypt than
among the Egyptians they ruled, thus in this context ignoring the voluminous recent scholarly literature I have
assembled here, perhaps especially the work of Naphtali Lewis, Peter Green, Jean Bingen, Frank Walbank,
Denise Eileen McCoskey, Karin Blomqvist, Alan K. Bowman, Klaus Koch, Werner Huß, Paul Cartledge, and
Benjamin Isaac. In an apparent attempt to deal with this growing amount of scholarship he cites only Walbank
but distances his approach from ours, since Walbank allegedly “…uses the phrase ‘cultural and religious
apartheid’ to mean the de facto separation of cultures” (ibid.), possibly to imply that the Greeks never had any
apartheid intention. Later on in the book, Manning explains that the formal separation of Greek and Egyptian
legal systems that characterizes Ptolemaic Egypt has ‘…tempted some scholars to view Ptolemaic society in toto
as a kind of apartheid system…’ but it was in fact ‘…breached every day by people living their lives in a
multiethnic state.’ (Ibid: 178) An accomplished scholar himself and otherwise prone to critical thinking,
Manning, in this context (discussing racism and apartheid in Ptolemaic Egypt), seems to treat the Greeks in
Egypt from 332 BCE until 642 CE as people who accidentally became rich and powerful and just happened to
speak Greek, as well. He does not seem at all aware that apartheid in South Africa was also breached by people
every day, living in an even more multiethnic state than Ptolemaic Egypt. The richest white people, for example,
had their black servants live with them on their private premises, far away from the townships and Bantustans,
even though this was not allowed in theory. Manning accuses Bathish & Löwstedt 1999 of ‘hyperbole’ (64), i.e.
intentional exaggeration, and even of insobriety, for suggesting apartheid as the form of Graeco-Roman
domination in Egypt. In actual fact, I even consider ‘apartheid’ a possible understatement; genocide has not (yet)
been proven to apply in this case, though the indications are many, particularly in the fields of cultural genocide
(see Chapter II.9.1 below), but the amount of people killed because of and during close to one thousand years of
Greek-led apartheid and during nearly fourteen centuries of epiapartheid since then must by now also be very
large indeed (see Chapter II.1.1 below). Aside from this, in my opinion, fundamental weakness, I consider
Manning’s book a good one. He is an extreme continuationist, if the expression be allowed, seeing Greek rule as
a continuation of Egyptian rule, and I am sure he would consider me an opposite extremist. Yet, by taking an
opposite perspective to mine and developing it, and as a professor of classics at Yale University and senior
researcher at Yale Law School, his publications have been hard for me to avoid and have taught me about
politics and life in general in Egypt at this time, perhaps especially about the Egyptian collaborators with the
Greek regime, as well as the legal systems, and thus I will sometimes refer to his book as an authority, and even
as a positive reason for caution with overestimating the importance of racism and/or apartheid. In this regard,
however, I consider myself far more balanced than he. I also consider my work here more consistent than his.
Much of his book actually confirms my view of apartheid and racism in Ptolemaic Egypt. (See, for example, my
Manning quote in footnote 450 below, on land apartheid.) Unfortunately, he states that our article claims that
Ptolemaic Egypt is ‘…the ancient cousin of Honaker’s [sic] East Germany, or the predecessor of Botha’s South
Africa’ (ibid.), which is wrong. We make no mention of Honecker’s regime or any specific comparison between
Graeco-Roman Egypt or any part of it with Botha’s regime either, but rather extend our treatment of apartheid in
South Africa to all White-controlled territories from the colony governed by Jan van Riebeeck from 1652
continuously until the sovereign country under President F.W. de Klerk in 1994. Manning then quotes our
definition out of context, with our ‘working definition’ (which I have called the ‘preliminary definition’ in this
 119

exceptions to almost all of their discriminatory regulations, barring the right to vote, which
remained an exclusive white privilege between 1910 and 1983 (though not before 1910 in the
late British Cape Colony), and a non-black privilege from 1983 until 1994. The Egyptians and
the Greeks in apartheid Egypt never experienced democratic rule, regardless of the demos.
The few Egyptians who enjoyed exceptional status, e.g. those who made careers under the
Ptolemies, were already assimilated, i.e. ‘de-egyptianized’, to a great extent. As implied in the
quote above, they used the Greek language instead of Egyptian, and many of them even took
Greek names.137 Visible differences between Greeks and Egyptians were of course not as
great as those between Blacks and Whites in South Africa, and that made apartheid a slightly
more pliable and flexible system in Egypt. Yet, this made no difference for the vast majority
of the inhabitants.

Though later...a certain degree of low-level acculturation took place,

in the fourth and third centuries imperial racism was rampant among
the Greeks and Macedonians...and never entirely died out.138

The ‘low-level acculturation’ refers to the extremely rare, yet, towards the end of the
Ptolemaic period, slowly increasing rate of Greek-Egyptian marriages and other contacts,
which took place almost entirely on the lowest income and status levels, a fact to which we
shall return. In Ptolemaic, and even more so in Roman Egypt, however, interracial marriage
was banned by the authorities, either in all of Egypt, or in certain cities or regions. Indeed, the
first example of an interracial marriage of which we know is in 256 BCE, i.e. not until after 76
years of Macedonian rule.139 In apartheid South Africa, too, interracial marriage was not
always banned, and though uncommon, it also involved Europeans from a low income and
class level. In general, ‘apartheid’ – if used in the wide sense, proposed above – is no
exaggeration when applied to Egypt under Macedonian-Greek rule.

Ptolemaic Egypt...remained throughout its history a land of two

cultures which did coexist but, for the most part, did not coalesce or
blend. . . . We discern the manifestations of the two discrete cultures
in every aspect of their coexistence.140

The budding Roman Empire took over Egypt as Cleopatra VII, the last ruling Ptolemy,
was killed or (according to the well-known ancient legend) committed suicide in her royal
palace in Alexandria in 30 BCE. The Romans had for long been envious of the excellent
harvests in Egypt and they, too, would economically exploit the Egyptians more than they did

book), leaving out the immediately (in the same paragraph) following three additional parts of the actual
definition in the article, which are the same as in Section I.5 above, i.e. the political independence and
sovereignty of the state, the fact that the oppressors came to regard the country as theirs more than the
indigenous people’s, and finally their leading position in military technology. On perspectivism, balance, and
critical rationalism, see the next section below.
137
‘Any Egyptian who wanted to get anywhere under the Ptolemies had to speak and preferably also write koine
Greek.’ (Koine Greek was the lingua franca that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean at the time.) Green:
Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age, 1990: 313; see also Weber 1993: 388ff;
Huß 2001: 663; Walbank 31992: 117. Similarly, Non-whites in South Africa took on English and Afrikaner
names, and at least hundreds of Palestinian (Arab) citizens of Israel have now also started to change their original
Arabic to Hebrew names. See footnote 661 below.
138
Green 1990: 313; see also Blomqvist: På promenad i Alexandria med Gorgo och Praxinoa, 1997: 63.
139
Walbank 31992: 117; Bowman 1996 (1986): 125. See footnote 548 for what was probably a very rare
exception, possibly the only exception to the rule, namely an interracial high society wedding, as it were, towards
the end of Greek rule.
140
Lewis, N.: Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt: Case Studies in the Social History of the Hellenic World, 1986: 154f,
cf. Green 1990: 5.
120

any other of the many peoples they conquered.141 They left the social structure of Ptolemaic
Egypt intact, with the exception of political power and additional ‘repressive
provisions...amounting to a veritable ancient apartheid’, according to Naphtali Lewis, one of
the main authorities on the subject.142 The Greeks remained in Egypt and remained an upper
class with all their previous (especially economic, but also cultural, social, educational, fiscal,
linguistic, etc.) privileges except for the possibility of ruling, which now passed directly to the
hands of the emperor in Rome and the bureaucracy of the (Roman) governor and his (Roman)
occupying army. If apartheid is no exaggeration when applied to Ptolemaic Egypt, it is in
some respects even an understatement when applied to the early Roman period, especially, as
we will see, with regard to racist marriage and inheritance laws.
After the Romans introduced Roman citizenship for Egyptians in the third century CE,
however, discrimination on a racist basis appears to have been relaxed. Yet, in reality, it was a
mainly cosmetic change. Racial class was now formally substituted by economic class, but on
the whole the poor remained Egyptian and vice versa. Later, the Roman Empire split in two:
the West Roman and the Byzantine Empires.
Byzantine Egypt lasted from 330 CE until the Muslim Arab conquest in 642. It was
ruled by the emperors of East Rome (Constantinople), who continued Roman policies in
Egypt, but strengthened the domination by people of Greek ethnicity, with Greek culture and
language again becoming the sole culture of the oppressors. In this sense, it was a throwback
to Ptolemaic practices, yet another three hundred years of Greek rule. However, people of
Greek descent had continuously dominated the privileged European class in terms of sheer
numbers, just like the people of Dutch descent dominated the European population in South
Africa throughout three-and-a-half centuries of apartheid. The non-independent status of
Egypt under Byzantine rule, on the other hand, was of course a continuation of West Roman
policy. Egypt remained the richest province of the Byzantine Empire, as well. During this
time and also during the previous late West Roman period, religious divisions and interfaith
violence became almost as acute as the racial divisions and violence (see Chapter II.1.1,
below), but the religious and racial groups still largely coincided, and it is often difficult or
impossible to determine whether racial or religious violence was more prevalent.
It took a while for this complex and explosive situation to evolve. The Egyptians were
the first to adopt Christianity on a large scale, starting already in the first century CE, and they
were initially punished for it severely by the Romans, who often saw Christianity as a threat to
their rule during the first centuries. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptian Christians were killed
by the Romans and their supporters. The killings were sometimes even turned into bloody
spectacles for the amusement of mass audiences in stadiums. The Christians, the Egyptians,
were literally thrown to the lions. After the tables had turned, however, people of Egyptian
ethnicity, the oppressed majority, were vindicated to some extent, as Christianity became the
Roman state religion. This happened after over 600 years of apartheid and is unique for a
society of this kind. Already by this time, it was most likely the oldest apartheid society the
world has ever seen. But this ‘vindication’ of the Egyptians was really only taking place on

141
Lewis, N. 1983: 33; Brown, P.: The Murder of Cleopatra: History’s Greatest Cold Case, 2013. It could
perhaps be added that, at least, the Romans did not wipe out Egyptian culture in one fell swoop, like they did
Carthage. Nevertheless, the Egyptian language, religion, philosophy, literature, the knowledge of Egyptian
scripts, and more were all practically gone by the end of the Roman era. The beginning of Roman rule marks the
end of the independent apartheid state in Egypt, but apartheid did not end. It continued to exist under a colonial
and imperial structure, much like most of white-ruled southern Africa after the British conquests during the 19th
and early 20th centuries, but for six centuries.
142
Lewis, N. 1983: 34. See also Koch 1993: 589, Walbank: Response, 1993: 121, and Cartledge: Introduction,
1997: 5, Muhlberger: The Hellenistic States and their Culture, 1998, for eight more recent characterizations of
Graeco-Roman Egypt, or aspects of it, as ‘apartheid’ phenomena. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to
access all of the sources cited in the four mentioned works. It is also unfortunate that Cartledge himself does not
explicitly reveal his own opinion as to whether they are accurate or useful descriptions, although he appears
favorable towards them.
 121

one spiritual level, despite a few killings of Greek Pagans by Egyptian Christian mobs. On
other spiritual levels, not to mention material oppression, the Egyptians’ own culture had been
completely or nearly annihilated, e.g. their own language, religion and philosophy.
Constantinople then split its form of Christianity, Greek-Orthodox, from the Egyptian
‘Coptic’ form and persecuted, killed and tortured many of the Coptic – i.e. ethnic Egyptian –
Christians for doctrinal as well as political and racist reasons. The Copts still start their
calendar with the year 284 CE, the ‘Era of the Martyrs’, or the climax of persecution of
Egyptian Christians, rather than the birth of Christ, in remembrance and deep resentment of
the brutal persecution by West as well as East Rome. Religious persecution and discriminative
taxation pressures on Copts resulted in the Europeans remaining much disliked in Egypt, and
the indigenous population finally offered little or no resistance to the Muslim Arabian
conquest in 639-642 CE.
Some or many of the Egyptians even joined the Arabians in overthrowing Byzantine
rule, although the remaining Greeks tried hard to rally the Egyptians to do more to uphold the
regime of their European oppressors. After nearly a thousand years of oppression by the
Europeans, after which the racist dividing lines were as obvious as ever, it was hardly
astonishing that Egyptians in general would be happier, or much less unhappy, with Muslim
Asian rule, although all Egyptians, like their Greek oppressors, were Christian at this time.
When the Byzantine fleet finally fled Alexandria in 642, there were ‘large numbers’ of Greek
civilians, mainly officials and upper-class people, among them.143 In the end, from a social as
well as a political perspective, race in Egypt under European rule had remained more
important than religion.
However, there was ‘no large-scale emigration’ of Greeks (or Egyptians, or anyone
else) from the now liberated country. Some lower-level Greek officials even held on to their
state jobs under Arab rule. Egypt remained mainly Christian for centuries to come, and no
Egyptian land was confiscated by the conquering Arabians.144 The invading Muslims did not
team up with the previous wave of invaders, as the Romans had done in Egypt, and the British
would do in South Africa (and the Americans seem likely to do in the Middle East with the
Israeli Jews). Thus, the Muslim invasion and victory over the Byzantines may be seen as the
end of apartheid in Egypt, and as the liberation of Egypt from apartheid.
There are, however, still some remaining legacies of apartheid in Egypt today.
Alexandria, still the largest city on the Mediterranean Sea, and the second largest in Egypt, is
still named after the man who initiated apartheid there, thus honoring him and the ethnic
cleansing of indigenous communities that took place at this site under his watch, or by his
orders (see Chapters II.4.1 and II.6.1 below). The name of the country, Misr in Arabic and
Kemet in Egyptian, but still Egypt, Égypte, Egypten, Ägypten, etc. in Europe and most of the
rest of the world, is another remarkable, lingering reflection of European apartheid
domination and apartheid nomination. Much of the vernacular and egyptological terminology
for ‘Egyptian’ phenomena is still Greek. (See Chapter II.8.1 below.) There are indeed still
many westerners, including intellectuals, who believe that the imposition of Greek culture on

143
Haas, C.: Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict, 1997: 344. See also Mojsov:
Alexandria Lost: From the Advent of Christianity to the Arab Conquest, 2010: 40; McCoskey: Race Before
“Whiteness”: Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt, 2002; McCoskey 2004. In the introduction to a recent
collection of articles, the editor, Roger Bagnall, doubts the ancient testimonies to the effect that the Muslims
were aided by Egyptian collaborators due to the unpopularity of the ‘Romans’. Nonetheless, Bagnall graciously
gives the last word on the issue to specialist Petra Sijpesteijn, who disagrees with him. Bagnall: Introduction: 3f,
in Bagnall (ed.): Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700, 2007; Sijpesteijn: The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the
Beginning of Muslim Rule, in Bagnall (ed.): 441ff. Of course there must have been other motivations present
among the Egyptians for aiding the Arabs, perhaps even most of all self-enrichment. To try to distinguish
motivation for a revolt against oppression and exploitation from the more selfish reasons is in my view probably
rather difficult, if not impossible. It is to me almost a logical truth that both kinds of motivations must have been
important, sometimes one more than the other.
144
Sijpesteijn 2007: 455
122

Egypt was something good and beneficial for Egypt and the world. Most of all, however, I
consider the perpetuation of female genital mutilation in Egypt a (mixed) legacy of Greek
apartheid (and other patriarchal structures) in Egypt, and I will argue this thesis in Chapters
II.1.1 and II.2.1 below.

2. South Africa
With their apartheid system in the narrow sense, the white minority of South Africa
dominated the Blacks and the non-White and non-Black population (the Coloureds and
Asians) with a set of legalized inequalities, racist ideologies, and brute force. This included
the restriction of non-Whites from entering certain areas unless they possessed a certain
document permitting them into these areas, for reasons such as work. The concept of
‘separateness’, although it does not sufficiently define apartheid, as argued above, is still a key
notion for describing this system, since racial segregation, of both public and private facilities,
played a vital role in the white practice of oppression to the extent that many public benches,
toilets and other facilities, such as voting and running for public office, were restricted to
‘Whites Only’. Sexual relations, marriage and even ‘intimacy’ between the races were also
banned.145
Apartheid in South Africa can be traced back to the 17th century, when the Dutch East
India Company, VOC (Vereenigde Nederlandsche Ge-Octroyeerde Oost Indische
Compagnie), actively separated the Cape settlers from the local Khoisan (pastoralist Khoikhoi
and hunter-gatherer San) peoples. The racist system of slavery that was practiced in South
Africa over the next two centuries was exceptionally brutal. In the 1760s, it generated the first
apartheid passes for non-Whites. These passes were issued to slaves and Khoisan ‘servants’
by their owners and employers to provide proof that they had not run away from prison or
from (forced) work. Other features of apartheid in the narrow sense were also present already
in the early Cape Colony, such as the ban on intermarriage between races and restrictions on
land ownership for Blacks. Most of the officials and all of the top officials appointed were
white.
In 1658, only six years after they had set up the first white colony in South Africa, the
Dutch started importing a substantial number of slaves, at first mainly from Asia: India,
Malaysia and Indonesia. Later, Madagascar and Mozambique became the main sources of
slaves for the Dutch. The slaves in South Africa were mostly domestic servants and farm
laborers. In 1750, half of all white men in South Africa owned at least one slave, an
exceptionally high proportion, which gave the white elite classes both width and strong
mutual solidarity. The Cape Colony was one of the cruellest slave societies the world has ever
seen. Punishment for disobedience could be extremely harsh. Few slaves ever gained freedom,
and, in contrast to e.g. Islamic slave law and practice, the children of free men by slave
women automatically became slaves. This was the same racist system of slavery that Whites
had introduced into the Americas, and the Greeks before them into Egypt. Nearly half the
Company’s slave children in 1685 had European fathers. Since non-White wives were not
allowed into Holland, the system was encouraged (if not devised and enforced) from there.
The slaves were stereotyped and stratified by color. Supervisors and artisans were

145
During the first period of Roman rule in Egypt, and at least in some areas already under Greek rule, the
authorities similarly restricted or prohibited marriage between Egyptians and Europeans, at least Greeks and
Romans. See Lewis, N. 1983: 32f, and Chapter II.2.2 below. In Israel today, the state does not offer citizens (or
others) the possibility of civil marriage, and the religious authorities, who are the only ones able to pronounce
people married, refuse to do so for individuals of different faiths. See Chapter II.2.3 below. What the state
enforced in South Africa and in parts of Graeco-Roman Egypt, is thus taken care of by society only in
Israel/Palestine. This difference is smaller than it might appear, however. Firstly, the state of Israel, by only
recognizing religious marriage, is more than just passively collaborating with social apartheid. Secondly,
personal interracial bonds were scorned and rejected, not just by the state, but by civil society, especially elite
civil society, in Egypt and South Africa, as well.
 123

generally of mixed race, while Indonesians and Africans did unskilled work, the worst chores
going to slaves from Mozambique. The slaves outnumbered the settler population until 1795.
That rigid color hierarchy and a non-white, rightless labor force were the Dutch regime’s
lasting legacy to South Africa.
On the gradually east- and northward-moving frontier, poor Whites would gain
increasing independence from the Dutch government and started calling themselves
‘Afrikaners’. They fought frequent, victorious wars of conquest and domination against the
indigenous people, sometimes finding allies among the now deeply divided indigenous
communities.146
The Cape Colony was occupied by the British from 1806 onwards. The British mainly
wanted to secure their long-distance ship traffic, as the Dutch had before them, and they
initially accepted the Dutch slave society. Even though Britain outlawed the slave trade in
1807, and aggressively pursued outlawing it around the world from 1811, it was not banned in
the British-ruled Cape Colony until 1838. From 1809, the British themselves even practiced
something very close to slavery in South Africa, much like medieval European serfdom, as
they exploited Khoisan people who became tied servants of white masters. It was mainly
British missionaries who finally put an end to this practice as well as to Dutch slavery, though
here they were eventually supported by the British authorities and businesses. Yet oppression
continued. The unskilled, non-white labor force was only half-free, poor, and destitute. The
end of slavery in fact sharpened racial divisions. Interracial marriage (which had been
practiced by a few poor Whites on the frontier) became even more uncommon, and in 1828
the British introduced urban residential segregation along racial lines, possibly for the first
time on the African continent since the Greeks and Romans had practiced racist segregation in
Egypt. By now, the British were also bringing in settlers. The new towns of the Eastern Cape,
which the British were in the process of building on land stolen from the indigenous Xhosa,
were divided into racial districts. These are sometimes erroneously considered the first cases
of racist segregation in Africa, but as we shall see, the Ptolemies in Egypt probably did the
same over 2,000 years earlier, and the Romans also probably took over the practice from
them.147 Many descendants of the majority Dutch among the Whites, who had become
comfortable with the slaves, including the oppression and the violence, left the British Cape
Colony and formed several ‘Boer republics’, small agricultural economies, in the northern
parts of the country, the main ones of which were Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and
Natalia.
During the 19th century, over 152,000 Indian indentured laborers were imported by the
British to work on sugar plantations in the Natal Colony, which the British took from the
indigenous as well as from Boers or Afrikaners, on what was to become South Africa’s east
coast. These laborers were thus added to the already numerous descendants of Asian slaves in
the Cape to form the third largest racial group, placed on a higher level of the fixed hierarchy
of race than Blacks, but much lower than Whites. Classified as equals to the Asians were so-
called ‘Coloureds’, people of mixed racial ancestry, initially mainly White-Khoisan, later
anyone with multi-continental roots, but also many out of the by now defunct Khoikhoi
ethnicity. The persistence of the overriding importance of skin color for the racial hierarchy is
evident. Descendants of slaves were classified by the cynical authorities above descendants of
recently independent indigenous people due to their lighter skin color, their potential for
forced collaboration, and their numbers, similar – incidentally – to the use of descendants of
African slaves in the western hemisphere. Today, Asians and Coloureds together make up

146
Iliffe 1995: 123-126; Lester 1996: 23f; Thomasson: South Africa Faces Up to Slave Past, 1999
147
Iliffe 1995: 173-180. The centrality of segregation to apartheid is therefore originally not a purely Dutch or
Afrikaner invention in South Africa. This is an important corrective for those who still mistakenly believe that
the British were somehow morally superior to other Whites in the country’s history, a belief apparently created
consciously by the British, for instance with their sham notion of a ‘Cape Democracy’ during nineteenth-century
British rule. See further, Section II.6 below.
124

around twelve percent of South Africa’s population.

The discovery of diamonds and gold in the latter half of the 19th century brought
prosperity, industrialization, population growth, and intensified conflicts over land between
Whites and Blacks, and between Whites, as well. The latter resulted in the Anglo-Boer War,
from 1899 to 1902, which the British won, though by 1910 the Afrikaners were given several
‘majority’ rights (they remained the largest white population group) in the now unified
country. Crucially, power, wealth and firepower remained even more firmly in white hands
after the formation of the Union of South Africa, the first political unification of the whole
country in 1910. The non-Whites were losing out politically and economically, at least in
relative terms. Already two years after the unification, the organization that was to become the
ANC was formed as a non-violent, inclusive movement against racial discrimination.
From 1948, the Whites were looking to square the circle: to keep the non-Whites out
of sight, while at the same time exploiting and oppressing them. That was what was to
become known as apartheid. ‘Reserves’, later referred to as ‘Bantustans’ or ‘Homelands’ were
formed by the Whites to contain the masses of unwanted Blacks. The rest of the world,
however, did not recognize these oppressive constructions as independent countries, when
they were declared as such during the 1970s and ‘80s, and they were dismantled along with
apartheid in the narrow sense in the 1990s. In the end, the white South African cause, of
keeping Blacks away as much as possible whilst at the same time living and feasting off their
work, became a self-defeating one.148
During apartheid from 1948 as well as the preceding periods of white domination, it
seemed almost impossible for this racist and oppressive system to ever end. Non-Whites did
not have the vote nor access to enough or good enough weaponry to resist or oust the
invaders, and therefore, any essential change was ruled out systematically. (Coloureds and
people of Indian descent were only allowed to participate in voting after 1983, by which time
the system was already crumbling).149 In the end, over 300 laws had been passed by the South
African parliament to ensure that non-Whites were disadvantaged and to help the white
minority reap all the benefits and all privileges, while leaving the rest, especially the black
population, in a very disadvantaged situation, where their income, employment and education
opportunities, health and living standards were regarded as ‘less important’ issues.150 From his
prison experience, Mandela describes one example of many of how far apartheid is able to
reach into people’s daily lives.

When the proverbial inflexibility of red tape is combined with the

petty small-mindedness of racism, the result can be mind-
boggling…Although we were kept together, our diet was fixed
according to race. For breakfast, Africans, Indians and Coloureds
received the same quantities, except that Indians and Coloureds
received a half-teaspoonful of sugar, which we did not. For supper the
diets were the same, except that Indians and Coloureds received four
ounces of bread and we received none. This latter distinction was
made on the curious premise that Africans did not naturally like bread,
which was a more sophisticated or ‘Western’ taste. The diet for [the
separately kept] white detainees was far superior to that of Africans.
So color-conscious were the authorities that even the type of sugar and
bread supplied to whites and nonwhites differed: white prisoners
received white sugar and white bread, while Coloured and Indian

148
Ibid: 271ff.
149
Robertson: Dictionary of Politics, 1993: 19. The limited votes given to (the very few) rich non-Whites in the
British Cape and Natal colonies during certain periods of the 19th century were in fact designed and set up to
keep Whites in absolute power. See Iliffe 1995: 177.
150
Valji 2004
 125

prisoners were given brown sugar and brown bread.151

Yet, somehow, it did end. Globalization demanded access for capitalism to new
markets and that included access to tens of millions of non-white South Africans, as
consumers. Globalization also led to the development of international law and a new majority
of postcolonial nation-states have had and are having an impact although they still face
discrimination by the north Atlantic powers since half a millennium. Several of the most
inhuman apartheid laws, including the bans on interracial marriage, sex, and intimacy, were
gradually repealed during the 1980s amid growing international pressure as well as
continuous internal unrest and violence. Despite very energetic government attempts to
reverse the demographic dynamics, the black population grew in relative terms and the white
one shrank. At the same time, the apartheid-induced wars in neighboring Angola,
Mozambique, and Namibia intensified. Then, suddenly and fully beyond the control and input
by southern African players, the Cold War ended in 1989.
Henceforth, South Africa’s main perceived usefulness for NATO, the most formidable
military power in human history, as the main fortress on a southern front against the
communist-led, former Portuguese colonies and other actual or potential Soviet allies,
including the ANC, simply evaporated. Other factors contributing to the demise of apartheid
were the internal and external resistance, both overwhelmingly non-violent in character, as
well as additional economic pressures from globalized capitalism. In 1990, Nelson Mandela
was released from prison. In the following year, all remaining racist laws (more than 60 pieces
of legislation) were scrapped. Three years later, Mandela’s political party, the ANC, won the
country’s first democratic elections and led the design of South Africa’s new, non-racist
Constitution, which has become one of the most liberal, inclusive and admired Constitutions
in the world.
However, formidable problems still plague South Africa. The country remains deeply
divided between rich and poor, between white and non-white. Black poverty in the face of
white affluence, rampant crime, and high unemployment levels appear to be persistent after-
effects of apartheid, or constant features of epiapartheid. For instance, 96 percent of the share
value at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and 87 percent of the land was still in white
owners’ hands in November 2002. In 2012, over eighteen years after ‘liberation’, the New
African magazine wrote ‘…95 % of the South African economy remains in white hands,
together with 83% of the land.’ Although the population of the country had risen by some
eleven million people since the end of apartheid, the average life expectancy in South Africa
dropped by 13 years between 1990 and 2007, mainly due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which
is not unrelated to apartheid (see Chapter II.1.2 below). Hardly any of the Whites responsible
for apartheid had been punished or sanctioned for their crimes in any way. At this stage, the
white population in the country amounted to only 9.6 percent of the total population, down
from nearly 25 percent in 1948. Many Whites left the country for good during the 1990s, but a
distinctly white presence will almost certainly remain in South Africa in the coming centuries,
just as a physical, distinctly Greek presence remained for centuries in epiapartheid Egypt,
which experienced a poorly understood and unexplained temporary population decline after
the end of apartheid there in 642 CE, but which blossomed after that.152 It is still far too early
151
Mandela 1995 (1994): 244. This degree of official idiocy is unlikely to ever have occurred in other apartheid
societies. It remains, however, a mere matter of degree. It is also idiotic to heap privileges on one atheist because
he is considered a Jew, and deny them all to another atheist, who grew up around the corner from the first one,
because he is considered an Arab. However, as a ‘prize’ for the imbecility of white South African racial
classification and discrimination practices as described here by Mandela, one might say, this form of oppression
– apartheid – deserves and warrants being given an Afrikaans name.
152
Ross 1999: 185ff; Iliffe 1995: 43ff; Commey: South Africa – Land: A Ticking Time Bomb, 2002: 12-16;
Commey: 100 Years of the ANC…But the Black Man Cannot Live by Political Freedom Alone! 2012 (quote).
Some of the white shareholders, as during the reign of political apartheid, were Europeans, Americans and
Australians. On the aftermath of apartheid in Egypt, see Chapter III.6 below. Thörn: Anti-Apartheid and the
126

to definitively say whether South Africa will experience a more complete liberation from
apartheid, but so far it is obviously less liberated from its form of apartheid than Egypt is from
Graeco-Roman apartheid. Liberation from apartheid is not an all-or-nothing affair; it is more a
matter of degree, and a process, though of course it is a process that has milestones, i.e. more
significant events, such as 1990, 1991, or 1994, all dates that signify liberation from apartheid
in South Africa.

3. Israel
The policies and practices in Israel and the Israeli-occupied portions of Palestine, even
though they are still not generally regarded as apartheid societies, very closely resemble the
white racist policies and practices against the non-Whites of South Africa between 1652 and
1994, with the Israeli government and civil society playing the role of the white South African
government and civil society, the non-Jews corresponding to the non-Whites, and the
Palestinians corresponding to the Blacks. Indeed, the main South African liberation movement
and the ruling party since apartheid, the ANC, condemned Israeli apartheid in 2001 (see
Conclusions, Section III.2, below). Moreover, while in office, the former Israeli prime
minister, Ariel Sharon, reportedly admitted practicing the notorious apartheid Bantustan
policy explicitly, though not in public. Abdel Rahman, special envoy of the Palestinian
president Yasser Arafat to South Africa, once stated: ‘...The Palestinian people have much in
common with South Africans’ anti-apartheid movement...but [they] are still under a colonial
apartheid system.’153 The immediate historical background to this system is succinctly

Emergence of a Global Civil Society, 2009 (2006), raises the interesting question of whether anti-apartheid is
socially more significant than apartheid from the perspective of world history. Although other social movements
played important global roles during the latter part of the 20 th century, such as the women’s rights movement, or
the environmental, anti-war, and anti-famine movements, the global anti-apartheid movement was a singularly
successful and dynamic movement that turned from obscurity to mainstream during the 1980s and put its stamp
on or midwifed the birth of global civil society as an agent of change, and, indeed, of moral progress. Following
Falk, R.: International Law in a Fragmented World: The Challenge of New Issues and New Actors, 1991, Thörn
calls the latter ‘globalization from below’, i.e. from the common people for the common good, as opposed to
‘globalization from above’, which are global policies and practices from the elites for the elites. Ibid: 194-213.
Globalization from below was an important factor in the emergence of global civil society, which has been seen
as something vital to renew and/or replace a diminishing public sphere since the 1960s, about which Jürgen
Habermas and others have famously complained. Ibid: 16; Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeouis Society, 1989 (1962); Calhoun (ed.): Habermas and the
Public Sphere, 1992. I believe the reasons why anti-apartheid was so successful that it, for a while, could
spearhead globalization from below, were its focus and well-defined aims – similar to the suffragette movement
of the early 20th century which brought the vote to women in the non-democracies throughout the western world,
to the 1950s and ‘60s civil rights movement in the USA, and to the anti-colonialist movements at the same time
throughout much of the non-western world – as well as its global appeal. It was not difficult for people anywhere
in the world to see apartheid as wrong, and many creative, constructive, and non-violent initiatives against it as
right. On the other hand, there are many other sources of globalization from below, e.g. various local and
universalized campaigns against slavery (going back over 2,000 years, see footnote 713 below), for trade unions,
for democracy, for various religious missions, and many more. See Brand, Brunnengräber, Schrader, Stock, &
Wahl: Global Governance: Alternative zur neoliberalen Globalisierung? 2000 for a critical look at how alleged
‘alternatives’ to neoliberal globalization, i.e. to globalization from above, have been formulated and realized so
far, e.g. in the hegemonic, and often non-democratic and anti-emancipatory ways of the Bretton Woods
institutions, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and many other dominant governance structures
already strongly associated with neoliberalism and the global elites themselves. On the still poorly understood
relationship between HIV/AIDS and apartheid; see Chapters II.1.2 and II.2.2 below, Follér & Thörn: The Politics
of AIDS: Globalization, the State and Civil Society, 2008, and Klein 2008 (2007): 206.
153
N.N.: Arafat Aide Asks South Africa to Promote Mideast Peace, February 9, 1998. Of course modern Israel is
not a colonial power in the traditional sense. Yet, the predominance of European and North American Jews in
Israel and its close ties with NATO and, especially, with individual NATO member countries have in many ways
made Israel itself an outpost of a North Atlantic-led global hegemonic system. And some of the many territories
Israel has invaded and occupied have turned into colonies, i.e. into dependent, undemocratic means of the mother
country, i.e. of Israel. See Chomsky: Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, 21999.
There are also efforts being made to bring Israel into the European Union. In May 2003, the Israeli foreign
 127

summarized by Alex and Stephen Shalom:

More than half a century ago, the United Nations (which at the time
had comparatively few Third World members) recommended the
partition of Palestine into Palestinian and Jewish states, and an
internationalized Jerusalem, with the Jewish [and most recently
immigrated] minority to receive the majority of the land, as well as
most of the fertile land. A civil war and then a regional war ensued
and when the armistice agreements were signed there was Israel, the
Jewish state, but no Palestinian state and no international Jerusalem,
both of these being taken over and divided between Israel and Jordan
[and the Gaza strip by Egypt]. The occupying Israelis, however, were
not content to block the emergence of a Palestinian state; they wanted
as well to expel as many Palestinians as possible. This ethnic
cleansing – forced expulsions facilitated by acts of terror – drove
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their ancestral lands, to
refugee camps where they lived in squalor, longing to return [and with
international law on their side]. In 1967, Israel conquered Jordan’s
[and Egypt’s] share of Palestine, creating a new wave of Palestinian
refugees, and subjecting many more to ruthless Israeli rule in the
occupied territories.154

There were only 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1881. At that point in time Arabs made up
95 percent of the population of Palestine. Although ruled by Ottoman Turks during most of
the last half-millennium, mainly Arabic-speaking Palestinians have continuously populated
and owned the territory of Palestine for well over a millennium. After the birth of the Zionist
movement in 1896-7 (see Chapter II.9.3, below), however, Jewish immigration into the
country gathered steam, so that around 60,000 Jews inhabited the country when the British
took over the province from the Turks at the end of World War I. Yet, they were still only
around ten percent of the total population. In 1917, Britain issued its ‘Balfour Declaration‘, in
the words of the Guardian newspaper: a “masterpiece of political obfuscation, in which the
British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, writing to Lord Rothschild of the World Zionist
Organisation, promises all things to all men: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best
endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other
country.’” And so, it did not quite promise all things to all men. In particular, the political,
social, and economic rights of the indigenous 90 percent of the population are conspicuously
absent. Yet the British had previously promised Arabs political independence if the Arabs
would help them topple Ottoman rule, a promise that was simply broken. The British foreign
secretary, Jack Straw, admitted in November 2002 that the British had helped create the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the Balfour Declaration. But it should not be forgotten that it
was also the result of Zionist lobbying, and more generally of western nationalism and racism
against Arabs as non-Whites and non-Christians or non-Catholic or non-Protestant Christians.
In the years following the Balfour Declaration, another 35,000 Jews arrived, many with a

minister, Silvan Shalom, confirmed that Israel was in fact pursuing this goal with several approving European
allies. See N.N.: Radical Deputies Urge EU Membership for Israel, January 30, 2001; N.N.: Israel Considers
Applying to Join EU, May 20, 2003. See also Löwstedt: Comparing Israeli Oppression with South African
Apartheid, 2005, and footnote 483 below on Sharon’s admission, while in office as the country’s elected head of
government and political leader, to be practicing apartheid.
154
Shalom & Shalom: Turmoil in Palestine: The Basic Context, no date; see Pappe 2006 on the ethnic cleansing
planned, carried out, and then covered up and denied by the Israelis. I will deal with the wider historical
ramifications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in detail in Chapter II.9.3 below.
128

Zionist intention of creating a Jewish nation-state in Palestine, and clashes between them and
the indigenous Palestinians started to erupt.155
The executive decision by the UN in 1947 to guarantee Israeli statehood came after the
extent of the genocide of Jews in Europe had become known towards the end of World War
II. Due to Zionist propaganda as well as genuine sympathy and guilt feelings, it was widely
felt that the Jews needed to protect themselves with their own state apparatus from such
persecution in the future. The number of displaced European Jews, people who had no homes
to which they could return after the war, was very high. In 1948, around half of the Jews in
Palestine were survivors of European judaeophobia and genocide. These were two of the main
reasons why the UN Security Council members voted for the creation of a Jewish state in
1948. Other reasons included well-mobilized and resourceful Zionist lobbies and activists in
the western countries and an arrogant and partial or total disregard among the decision-makers
for the indigenous Arab population in Palestine and for the needs and wishes of Arabs and
other colonialized people in general. Ironically, there may also have been lingering or newly
discovered anti-Jewish sentiments among the mainly white and Christian decision-makers:
‘Send the Jews away from Europe and America, so that we don’t have to live with them any
more’. Even today, the non-Jewish Zionists may actually be the worst anti-Semites of all.
While the UN mandate thus gives the existence of a modern state of Israel a certain
degree of legitimacy, it would be cynical to overlook the facts that speak for a reassessment of
the situation from a postcolonial and a post-apartheid human rights perspective, in favor of
human and citizen rights for Palestinians and Jews equally. Theoretically speaking,
colonialism is the next-door neighbor of apartheid, and as we have seen, also eligible to
qualify as a crime against humanity. The UN Plan for Palestine was hopelessly unfair, and not
unlike the design of the crusader states in Palestine many centuries before (see Section I.4
above). Jews owned merely seven percent of the territory of Palestine when Israel was
created, and only 11 percent of the country that was to become theirs.156 Most of the rest of
what is today Jewish-owned or Jewish-held land in Historic Palestine was thus stolen.

[T]he expulsion of the Palestinians was an inescapable outcome of the

United Nations’ 1947 decision to partition Palestine into separate
Jewish and Arab states the following year. (The Arab state never
came into existence.) Before the partition, Jews comprised only one-
third of the population of Palestine, which held some 608,000 Jews
and 1,237,000 Arabs. Even within the area designated for Israel under
the U.N. partition plan, the population consisted of some 500,000
Jews and 330,000 Arabs. How could a country with such a large Arab
minority become a Jewish homeland?157

The answer: nearly 800,000 Palestinians, more than half of the entire native
Palestinian majority, fled or were forced to leave their homes and villages during the 1948-
1949 war when Israel was created on the major part of the territory of the then British-
mandate Palestine for a minority of Jews, most of them very recent immigrant arrivals. Many
Palestinians were also killed. Arab forces from the region attempted to come to the aid of the
Palestinians but were repelled by Jewish forces, greater in numbers, with better training, and
better weapons. The Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, has recently shown that the ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians that led to the Jewish state was not ‘just’ a crime against humanity. It was a
155
Abi-Aad & Grenon: Instability and Conflict in the Middle East: People, Petroleum and Security Threats,
1997: 6f; Brown: Israel and the Middle East: Key Events, 2002; N.N.: British Empire Blamed for Modern
Conflicts, November 15, 2002
156
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 92; Kovel 2007: 66ff; Hagopian: The Palestine-Israel Conflict: A Short History,
2004: 11
157
Miller, R.: The Palestinians’ Right of Return, no date. See also Mearsheimer & Walt: The Israel Lobby and
U.S. Foreign Policy, 2006.
 129

premeditated crime against humanity. Thus it could be argued that Arab forces from the
region were not primarily aggressively attacking a sovereign state in 1948-9 (as Israel claims
was the case) but acting legitimately to prevent an ongoing serious crime against humanity
from getting even worse. Unfortunately, international law, which is certainly not entirely on
Israel’s side either, still trumps human rights, but that may not remain so forever.
The number of Palestinian refugees has since swollen to over four million in camps in
the West Bank, Gaza and Arab states. There was a considerable increase in that number after
Israel’s war of conquest in 1967. In this war Palestine under nominal Arab rule ceased to
exist. Prior to the war, Palestinians still had 22 percent of their land left, afterwards they had
nothing. Since then Israel has embarked on the longest military occupation in modern history:
more than 46 years of relentlessly increasing Jewish supremacist military, paramilitary and
civilian presence in the West Bank and Gaza, numerous aspects of which are illegal under
international law.158
Worldwide, the number of Palestinian refugees, including only those of their
descendants who qualify for UN refugee status, is currently estimated at over 4,500,000 – the
largest and longest existing refugee population in the world today. Some of them are
internally displaced by Israel within Historic Palestine. Refugees still make up nearly 60
percent of all Palestinians. For some months after the 1967 war, Israel was ready to trade all
the territories occupied in that war, except east Jerusalem, some 20 percent of Historic
Palestine, for peace with the Arab states. The latter refused and the gradual ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians started anew. At the same time, however, the Palestinians delivered cheap labor
welcomed by the Israeli business community and represented a growing market for Israeli
commodities, which the Palestinians were forced to purchase. Arab-made products were not
allowed to be imported into the territories. Military occupation led to increasing encroachment
on Palestinian land by both army and settlers. The Palestinian population also grew, as their
land continued to shrink.159
Israel has constructed over 200 illegal settlements on the territories it occupied in 1967
and is filling them with over half a million illegal settlers. It started slowly. In 1977 there were
less than 4,000 illegal Jewish settlers. In 1980 Israel illegally annexed east Jerusalem to the
country, which led to the gradual construction of a suffocating eastern semi-circle of
settlements around this city. By 1985 Israel had settled 45,000 Jews in the Occupied
Territories (a war crime under the Geneva Conventions). By then, their illegal presence there
was already seen as one of the main obstacles to peace in the entire region. 160 Today the
illegal settlers have increased more than tenfold since 1985. Israel now illegally houses over
260,000 Jews in the settlements on the West Bank and around 250,000 more, also illegally, in
Arab east Jerusalem. Another 17,000 have settled in the Golan Heights, captured from Syria
in the 1967 war and illegally annexed by Israel in 1981. The Palestinians have since seen
themselves pressed to make one concession, effectively recognizing Israel’s statehood, i.e. its
de facto right to sovereignty over the land it was ‘given’ by the UN (land that was not the
UN’s to give) against unanimous Arab resistance and over the additional land that Israel
conquered in 1948 and 1949. The mainstream Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
made this concession in 1988 and was rewarded by the USA and the rest of the west by no
longer being considered and dealt with as only a terrorist group. Only the right to return to
personal (i.e. individual) Palestinian land property or financial compensation for having had

158
Pappe 2006: xiiiff; Said: Emerging Alternatives in Palestine, 2002; Tilley (ed.) 2009
159
Hottelet: Heading toward Apartheid in Israel, 2000: 11
160
Avishai: The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel, 1985: 10. See Kovel
2007: 92-99 for a critique of Avishai’s attempts to justify Israeli ethnic cleansings. All Jewish settlers in the
illegally occupied Palestinian territories are illegal according to Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
See Tilley (ed.) 2009: 165.
130

that property stolen from them were still being demanded by Palestinians, in accordance with
international law.161
Israel, however, has never recognized the right to exist of a Palestinian state, let alone
an Arab state on Palestinian territory. Moreover, Israel refuses to accept moral responsibility
for the fate of the refugees and claims their expulsion was a direct consequence of an Arab
war of aggression against Israel. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194,
adopted on December 11, 1948, nevertheless grants the Palestinian refugees the right of return
and the right to compensation. Israel never complied with the wish of the international
community. Since then, Israel has in fact continuously defied the United Nations and other
international and global organizations, often in tandem with its main ally. Edward Said
remarks: ‘no state (aside from the US itself) has defied the international community on so
many issues for so long.’162 From 1967 to 2003 alone, Israel saw 130 UN resolutions issued
against it, none of which was implemented by the Jewish state.163
In 1987, the first Intifada against Israeli occupation was initiated by youths armed with
mostly nothing more than stones and sticks as well as most of Palestinian civil society, which
waged entirely non-violent resistance. It subsided in 1993, with the signing of an interim
peace accord in Oslo between the Israeli government and the PLO. By then, over 1,200
Palestinians and 179 Israelis had been killed in this first massive popular uprising.164
The Oslo Accords, however, were not upheld by Israel. As frustration grew among
Palestinians, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, were invited
to Camp David by US President Bill Clinton in the summer of 2000. The ‘new’ proposed
peace plan, championed by Clinton and Barak, essentially remained a Bantustan or native
reservation plan, which was the way Israel had implemented or made Palestinians implement
parts of the Oslo Accords previously. The Palestinian ‘autonomous areas’ would be reduced
from around 200 to four or five. But each of these would be isolated from the other, and
‘sovereignty’ was about equal to Bantustan ‘sovereignty’ in South Africa, something that
neither the USA nor any other country in the world, for that matter, had accepted during the
1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s for the self-policed ‘black’ South African statelets. Free travel and free
trade within the proposed Palestinian state would have been as impossible as it was within and
between the South African Bantustans. Moreover, Israeli ‘by-pass’ roads, to be used by Jews
only, primarily by Jewish settlers and Israeli military personnel, would criss-cross the
Palestinian cantons. These roads would in practice remain under Israeli sovereignty as well. In
essence, the Israeli-American plan for the Palestinians meant that 200 small prisons would be
turned into four or five larger ones, and Israel would control the land around them, between
them, and the airspace above them. Palestine would not be allowed to border its neighbors,
Jordan and Egypt. All land next to the borders would still be under Israeli control. The
Palestinian people would thus remain under total Israeli military, political and economic
control. Furthermore, as Seth Ackerman reported: ‘[i]n exchange for taking fertile West Bank
lands that happen to contain most of the region’s scarce water aquifers, Israel [at Camp
David] offered to give up a piece of territory in the Negev desert – about one-tenth the size of
the land it would annex – including a former toxic waste dump.’ Nonetheless, the Israeli and
US media somehow managed to produce and successfully spread a depiction of the Barak-

161
Dugard 2007; N.N.: Factbox: Jewish Settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, October 25, 2004; Redden:
Talks Turn to Palestinian Refugees After 52 Years, 2000; N.N.: Israel Says Jewish Settlers Number Almost
200,000, July 27, 2000; Miftah: Perspective: What Red Lines, What Compromise? No date; Said: Palestinians
Under Siege, 2000; Tufakji: Settlements: A Geographic and Demographic Barrier to Peace, 2000: 52-58; N.N.:
Factbox: Tension Rises between Israel and Syria, October 7, 2003. Both the 4 th Geneva Convention and UN
Resolution 242 render the Jewish settlements illegal. See also N.N.: EU Presidency Condemns Illegal Israeli
Settlements, April 5, 2001
162
Said December 17, 2000
163
Ess: UN Resolution 1515 To Back Roadmap, 2003
164
Heritage: Cradle of Intifada Nervously Awaits Mideast Peace, August 24, 2000
 131

Clinton plan as generous towards Palestinians, and PLO leader Arafat as the one who spoiled
the party by subsequently rejecting the plan.165
The second major civilian Palestinian uprising, the Second Intifada or ‘Al-Aqsa
Intifada’, erupted on September 28, 2000, and soon turned into a contained civil war,
involving heavy weaponry on the Israeli side, again pitched against mainly stone-throwers but
also a few light firearms, and from 2001 bombs and grenades for suicide attacks, and later
home-made and imported missiles, on the Palestinian side. Intense pressure from the US and
other Israeli allies have so far kept the neighboring Arab states from attempting to intervene in
the Intifadas as they had done in the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, although a majority of
inhabitants of these countries would probably favor such an intervention, despite the
overwhelming military hardware odds stacked against them.
The promises to the Palestinians incorporated in the spirit of the Oslo accords, that a
Palestinian sovereign state would be established by 1998, that the illegal settlements would
disappear or at least stop expanding, had been postponed repeatedly or broken. The first five
people to be killed in this Intifada were again Palestinians, but somehow, the world’s
dominant media, led by the pro-Israeli, privately-owned US media, managed to turn this
around as well. Nine weeks later, at least 264 people had been killed in the violence in the
Occupied Territories and Israel, all but 29 of them Palestinians (including ‘Israeli Arabs’) or
foreign nationals killed by Israeli armed forces or settlers. 166 The US Secretary of State
(foreign minister) at the time, Madeleine Albright, referred to this situation as a ‘siege’ by the
stone-throwing Palestinians of the state of Israel (see Chapter II.9.3). Youths with a Stone Age
arsenal were allegedly besieging one of the five greatest military powers in the world, a
diversified, hypermodern military machine with hundreds of nuclear bombs! In fact, the
Israeli army had moved into nominally Palestinian territory, where almost all of the clashes
were taking place. That is a sad reflection of how far propaganda can go, in terms of negation
of reality, and of how impunity rules, especially for major crimes. The conflict then escalated
far beyond the ramifications of the first Intifada. The Israelis started using tanks, helicopter-
borne and even jet fighter- and drone-borne missile and bombing attacks, mainly against the
indigenous civilians, but also against some of those Palestinians who had been involved in
armed attacks on Israelis, which was of course the only official reason why Israelis attacked.
In the following year, Palestinian militants embarked on a suicide attack campaign that lasted
until a unilateral suspension of such attacks by Palestinians in 2004, although a handful of
165
See Ackerman, S.: The Myth of the Generous Offer: Distorting the Camp David Negotiations, 2002, for an
excellent treatment of the subject. See also Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 47f; Carter 2006: 149-152; Chomsky:
US-Israel-Palestine, 2002; Hass: The Myth of the State and the Reality of the Annexation, 2003. There is no
known direct parallel to Bantustan policies in Graeco-Roman Egypt. One reason may be that there were no
international laws, conventions, or agreements at that time granting peoples the right to self-determination or
demanding democracy, and consequently no need for such expensive and cruel hypocrisy. However, there were
temples of the ancient Egyptian religion, within which impoverished Egyptian peasants were sometimes able to
find asylum from the Ptolemaic or Roman state tax collectors. Led by the least unprivileged group of Egyptians –
the priests – the temples, however, had no other known rights vis à vis the Graeco-Roman elites, and were thus
much further away from true sovereignty than the Bantustans were. They were also of course even smaller in
size, and the apartheid-regime-instated puppets, who were presumably in charge, had even less freedom than a
South African or a Palestinian Bantustan authority did or does. Jews, similarly, were also granted asylum from
tax collectors in the numerous synagogues that existed throughout Egypt in late ancient times. See Fraser:
Ptolemaic Alexandria, Volume I, 1972: 283f. Bingen 2007: 272 characterizes the Ptolemaic proto-Bantustan as a
‘pocket-handkerchief territory’, and asks: ‘How could such a tiny area imply a space for a large rival economy
and a significant autonomous domain?’. This is a question that should be identically formulated with regard to
Israeli and South African Bantustans, and perhaps even with regard to the kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland,
which appeared under British colonial rule and white apartheid in South Africa.
166
N.N.: Israel Uses Excessive Force - Israeli Rights Group, December 6, 2000. Additionally, four foreign
nationals had been killed by Israeli soldiers during this Intifada at this point in time. B’tselem, the Israeli human
rights group, condemned Israel for ‘grave’ human rights violations. The news agency Reuters’ own, unofficial
death toll was slightly higher, with at least 297 people killed, though that included people killed within Israel’s
1967 borders, mainly Israeli Arabs, killed by Jews, which the B’tselem toll did not include.
132

suicide attacks have taken place since. By the beginning of the fifth year of the Second
Intifada, at least 3,070 Palestinians and 940 Israelis had been killed, according to Reuters
News Agency. The non-governmental organization, Palestine Monitor, put the Palestinian
death toll at 3,334 and the Israeli one at 1,008. Among the killed Palestinians according to
Palestine Monitor, 82 percent were civilian, and 19 percent (621) were children under the age
of 17. According to the Israeli domestic secret police, Shin Beth, 69 percent of the Israelis
killed were civilians. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis had also been
wounded in the fighting.167 The two sides are obviously very unequal in firepower and
consequently in casualty rates.

It needs to be remembered that Israel is the only state in the world

today that has never had internationally declared borders; the only
state not the state of its citizens but of the whole Jewish people [most
of whom live abroad from Israel]; the only state where over 90
percent of the land is held in trust for the exclusive use of the Jewish
people. That it is also the only state in the world never to have
recognised any of the main provisions of international law…suggests
the depth and structural knottiness of the absolute rejectionism that
Palestinians have had to face.168

The South African concept of apartheid mirrors the current situation in Israel, the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip quite accurately. Just as Blacks were denied self-determination as
well as several other basic human rights in South Africa, the Palestinians under Israeli military
occupation are also denied self-rule and the vote along with several other basic human rights.
Ever since the beginning of the so-called ‘peace process’ with the 1993 Oslo Agreement,
which led to a division of the entire region, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza
have not been allowed to enter the rest of the country – many Palestinians work(ed) in Israel –
without special permits, issued by the Israeli government, allowing for their entry. These
permits are issued for a short period of time, sometimes as little as two hours. At the same
time, segregation exists in practice in other parts of the country, such as in east and west
Jerusalem, where the west is for the Israelis and the east is still predominantly Arab with the
exception of the Old City of Jerusalem, which is divided between Arabs (Christian and
Muslim), Armenians, and Jews, and of course the illegal Jewish settlements, growing almost
by the hour.
Although there is no apartheid law demanding physical separation within Israeli state
territory, people from these different racial groups do not mix much in practice.169 Even Jews
167
Tostevin: Israeli Death Toll Tumbles in 4th Year of Conflict, 2004; N.N.: Israelis, Palestinians Target
Children-Amnesty, September 30, 2002. See also N.N.: Palestinian Intifada – 4th Anniversary, September 27,
2004. The passenger plane hijack-suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in
Washington in 2001 produced more casualties (nearly 3,000 dead) than the Palestinian suicide attackers had
achieved so far. Reuters counted 330 Israelis killed in around 60 suicide attacks during the Second Intifada until
May 19, 2003. But the combined number of attacks and Palestinian suicide attacker casualties were probably
unprecedented in history since World War II, i.e. since the Japanese Kamikaze suicide attack squads. As opposed
to the hundreds of Kamikaze pilots, however, the Palestinian suicide attackers were not pressured or coerced to
sacrifice their lives by a strong state. (Nevertheless there are pressures from the leaders of militant groups on
those who eventually sacrifice their own lives and sometimes murder others in this manner.) N.N.: UN Fears
‘War-Like’ Situation, December 2, 2001; N.N.: Suicide Bombers Strike Again in Israel, May 19, 2003;
Robinson, A.: Suicide Bomber Hits Israeli Mall, Peace Hopes Dim, 2003
168
Said: What Israel Has Done, 2002
169
A qualified exception to this would be the way some Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, so-called ‘Israeli
Arabs’, and some Jews mix in the pre-1967 areas. These Palestinians make up almost a fifth of the country’s
population but face entrenched discrimination against them in all walks of life. For example: ‘According to the
New Israel Fund, an organization that promotes social justice, only 3.7 percent of Israel’s federal employees are
Arabs; Arabs hold only 50 out of 5,000 university faculty positions; and of the country’s 61 poorest towns, 48
are Arab. But the most glaring discrimination is the way in which the Jews strictly limit the Arabs from
 133

of different origins tend to stick together and live separately from other Jews. Especially the
Russian and Ethiopian Jews, both recently arrived in large numbers, have a difficult
relationship, and European Jews and Yemeni Jews also tend to separate from each other. In
2002, the New African magazine reported that 77 percent of Ethiopian Jewish adults in Israel
were unemployed, that 72 percent of their children were living below the poverty line, and
that further discrimination against them existed in various ways. As a partial result of that,
among many other things, the suicide rate in the Israeli armed forces was highest among
Ethiopian Israelis.170 Apart from the issue of separateness, there are other aspects of
oppression and discrimination against the Palestinians, as with the South African apartheid
system, of racially motivated different wages, living standards (especially for the Palestinian
refugees) and rights to property, or as Edward Said described it:

[M]inute by minute, hour by hour, day after day, [the Palestinians] are
losing more Palestinian land to the Israelis. Scarcely a road, or a
highway, or a village that...hasn’t witnessed the daily tragedy of land
expropriated; field bulldozed; trees, plants and crops uprooted; houses
demolished . . . Jews can build, but never Palestinians. This is
Apartheid.171

In South Africa, the Blacks in the 1980s owned a maximum of 14 percent of the land
only. In Israel, however, the indigenous people control only two percent of the land.172 Apart
from the fact that the majority of the population owns the smallest amount of land in an
apartheid society, it is also the least desirable area of land, where ‘…soil erosion and the
overworking of the soil make it impossible for them to live properly off the land.’173 These are
some of the various measures which the Blacks and non-Whites of South Africa had to face
for almost 350 years and which the Palestinians are still facing today.
Perhaps no single person has come closer to explicitly accusing Israel of apartheid
than the most famous victim of apartheid in South Africa. In Pretoria on December 4, 1997,
President Nelson Mandela reportedly said: ‘The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and
over the years an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this
iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom
of the Palestinians.’174
‘The histories of our two peoples, Palestinian and South African, correspond in such
painful and poignant ways that I intensely feel myself being at home amongst my
compatriots,’ the first democratically elected president of South Africa told the Palestinian
Legislative Council in Gaza two years later, on October 20, 1999. ‘Arafat and I were allies
during the days of struggle. Our struggle was the same. Our hopes and aspirations and dreams
were identical, and that is why I am here today,’ Mandela said later on that day in the Shati
refugee camp in Gaza.175

purchasing land.’ (De Préneuf: Israel’s Apartheid, 2000). Furthermore, ‘[c]omprising over 18% of the
population, Arab citizens of Israel receive only 4% of the [state] development budget’, according to a press
release by the Mossawa Center, The Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, on March 20, 2001. On
political suppression and discrimination, see also Williams, D.: Israeli Arab Lawmaker Faces Sedition Trial,
2001; N.N.: Israeli Arab Lawmaker Slams Sharon “Apartheid” Plan, April 21, 2002.
170
Aidi: How Israel Treats Its Ethiopian Jews, 2002: 56-59. See also Eaves: Ethiopian Jews Struggle to Adapt in
Israel, 1998; Ushpiz: Israel’s Ethiopian Jews: Doomed from the Start, 2000: 44f. A similar voluntary separation
of Whites, especially between those of Afrikaner and British origins, was well underway in 19 th century South
Africa. It sharpened and climaxed during and after the Anglo-Boer War.
171
Said: An Orphaned People, 1998: 18-20
172
Mandela: The Struggle Is My Life. 31990 (1978): 13. On Israel, see Chapter II.4.3. below.
173
Mandela 31990 (1978): 177
174
Quoted in Kasrils: The Other Apartheid State, 2009
175
Amr, W.: Palestinians Tell Mandela He Is Their Dream, 1999
134

Today’s volatile situation in Palestine and Israel is characterized by vicious circles of

land confiscations and violent provocations by the Jews and terrorist acts 176 by Palestinian as
well as by Israeli extremists and by the Israeli armed forces. This goes back at least to the end
of the British mandate in the 1940s. At present, there are more than 460,000 Jewish settlers in
the Occupied Territories and Jerusalem, spread out over more than 200 settlements, each of
them with a 400 meter radius of Palestinian-free land surrounding it. With regard to
international law, the settlers are all there illegally. The Fourth Geneva Convention (Article
49(6)) prohibits the settlement of civilians in territories that are militarily occupied by troops
of the same nationality as those settlers. The reason is compelling: The indigenous population
has no legal way of influencing the government that is occupying them and settling their land.
The number of illegal settlers in Palestine is growing constantly, but so are the numbers of
Palestinians, despite vigorous Israeli decimation and a numerically gradual, direct and
indirect, mass expulsion of the indigenous population.
The head of the Israeli government during most of the Second Intifada, Ariel Sharon,
represented the right-wing Likud Party, which has vowed ‘never to permit the establishment
of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River’. Sharon’s unofficial yet obvious policy was
‘…to depopulate as much as possible the Occupied Palestinian Territories by making life for
its citizens unbearable’. This was done mainly through assassinations and random shootings
and bombings of Palestinian civilians, and also through closures, curfews and sieges, which
have led to chronic malnutrition of between 20 and 40 percent of Palestinian children, and a
strangulation of the entire Palestinian economy, including the intentional targeting of the
education and culture sectors. Moreover, a massive campaign of army- and settler-induced
daily harassment and terror, which has wounded more than ten times as many Palestinians as
it has killed since the eruption of the Second Intifada in September 2000, contributes to the
widespread impression that it is not genocidal or even ethnic cleansing, although both could
certainly be debated. Around 80,000 Palestinians reportedly fled the Occupied Territories
during the first two years of the Second Intifada, most of them economic as well as political
refugees, who left mainly in order to earn money abroad in order to help their families survive
at home.177 That seems to be one of the main reasons why the Israelis, led by Sharon and
Barak, provoked and prompted the Palestinians to start the Second Intifada (see further
Chapter II.9.3, below).

176
Although I consider apartheid to be a state of war against the entire indigenous majority – including all
civilians – initiated and perpetuated by the de facto invading racial minority (see Section II.1 below), including
its civilians, I also consider any targeted or collateral killing of civilians to be war crimes, whoever it may be that
commits these offences. Thus, the indigenous are at an additional military disadvantage: having to be morally
superior to the occupiers. But in my view the alternative, considering civilians as legitimate targets or their
deaths as unavoidable collateral damage, will in the long run make liberation and reconciliation more difficult or
impossible to achieve. See Said: Palestinians Must Occupy the Moral High Ground, 2001. Regarding the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, including east Jerusalem, the Fourth Geneva Convention renders resistance
acceptable. It is the right of the subjugated people to actively resist a military occupation such as this. Israel and
the USA are the only countries fighting the notion that the Convention should apply to the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, mainly by boycotting any implementation, enforcement or even discussion of the Convention on an
international level. Israel claims that it observes the humanitarian provisions of it, but disputes that it legally
applies to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which it says were under no legitimate rule when it captured
them in the 1967 war. See Nebehay: Israel, U.S. Set to Boycott Talks on Territories, 2001. This huge
discrepancy between Israel and the USA on the one hand and the rest of the international community on the other
was further exemplified in 2001 by the former labeling the anti-Israeli militant groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and
Hizbollah, as ‘terrorists’, which the United Nations did not. However, the USA has received considerable
backing from the other NATO countries – and with regard to Hamas, even from the EU – on this issue since
then. The majority of the world’s countries and citizens, however, do not, especially since Hamas’ unilateral
2004 ceasefire and suspension of suicide attacks, and its 2006 legislative election victory, considered free and
fair, except for numerous Israeli obstacles, by the international community. See N.N.: Syria, Lebanon: Fight
against Israel not Terrorism, December 20, 2001; N.N.: EU Joins US in Denouncing Hamas as Terrorist Group,
September 6, 2003, and Chapter II.9.3 below.
177
Quotes from Awwad: Palestine: Ethnic Cleansing by Starvation, 2002. See also Carter 2006: 151.
 135

Previously, under Labor Party and American control, the Oslo peace process had led
on the one hand to raised hopes due to increasing Palestinian self-administration of the Gaza
strip and sparsely scattered dots of returned Palestinian land on the West Bank; but, on the
other hand, these dots of land closely mirror the ‘Bantustans’ or ‘Homelands’ unto which the
South African apartheid government granted ‘independence’ in the 1970s and 1980s. These
patches of land are too poor in quality and they are too small and isolated from each other to
ever become viable economic or political entities, let alone a single such entity. No one is
more aware and more approving of this than the two powers who decisively formed and
continue to control that ‘peace process’, the closest friends that the South African apartheid
elites ever had, namely, the Israeli and American elites.178 They are the ones who planned it
and accepted the plan that way.
In conclusion, Israel is practicing and institutionalizing apartheid in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, against a Palestinian majority on the ground. But it also implements a
somewhat more flexible sort of apartheid against a Palestinian minority within Israel itself.
And, most importantly, it implements apartheid on a grand scale in the ‘Even Greater Israel’,
against the Palestinians in refugee camps and in forced exile around the Middle East and
around the world. This is the first conclusion to be drawn from this work. The second is that
the Israeli elites are implementing apartheid against the whole world, against all of humanity
including all Jews – that is, even against themselves – by virtue of the legal (since 2002 at the
very latest) and moral fact that apartheid is a crime against humanity.
Perhaps Israeli apartheid will be as successful as its Graeco-Roman forerunner in
neighboring Egypt, and continue for another 900 years. But I doubt that strongly. The
situation today is very different from 2,000 years ago. The whole world is aware of Israeli
discrimination and atrocities against Palestinians, perhaps even more than it was of white
South African discrimination against that country’s indigenous population. And that
awareness is by dislike and aversion that are slowly but surely being turned into policy and
even into law. In fact, important actors in the international legal community have already
identified Israel as a criminal suspect, much more decisively than it ever did to apartheid
South Africa. I personally believe Israeli apartheid will end, at least as dramatically and at
least to the same extent as South African apartheid did, in a matter of a few years’ time. But, I
must admit, this is not a scientific prediction.

178
Chomsky: The Chomsky Reader, 1995 (1987): 375. As the first Intifada gets underway, Chomsky warns of a
scenario for Israel that includes: ‘expulsion of a substantial part of the Arab population on some pretext, and
conversion of Israel into a society on the South African model with some form of Bantustans, committed to
regional disruption, etc.’ See also Chomsky 21999: 544-563. See footnote 483 for confirmation that there is at
least one explicit, though not public, approval of an explicit apartheid policy against Palestinians at the top levels
of Israeli government.
136

Methodology, Epistemology, Paradigms, and Values

In my opinion, scientific research should be accompanied by a declaration of research-
relevant values by the researcher, and that is what this section is about. Although I hold truth
and objectivity to be the eminently worthy goals of empirical research, I also believe they are
impossible to attain in the strict sense, and that values regulate, enable, inspire, and organize
research as well as disturb and even prevent it. Science and scholarship must not ignore
values. We should not, however, stop trying to attain objectivity and truth, either. A
researcher’s relevant values, in my view, will include epistemological, methodological,
political, and metaphysical convictions and (conscious and unconscious) beliefs and
assumptions, as well as relevant biographical background. I will deal with them in that order
and explain how they may be relevant for this particular investigation.
Following Karl Popper’s notion of critical rationalism (to which I will return
presently), I believe truth can be approached asymptotically, i.e. that we can get closer and
closer to empirical truths without ever actually attaining them, and that self-criticism is crucial
for good and successful science. In my first book, an anthropological-philosophical treatise
published in 1995, I referred to my own epistemology as ‘perspectivism’, developing Ludwig
von Bertalanffy’s approach of the same name, while maintaining that perspectives of the
researcher should be investigated and criticized as well as the subject matter of scientific
inquiry, and that widely different perspectives should additionally be sought in both cases in
order to attain good composite representations of any investigated object(s) or relation(s)
between objects, i.e. representations which are as detailed and accurate as possible, and if
possible also relevantly related to other objects, and thus situated, along with the critique of
the researcher, in relevant contexts. In determining what research and what knowledge is
relevant, values, of course, play a huge role. But they do in other realms, too.
Objectivity, in my view, is also an asymptotic ideal, which can be approached through
choices of more than one ‘good’ or ‘revealing’ perspective. This appears to hold for
knowledge in general, i.e. not just for scientific knowledge. Both science and good
journalism, for example, work in similar ways towards a shared ideal of truth and objectivity,
seeking to corroborate, confirm or verify statements from maximum numbers of failed
falsification attempts, or, at least, from a maximum number of independent sources.
Therefore, I use both academic and journalistic sources of information. Marginally, I also rely
on oral history and on my own personal experience and recollections. Fairness and balance are
two values often immediately following truth and objectivity as supreme journalistic values,
and I include them as well among my values for journalistic as well as scientific information-
gathering and analysis.179 Yet, I must admit that I strongly suspect that most of my sources are
sympathetic to the victims (of all races) rather than to the perpetrators (also of all races) of
apartheid.
With regard to the bulk of my sources, fairness, balance, and selectivity are therefore
an issue, especially in the contentious matter of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I have tried to
disregard and eliminate the sources that to me seemed to contain propaganda, but propaganda
(including lies, distortions, ideology, and bias) is to be found in official (governmental and
intergovernmental) and journalistic as well as academic sources on this conflict, on both sides,
sometimes conscious, often unconscious, sometimes even mixed: pro-Palestinian untruths and
pro-Israeli untruths from the same source. In Chapter II.9.3, below, I will attempt to gauge the
scope and severity of the manifold varieties of propaganda from each side. Many pro-
Palestinian and (especially) pro-Israeli sources are guilty of bias, de-legitimization, de-
humanization, demonization of the Other, and of direct incitement to violence. But many
others, including myself, are more interested in the truth, in objectivity, fairness and balance.

179
Bertalanffy: General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, 1969 (1968): 228-232, 239ff;
Löwstedt 1995: 57-61; N.N.: Codes of Ethics, Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri, 2010
 137

Some caution should be observed, however, with my selection of sources. Most of all,
perhaps, there is the issue of language, its embeddedness in society, and the many
unconscious aspects of language acquisition and language use. I have written this book in the
English language, which has made me prefer English-language sources for easier quotation,
discussion, and analysis. Although Swedish was my first language until my mid-twenties, I
have since made English my first language (not a huge change for me personally as I was
raised partly bilingually with an English mother in Sweden and I spent two years in an
English school in Hong Kong in my early teens, and later married a US American). The
English-language sources, however, are overwhelmingly published and edited in the USA and
Britain, the two largest media content and weapons producers and exporters in the world, and
very deeply involved in the apartheid societies and the apartheid wars engendered by both
South Africa and Israel. For these two reasons, and the additional two reasons that both the
USA and Britain have been and are the two dominant military, political, and economic powers
in the world during the last two-and-a-half centuries, and that their power was not given to
them voluntarily by the majority of people subjected to that power (i.e. that the USA and
Britain never have been involved in promoting democracy on the global level, but rather the
opposite), the utilized sources as well as the many unnamed and/or unutilized sources and
their influence on me must be considered with a great deal of skepticism.
These two countries’ involvement in the apartheid conflicts, moreover, has been
almost completely on the side of the perpetrators of apartheid, which, let us not forget, is a
crime against humanity. There are no major powers other than Britain and the USA who have
sided so closely with the apartheid states in South Africa and Israel, except the latter two with
each other. For this fifth reason alone, extreme caution should be exercised.
On the other hand, there is still quite a diversity of media content coming from the
USA and Britain, and I have tried to stay away from the mainstream media (including even
several university textbooks) and their ideological approaches and interpretations and from
elite-sponsored points of views in general (including also elite anti-Israeli or anti-American or
anti-NATO propaganda originating from Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Cuba, Russia, China or
elsewhere). Nonetheless, CNN, the New York, Los Angeles, and London Times appear
among my sources, as do the much more prominently used news agencies, especially the
British-based Reuters. Even Reuters, in my opinion, manifests a pro-British, pro-NATO, and
pro-Israel bias, but I do not believe it is as biased as the media outlets I just mentioned (see
my detailed treatment in Chapter II.9.3 below). Other, much smaller, English-language mass
media such as Britain’s Guardian, Observer, or Independent newspapers are in my opinion
more objective, balanced, and fair than any of the news organizations I mentioned previously,
and I have also used them frequently. However, they do not have the logistical, financial, and
other resources to report on the conflicts as comprehensively as the much larger media
organizations I mentioned before these three newspapers. All of the news organizations now
mentioned are privately owned, for-profit ones, and I have also sought to balance this with
non-profit and/or publicly-owned publications, such as the BBC, ZNet, Counterpunch, etc.,
though bias of course also appears in these sources. With regard to human rights violations, in
particular, I have often consulted reputable NGO and IGO sources, but again almost
exclusively in English. Academic sources are also lop-sided with regard to language. Only
with regard to Graeco-Roman Egypt have I used a substantial amount of non-English sources,
mainly German-language ones (mainly because so much egyptological research is published
in German and I have easier library access to these, living, during most of the time I have
written this book, in a German-speaking country).
Aside from language, in the course of this investigation, I will unfortunately also
present a lop-sided choice of sources on apartheid societies regarding authors. Most of the
sources on Egypt and South Africa as well as Israel/Palestine under European rule are
Europeans and descendants of Europeans, like myself. Many of my sources on Israeli
apartheid are Jews, Israelis and others. This imbalance has been prompted by the fact that the
138

people oppressed by apartheid are often routinely and systematically deprived of good
education, of resources for research and of possibilities of publication. On these problems and
their racist causes, see Sections II.7 and II.9 below. My saving grace with regard to the
Middle East as well as South Africa is the fact that the best-educated (in a qualitative rather
than a technical sense) Europeans, European descendants and Jews – and there are many of
them – are critical of or opposed to apartheid and racism in general (see Sections II.7 and
III.6). Nonetheless, the reliance on authors on apartheid that belong to the racial elites or are
somehow related to them has probably contributed to obscure some of the true characteristics
of the system, sometimes possibly due to intentional obscurity. It is perhaps not until now,
with the Palestinians, that we finally have a considerable number of reasonably- and well-
educated members of an oppressed indigenous racial majority suffering from apartheid. This
is the case due partly to international aid, which has done much to keep Palestinians relatively
well-educated despite enormous obstacles (many of them intentionally deviced by Zionists).
That, finally, is reflected in the relatively large number of Palestinian and Palestinian-related
sources used throughout this investigation, especially in comparison with Egyptian victims of
Graeco-Roman domination but also with black South Africans.
Yet, despite my numerous remaining, entrenched Anglo-American, European, and
pro-Israeli biases, which I have tried to overcome as much as possible, I consider this book to
be a part of the Anti-apartheid Narrative, a very pro-Palestinian and very pro-Black South
African narrative, i.e. a narrative with an opposite bias. Some of my sources are activist
sources attempting to affect the outcome of the conflict, but (if more balanced sources were
unavailable) I have still tried to choose to believe in activists who appear to me to have human
rights, peace and justice in mind with regard to that outcome. In fact, I almost consider myself
part of the Palestinian and black South African communities, who have so much in common. I
have lived with them, identified myself, cried and suffered with them and for them. Still, I
will always remain an outsider. I have learned some vocabulary, phrases, idioms, and
grammar in their native languages, but not their native languages, and, of course, I have not
suffered as devastating losses as they have.
The outsider role provides for disadvantages: personally I do not belong to something
to which I sometimes feel I should or to which I wish to belong, and professionally I am not
able to consider myself an expert on either of these two countries or cultures. I do, however,
consider myself an expert on comparisons between these two societies and on each of them
with other societies.
The outsider role also provides for advantages. I am at least able to be objective about
them, because looking from a distance provides contexts sometimes not seen from the inside
(perspective), and I am also sometimes able to better relate to their counter-cultures and
counter-narratives, especially if these are conceived as pro-Israeli or pro-Jewish and pro-
White South African cultures and narratives, though much less, of course, if conceived as the
Pro-apartheid Narrative. I have often even been mistaken for a white South African or for a
Jew. I can also play the role of a mediator, not least because I have been a teacher during the
last seventeen years of my life. Working mainly at Webster, a private American university,
and with students from many countries, including Israel, Palestine, and South Africa (both
white and black), I have felt compelled to at least try very hard to be objective when relating
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the classroom (even to the point of intentionally avoiding
the apartheid perspective on Israel/Palestine), in any case much more than about South
African apartheid. In fact, I do consider myself pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli, and pro-White South
African, but not strongly biased in their favor.
Due to the North Atlantic identity of both researcher (me) and most of the sources
consulted in the course of the research phases of this investigation, I will conduct a hard look
at US, British, and European involvement in apartheid presently. But first there are some
remaining epistemological, methodological, and autobiographical issues to be mentioned.
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Aside from critical rationalism and perspectivism, and aside from attempting to
approach truth, objectivity, fairness, and balance, I also follow Thomas Kuhn’s and Sigmund
Freud’s approaches to the minds of the knowing or curious subjects. Most if not all of the
contents of our mental lives have unconscious elements or aspects, which can become more
explicit through critical thought, analysis, and inclusive polylogue. It is therefore, in my
opinion, commendable and intellectually rewarding for a researcher to continuously try to
seek and explore his or her own unconscious values and at the same time reasonable to inform
readers of the researcher’s conscious values. Thus a basic researcher in physics may have both
political and religious assumptions and ideas that may influence his or her science, a political
scientist almost certainly so.
Bertalanffy’s perspectivist approach is insightful and powerful, partly because it uses a
helpful metaphor, seeing, which on the one hand comprises much of our knowledge (it is
more than just an analogy), but, on the other hand, seeing things differently does not only
depend on perspective. It also depends on aspects, on seeing the same thing differently from
the same perspective, and here other conditions than the spatial ones play much more
important roles. Aspects are structural, ideological and consciousness-related conditions and
limitations of knowledge, which, as a whole, therefore depends both on perspectives and
aspects. Both of these are both powerful metaphors for knowledge and important examples of
it. Aspects, however, are also examples of the absence of knowledge, i.e. of ambiguity.
Certain aspect-related conditions of knowledge, in my opinion, derive from forms of
perception and categories, to use the Kantian terms. We adult human beings structure and
classify our experience and knowledge, for example in terms of space and time, cause and
effect, interaction and interrelation, concepts that animals and human infants do not seem to
use or even have access to in their repertoires of experience and memory. As Jean Piaget and
others have shown, such categories and forms of perception are only constructed and
developed slowly through child- and adulthood. Thus, there are developmental aspects to
knowledge. There are limits to what can be known, and they differ from one subject to the
next. Nevertheless, it is rather obvious that almost all or all healthy adolescent and adult
humans are at least capable of formal-operational intelligence, Piaget’s highest level of
intelligence. However, we often only use the lower levels, and therefore we often understand
and explain things insufficiently and even deficiently. Furthermore, there are many other
developmental factors than intelligence that influence knowledge, as I argued in 1995, e.g.
technological, conceptual-perceptual, linguistic, or semantic ones, and these are much more
likely to vary between individuals than the factor of Piagetian intelligence is.
There are also socially conditioned limits to knowledge, influenced by the roles of the
perceiving and knowing subjects in political conflicts and in the socio-economic production
process, to put it in historical materialist terms, but also by the roles in other conflicts than the
conflicts between economic classes, i.e. in the struggles between the sexes, between racial or
cultural groups, between generations, between religions, ideologies, etc. This is another
reason to employ transparency, especially in the social sciences. Aspects of what I say about
them must, consciously or unconsciously, depend on my roles and positions in these conflicts.
For instance, nobody paid me anything for writing any part of this book, except small sums
from the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research, Voest-Alpine (an Austrian firm that had
done business in apartheid South Africa but later wanted to contribute to helping the country
deal with apartheid’s many after-effects), and Webster University Vienna’s Faculty
Development Committee (see Preface). Even combined, these sums were not enough to pay
for even a tenth of the publication costs for a printed book, and the first one was tied to a
conference presentation in faraway South Africa, anyway. Another example: I have today
more Palestinian than Israeli friends; when I was 13 to 15 years old, however, the opposite
was the case. An externalist view of science, i.e. of science being influenced by extra-
scientific factors, is in my opinion necessary, especially for the social sciences. But is
knowledge of small research grants or of my adolescent friendships and experiences really
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necessary for understanding the science involved here? Personally, I doubt it strongly, yet I
cannot rule it out entirely, and that, exactly, is why I am mentioning these technical and
autobiographical details here. I will expand on this presently.
My epistemology as well as my methodology are perspectivist. By changing
perspective, one can eliminate some, though not all, aspects. Ambiguities due to aspect should
in my opinion be minimized and perspectives maximized. Apartheid criminals and victims,
for example, should be identified. When police issue arrest warrants, they try to use photos of
suspects from the front as well as in profile, i.e. widely different perspectives, so that the
people may know sooner and recognize more and better. And there will always be apartheid
criminals on both sides of the racial divide. Even within the apartheid victim populations,
among the indigenous people, there are (relatively) powerful people who bear responsibility
for major crimes (committed mainly against their own people, but also against many members
of the elite race and others, some completely unrelated to the conflict). In Edward Said’s
words, the first duty of the critical individual is ‘to speak truth to power’, regardless of where
that power resides. Nevertheless, there are greater and lesser responsibilities, and the creations
of the racial divides themselves, along with most other aspects of apartheid, remain the
exclusive responsibilities of members of the racial elites, i.e. of the invader/settler elites. This
is something, I believe, my investigation proves conclusively. This, then, is the general
epistemology and methodology I have been attempting to apply in the course of the research
behind this book: critical rationalism, externalism, perspectivism, polylogue (rather than
dialogue or monologue), striving for truth, objectivity, fairness, and balance, and speaking
truth to power.180
180
Löwstedt 1995: 57-61; Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1980 (1934): 29f, 262-265; Popper:
Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, 1982 (1974): 141-148; Kuhn 21970: 111ff, 183ff, 198ff, 205ff;
Piaget: The Construction of Reality in the Child, 1986 (1936); Said: Representations of the Intellectual, 1994: 9,
17; Bové (ed.): Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, 2000. On polylogue, which,
in the theory of my former Vienna University teacher, Franz Wimmer, also means that a philosophical thesis,
which has been developed by people from only one cultural tradition, should not be considered well-founded, see
Wimmer: Interkulturelle Philosophie: Eine Einführung, 2004, and www.polylog.org. On another one of my main
methodological inspirations, my professor in theory of science at the University of Göteborg, Håkan Törnebohm,
and his profound theory of paradigms, rather different from Kuhn’s in that it is also a paradigm critique and a
challenge to unconscious and conscious bias, see Törnebohm: Program för Studier av Paradigm, 1987. The idea
of a declaration of values of the researcher accompanying the research comes from Törnebohm. In my 1995
book, I believe to have shown that my therein proposed definition of culture, in the sense of what is ‘essentially
and specifically human’, holds from two different main independent perspectives or utilized methods, namely
pan-cultural principles of constancy and change, on the one hand, and a sixteen-fold, equally pan-cultural
perspective (economy, production, trade, transport, communication, quantification, dimensionality,
understanding, semantics, language, art, music, empathy, ethics, regulation, and society), on the other. The same
results, in terms of detailed descriptions of cultural phenomena, are thus derived from both perspectives. That
makes it methodologically more solid than the present book. However, the number of supporting sources and the
size and amount of the research cited makes this book superior. On a methodological and theoretical meta-level,
the perspectivism of the first book, a philosophical foundation for a proposed new field and discipline of research
(which I named ‘anthropological philosophy’) prevails, but in the detail of material and the spectrum of sources,
the present book provides more perspectives, both on the much more limited subject matter, apartheid, and on its
relevant contexts, and on others’ and my own views on our roles as witnesses, researchers, analysts, participants,
and activists. (The physical constant, the Loschmidt number, however, is reached by means of 20 different and
mutually independent methods, and it is therefore (on the meta-level) ten times more objective than my theory of
culture, and 20 times more objective than my theory of apartheid. And so I concede that the scienticity of my
approach to apartheid is much inferior to the scienticity of some natural scientific achievements, yet I also insist
that this is science.) The arrivals at nine realms of apartheid here, and sixteen realms of culture there, also have
some things in common. They are attempts to break out of what I see as anthropological straight-jackets or even
anthroponarcissism imposed mainly by philosophers – including my philosopher favorites (aside from a few
others including Ptahhotep (see Section III.6 below)), such as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx or Cassirer – as well
as attempts to approach humanity and aspects of human existence in phenomenological ways, i.e. on the basis of
immediate and direct experience, partly or even fully beyond language and other structural determinants and
potential distortions of mediated or recalled, i.e. constructed, experience. In both books, my approach is critical-
anthropological as well as phenomenological. For this approach, I owe gratitude especially to my main
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In the last part of this section, I will attempt to explicate my views, backgrounds and
positions on the currently most controversial subject of this book, Israel and the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, having now already covered my views on epistemology and general
methodology. According to Kuhn, a researcher’s paradigm – including her or his (conscious
and unconscious) metaphysical beliefs, ideology, and moral values – exerts influence on the
research and on its presentation, and that is why I will soon go further into these areas, in
particular, my views on responsibilities for the Middle East conflict. However, although it is
not difficult to follow Kuhn’s road into full epistemological relativism, I refuse to do so. Since
paradigms are largely or partly unconscious there seemed to Kuhn to be no scientific yardstick
with which to measure or rank them. Moreover, nobody can be totally aware of what any
paradigm actually is. Here I will follow Bertalanffy and Popper instead: Allowing and using
more perspectives is always (from the points of view of epistemology and scientific
methodology) better than less; because each corroboration improves the scienticity or
epistemic value of a hypothesis. Perhaps there is no ultimate yardstick, but at least a paradigm
can be compared with itself, in time, and sometimes directly with other paradigms. That is
why perspectivism is not relativism. Moreover, although there are infinitely many possible
perspectives, all will not always be necessary for knowledge to occur. The Truth may only be
reached asymptotically, but the acquisition of knowledge (as well as false beliefs, lies,
distortions, etc.) will occur sooner. I will therefore also attempt to provide reasons for and
contexts around my paradigmatic evaluations here, based upon the facts and theoretical
considerations outlined so far in this introduction to the topic.
As this is primarily an exercise in political science, I finally wish to situate myself
eclectically yet selectively, among and within existing paradigms in this science. As described
by David Marsh and Gerry Stoker, there are presently eight paradigms at work in political
science in general: behavioralism, rational choice theory, institutionalism, feminism,
interpretive theory, political psychology, Marxism, and normative theory. All of these
approaches have turned out useful for the work that went into this investigation. (I started
teaching political science methods, using Marsh & Stoker as a textbook, before I started
researching apartheid or South Africa or Israel/Palestine.) But in the course of my research,
both before and during the fifteen years or so that I have worked on this book and other
research projects in social science and related fields of inquiry, I have also found that all of
these eight paradigms also have limits to their usefulness.
Behavioralism is a legacy of logical positivism, which means strict empiricism for
political science, which has often worked and still works with airy, ill-defined, and sometimes
dangerous constructions, such as ‘estate’, ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘class’, ‘race’, ‘culture’, etc. In
this sense, I am continuing the behaviorist tradition by challenging the apartheid constructions
that are used to separate and oppress people. (See especially Sections I.6 above, and II.9
below.) I am an empiricist, though not a logical empiricist or positivist, but rather a
philosophical empiricist. Put simplistically, I believe the content of knowledge must be
experience, or at least relatable to experience, but also that there are forms of knowledge
which are subject to evolutionary and developmental transition as well as timeless logical and
mathematical constraints. On the other hand, I have already spoken out in this investigation
about what I perceive as the danger of behavioralism, as well as of its psychological father
figure, behaviorism, which is the relative lack of theory and the occasional over-abundance of

philosophical mentor, Michael Benedikt (1928-2012), and to my colleague and friend, Cornelius Zehetner, both
at the department of philosophy at the University of Vienna, and at the Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie und
kritische Anthropologie, to which I also belong. See further, Benedikt: Philosophischer Empirismus, Vols. I-IV,
1999-2003; Zehetner: Vorwort, 2010; Zehetner: Das A priori kritischer Anthropologie: Zum Intelligiblen in
Kants vierfachem Ansatz und seiner Weiterführung bei Benedikt, 2010b; Löwstedt 1995;
http://gesellschaft.dada.at. With both of my books, the sixteen and nine defining parts, respectively, of the
subjects under investigation are thus in the nature of the subjects themselves, or, at the very least, in the nature of
the way that I experience the subjects under investigation.
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facts (or numbers) needed to suggest one. Since Noam Chomsky showed how language is
better described and explained as structure than as behavior (in the 1950s and ‘60s), there are
also concerns, which I share, whether there are not other phenomena that need explanation in
structural rather than behavioral terms. In fact, social phenomena, such as language, but also
power structures, are often considered in non-behavioralist ways, and many aspects of my
theories of racism and apartheid are also couched in these structural concepts. Nevertheless,
my use of expressions such as ‘White South Africans’ or ‘Black South Africans’ should be
read with a dose of behavioralist skepticism. It is important to know that the apartheid
government separated the non-White majority (in ways similar but not identical to the ways
the Israeli authorities separate the non-Jewish majority in Israel/Palestine), on the first level
by distinguishing Blacks from Coloureds (including indigenous Khoisan groups and mixed-
race people) and Asians, and then by separating Xhosa from Zulu from Sotho, and then
separating the northern from the southern Sotho, and the northern and southern Xhosa into
Ciskei and Transkei, etc. The higher up you climbed this ladder in South Africa, the less
tolerance you received about mixing these constructed and official racial categories. The
separation was so far-reaching that at least the first levels of separation could not be denied by
anybody. For example, it was simply bad for Blacks and Whites to have children: Anyone
could see that the children would end up unhappy, unwanted, and the parents, most likely,
would not stay together. The cultural distinction assumed natural validity in this way. I hope
to have avoided all the traps set by the apartheid authorities by its constructions, which still,
however, sometimes find themselves reflected in my own terminology. That is why
behavioralism can still be a refreshing breath of clear air as well as a (mostly) sound
methodology. After all, apartheid is human behavior, consisting of violence, repopulation,
oppression, dispossession, exploitation, biased and inflammatory discourses, all political
phenomena, which I believe should be studied hard by political scientists. The emphasis on
logical and organized thinking is also something I share with behavioralists, for example my
critique of different meanings of ‘colonialism’, ‘colony’ and the many derivations of these
terms that are utilized in order to assign them their pivotal significance, and my replacement
of them by a more limited and precise definition of colonialism.
Rational choice theory is mainly an adaption of economic ideas within political
science, based on the principles of individualism and self-interest (Adam Smith’s economic
principles), and on methods of quantification and deductive reasoning. It has found uses in
studies on strategy, electoral behavior, economic behavior, and crime, among other things.
Rational choice theory should be seen as part of a tool kit for political scientists rather than as
a paradigm of its own. Its ideas have influenced my work to a lesser degree than other schools
of thought in political science have. Nevertheless, I am also dedicated to deductive reason,
although I sometimes use corroborative, inductive, and circumstantial arguments and
evidence, when deductive reason from generally held scientific belief is no longer possible, or
I consider the strength of the belief inadequate for the point I am making. Moreover, self-
interest is in my view at least of equal importance to altruism in human motivation, and it
figures prominently in my interpretation of the behavior and strategic thinking of both
apartheid perpetrators and apartheid victims. I am also convinced, however, that the
distinction between the concepts of self-interest and altruism and the concepts themselves
sometimes or often must be jettisoned in favor of other explanatory (and descriptive)
concepts, namely in a blurry, grey zone of considerable magnitude, in which people may do
things and even make sacrifices, e.g. for their own great-great-grandchild(ren), i.e. for a
person or persons who may never be born. This is also an area of interest for interpretive
theory, the fifth paradigm (see below).
Institutionalism is the paradigm based on the idea that political scientists should study
and describe the institutions of the state in a de facto way. This is another legacy of logical
positivism and has several good points. For instance, it is important to know what power the
defense and foreign ministries wield together in apartheid and other militarized states (quite a
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lot). It is equally important to know how commonly deception is and has been a part of public
diplomacy (also quite a lot), or that international law currently has but a few mechanisms for
its implementation, which are almost entirely undemocratic. I try to be realistic and pay
attention to such knowledge as much as I can in order to understand and explain things in their
proper contexts. Institutionalism is strongly empirically grounded and thus serves politicians
well, for better or for worse. But institutionalism is also not enough to define political science;
especially informal power structures, norms, rules, and networks often go undetected in such a
narrow approach to political science, a discipline still known in some countries as
Staatswissenschaft (‘state science’) or even ‘government’.
Feminism is a relative newcomer in political science, coming into it mainly from the
directions of sociology and history. Feminism emphasizes the largely downplayed, ignored,
and repressed roles of women in politics and attacks the conventional distinction between
public and private, along with other patriarchal constructions, in a politically engaged kind of
political science. Especially Sections II.1-3 below are inspired by feminism, in particular with
my treatment of femicide and other varieties of violence against women as parts of, or closely
related to, apartheid violence, apartheid repopulation, and apartheid citizenship. I consider the
apartheid fragmentation (divide-and-rule) practices even more intense and bloodier in the
indigenous gender wars than in other political, e.g. ethnic, tribal, religious, strategic or
ideological wars between groups of indigenous people under apartheid. The Inkatha/ANC,
Fatah/Hamas, and even the 19th-century indigenous Zulu Wars, which took place before
apartheid physically arrived, all pale in comparison. I believe I am the first to make this
connection, linking Palestinian ‘honor’ murders to South African ‘witch’-burnings to
Egyptian female genital mutilation, and to the apartheid states and the states of apartheid that
condition and uphold, and to some extent even create, these practices. I consider establishing
this link to be not just a scientific but also a feminist contribution to political science. The link
is not reductionist or simplistic; it sees femicide as part of apartheid, but also as something
else, and that is why there must, in my opinion, be shared responsibility for these crimes
against women and girls among both apartheid perpetrators and apartheid victims. Here, I
have partly shifted territory from political science to sociology and anthropology (race and
gender in society and individual as opposed to race and gender in politics), which are also
more familiar terrains for feminist scholarship than political science is. As someone originally
trained in philosophy, history of ideas, and theory of science, I sometimes also feel like a
newcomer, or even a poacher, in political science, anthropology, or sociology, subjects in
which I have never formally taken university courses. Yet, I have taught university courses in
all of these subjects, especially in political science, and I have also to some extent familiarized
myself with scholarly literature and with terminologies in them, as well, starting to take
courses in the theory of science and the history of ideas in the early 1980s which investigated
and taught the feminist approach, and teaching feminist methodology myself at undergraduate
levels in various disciplines, but especially as a method and approach in political science, ever
since I started teaching at university level in 1997.
A fifth paradigm described in Marsh & Stoker (editors) is alternatively labeled
‘interpretive theory’ and ‘anti-foundationalism’. In the first edition of the book, it was dealt
with under the title of ‘discourse theory’, in the third edition also as ‘constructivism’. All four
labels are instructive. Like behavioralism, interpretive theory seeks to deconstruct oppressive
constructions. As opposed to behavioralism, rational choice theory, and institutionalism,
however, interpretive theory investigates meanings, ideas, and motivations, infinitely more
varied and complex than mere self-interest: for example reason, intentions, beliefs, the
unconscious, or a system of signs. Here, politics is a conflict between narratives, between
discourses. Furthermore, interpretive theory uses post-structuralist and postmodern
philosophy (its anti-foundationalist aspect) and considers explanation of the natural world
fundamentally different from understanding human contexts. This sets this paradigm apart
from both behavioralism and rational choice theory, both of which see the goal of political
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science as the formulation of general laws and successful predictions from deductive uses of
such laws, i.e. as something essentially similar or identical to the goal of natural science. My
own position here is undecided or compromising. Perhaps political science will one day
produce laws such as in Newton’s theory of mechanics, and my development of an analytic
understanding of racism in general, and of apartheid in particular, could be a step in such a
direction. It would, in my view, be wonderful to be able to prove, for example, that apartheid
societies cannot last, that the oppressive race will eventually disintegrate, integrate into, or
flee the country. But, we are, I believe, still very far from being able to provide such
knowledge, i.e. certain knowledge. On the other hand, I believe the knowledge engendered by
my analysis is useful already, for new and deepened interpretations of these phenomena.
Moreover, by admitting that this investigation is part of an anti-apartheid narrative (see
above), I get very close to interpretive theory, including its relativistic tendencies.
Nonetheless, there are also limits to my relativism, as noted above with regard to
perspectivism, paradigms, and Popper.
Next, political psychology works with the understanding and explanation of political
relations and processes from the points of view of cognitive, motivational, and social
psychology. My interpretations of apartheid perpetrators in the next section draw heavily on
psychoanalysis and on the theory of schizophrenia, and my interpretation of perpetrators of
femicide on both sides of the racial apartheid divide also works with the concept of the
unconscious and with mental repression, i.e. with structural, not behavioral, concepts. I am
convinced that other areas of motivational psychology, as well as cognitive and social
psychology also help to explain apartheid, for example the out-of-sight/out-of-mind effect of
erecting concrete walls to hide the indigenous people as in Israel/Palestine, and its structural
parallel and historic precedent, the geographic positioning of townships hidden away from the
Whites in South Africa, which contributes to the apartheid elite adult illusions that Israeli
Jews and white South Africans are majorities facing indigenous minorities, and the apartheid
elite child’s illusion that the indigenous people do not exist. (See Section II.6).
As a minority approach, Marxism, the seventh paradigm, is doing very well in political
science (and elsewhere). I was introduced to it by Sven-Eric Liedman, Lennart Olausson, Eva-
Lena Dahl, and others during the early 1980s at the department of history of ideas and
learning at the University of Gothenburg. It was exciting. I am still convinced that Marx’s
theory of capital is basically correct. (I have made sure, however, that this is irrelevant to my
theory of apartheid.) If entirely left alone by state and state-like regulation, capital will, due to
economies of scale, make the markets eventually end up as monopolies or oligopolies, with
rising commodity prices and sinking product quality. Of course, Marx, who died in 1883,
could not foresee the 20th-century ascent of social welfare states and increasing state
regulation of local markets (effectively initiated in 1890 with the so-called ‘Sherman laws’,
the antitrust laws in the USA), but the theory of Das Kapital is not just a thing of the past: we
now have ample grounds to believe that the global markets are behaving the way Marx
predicted, precisely because there is no global regulator. Marx’s general notion of historical
materialism, however, is his most successful legacy in social science and the humanities in
general, and in political science in particular. People’s social class standing, if they
themselves own or are owned, where they fit inside the economic ‘base’ of society, i.e. with
regard to the means and the forces of production, certainly tells a lot about those people, and
the same goes for institutions. The economistic, determinist, materialist, and structuralist
strands of classical Marxism are not necessary for Marxism to function well as an approach to
better understand relationships of power, except perhaps as regulative or heuristic principles.
In my analysis of apartheid, unequal and discriminatory land ownership and employment laws
and conditions come in as number four and five among the nine defining principles. (Racially
separated access to other natural and human resources than land and labor are dealt with less
centrally in numbers seven to nine, but with historical materialism again in Section II.6, which
continues the theme from the previous section with access to employment, education, leisure
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activities, and other modern-day life necessities.) In this important way, historical materialism
has served me as a useful tool to analyze and understand apartheid. I have also been heavily
influenced by Marx’s and Marxist approaches to ideologies, including religion, myth, and
science. As with feminism, the Marxist method of approaching apartheid, a societal
phenomenon, in my opinion renders partial understanding. Violence, race, and gender are the
central subject matters of the first two defining principles of apartheid, thus leading to a rough
main classification of apartheid as racism first, and sexism and classism second. As with
feminism, too, one of the main reasons behind analyzing apartheid is the wish to help change
the societies that suffer from it into societies that lack apartheid. This activist-emancipatory
aspect of both feminism and Marxism also pervades this investigation.
Normative Theory contends that knowing what ‘ought to be’ should be the goal of
knowledge of politics, and here I join the revived mainstream, who believe there is a place for
values in political science. This heterogeneous mainstream (and thus not really just one
paradigm, but a bewildering multitude) survived the assaults of logical positivism on
normative political theory during the 20th century, partly by challenging metaphysical and
epistemological assumptions made by logical positivists, in particular their atomistic view of
reality and the mechanistic mirror-theory of knowledge. I recommend human rights as
understood in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (though not without critical comments;
see Preface, above), as well as cultural diversity and biodiversity, which are not (yet) quite as
mainstream values as human rights are, but well on their way. For the dissenting voices, neo-
positivists and others categorically opposed to values in this or any other science, all I can
offer is the current academic wisdom that values always interfere with (and guide) research
and its formulation and presentation, as studies on paradigms keep confirming, and that the
least an honest researcher can do in the service of objectivity and transparency is to disclose
those values with the results of the research. Nevertheless, the precise relationship between
norms and facts has not been determined by anyone, and so I also still heed the positivist call
for at least maximizing objectivity and eschewing bias as much as possible.
Comparative political science is what I do here, and this investigation is also part of
the mainstream comparative research in the discipline, which mostly compares countries or
nation-states (rather than classes, races, continents, societies, genders, religions, etc.). My
investigation relates existing empirical data in new ways, rather than collecting or analyzing
new data. Comparative research is referred to as ‘method’ rather than ‘paradigm’, ‘theory’, or
‘approach’ in Marsh & Stoker (eds.). In my case the number of countries is very small, so that
my investigation lent itself to qualitative rather than quantitative research strategies.
Nevertheless, there are quite a few percentages and other statistics mentioned, used, and
sometimes compared and analyzed in this book (especially demographics, body counts, and
racist land ownership laws, but also, for instance, the racially motivated differences in income
in Section II.5 below), and these numbers no doubt help to contribute to the reader’s and my
understanding of apartheid. I even conclude this book with informed estimates (using
hypothetico-deductive reasoning) leading to a rough quantification of responsibilities behind
gross human rights violations under Israeli apartheid, namely a maximum 2.2 percent being
Palestinian or resistance crimes and a minimum 97.8 percent being Israeli-Jewish or Zionist
crimes. This is, admittedly, a one-dimensional view of apartheid, but I think it can still be
instructive, especially once a second dimension of demographics is added: there are twice as
many Palestinians as Israeli Jews.
In this investigation, three countries are analyzed in-depth, in a qualitative manner, by
means of the definition of apartheid, and occasionally the spectrum is widened to include
seven countries for further comparisons. Much more work needs to be done, especially on
Rhodesia, Guatemala, Liberia, and the kingdom of Jerusalem, my second group of apartheid
countries, but also on many other societies, such as Bolivia, the Mongol Khanates, or the
Saxon and the Viking and the early Norman kingdoms in England and France, where I suspect
apartheid, without yet being able to argue it in detail in terms of my definition of apartheid,
146

my own lack of knowledge being the main limitation for applying my theory there. My
definition of apartheid is modeled on the well-researched, well-documented and relatively
successful, i.e. long-lived, apartheid societies in Graeco-Roman Egypt, white-ruled South
Africa, and modern Israel, Egypt under Greek and under Graeco-Roman rule being the
longest-living apartheid system(s) of which I am aware. But it may have to be revised in the
light of evidence from less successful, i.e. short-lived, apartheid societies. The scientific
understanding of apartheid is still in its infancy. Still, there is nothing that suggests that my
approach here is any less rigorous than more quantitative research. After all, numbers are one
way of abstracting among others. And mathematics and analytical logic are not the only ways
to abstract knowledge. Often, philosophy is mentioned as a third way, and that is where my
impetus and my interests stem from, e.g. in formalizing language and communication or
quantifying with regard to real behavior such as exploitation or equity, rather than with
additional ways, such as theoretical physics, religion, or magic.181
My brief self-description, like my political science comparative research, also begins
mainly in terms of countries, but more importantly in terms of region and class: I am a
northern European, with middle- and working-class roots in Sweden, England, Germany and
Poland. I may have some Jews among my ancestors at least three generations ago. They were
Germans and/or Poles (East Prussians), who emigrated to England in the late 19th century.
Whether they really were Jews does not interest me much now, although I tried many years
ago (unsuccessfully) to find out. At the time – during the 1970s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s – it was
an exciting question for me whether I could consider myself part Jewish. I had had Israeli
Jews among my best friends and a Jewish-Austrian girlfriend. I had read Leon Uris’ Exodus,
Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night, and other books, especially on the second world war
and the holocaust, and I had seen hundreds of movies, television programs and documentaries
about Jewish suffering, fighting, often dying, sometimes surviving, and sometimes winning,
often heroically. I also started considering the Jewish intellectuals, Sigmund Freud, Albert
Einstein, and Noam Chomsky, as heroes; and in some ways I still do; I still consider them to
be the greatest three thinkers of the twentieth century. (None of them, however, were Zionists,
except Chomsky (in his youth), who, as an adult, then turned out to be the most outspoken
critic of Israel and Zionism out of the three.)
The way I now look at Jewishness in general, and my own possible Jewishness and my
other racial criteria in particular, however, is very different from thirty or twenty years ago: I
might have four times as many Palestinian non-Jewish ancestors eight generations back and
another four times as many African ancestors yet another four generations back. (All of my
ancestors between 80,000 and some 15 million years ago, at least, were probably African.)
There is a particularly strong reason that I decided to scrutinize my own values on race and
started to investigate race and racism scientifically. My wife is black. She has recent African-

181
Sanders: Behavioralism; Ward: Rational Choice; Lowndes: Institutionalism; Randall: Feminism; Bevir &
Rhodes: Interpretive Theory; Marsh: Marxism; Buckler: Normative Theory; Hopkin: Comparative Methods, all
in Marsh & Stoker (eds.): Theory and Methods in Political Science, 22002; Parsons, C.: Constructivism and
Interpretive Theory; Hart: Political Psychology, in Marsh & Stoker (eds.): Theory and Methods in Political
Science, 32010. The only paradigm for political science that I would wish to add, and to which I also subscribe,
is cosmopolitanism, see Held: Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities, 2010. See Löwstedt:
Globalisierungsstress: Über das unvermeidliche Ende des Neoliberalismus, den dringenden Bedarf einer
demokratischen Weltrepublik, und die vorherige Notwendigkeit von globaler Finanz- und Medienmarktaufsicht,
2010, on further aspects of the paradigms involved in my work in the field of political science. I used Marsh &
Stoker (eds.) in its first edition three times (1997, 1998, and 1999) as course literature for my courses in political
science methodology. I agree whole-heartedly and try to apply what the editors write about current political
science: ‘There is a pluralism of method and approach out there that should not be denied but it should not be
‘isolative’ but rather interactive. It should be eclectic and synergistic.’ Stoker & Marsh: Introduction, in Marsh &
Stoker (eds.) 22002: 4. Of course, I do not pretend to reflect that pluralism comprehensively in this investigation.
It is merely meant as an example that will co-exist with different methodical investigations, interpretations, and
other discourses, focusing or touching on the themes covered here and elsewhere.
 147

American, white American (none of whom we know), and possibly Native American
ancestors. We married (in Austria) in the year 1985, when interracial marriage was still illegal
in South Africa, and black-white intimate relations had just been legalized there, but were still
frowned upon, to say the least, and not only in South Africa. Whether in Europe or North
America, racism was now something I was confronted with, on an every-day-basis. Luckily,
we never spent time in apartheid South Africa, but we have been to South Africa since 1998
and still we felt some opposition to our union, from Blacks as well as Whites. My uncle and
my brother adopted children from Korea and Colombia, respectively; many of my close
relatives (including my parents) married foreigners and/or moved abroad like me, and today
my family is spread around the world, although concentrated in northern, western, and central
Europe and the northeastern USA. I feel no special allegiance to any existing states,
nationalities, ethnicities or races other than those that are oppressed and truly struggling for
survival, for equal rights, and for justice. Nor do I have any allegiance to any state or state
agency except to the Austrian tax authorities, since I currently reside, work, and pay taxes in
this country. I never served in Sweden’s conscription army but I have kept my Swedish
citizenship, the only one I ever had, throughout my life and will hopefully never be forced to
give it up, yet I really only hope so for practical reasons, having now spent more than half of
my life outside my country of birth, to which, however, I still have strong personal and
familial ties. If I have any nationalistic reflexes left in me, they are probably pro-Swedish,
relate to some sort of sports or food or drink, and tend to embarrass me. My comments in this
book about the states of Sweden, and of Austria, where I have lived more than half of my life,
and their civil societies, tend to be critical rather than approving, though not only so. Aside
from Austria and Sweden, I have lived in Palestine and in Hong Kong, and I have also spent
much time in France, England (where I have many close relatives, almost as many and as
close as in Sweden), and in the USA, South Africa, Switzerland, Hungary, Tunisia, and Egypt.
I am usually rather critical of all monopolies on violence, i.e. of all states and state-like
structures, also including NATO, the EU, the Palestinian National Authority, Ancient Egypt,
and the UN, but I also think there are many good people, ideas and institutions in many states,
and in state-like and intergovernmental organizations as well as in nongovernmental
organizations, although in my opinion the latter can be just as corrupt as states and
intergovernmental organizations can. I am neither an anarchist nor a statist, but I believe in a
world republic, and in world citizenship. Likewise, I do not consider myself a member of any
organized religion, but I do not consider myself an atheist, either, but rather as an agnostic.
During my upbringing, however, I was probably much influenced by the Swedish Lutheran
protestant state church, perhaps especially while going through most of the school system
there, although I was never confirmed in this or any other faith. I strongly believe that no
human being deserves to be killed, or to be murdered. I am opposed to elitism, sexism,
classism, ageism, and racism in all forms, and I am in favor of human rights, cultural
diversity, and biodiversity. Each of these three touchstones of my positive values (which stem
from my parents and from southwestern Swedish society rather than the Swedish education
system) has philosophically problematic aspects and relationships with the other two, which I
will not pursue further in this investigation.
In general, I hold Israeli Jews, especially Zionists, ultimately responsible for the tragic
and violent events in the Middle East, but I also believe that the USA, the UK, apartheid
South Africa, and Europe, including Nazi Germany and other persecutors of Jews as well as
Islamophobics (European as well as non-European) ever since the crusades, and other racists
and apartheid elites through history, should share some of the major blame. But even non-
racists are responsible, especially in those countries that have signed the Geneva Conventions,
as we shall see. All Israeli Jews are certainly not responsible. Children in particular must in
my view always be considered innocent, but also a wide variety of other Israeli Jews,
especially the dissidents, who are some of the bravest people in the entire conflict. But the
Israeli elites, who do carry the primary responsibility, are large: sometimes they stretch to
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encompass almost the entire voting population, over 80 percent of the adults in Israel, or a
similar overwhelming majority of people who belong to the army (more than the army
belongs to them), even if only as reservists. The most responsible must remain the political,
military, and economic elites of the country, who have largely manipulated mainstream Israel
to be in favor of apartheid and other crimes against humanity. Only in a third tier of
responsibility, after Israeli Jews and their foreign sponsors and supporters, do I consider
Palestinians and other Arabs responsible, in a fourth, the rest of the world, which also has a
legal and moral duty to end apartheid. Although all human rights violations should be
sanctioned or punished on an individual basis, in my view, there are circumstances involved
in this conflict that should be considered structural, and the overriding such circumstance is
apartheid. This does not mean that Palestinian murderers should be treated with silk gloves,
but their crimes should be sanctioned in proportion to the crimes perpetrated by Israelis, and I
believe the latter can quite easily be shown to be the worse ones (see Part III, and in particular
Section III.4). I will also return to the hoary problems of proportional punishment and
amnesty in the service of peace and reconciliation in Part III, below. Now, I will proceed to
argue for my construction of four tiers of responsibility, starting with the second, since the
first, the Israeli responsibility for Israeli apartheid, is argued throughout this investigation. The
methodological part of this section is thus ended, but the values go on, so do the research
paradigms, and so do the facts, which will now also speak their part.
One of the most conspicuous, yet hardly ever questioned features of the (so-called)
peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians is the identity of the de facto chief
negotiator and ‘mediator’, the USA. While the world’s most powerful country takes sides with
the militarily most powerful country in the Middle East, it effectively bullies the rest of the
world into accepting it in its role as negotiator. (The rest of the world, however, could do a lot
more than sheepishly accept US leadership on this issue.) The USA is in fact Israel’s closest
ally, politically and militarily. Tellingly, it was only apartheid South Africa that ever came as
close to Israel as the USA has. The latter is now referred to, even in the so-called ‘quality
media’, as a mediator or a middle man, often creating the false impression that all or most
Palestinians are extremists on a par with Zionist fanatics:

The reward for his [US President Bill Clinton’s ‘peacemaking’] work
is already a string of mixed reviews, flanked by bitter attacks on his
Middle East legacy from the two extremes in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
One lesson he must have learned is that he who dares to stand in the
middle often ends up in the crossfire.182

182
Wright: Clinton Earns Mixed Reviews for Mideast Efforts, 2001. Similarly, the UN, dependent on funds from
its greatest financial resource – the USA – and from the outset open to manipulation for that very reason,
endorses almost anything that the USA will do for ‘peace’ in Israel and Palestine. See for example N.N.: Annan
Backs New U.S. Middle East Peace Initiative, November 19, 2001. See Waddington: Outgoing U.N. Rights
Chief Says Fell Foul of the U.S., 2002, on the US-led oustings of the UN General Secretary, Boutros Boutros-
Ghali, and of the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mary Robinson, largely because of their more even-handed
approaches to the Middle East conflict, among many other manipulations. A more objective assessment than the
quoted passage from Wright of US involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be found in the following
unusual quote from an Israeli newspaper: ‘The eight years of the Clinton administration has been the most pro-
Israeli era in the history of bilateral relations. As a result direct links were forged for the first time between
Israel’s various governments and senior figures in the U.S. administration.’ Salpeter: How Much Diaspora
Interference Is Acceptable? 2001. Today they also include direct links between the armies and espionage
agencies. See Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 31. The Clinton administration’s ‘Special Middle East Coordinator’,
Dennis Ross, has strong Zionist leanings, and was apparently appointed by Clinton to sabotage peace in the
region. See, for instance, the revealing interview in Zacharia: Ross to ‘Post’: Palestinians Missed Historic
Opportunity, 2001; Wright: Former U.S. Envoy Faults Arafat for Failure, 2001: ‘Under Ross’s management of
Middle East peace talks, the United States said the Jewish settlements [in the Occupied Palestinian Territories]
were unhelpful to making peace, but it did not adopt the international consensus that they violate international
law.’ See further: Wright: Palestinian Activist Sees Change in U.S. Approach, 2001, in which the unofficial
 149

In fact, as we shall see, on average every fourth killing of a Palestinian by Israelis is

paid for directly by US taxpayers, largely thanks to unprecedented aid for Israel by the
administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (1963-1974), and of Bill Clinton and
George Bush Jr. (1993-2009), but also due to increasing support for Israel from every US
government since 1948. If anything, the USA should in my opinion be seen as the worst
possible existing mediator in this conflict. Rather, it is a partner-in-crime, though only a junior
partner-in-crime in this particular crime against humanity.
It is also the only country in the world that has more Jewish citizens than Israel. It is
important to note that this fact by itself does not make the USA pro-Israeli. But many
American Jews (as well as many non-Jews) are pro-Israeli, and the USA today manifests an
almost uniformly pro-Israeli system of elites that is sometimes even more Zionist than the
Israeli elites themselves are, for instance in the news media (see Chapter II.9.3, below).
One of the main reasons behind this is the exceptional, in fact unique influence of the
Israel lobby (consisting of Jewish and Christian Zionist pressure groups and individuals) upon
US foreign policy, as Mearsheimer and Walt have shown so elegantly. By targeting legislators
(especially at the federal level, in the Congress, Senate, and White House, but also at state
level) and their staff, as well as influential media figures, this lobby is able to decide US
Middle East policy in a virtually unchallenged manner. But there is another main set of
reasons that is largely ignored by these authors: the US weapons lobby, the war industry, and
its many dependants.183 US military, political, and economic power is a tool for the Israel
lobby. But Israel is also a tool to the US war industry.
The inventor of nuclear warfare and the so far only military power to ever use nuclear
weapons in a war (that would have been won without the atomic bombs, anyway), and
atrocious chemical weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange in another one, is today by far
the largest arms manufacturer, arms buyer, and arms distributor in the world, year by year
selling around half of the world’s weapons, and, if not scientifically established as the chief
war monger since 1945, then, in any case, among the main ones. 184 In the year 2000, the next

Palestinian spokeswoman, Hanan Ashrawi, blasts Ross’s ‘peacemaking’ record. See also Kovel 2007: 133f;
Aruri: Dishonest Broker: The Role of the United States in Palestine and Israel, 2003; Chomsky: Breaking the
Israel-Palestine Deadlock, 2011; and Mearsheimer & Walt 2006, an excellent and authoritative critique of
virtually blind US loyalty to Israel. On the strong tendency of mainstream US mass media, in particular the New
York Times, to knowingly present the USA falsely, namely as a neutral mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, see Chomsky: Introduction: Project Censored, 2001. Even Jimmy Carter (2006: 16), apparently trying to
score domestic political points against the Republican Party at the expense of Palestinians, writes as if the USA
were recently an honest and neutral broker in the Middle East conflict. On British prime minister Tony Blair’s
version of Ross, his equally useless peacemaker, Lord Michael Levy, the British ‘special envoy’ to the Middle
East, in fact a former Jewish Agency board member, who had a business and a house in Israel, and a son who
used to work for the Israeli justice minister, see Pilger 2003 (2002): 144. Levy, one of the shadiest characters in
British lobbying history, had played a key role in enabling Blair to first become British prime minister, and then
(along with US President G.W. Bush) the Middle East Quartet’s ‘special envoy’, in practice an Israel lobby front
man. In return, Blair made Levy lord, a life peer in the aristocratic hierarchy that is Britain, and from then on
Blair did almost whatever the Israel lobby told him to do, perhaps the most important Zionist tool in Britain since
Lloyd George, the prime minister responsible for racist policies and laws favoring Jews over Palestinians in
Palestine. See Ferguson: There Was Once a Jolly Bagman: The Observer Profile: Lord Levy, 2006; El Fassed:
Tony Blair: A True Friend of Israel, 2007. On Blair’s equally dangerous Foreign Office adviser, Daniel
Bethlehem, who previously worked for Israel and advised it to cover up the 2002 massacre in Jenin of
Palestinians by the Israeli army, see MacAskill: Israel Adviser Switches to Top FO Job, 2006. Carter, 2006: 209
rightly complains that the world has too easily accepted US leadership in negotiating war and peace in the
Middle East, but the Israel lobby is present in other countries than the USA, as well.
183
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007. Obviously, I consider my approach here as complementary rather than
contradictory towards Mearsheimer & Walt. See Löwstedt November 10, 2007 and Löwstedt & Madhoun: The
Israel Lobby under Scrutiny, and in Denial: An Evening in Vienna with Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007, and
Pappe: Clusters of History: U.S. Involvement in the Palestine Question 2010 (2007).
184
Phillips: Obama Administration Continues US Military Global Dominance, 2009. The main reason why
established social scientists have not been able to confirm this simple truth could be that most of them are
150

largest arms exporters were the USA’s close NATO allies Britain and France, the fourth was
Russia (which has also become much of an ally since the end of the Cold War, especially in

already paid by or dependent on the US elites (or on other elites dependent on the USA), in one way or another,
or that they simply fear upsetting the global masters. See, however, Fanon 2001 (1961): 252 and Sartre (ibid): 22
on the USA as a ’super-European monstrosity’. Throughout history scientists have been co-opted by more
powerful elites, and there is no reason to believe that today is better than any earlier time in history. Further
evidence for the nearly total absence of peaceful intentions in overall US foreign policy are, among many other
things, the following six official stances: the opposition of the USA to the World Criminal Court, aimed to
combat genocide and other war crimes (see N.N: The States Parties to the Rome Statute, International Criminal
Court, August 21, 2014; Bonpane: The International Criminal Court (ICC), 2003, and footnote 263 below), the
Biological Weapons Convention (see Waddington: Pressure Mounts on US Over Germ War Pact, 2002), the
Kyoto pact against global climate change (see Edwards, Dave: Climate Wars: Paying The Ultimate Price For
Corporate Control of Society, 2000), the UN Anti-Torture Treaty (along with China, Cuba, Israel, Japan,
Nigeria, Syria and Vietnam, see Arieff: US Loses Fresh Bid to Block UN Anti-Torture Pact, 2002), the 1997
Treaty to Ban Landmines, (along with Israel and 34 other countries, see N.N.: 1997 Mine Ban Treaty – States
Non Party, no date), and its dismissal of the UN Human Rights Council (along with Israel, the Marshall Islands,
and Palau, see Leopold: UN Creates New Rights Council over US Objections, 2006). In its foreign policy (and to
a lesser extent: in some of its current domestic policies, though its genocidal past should not be forgotten), it
appears that the US elites, for the reasons just outlined, are adamantly opposed to human rights, cultural diversity
and biodiversity, except accidentally when the use of propaganda invoking them could be seen as furthering their
own interests. With regard to human rights, there seems to be a pattern whereby only political and civil rights are
promoted whenever they seem to be conducive for elite interests, for example the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, whereas social and economic rights are usually simply denied or ignored downright. Similarly,
cultural diversity (see footnotes 896-897 below) and biodiversity are promoted only within the USA, and again
only when conducive or acceptable to elite interests. The elites, moreover, do not represent the interests of the
majority of US taxpayers or voters. See Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 109f, referring to recent opinion polls that
revealed three-quarters of Americans were against favoring Israel over the Palestinians, while their government
did just that. Even the (relatively well-educated, wealthy and influential) American Jews are not democratically
represented by the powerful Israel lobby organizations that claim to speak in their name. These organizations
called hysterically, and successfully, for war against Iraq in the early part of this century while a larger
percentage of American Jews (77 percent) than the average entire US population (62 percent) was opposed to it.
See Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 243. The USA does not, however, officially admit to these patterns, although it
is rather obvious that at least its political, military and corporate elites profit the most (in the short term) from a
war-torn, overpopulated world with scarce natural resources – though of course only as long as the USA remains
the world’s undisputed military leader, able to control or take control over most of those resources – and that
those elites can also best augment their influence and power under such circumstances. The rest of the world has
become dependent on the USA, and labor costs around the world are being driven down to a minimum as US
power increases. In my opinion there is too much synergy and sophistication in these policies and positions to
put the increase in human rights violations and drastic curtailment of diversities down to accidental and
unintended consequences of US policies, at least since before the end of the Cold War. The elite representatives’
sense of vision may reach no further than the tips of their own noses, but they are – like perhaps all of the major
elites in world history – opportunists. They lack strong principles, and therefore they can be moved. Moreover,
they will eventually be removed; like all empires of the past, like all systems of coercion, oppression and
exploitation, this one also appears destined to crumble and fall. And we are today closer to a cosmopolitan and
global democracy than ever before in world history. See Monbiot: How to Stop America, 2003, and footnote 896
below. But if instead a new (or old) military superpower takes over from the USA as world leader, we may of
course be worse off than before. It can always get worse. It should also be added, again, that the USA did not
invent any of the main varieties of oppression, nor the form, globalized capitalism, within which much of it
happens today. (There is, moreover, a human face to capitalism, whereby firms, rather than organisms (people),
are first selected and eliminated in the struggle for survival. But this section is not about that.) Significantly, the
USA is the largest guns seller but not the largest guns exporter in the world, the EU is. Americans therefore kill
each other much more than Europeans kill each other. See Arieff: World Gun Supply 639 Million and Growing -
Survey, 2003. (And what is the inhuman aspect of the USA but an extension of western European greed, vanity,
megalomania, and warmongering?) Yet, for the reasons outlined above, the US elites did and do, in my opinion,
make more choices to the detriment of the whole world than any other society has done in the recent past.
Nevertheless, Europeans and Americans are not just perpetrators of the worst racist crimes, they also learned to
overcome and to some extent overcame racism, in law as well as in practice. For example, the devastating
experiences of World War II and the extremes to which racism was taken in this war, have led to a number of
European generations strongly opposed to racism, especially to racist murder and genocide, and there is, as yet,
no indication that this firm rejection of racist murder and genocide is diminishing in intensity or extent.
 151

the wars against Islamist and Islamic organizations and countries) and the fifth was yet
another NATO member and close American ally, Germany.
Two years later, Russia had jumped to second place, and Britain had also slipped
behind France in selling weapons. By 2006 Israel had become the fourth largest weapons
seller. The US, however, still accounted for nearly half of the world’s weapons sales, with
second-place Russia selling less than half of what the US did. Furthermore, the USA has long
had the largest number of troops deployed outside of its borders, again followed by a close
ally, this time France. In October 2002 there was reportedly US military presence in 132
countries, i.e. in more than two thirds of the world’s countries, most of it connected to the
undefined US ‘War on Terror’, a contradiction in terms that were nevertheless uncritically
adopted wholesale by most of the world’s governments as well as the mainstream mass media
from the US government and armed forces across almost the whole world following the
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Perhaps this will be
the high mark of US power. It also enabled the US to form coalitions of not only NATO allies
to fight for US interests in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also previously neutral countries such as
Sweden and Austria, and recent enemies such as the many former Soviet republics and former
Warsaw Pact countries that provided additional support (and cannon fodder) for the
Americans in the 21st century wars.
Prior to the September 11 attacks, in 2000, the hegemonic power itself spent 36
percent of all military costs worldwide, more than the next nine powers combined. This was
eleven years after the total defeat of the Soviet-led Communist group of countries, the last
enemies that seriously challenged the USA. By 2003, US military expenditure had risen to
more than half of the whole world’s. Since then, the US government has let its citizens and the
world know that its ‘War on Terror’ could last for fifty years or more, in effect giving itself a
carte blanche for starting wars, practicing and supporting repression, torture, and murder with
impunity, as well as overt and covert control worldwide.185
In a sense, this is the first real world war. In the previous great wars with that name,
the main powers all fought, but there were many neutral as well as ignored countries. Now,
there are none. The US president, George W. Bush, let the world know on November 6, 2001,
that there is no neutral option in this war: ‘You’re either with us or against us in the fight
against terror.’186 Countries like Somalia, Iceland, Paraguay, and Uzbekistan are deemed
important in this war. The influential former US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul
Wolfowitz, also known as the ‘architect of the Iraq War’, and later head of the World Bank,
even prepared the US (and implicitly the world) for greater sacrifices than those made during
the 20th century: ‘Our struggle against these people [fanatical terrorists] will be a struggle
perhaps even longer than the Cold War. It will test our resolve perhaps even more than the

185
Pilger (2003 (2002): 1f.) points out the uncanny resemblance of this US scheme, the longest war in my
knowledge since the Hundred Years’ War between England and France during the European Middle Ages (1348-
1453), to George Orwell’s chilling dystopia, ‘1984’. See also Chomsky: Deep Concerns, 2003; Callinicos:
Marxism and Global Governance, 2002: 258. Callinicos cites the Financial Times, December 8, 2001, on the
military spending figure for the year 2000. On Israel’s entry into the top five, see Klein 2008 (2007): 436. Israel
is also the biggest foreign seller of weapons to the USA (ibid). With wars nowadays claiming around 95 percent
civilian victims, it can be argued convincingly that war is terror, and that military elites are part of a self-serving
transnational elite system. (In the first World War, conversely, civilian victims were only around five percent.
The turning point was World War II with a roughly 50-50 percent ‘balance’ between civilian and military death
tolls. See Philipose: Real Death in a Primetime War: Forgive Average Americans for Believing This Is a
Fireworks Display, 2003.) Thus, a ‘war on terror’ is eminently self-defeating, unless of course ‘war’ is only used
metaphorically to mean peaceful enrichment of the poor and empowerment of the marginalized. Sir Peter
Ustinov made roughly the same point when, in one of his last public appearances before his untimely death, he
said: ‘…war and terrorism are intrinsically the same thing, except that terrorism is the war of the dispossessed
and war is the terrorism of the powerful.’ Ustinov: The Transatlantic Rift: Introductory Remarks, 2003
186
Quoted in N.N.: ‘You Are either with Us or against Us’, November 6, 2001
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conflicts of World War II’.187 If the twentieth century saw world wars, then this, the war on
terror, is Global War I.
Not only is the USA by far the largest seller of weapons, its government is also by far
the largest buyer of them. To say that US foreign policy is based on warfare is therefore no
exaggeration. War, or the threat of war, is how it imposes its will on most of the rest of the
world. Its diplomacy also seems to be firmly based on this principle. Moreover, its power is
augmented by the US economy, the largest in the world. Extremely high levels of profit
(sometimes ruthlessly acquired by means of neo-colonialism and similar methods), high-level
and wasteful production and consumption contribute to make the USA the only superpower in
existence today.
Indeed, the power and influence of the USA is so great, and it has been for so long,
that both the sovereign states of Ireland and Israel have been called ‘consequences of
American fancies’188, helped along by racialized and racist lobbies (respectively) in the USA,
with ignorance, arrogance and little realization of the havoc and unnecessary suffering they
would cause across the oceans. Its recent wars against Japan, Germany, Indochina,
Afghanistan, and Iraq (and many others) prove that it moves its armies at will across the face
of the entire planet and even outside of it as well as underneath it.
In the US Congress, the most powerful legislative assembly in the world, there is
virtually no criticism uttered against Israel, the only country to enjoy this privilege. Even the
USA itself is criticized more. To get elected to Congress, and even to smaller legislative US
assemblies, such as State Senates, candidates are often screened, selected, schooled, and (if
they pass) bankrolled by the Israel lobby, i.e. the Jewish and Christian Zionist pressure groups
and individuals who pay for the increasingly expensive election campaigns that have become
necessary for entrance into the world’s most powerful political elite.
From the point of view of the US weapons industry, the main share of US aid to Israel
is military, and that must be motivated somehow, at best (for the US elites and many within
the Israeli elites) if Israel stays embroiled in armed conflicts by means of aggressive
expansionist policies (to which neither Israel nor the USA will ever admit), remaining ahead
of its numerous foes in terms of military capability at all times. No less than 75 percent of US
federal military aid to Israel must, according to US stipulations, be spent on US-made
weapons.189
Quite frankly, I do not believe that the Israeli and US elites are interested in peace,
neither in the sense of an end to Israeli apartheid, nor in the wider sense of an end to armed
hostilities in the Middle East region. The only important, partial exceptions to that are the
Israeli and US civilian business elites (i.e. outside the state- and privately-owned Israeli and
US war industries, fourth and first among weapons sellers in the world), who would obviously
prefer an end to hostilities, with continued globalization, a flourishing tourist industry and a
docile Palestinian labor force in their stead.190 The two countries’ elites in general, however,

187
Wolfowitz: “Breadth of Vision”, 2004: 51
188
Bernal, personal communication, October 18, 2001. For the record, I do not support British rule in Ireland
(and neither did Bernal). I do, however, object to the post-World War I settlement, which prolonged the overdue
British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. On US military presence within 131 supposedly and allegedly
independent and sovereign countries, see Said: Israel, Iraq, and the US, 2002. On the USA and Ireland, South
Africa, Israel, respectively, see also Section III.6 below.
189
See N.N: France World’s Third Biggest Arms Exporter in ‘99, December 13, 2000; Shalal-Esa: Global Arms
Sales Down Sharply in 2001, 2002 (the article states that worldwide weapons demand and supply were generally
expected to rise sharply again in the coming years); El-Azar: One into Four: The Quartet, So Far, Has Served as
a Smoke Screen for Washington, 2002; Baroud: Your Duplicity is Killing Us, 2002; N.N.: Mandela Calls U.S. a
“Threat to World Peace”, September 12, 2002; Parko: The Truth about Terrorism, 2006. See also Chapter II.9.3
below. On the power of the Israel lobby in the USA, see Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 151-167
190
This is not a powerless elite, and it might well have been the driving force in bringing about the resumption of
high-level peace talks, centering on the so-called ‘Middle East Roadmap to Peace’ between the Israelis,
Americans, Palestinians and others in June 2003, after nearly 3 years of Intifada and economic recessions in both
 153

appear to feel strongly that they have too much to lose from a just and enduring peace. I am
far from alone with this opinion, as the following quote from a dissident Israeli Jew a few
years ago testifies: ‘The U.S. is 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.’191
Although this perspective might seem like an invitation to utter despair about the future of the
Middle East and the world, 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 in favor of apartheid, yet only ten years later they themselves voted in a
referendum to dismantle political and judicial apartheid. Pride comes before a fall.
To blame Israeli apartheid mainly on the USA or on US elites 192, 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
from 1918 to 1948 by pitting Jews against the majority Arabs and (most of the time) giving
Jews vastly preferential treatment (similar, for instance, to Belgian and German colonial use
and escalation of Hutu-Tutsi conflicts, whilst mostly favoring the minority Tutsis, in
Rwanda).193 As we shall see, the ancient Roman dictum, divide et impera, i.e. divide and rule,

Israel and Palestine linked to it. See Scheer: Analysis: Road Map OK May Show Way out of Israel Recession,
2003; Scheer: Israel Defence Budget to Be Slashed-FinMin, 2003. At this time, Israel’s budget for warfare and
defense amounted to more than a third of the entire state budget. As it turned out, though, no peace was
achieved. Other members of elites interested in peace are mainly members of the cultural elites, yet they are
unfortunately rather powerless compared to the political, economic and military elites, especially in uncivil
societies such as apartheid societies.
191
Reinhart: Guaranteed Failure of the Roadmap, 2003. See Carter 2006: 202f. on US reluctance to initiate or be
drawn into any kind of peace process. See also Ess: The Stage Is Set for Ethnic Cleansing, 2003. Similarly,
Nelson Mandela himself slammed the Israeli re-election of Sharon and his right-wing government in 2003 as
‘suicidal’ for peace, and said US President George W. Bush’s continuous 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 percent, 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.
Much was made of this aid by the western mass media. 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.
At this stage, a former US Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, known in his time with the Carter
administration as a ‘hawk’, even went 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.
192
See Blankfort: Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2005, for a strong position
against giving the USA the main blame, as Noam Chomsky appears to do. My own position is between
Blankfort’s and Chomsky’s, yet closer to Blankfort’s, as will become evident below. We are all responsible for
our own actions, and that includes all Israelis. For a thoughtful and balanced approach to the distribution of legal
and moral responsibilities for Israeli apartheid between Israel and the USA, see Klippenstein: UN Specialist for
Palestinian Rights Suspects Israel Committed War Crimes: An Interview with Richard Falk on the Crisis in
Gaza, 2014.
193
On the British in Palestine, see Pappe 2004: 63-122; 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 of its often violent history as an example of apartheid (but
rather see it 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 and use the same language as the Hutu
majority whom they have almost constantly dominated over recent centuries, during the last century due to
exacerbation of the domestic conflict by colonializing Germans and Belgians who mistakenly imagined that the
154

no doubt partly enriched by British colonialist practices, is now also being followed by
Israel’s apartheid governments, though only seldom so openly or so crudely in these days. The
British, among whom were the very first Christian Zionists, in fact played a much larger role
than the USA in the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, also 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, anti-Muslim bias in British policy was obvious already in the Balfour
Declaration at the end of the First World War, and earlier, of course, anti-Arab and anti-
Muslim bias and policies have been present in British mainstream culture ever since the
crusades. The British elites and, more recently, the British and transnational Zionist lobbies
played huge roles in bringing about and strengthening that bias, and they still play these roles
today. 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 racism, i.e. in 19th-century Europe, which
was to a large extent dominated by western European, especially British, thought (as well as
by British military, political and economic might). 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 vast mineral wealth (especially oil and gas) would
become increasingly crucial for the global economy, and thus also for strategic considerations,
especially since the second world war. Israel would be the point of entry for western military
power in case of an oil crisis, e.g. an embargo against the west, though now Israel is losing
this role as western troops and military bases are already all over the region. Israel is still a
strategic asset for NATO powers, as I believe I witnessed during my many long waiting
periods at Tel Aviv’s airport in 2004-5, when I saw numerous unmarked airplanes land and
take off there, though now Israel already seems ever more frantically to cling to its perceived
role as a frontier bulwark against Muslim fundamentalism, Muslims and Arabs, who are all in
turn constructed as an existential threat to the west. With their near-oligopoly on the advanced
weapons market, the western political, economic, and military elites were enabled and have
enabled themselves to divide and rule, and to pick and drop allies and enemies in these
regions as they see fit. This does not mean, however, that Europeans and European or ‘white’
or ‘western’ culture should be blamed entirely for racist Jewish ideas, either. Israel is certainly
not a mere pawn in this game of total global dominance. In Chapter II.9.3, we will take a look
at Jewish ideology through the ages, and discover that ethnocentrism and even genocide
through divine sanction are important to it, as well, of course, as are the fundamentally
opposed, though nowadays conspicuously scarce, Jewish traditions of humanism and
universalist ethics.194

Tutsi had invaded the country (allegedly from the north) at some point in time. Even the term, ‘genocide’, though
certainly not always inappropriate, must be used carefully about Rwanda, since class can be seen as more
important than race or ethnicity in the Tutsi-Hutu conflict, in 1994 as well as before. On the other hand, the
arbitrariness of terms such as ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, or ‘people’, can also be illustrated very well in this conflict. See
Lemarchand: The Rwanda Genocide, 2004: 395-412; Melson: Modern Genocide in Rwanda, 2003: 325-338.
Similarly, the oppression of Shia majorities and minorities by predominantly Sunni elites in Bahrain, Iraq, and
parts of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Pakistan also has strong apartheid characteristics and features, yet less racial
and cultural criteria, as the oppressed and the oppressors (like in Rwanda) use the same language, are often
physically indistinguishable and sometimes even have the same religion. See Nasr: The Shia Revival: How
Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future, 2007; Kristof: Bahrain Pulls a Qaddafi, 2011. Economic class
warfare with sometimes atrociously destructive effects seems to be the crux of the matter in these societies,
although racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide may also play important roles.
194
It should be mentioned, however, that humanist and universalist ethics are certainly not Jewish inventions.
They can be found prominently among the ancient Egyptians, e.g. in Coffin Text CT 1130, written around 2000
BCE. See Lichtheim, Miriam: Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1: The Old and Middle Kingdoms, 1973: 99ff,
131f; Assmann: Ägypten: Eine Sinngeschichte, 1996: 174, 221; Brunner: Die Weisheitsbücher der Ägypter,
1997: 137ff. It would not surprise me, regardless of whether it ever turns out possible to indicate it, if these ethics
existed prior to the ancient Egyptian civilization as well. On Zionism as an offshoot of Eurocentric, imperialist,
colonialist and racist thought, see Said: The Question of Palestine, 1992 (1979): 56-82. On an example, the
 155

A fourth reason to blame the British for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the British
betrayal of the secret deal made between Henry MacMahon, British High Commissioner to
Egypt, and Sharif Hussein, Guardian of Mecca and Medina. In order to get Hussein and the
Arabs to join the British side in the First World War against the Ottoman Turks, who ruled
over almost all Arabs at this time, MacMahon promised self-rule for the Arabs. The Arabs did
join and did defeat the Turks, paying a high price in terms of human, economic and military
losses. But the British did not honor their part of the deal, and instead carved up the Arab
lands destructively between themselves and the French, leaving the deserts of the Arabian
peninsula for Hussein and his family, who instead became friends of the USA after the
outrageous British betrayal.195
Aside from the British destruction of Palestinian sovereignty, democracy and self-rule,
the modern state of Israel’s perhaps closest military and political ally so far, after the USA and
Britain, was apartheid South Africa, so it – and its state servants and civilian supporters, many
of whom are still alive and prospering today – should also carry some responsibility for
apartheid in Israel. South Africa 1652-1948 was a predecessor to apartheid Israel, and from
1948 until 1994 a fellow traveler, loyal ally, and intimate friend. The secret alliance between
Israel and apartheid South Africa included top level military and diplomatic secrets, secretly
shared nuclear weapon technology, the active splintering of protest movements, propaganda,
and a long-held, shared elitist and racist ideal of invader minority rule over indigenous
majorities.196
Anti-Jewish197 persecution and genocide of Jews in Europe, especially by the German,
Austrian, Romanian, Croatian, and other Nazis and racists, must be considered as well, both
for the widely perceived ‘need’ for a Jewish homeland or a Jewish state and for the many
actual atrocities that many members of a traumatized Jewish people seem to be inverting and
repeating in a psychopathological manner, reminiscent of similar, organized or unorganized
offenders of human rights. (See Chapters II.1.3 and 9.3, below.) The identification of the
victim with the aggressor is a common pattern and it appears to repeat itself here. Incidentally,
this is not unique to Jews, and it certainly is not universal among Jews. The extremely high
rate of violent crime and rape in South Africa (where most of the victims are still black
women) extends the spiral of apartheid violence to epiapartheid victims, and the repeated
accusations by Palestinian civilians of torture and mistreatment by the Palestinian security
forces tell a similar tale about the victims of ongoing apartheid.198
The large number of displaced and homeless Jews after World War II was crucial for
the establishment of Israel, and Adolf Hitler, as well as his judeophobic predecessors and his
numerous followers and partners-in-crime, are to blame for creating that situation and also for
contributing to the traumatized nature of different kinds of Israeli/Jewish defense systems –
ranging from military to bureaucratic to psychological structures. However, Zionists, who had

Israeli censorship laws, still in use in Israel as well as in the Israeli-occupied territories, which stem from British
Emergency Regulations for Palestine 1945, although they were repealed by Britain before its rule over Palestine
ceased, and although Jordan also overturned it, with the aid of its Constitution (something that Israel does not but
should also have), during its rule of the West Bank 1948-1967, see Tilley (ed.) 2009: 238f.
195
Pappe 2004: 64-71
196
Polakow-Suransky: The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with South Africa, 2010; McGreal:
Worlds Apart (Israel and Apartheid: Part 1); McGreal: Brothers in Arms – Israel’s Secret Pact with Pretoria
(Israel and Apartheid: Part 2), 2006¸ Beit-Hallahmi: The South Africa-Israel Alliance, 1986-1988: Public
Relations and Reality, 1990
197
I consider the use of the popular expression ‘anti-Semitic’ imprecise and misleading within the entire context
of this investigation. This is not meant, however, to diminish the scale of atrocities committed against Jews
throughout history, in Europe and elsewhere. See, further, footnote 13 above.
198
Kovel 2007: 74f. argues that the repetition of trauma by violated people upon other people than the violator is
taking place on a collective scale among Zionist Jews. He could be right, but it should be remembered here,
especially, that not all Jews are Zionists (as Kovel himself exemplifies in a great way), and that not even all
Israeli Jews are Zionists (as a small number of brave Israeli Jews prove on a daily basis).
156

organized themselves well before the German National Socialists, also directly and indirectly
pressured many European Jewish survivors and refugees to emigrate to Palestine after the
war. This included several thousand orphans who had expressly asked to go to England or
France, and many others who wanted to go to the USA.199 Zionism existed before Nazi
Germany, but not long before.
It is no wonder that the Zionist movement, the ‘national revival of the Jewish people in
its ancestral home’, was born in Vienna, the city where, only a decade later, Adolf Hitler
himself would be influenced to become a judeophobic right-wing extremist, and at a time
when Karl Lueger, the mayor of the city, was voted into office with a rabidly anti-Jewish and
pro-’German’ political program. Hitler stated that he ‘discovered’ anti-Semitism in Vienna
and called Lueger the ‘greatest German mayor of all time’. I am not saying that Zionism is a
version of or prerequisite to Nazi ideology. It is not. It is an extremist reaction to an extremist
threat that existed long before Hitler’s political career started, a reaction to immensely more
powerful European and Christian judeophobia. But the two movements appeared at roughly
the same time, in the very same place. They grew out of the same poisoned, ideological,
racist, Euromaniac soil.200 Unlike the judeophobic racists, however, the Zionists were at first
relatively powerless, though soon financially strong. And so one of their main strategies,
before statehood and military strategy, was to cunningly trick the indigenous population of the
chosen land for the chosen race into giving up their land for money, and to make as little fuss
as possible while doing it.

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned

to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border
by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying
it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to
our side. Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor
must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of
the immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us
things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them
anything back.201

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote this in his diary about the future
indigenous victims of the future Jewish state, but his strategy did not work, simply because
Palestinians figured out the racist, Zionist plot almost immediately. As a result, Jews still own
merely seven percent of Historic Palestine legitimately. Illegally expropriated Palestinians
have held on to their land and to their property documents and deeds, in many cases even the
keys to their houses, some of which still stand and are again inhabited, now by Jews. Thus,
direct compensation and repatriation of Palestinians, as demanded by the UN and international
law from Israel, remain very implementable restitutions, and, indeed, (partial) solutions to the
conflict, even more implementable than for dispossessed Blacks in South Africa, who were
generally dispossessed much earlier than 1948.

199
Kovel 2007: 79ff.
200
Shlaim: The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, 2001 (2000): 1ff, quote: 1; Morris, H.: The State They’re
In, 2004; Hessing: In der Nacht der Geschichte ein königlicher Traum: Prophet der zionistischen Bewegung:
Zum hundertsten Todestag von Theodor Herzl, 2004; Watzal: Zionismus - Postzionismus - Neozionismus:
Welchen Weg nimmt Israel? 2004: 131-146; Hitler: The Discovery of Anti-Semitism in Vienna [excerpt from
‘Mein Kampf’]: 263. Needless to say, perhaps: this does not apply to Vienna today. But an important street (a
section of the Ring Road) was still named after Lueger until 2012. A public square at another section of the Ring
Road is still named Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Platz. And instead of getting rid of those names, despite protests from the
community, the Vienna City Council found it appropriate to name another street and another public square after
Theodor Herzl, despite more protests from the community (as if honoring an anti-Jewish racist would somehow
be cancelled or balanced by honoring a Jewish racist).
201
Herzl, Theodor: The Complete Diaries, edited by Raphael Patai, New York: Herzl Press, 1960): June 18,
1895, quoted in Kovel 2007: 48
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Along with Israel, the USA, the national (usually American and Israeli, Jewish and
Christian) and transnational Zionist organizations, Britain, apartheid South Africa, German,
Austrian, Central European and generally European racism against Jews (as well as against
Arabs and Muslims) must therefore also be held responsible for the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict.
Finally, the USA (and others) pressured and enticed Egypt and Jordan, the two most
affected Arab states bordering Israel, to sign separate peace treaties with the Jewish apartheid
state, in 1979 and 1994, respectively. Since the vast majority of the populations of Egypt and
Jordan appear to be against those treaties and other aspects of those regimes, the USA has
(with support and probably even directives from Israel) continuously propped up
undemocratic and corrupt regimes in both countries, mainly by the crude but ultimately
efficient means of delivering weaponry free of charge. It has also seemingly worked hard to
keep other undemocratic regimes, similar to those of Egypt and Jordan, in power in most of
the Persian Gulf and North African states, including the wealthy oil and gas producers, Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. If the USA were serious about
its lip service to the promotion of democracy in Arab and Muslim countries, it would not be
keeping undemocratic Arabs and Muslims in power, even militarily, in those very countries,
as well as in Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Iran (1953-1979), and elsewhere. More democracy
in the Arab and Muslim worlds would no doubt lead to more anti-Israeli stances in the region.
Since the 1970s, however, all of these Arab and Muslim states (with the sole exception of Iran
since 1979) have avoided criticizing Israeli human rights violations too harshly or intervening
to protect Palestinians against Israeli aggression, although most of the countries’ people would
seem to back such moves. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated in 1981 on
account of his Israel-friendly policy. Muslim fundamentalists and democrats since then waged
a contained civil war, with pauses, against the Cairo regime, not only due to Egypt’s peace
treaty with Israel, but partly so. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, was widely seen as a
puppet of the Israelis, especially in his bogus peace talks with Israelis and Palestinians, and
with his continued blockade of Gaza, something that his predecessors, however, initiated
already in 1948 and followed through ever since. In February 2011, victory came for the anti-
Mubarak and pro-democracy camp after a Tunisian model of liberation, and a more critical
Egyptian stance towards Israel was slowly developing and expected until the USA, Israel, and
European powers again intervened (with the aid of very large numbers of Egyptians opposed
to Islamist rule). This largely covert intervention is something similar to what Europeans and
European descendants have actually been doing in Egypt almost continuously for over 2,400
years. Jordan appeared to be slipping into the same kind of situation in late 2002, although
that situation was eventually defused through annihilation of many of the leading militants. In
2011, it arose again, in the context of the Arab Spring, but, as in Egypt, the outcome was
again a return to the status quo.
It seems that only military, financial, and political aid for these undemocratic and
corrupt regimes, from both the USA and other western powers, are able to keep these
countries from intervening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Egypt under Mubarak was the
second largest recipient of US military aid, second only to Israel. Jordan was the third. In the
year 2003, the USA supplied Israel with $2.1 billion in military aid, Egypt with $1.3 billion,
Jordan with $198 million. (Fourth on Washington’s list of most needy friends that year was
the Colombian government with $98 million. Interestingly, these four states are all notorious
violators of human rights, just like their patron.) And that seems to have been just one of the
enticements for certain Arabs to accept, recognize, and accommodate Israel. Thus, some Arab
elites, too, are to blame for the overdue survival of apartheid in Israel (though certainly not for
its creation and initial implementation).202

202
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 31 argue that Egypt and Jordan are thus continuously rewarded by the USA for
their peace treaties with Israel, and that US taxpayers are therefore actually footing the bills to these two
158

Within the third tier of responsibilities are also actions by Palestinians. I will deal
more in detail with Palestinian crimes against Jews and others in the context of apartheid in
Section II.1 as well as in Section III.4, but I consider here particularly the loss of life of
Palestinians, not only due to collaboration with the Zionist invaders, but also among resistance
movements where so many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli as well as foreign, Jewish,
Muslim, Christian as well as other, have been lost or destroyed, due to poor judgment,
overzealousness, personal enrichment or advancement opportunities, and other factors. But,
again, these are crimes that have been profoundly provoked, and, additionally, the first two
tiers are responsible for an overwhelming amount of crimes, and of worse crimes, compared
to the third one.
Of course it is also up to us, to all of the human inhabitants of this planet, to resist and
discourage the crimes against humanity that constitute apartheid in Israel. This is the fourth
tier of responsibility. It can be done simply through demonstrations and other ways of
showing displeasure and anger at those most responsible for the crimes. It can also involve
boycotts, divestment, sanctions, and lobbying. It must also involve informing decision-makers
of facts that are being hidden, of speaking the truth to power. Those governments and
intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations not mentioned so far in this chapter
can surely do more, as well. In fact it is their duty to do so, especially if they are among the
191 governmental signatories of the Geneva Conventions. And this is not only to support
Palestinians, or to give blind support to Palestinians. The latter are also provoked to commit
crimes against humanity, targeting Israeli civilians in lethal attacks, just as the Blacks in South
Africa did against Whites. In other words: it is not only in the interest of Palestinians that an
immediate end be put to Israeli apartheid. It is also very much in the interest of Israelis. Then,
it is in the interest of humanity. Last, but not least, it is in the interest of the humanized natural
environment and of biodiversity, both due to the population race and racist immigration
schemes that make apartheid populations explosively large, and due to the development of
weapons of mass destruction that may or will create disasters and surely already have caused
drops in biodiversity.
Nobody can today be regarded as more responsible for Israeli apartheid than the Israeli
Jews, especially their elected political elites, but also their military, economic, media, cultural,
and academic elites. I will attempt to provide ample evidence for this judgment in the
following chapters. The Palestinians, on the other hand, cannot be blamed collectively for it.
Their resistance is not a cause of the separation and segregation. It is a direct consequence of
them. Any pseudo-argument to the contrary blames the victims and is therefore, in my
opinion, morally and historically corrupt. Of course, Palestinians should be prosecuted for any
crimes, for any human rights violations that they have committed, but the context of
punishment for those crimes, if they have victimized Israelis or (perceived) allies of or

countries in Israel’s, but not in the USA’s interest. On Jordan, see Al-Khalidi: Jordan City under Siege Seethes
with Tension, 2002; Al-Khalidi: Jordanian Troops Battle Do-or-Die Islamists, 2002. On Egypt, see Blair: Sadat’s
Gesture, 25 Years On, Evokes Bitterness, 2002; Drees: Journey Sadat Began in Israel Is Far from Complete,
2002. On the military aid see N.N.: US Promises Israel $2.16 Bln. Military Aid in 2004, November 21, 2002. See
Mokhiber & Weissman: We Had a Democracy Once, But You Crushed It, 2003 on the hollow ring of current US
lip service to democracy for Palestinian and other Muslims, with emphasis on the precedent US-led (and UK-
and BP-prompted) coup in Iran in 1953, which toppled the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed
Mossadegh, and installed the Shah, a puppet monarch, and his continuous rule of terror over the land, a direct
parallel to the subsequent antidemocratic, US-led or US-prompted military coups in Guatemala, Congo, Chile
and elsewhere. On Israel’s attitude towards democracy among Arabs, see Al-Naami: Israel Dreading a
Democratic Arab World, 2011. On the end of the Mubarak regime, the rights movement in the Arab world, and
the anti-Israeli but not anti-Jewish tone in the successful uprising in Egypt, see Gresh: The New Arab
Awakening: ‘Neither with the West, Nor against It’, 2011. On some of the numerous criminal doings, against
Egyptians and Palestinians, by the post-democratic Al-Sisi regime, perhaps the first post-democratic regime in
the entire history of the Egyptian civilization, see Massad: Egypt’s Propagandists and the Gaza Massacre, 2014.
 159

collaborators for Israel, must in my opinion always include the Israeli apartheid, the crime
against humanity that victimizes Palestinians.
The pattern of systematic collective punishment of Palestinians by Israel, and of Israeli
civilians by Palestinians, is based on the simple principle that people are punished for crimes
they did not commit. That is the essence of collective punishment. Israelis suffer collective
punishment very sporadically and in relatively small numbers, Palestinians continuously and
in relatively and absolutely large numbers. 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 racial 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,
well 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 – is blocking
the realization of these rights. By 2006 the USA had vetoed UN Security Council Resolutions
against Israel no less than 42 times since 1972. This was more than all the vetoes by all the
other veto powers, the other four permanent UN Security Council members, combined.
Moreover, since the USA threatened to veto numerous resolutions against Israeli aggressions,
many resolutions never even made it to the council. UN General Assembly, International
Atomic Energy Agency and other resolutions against Israel are also usually voted against or
blocked by the USA.203 These are undoubtedly unambiguously, anti-democratic measures
employed by unambiguously anti-democratic regimes.
The pattern of oppression that victimizes Palestinians is now homegrown. Their main
problem now are the Hebrew-speaking Israelis in their midst. But with the deadly
constellation of the USA, Britain, Europe, and the many non-Israeli Zionist zealots standing
behind the Israelis, the Palestinian problem becomes international. And with international law
close to impotence, the rest of the world, the vast majority, can do little.
If my method of identification and analysis of apartheid should be called a
‘moralizing’ approach to writing history and social science, then I would be the first to
confess to it.204 But it is a moralizing that I have tried to base on specific elements of
international law, such as the Geneva Conventions, the Statutes of the International Criminal
Court, and numerous UN resolutions, as well as, generally, on some of the most fundamental
principles of international law: human rights according to the Universal Declaration of 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,

203
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 40; 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. On Israeli
collective punishment, see Carter 2006: 116ff.
204
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 possibly an 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 20th 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.
160

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 morals and 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. Apartheid perpetrators are not only active, and apartheid victims are not only passive.
For instance, I try as often as possible to reiterate the justifications 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-
sidedness, due to context, and I believe it is indeed a much-needed corrective. Furthermore, I
am convinced that many more will be needed. Besides, there are, in my opinion, a great deal
more bad aspects to the side that creates, defends and promotes apartheid and other crimes
against humanity. I will return to these issues in the Conclusions.
In summary of this first part of my investigation, apartheid is a structure that can be
found under many different circumstances and conditions. But it always involves the
undemocratic rule of an invading minority and its self-defined descendants. It also always
involves an important civilian element of this oppressive minority as well as a strong and
independent state, vastly superior in military terms to the non-violent and violent resistance by
the conquered indigenous racial majority. A definition of apartheid can be found in Chapter
I.7 above, and it will be applied in detail in the now following, second part of the book.
As for the differences between apartheid societies: South Africa and Egypt, for
instance, did not have a biased, all-important ‘peace-broker’ like Israel does in the USA. Yet,
Britain and the USA did play a similar, though weaker, role for South Africa in the later
stages of apartheid in the wide sense. As we shall see, Rome also played a similar role during
the late period of the Ptolemaic state. Both Israel/Palestine and Graeco-Roman Egypt were
‘handed over’ from one set of occupying forces and racist minority rulers to another. In
Israel’s case, however, only part of what is now Israel, and an even smaller part of what is
now under Israeli military and political control, was initially (and under yet unfulfilled
conditions) handed over to the de facto invaders by the UN.
Palestine and Graeco-Roman Egypt also share not having to deal with disastrous
disease epidemics being spread (inadvertently or not) by the new occupiers. Furthermore, also
unlike South Africa, Palestine and Egypt were never slave-labor based economies under
apartheid. On the other hand, Israel and South Africa were both propped up by NATO, the
latter allegedly as an anti-Communist bulwark in the region, the former for no official reasons
other than the right of the ‘Jewish state to exist’, unofficially though, for US and other NATO
member countries’ strategic access to Middle East oil as well as fear of Islamic or Arab power
coupled with very strong Zionist lobbying groups in the USA, Europe, and beyond.205 South
Africa and Israel were no superpowers like the USA, the Soviet Union or the British Empire,
respectively, at the height of their power. That also sets them apart from Ptolemaic Egypt,
which was, for a while, the world’s leading military and political power. Yet the former two
were (and Israel still is) among the four to ten (at the most) strongest military powers in the

205
Mearsheimer & Walt 2006; Albert: Interview with Chomsky, In Depth Discussion on Israel/Palestine, 2002.
See also Wright: U.S. Isolated but Dominant at Middle East Talks, 2002; Plitnick 2003, and Chapter II.9.3
below. On ‘Israeli Jihadists’, i.e. many hundreds of NATO member country citizens, usually Jews working for
the Israeli army, participating in the slaughter of innocent civilians, and sometimes getting NATO government
backing and support for such activities, see Baroud: Recruiting to Kill - It Is Not Just an Israeli War on Gaza,
2014; Hassan, H.: Fighting Jihad for Israel, 2014.
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world. And, as I will try to show, the essential system of violence, oppression, and
exploitation is the same in each of my three main examples of apartheid. In fact, it is glaringly
similar in the two more current cases.

Israel’s apartheid policies are based on the following elements: The

exclusive claim of one group to a country at the exclusion of non-Jews
accompanied by their attempt to physically separate from them;
displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population and the seizure
of their lands and properties, confining them to small enclaves and
transforming them into a permanent underclass; formalization of
unequal power relations through discriminatory laws and policies,
enforced by political means as well as by the military and security
services; and the formulation of a meta-narrative that supports the
claims of the dominant group over the others, demonizing and
excluding the ‘others’’ claims. . . .
In the Gaza Strip, it means, among other things, that 500,000
Palestinian refugees will remain holed up in 3 square miles of derelict
camps surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled 24 hours a day. While
more than one million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have access to
only 60% of the land, 4,000 Israeli soldiers occupy 35%. The average
Israeli settler has 146 times more living space than his Palestinian
counterpart. Thus, with the rapid shrinkage of Palestinian land even to
bury their dead, the similarity with apartheid South Africa is all too
self-evident. Under the latter system a 5% white minority appropriated
87% of the land.206

I will attempt to show that there are even more and even closer parallels between the
South African and Israeli apartheid systems in the following. First and foremost, apartheid is
based upon the de facto invasion of a country or a region by an oppressive minority. The
human rights violations that accompany and follow this invasion amount to a pattern or a
structure, under which the indigenous majority is subjugated, expropriated, exploited and
otherwise victimized, often and essentially in a violent manner. Members of the racial elite are
also victimized, both by other members of the same elite and by resistance fighters, but never
to the large extent that the prime victims are. The pattern consists of nine holes, which are all
plugged in an apartheid society, if it exists long enough. More or less consciously, the holes
are plugged, one by one, in different sequences and under different circumstances, in order to
maximize control over and exploitation of natural and human resources in a conquered land.
The first and most important one, however, is violence. The apartheid holes are only partly
interdependent, sometimes mutually reinforcing, sometimes rather balancing each other. Thus,

206
El Fassed: Satyagraha to End Apartheid in Palestine, 2001. El Fassed might be referring to a five percent
minority of white land-owning families in South Africa, or to the class of land-owning Whites, or he might
simply be mistaken. During apartheid in the narrow sense the white population as a whole dropped from around
21 percent to around 14 percent of the total population. It has since slipped further, to under 10 percent, due to
white flight as well as to humanized immigration laws and practices, including the reintegration of South Africa
into its continental economic, social, cultural and political contexts, among many other factors. See Chapter
II.2.2 below. But that is not the point. On Israeli disregard for – or provocation against – Islamic law, which
requires that the dead be buried quickly, see Johnston: Palestinians Still Unable to Bury Rafah Dead, 2004. The
Palestinians, however, have also desecrated Israeli corpses, for instance those of soldiers killed in Gaza by
Palestinian freedom fighters, prior to the big-scale incursion into Rafah with its concomitant Israeli massacres of
indigenous civilians. See Sagar: The Crash of Civilizations, 2004. On El Fassed’s call for ‘satyagraha’ in
Palestine – Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of non-violent resistance which inspired both the civil rights movement
in the USA and the resistance against South African apartheid – see also Tomasevic: Israel’s W.Bank Barrier
Like Apartheid--Gandhi Kin, 2004, which describes how Gandhi’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, takes a firm and
explicit stance against Israeli apartheid, and encourages further non-violent resistance against it by Palestinians
as well as by the international community.
162

if violence becomes rampant then apartheid thought is usually provoked and follows suit by
becoming more extremist; but apartheid thought may also be weakened, and take a vacation,
as it were, when levels of violence rise. Conversely, when violence subsides it is often
accompanied by less extremism in the propaganda, yet sometimes the propaganda becomes
even more hateful, even as physical violence appears to be ending. This ambiguity remains a
mystery to me, and has led me to deal with apartheid violence as the first and apartheid
thought as the ninth and (in a structural rather than a temporal sense) last defining element of
apartheid, with apartheid repopulation, apartheid citizenship, land apartheid, apartheid work,
apartheid access, apartheid education, and apartheid language in-between.
Otherwise, the process of apartheid oppression on a macro-level is fairly simple. It
could also be crudely likened with the checking of items on a shopping list. I cannot
determine to what extent this is carried out consciously, but I believe it gets more conscious
with time. Today, Israeli apartheid has the most precedents, and it therefore probably exhibits
the most consciously perpetrated, and the strategically, militarily, legally, and diplomatically
most sophisticated form of apartheid.207 This also means that Israeli apartheid is probably the
most premeditated instance of apartheid.
An early Zionist, Chaim Arlosoroff (who has one of the main avenues in Tel Aviv
named after him today), wrote in 1932, before apartheid had become part of the international
political and legal vocabulary, of his aggressive strategy that would come to remain in place
as the true foundation of the state of Israel until today: ‘…a transition period during which the
Jewish minority would exercise organized revolutionary rule. [This requires that such a
minority would control] the state apparatus, the administration, and the military…in order to
eliminate the danger of domination by the non-Jewish majority and suppress rebellion against
us…’208

207
In 2004, a ‘confidential’ 10-year geopolitical forecast government report, prepared by Israel’s foreign
ministry and then leaked by (or to?) the media, warned that ‘Israel could end up on a collision course with the
European Union and face sanctions like apartheid-era South Africa...’ And as the expanding EU, Israel’s main
trading partner, might grow more powerful and influential to the detriment of Israel’s main political and military
ally, the USA, the report cautioned that ‘the Jewish state could become increasingly isolated internationally’.
Spetalnick: Israel, Europe Could Be on Collision Course -Report, 2004. See also footnote 61 above, on crusade
studies in Israel, apparently providing ways of learning how to make apartheid against and ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians work more successfully. The quotes and the facts speak for themselves in this regard. Israeli
apartheid is even more conscious than South African apartheid, and therefore Israelis are even more culpable of
committing this crime. In my opinion, Israel has every reason – good and bad – to learn from the South African
and other apartheid experiences, as opposed to Israel’s foes and victims, who in my view only have good
reasons. I believe that knowledge gathered from my investigation can be used for human rights recognition and
respect, reconciliation, and peace. But it could also be abused, in order to cover up and even to intensify crimes
against humanity. For instance, Israeli elites may never let the day of formal ‘independence’ of the Bantustans
come any closer than it is now, because they could see that this was the beginning of the end of apartheid in
South Africa. Likewise, the Native reservations in the USA, which now resemble the Occupied Palestinian
Territories even more than the South African Bantustans do, never became recognized sovereign states, mainly
because the USA never properly recognized them. Or Israel may make its laws even more different from South
Africa’s apartheid laws and/or defer even more apartheid roles to parastatal agencies in order to cover up the
crimes against humanity that constitute apartheid (which is still sometimes erroneously blamed exclusively on a
state, or even on laws). For example, torture may again become legal in Israel, as opposed to South Africa
(which of course does not mean that South Africans practiced less torture, but the latter had to do more to cover
up the torture and other violent practices). It is therefore my hope that the results of this investigation be used
first and foremost by opponents and victims of apartheid rather than by perpetrators and apologists for it, unless
of course the latter are converted to abandon their belief and role in or support of apartheid. And if they do so,
then I can only hope they or others will find more effective ways of bringing down the Israeli system of
apartheid, because it has been going on for far too long.
208
Quoted in Kovel 2007: 59. These requirements neatly sum up how Thompson described South African
apartheid, except that ‘Jewish’ reads ‘white’ in Thompson; see footnote 26 above. Arlosoroff’s ‘transition’, of
course, would (or will) only end either with the successful completion of expropriation and ethnic cleansing
and/or genocide of the indigenous population, or with the end of pro-Jewish racist rule, i.e. the end of apartheid.
In this context, Kovel 2007 and Pappe 2006 show beyond any reasonable doubt that Israeli apartheid, including
 163

Graeco-Roman Egypt, in sharp contrast, did not have the wealth of historical material
(on apartheid and other racist experiments) that has been at the disposal of proponents and
practitioners of 20th- and 21st-century apartheid. For example, the Greek and Roman forms of
racist taxation – which was actually the main form of economic exploitation in Egypt, as
opposed to slavery elsewhere in the world at that time, and low salaries or wage-slavery later
– were remarkably crude and sometimes even counter-productive, in all meanings of that
word. As a result of the exorbitant taxes, targeting them because of their race, the agricultural
producers, i.e. the Egyptian peasants, occasionally fled the land in large numbers, and
consequently the cities and their surroundings, presumably including at least some Greeks,
experienced famines. In this sense, we may discern a development of apartheid (although
famines were later also suffered by many southern Africans as a result of apartheid, and
malnourishment and malnutrition by many Palestinians as a result of Israeli apartheid (see
Chapters II.6.2-3, below), but no members of the elite race actually suffered thus, as far as I
have seen).
Yet, I can detect no structural development over more than 2,300 years of apartheid, so
far. The main elements remained the same, so far. The elite Greeks and Romans did
eventually have centuries at their disposal to refine and optimize their own apartheid
practices, and sometimes, apparently for that reason, these practices did take on sophistication
in some respects, such as their moderated taxation practices, their reluctant permission to
allow continued Egyptian ownership of some parts of the land, or their apartheid ideology and
their related, racist, and oppressive meta-ideology (see Chapter II.9.1), or their prudent
decision to avoid the martyrization of Ankhwennefer, a captured leading freedom fighter who
had been proclaimed ‘Pharaoh’ in defiance of the Greeks, who also called their kings of Egypt
‘Pharaohs’, while the lower echelon ‘rebels’ were routinely and brutally executed or murdered
in large numbers. That is how the white South African elites later treated Mandela and Robert
Sobukwe, as opposed to masses of other Blacks, and, even later, how the Israeli Jewish elites
treated Yasser Arafat and Marwan Barghouti as opposed to masses of other Palestinians. All
aspects of sophisticated apartheid phenomena are to be found in South Africa as well as
Israel/Palestine. We will step into the different specific conditions of apartheid presently,
starting with the most basic one, violence, in order to examine the relatively complex, and
sometimes superficially different, micro-levels of apartheid whilst discovering the essential
macro-level identity of apartheid societies across time and space, but first we will take a brief
look at what that basis means for the rest of the system and for the rest of the world.

the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, cannot simply be ‘mistakes’. They are in fact to a very large extent
premeditated and carefully planned crimes against humanity.
164

II. A System of Gross Human Rights Violations

Introduction: Apartheid as State of War and Crime against Humanity

What Life has taught me, I would like to share with those who want to learn
That until the philosophy which holds one race superior
And another inferior
Is finally and permanently
Discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war
That until there are no longer first and second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
There’s war
That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race
There’s war
That until that day, the dream of lasting peace,
World citizenship, and the rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
Now, everywhere is war…209

Escaping International Law and Dividing the Resistance

The creation of apartheid systems in South Africa, Egypt, and Israel each constitute
the creation of a ‘State of War’ as conceived by the English political philosopher John Locke:
‘Force, or a declared design of force upon the Person of another, where there is no common
superior on Earth to appeal to for relief, is the State of War.’210
The apartheid states and the elites that uphold them maintain rule for decades (in the
first two cases: for centuries), through the use of engineered racial and ethnic inequalities,
through imposed tension and violence, against both common decency and, lately, international
law. The indigenous people, the majority of the citizens, have no superior authority to turn to
for any kind of sustained protection or relief.
In retrospect, the role of the international community in bringing about peace in South
Africa and Israel must be said to have been a (so far) minor, though not entirely negligible
one. On the whole, occasional efforts from within the existing superior, though far from
necessarily legitimate authorities, the UN, the USA, the European intergovernmental
organizations, the British Empire, the five permanent UN Security Council powers and others,
have failed rather dismally with bringing peace to apartheid conflicts. In particular, none of
these have succeeded in unequivocally recognizing apartheid as a state of war for which the
invading, privileged racial minority must take primary responsibility. Indeed, their own roles
as ‘superior’ authorities have largely been made possible through racist measures of their

209
Marley: War, 1976, extracted from a speech on apartheid South Africa by Haile Sellassie I of Ethiopia, held
in California on February 28, 1968. It was slightly modified by Bob Marley, from whom this quote was lifted.
For the original text, see Selassie, E. (ed.): The Wise Mind of Emperor Haile Sellassie I, 2004: 75f.
210
Locke: The Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1986 (1690): 3.19. A more recent, corresponding analysis
of my most current apartheid example starts from the other end of the same argument: “Any ‘peace’ which
would be accepted today on the terms put forward by the Israeli government and the United States [the Camp
David proposal of 2000 and its successors] would not be peace, nor would it be a solution to the causes and
structures of the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Instead it would be a continuation of war by other means.” (Brand-
Jacobsen: Israel-Palestine: The Need for a Just Peace, 2000). Colonialism may similarly be seen as a state of
continuous war (and crime against humanity) initiated by the colonialists. See, for instance, Hardt & Negri 2000:
129. Yet, the International Criminal Court, for one, has no reference to colonialism (not yet, in any event) among
its principles of severe injustice, among which, however, both genocide and apartheid can be found.
 165

own, including genocide, colonialism, apartheid, and/or collusion with these same crimes.
The only partial exception is the global anti-apartheid community, in particular the
many anti-apartheid civil society initiatives, the majority of developing countries’, the UN
General Assembly’s (and the British Commonwealth’s (least of all thanks to Britain) as well
as the European Communities’) condemnations and sanctions against apartheid in South
Africa, which helped isolate the country and pressure states, other institutions, and individuals
to sanction apartheid there bilaterally as well as diplomatically. In the end (from 1986 to
1990), only Israel, Taiwan, to some extent France, a group of large western business
corporations, and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leaders of the world’s two most
powerful governments, were effectively supporting South African apartheid internationally.
Almost all of the rest of the outside world, the vast majority of humanity (and the vast
majority of South Africans), were working together to eliminate apartheid, with opinion polls
indicating that the vast majorities of Americans and British people also at least sympathized
with the anti-apartheid movement. Finally, at the end of the 1980s, the US and UK
parliaments, in rare shows of democracy with regard to foreign policy in those two countries,
then overruled Reagan and Thatcher and made the US and the UK join comprehensive
international sanctions against South Africa as two of the last countries in the world. By this
time, even right-wing conservatives such as Reagan and Thatcher, not to mention the
apartheid elites in South Africa itself, were being forced to realize that the days of apartheid in
South Africa were numbered.
Sporadic condemnations and initiatives by the international community against
apartheid in Israel have so far only had minor effects, mainly due to US and western European
interventions against these condemnations and initiatives. Nevertheless, a new global anti-
apartheid community is gradually forming, this time targeting Israel. And with Israel breaking
the same laws as apartheid South Africa, as well as new international laws, including anti-
apartheid laws, the legal case against Israeli apartheid is even stronger than the ones that led to
sanctions against apartheid South Africa in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Most of the time,
however, both with regard to South Africa and Israel, there was and is complicity by the
superpowers of the day, especially by the USA. Their elites also profited from apartheid – or
they thought they did. The US elites certainly still think so today.211
Apartheid is war, but most of the time it is a slow war. It is in my view better to refer
to this aspect of apartheid as ‘violence’, and thereby accentuate that apartheid is both war and
oppression and that it often lies between these two phenomena as understood traditionally.
When the 21st century started, we witnessed the continuation of a roughly century-old trend
with regard to wars: ever fewer declared wars, more and more civilian casualties in relative
and absolute terms, fewer and fewer military casualties in relative terms, and an increasing
difficulty to draw the line between civilians and military personnel. The suicide bombers wore
civilian clothes and so did most of their victims. The victims of suicide attacks in Israel, or in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the USA, were not only civilians, but also mercenaries in
uniform, reserve officers in civilian clothes, and Pentagon or Israeli Defense Force employees
as well as clients, contractors, mercenaries, etc., in civilian clothes, as well as additional
people who had been or were profiting from the oppression of people, in whose names the
attackers then struck. Similarly, Jewish settlers and US army contractors often operate in
civilian clothes, sometimes or mostly killing other people in civilian clothes. War and
oppression are not mirages – that is not my point here – rather, they are part of something
larger. Unfortunately, I have no theoretical way of tackling this larger entity. But I believe it
can usefully be referred to as ‘systematic human rights violations’, a descriptive, pragmatic
and legal rather than a theoretical, social scientific term.
Oppressive minorities generally establish and maintain power by the threat (the

211
Anglin: The Frontline States and Sanctions against South Africa, 1990: 254ff; Blum: Voting for Apartheid at
the UN, 2003; Fredrickson 2002: 133; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007. See also Sections III.2-6 below.
166

‘declared design’, in Locke’s rendition) and practice of violence, but also by using different,
subtler methods of dividing actual or potential resistance. Mostly, it seems that dividing
resistance is successfully achieved in apartheid by the elites through a system favoring a tiny
indigenous class economically, and thereby securing its collaboration with the oppressors,
although it will not always work. In several instances, the collaborators have switched
allegiances on more than one occasion. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, the main class of
collaborators with the Greeks and Romans was undoubtedly the priests (though according to
J.G. Manning there were also local (village- and perhaps higher-level) bureaucrats, indigenous
members of the military, and possibly additional indigenous cultural elites who collaborated
systematically), in South Africa and Israel the ‘assimilated’ political leadership and parts of
the business communities. In all apartheid societies there are of course networks of informers
and other less willing collaborators, as well. In east Jerusalem under military occupation,
moreover, Israel has generally favored Christians over the majority Muslims, affording special
rights and privileges to Christian clergy, especially local non-Arab clergy, and even driving
wedges between Christians of different denominations, as well as wedges between the clergy
and lay Christians. There is a resultant state of ‘perpetual suspicion and dissension’ between
these Christian and Muslim communities and individuals as a result of this policy. Israel has
also given limited political and civil rights to Palestinians who have stayed in what is now the
state of Israel and taken Israeli citizenship, though hardly any rights at all to the great majority
of Palestinians, who are refugees and/or subject to Israeli military rule and military oppression
in the occupied Palestinian territories. Similarly, both apartheid South Africa and Graeco-
Roman Egypt afforded inferior forms of citizenship to some of the indigenous people, yet
generally failed to achieve full loyalty from them. Although many, if not most, of the
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship refer to themselves as ‘Palestinians’, Israel has been
successful in making sure that Jews and important members of the international community
call them ‘Israeli Arabs’ and therefore will consciously or unconsciously consider them either
as anomalies or as generously tolerated foreigners and guests in the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish
state’, but certainly not as people who really belong to the country, or to whom the country
really belongs.212
In South Africa, moreover, Dutch colonialists exploited existing rifts between
Khoikhoi groups on the one hand, and favored Asian and mixed-race slaves and their
descendants over Blacks on the other. The apartheid (in the narrow sense) government further
entrenched this color hierarchy, manufactured by Whites, and exacerbated it by means of
forced spatial segregation, including even the allotment of different residential areas to
different African ethnicities, some of them simply made up by apartheid bureaucrats. The
townships and Homelands or Bantustans – in practice: detention centers and slow death traps
for the indigenous masses who had been denied citizenship or seen it revoked – were
strategically placed to minimize potential organization and to make unity of resistance
impossible or nearly so. This is physical divide-and-rule. Israel apparently picked up on the
idea of Bantustans or Homelands from this strategic angle. Gaza and the West Bank do not
share a border, for exactly this reason. The current ‘cantonization’ of the West Bank is taking
this process yet another step further. In Palestine, and even more so in Lebanon, the Israelis
also utilized, amplified and brought about differences and conflicts that had already existed to

212
Manning 2010: 84ff. See, however, footnote 134 above – Jean Bingen denying that the Egyptian priests were
actually powerful under Ptolemaic rule. In South Africa, some of the Zulu and Xhosa kings who were loyal, or
who were perceived to be loyal, towards the Whites, kept their titles and some of their power, though the Whites
had effective veto power. See Mandela 1995 (1994): 6f. For Israel, see Bishara, Azmi: The Israeli Democracy!!
2001; Chomsky 21999: 544; Said December 17, 2000. Palestinian collaborators are sometimes to be found in
high places within the Palestinian National Authority. See Salam: The Palestinian Authority: Government or
Mafia? 2007.
 167

some extent between Christians and Muslims, or at least they tried to do so.213
Often, the practice of dividing resistance entails the provocation and creation of
violence between the indigenous groups. For instance, a so-called ‘Third Force’ of clandestine
apartheid regime defenders from 1990 to 1994 engineered and created the greatest loss of life
within the borders of South Africa during the 46 apartheid years in the narrow sense. That
violence was mainly carried out in ‘Black-on-Black’ fighting between supporters of the ANC,
many of whom were native Xhosa-speakers, and the Inkhatha Freedom Party, a
predominantly ethnic Zulu party and a Bantustan powerhouse (in comparison with other
Bantustans and with nearby weak, small, and poor states such as Swaziland and Lesotho,
which could be seen as British divide-and-rule creations). The Inkatha leadership also had
close ties to leaders at the highest levels within the white regime.214
The fragmentation usually involves the indigenous neighbors of the oppressed people.
Israel and its main ally, the USA, have for long divided Arab and Muslim countries in ways
very similar to how South Africa and its NATO allies (along with Rhodesia) actively divided
African countries, especially Angola and Mozambique but also Zambia and Congo, with
regard to apartheid. In parallel ways, mainly by arming and financing groups of mainly
indigenous bandits in the borderline states, South Africa and Israel developed techniques to
‘export’ their apartheid violence, Israel currently to Lebanon and to Iraq.215
Finally, all apartheid societies are strongly patriarchal. This is quite possibly the most
used and useful form of dividing the victimized indigenous majority within itself, although it
is, at the same time, probably the least conscious form of dividing the primary victims.
Resistance is thus split right down the middle. Every single family is affected. Of course, both
radical and not-so-radical gender theory holds this to be true for all human societies.216
Nevertheless, the high degree of sexism in apartheid is remarkable. It is a weapon that is
employed widely, whether consciously or unconsciously, by the overwhelmingly male elites,
on both sides of the apartheid divide, in such societies. And among the three relatively
successful apartheid societies studied here, it involves ‘femicide’, i.e. the murder of women
and girls simply because they are women and girls, within the conquered population. Of
course, the invading racial minority’s male elite is the main winner, but in such a severely
hierarchical society as an apartheid society there are considerable scraps of power and wealth
to be gained by the (surviving) predominantly male elites of the oppressed indigenous
majority as well.
In terms of physical violence, the patriarchal division of indigenous society is the most
acute of all apartheid divisions of resistance over time. It is possible for apartheid regimes to
provoke and create physical violence, even civil wars, between the Xhosa and the Zulu,
between Arab Christians and Muslims, between leftists and conservatives, between
213
Dumper: The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict, 2002: 113,
114; N.N.: Vandals Destroy Crosses at Beit Jala Cemeteries, December 4, 2000; Miftah: Statement: Israel
Attempts to Provoke Religious Discrimination Between Palestinian Christians and Muslims, 2000. The latter
source quotes the daily Israeli newspaper, Jerusalem Post, which published an article on October 25, 2000, which
is quoted as stating ‘…since the outbreak of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, hundreds of Christian
Arab families have left with the assistance of the [Israeli] Foreign Ministry and foreign embassies, such as those
of England, Canada, and Cyprus.’ The article continued by falsely asserting that Palestinian Christian families
felt threatened after a Muslim preacher in Gaza allegedly made hostile remarks against the Christian community
there. In response, all three embassies subsequently stated that they were concerned solely with the fact that any
person of their citizenship living in Israel or the Occupied Territories is their responsibility, whether Muslim,
Jewish, or Christian. The embassies carried out their protocol procedure of publicly announcing to their citizens
the arrangements for evacuation, should they wish to leave. On Lebanon, see Cook: Do America and Israel Want
the Middle East Engulfed by Civil War? 2006.
214
Some of these clandestine death squads consisted of white men who had smeared their faces with shoe polish
in order for there to be no nighttime passers-by at the crime scene who could identify them as white. Sometimes,
however, the disguise did not work. See Mandela 1995 (1994): 587ff; Ross 1999: 181, 187f; Barber 1999: 288ff.
215
See Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 306-344 and 229-262, respectively, and footnote 214 above.
216
Chapman 1995: 96ff
168

revolutionaries and negotiators, or between Islamists and the Palestinian National Authority,
at certain times and under particular circumstances, but in apartheid societies these more or
less engineered conflicts have not proven sustainable over decades. The ‘demographic wars’
and traditions of femicide, on the other hand, are invaluable resources for apartheid elites,
because they can and do, as we shall see in the following section, persist over and last for
centuries, or even longer. It is important to point out from the outset that I am not attempting
to reduce all indigenous violence to apartheid violence. Nor am I trying to reduce patriarchy
or femicide to apartheid phenomena. Sexism is certainly not reducible to racism. Indeed, as
we shall see in Section II.6, apartheid may be seen as a patriarchal strategy, just as sexism
may be seen as an apartheid strategy. Yet, nowhere, perhaps, do these two scourges mutually
reinforce each other so effectively as here, in the grey area, the realm of overlapping, between
apartheid and patriarchy, between racism and sexism.

Trauma and Schizophrenia as Consequences and Aspects of Apartheid

I do not wish to go too deeply into psychiatric or psychological diagnoses or
interpretations of what motivates the oppressors to commit gross human rights violations
against a foreign country’s indigenous majority, because I am not an expert. But, based upon
Edward Said’s last book and other sources, including my own experience, it is my view that
the issues dealt with summarily here are issues that deserve further study. I believe that
opportunism, racism, religious fervor, ideology in general, fear, greed, vanity, and various
psycho- and sociopathological structures may all play roles in the motivation of apartheid
perpetrators, and so, probably in each case, do some traumatic past, i.e. pre-apartheid,
individual and collective experiences.
French Protestant survivors, the so-called ‘Huguenots’, for example, who were almost
annihilated during the Catholic pogroms in their home country, came to another continent, to
a land which they came to claim as their own, by divine grace, and they even dropped their
language to take up Dutch (and Afrikaans). The numerous Afrikaners with French surnames
have not spoken French, certainly not as a first language, for centuries.
Similarly, the majority of the first generation of Israeli Jews also came to another
continent as survivors of Nazi and simultaneous or previous campaigns of genocidal mass
murder and persecution. They also claimed the land they invaded as their own, by divine
grace, and also dropped their mother tongues to (re-construct and) learn Hebrew, a language
that had not been used in the vernacular for over two millennia. Some of the people in Israel
today with German, Polish, Czech, Russian, etc, names have not spoken those languages
already for several generations.
The Greek elites in Egypt also used a language that had not been used in the
vernacular, though only for a couple of centuries in this case. They restored Attic Greek,
which is significantly different from the koine Greek used as a lingua franca in the region
since long before the time of the Greek conquest of Egypt. The changes of cultural identity
incurred by changing the mother languages and the natural and cultural environment
intercontinentally are sure to have had long-term effects on both personality and mentality, as
is, of course, the traumatic experience of persecution and genocide.
A traumatic past seems to have been self-inflicted more than anything else by the
Greeks, especially the Macedonian males, arriving in Ptolemaic Egypt. The Dutch who came
to South Africa were also more likely traumatized by their own actions, forced or prompted
by orders or even laws from above.217 Not unlike the Greek and Roman soldiers in Egypt,
many of them had been conquering, plundering, killing and destroying for years, even
decades, before they came to set up a new apartheid system – in the case of South Africa:
under supervision from the Netherlands and the Dutch East India Company.

217
Iliffe 1995: 125: ‘Seventeenth-century Dutch law was brutal to Dutchmen; to slaves [in South Africa] it was
unspeakably cruel.’
 169

Another case of victimization and the victimization syndrome developed later with the
Afrikaners, the indigenous ‘white tribe’ of mainly Dutch (but, again, also Huguenot and other)
origins in South Africa. When the British took over the Cape Colony and developed it, they
gradually phased out the Dutch system of slavery. (Incidentally, the British abolished slavery
primarily in their own long-term interest, not the slaves’, because they needed mass markets
for their pioneering industrial mass production of consumer commodities, i.e. they needed to
turn the slaves into wage-slaves who would also be part-time consumers of industrial
commodities.218) In protest and in defiance of the British, many Afrikaners then emigrated on
their ‘Great Trek’ inland and set up their own independent agricultural apartheid republics,
Transvaal (first known as the South African Republic), the Orange Free State and Natalia. By
the time British imperialists and settlers caught up, diamonds and gold had been found in
great quantities on Afrikaner-held territory and the British invaded and took over the
remaining Afrikaner republics during the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), confining many
Afrikaner civilians, including women and children, to concentration camps and even killing
thousands of them or at least letting them die there. 30,000 Afrikaners, a tenth of the entire
Afrikaner population at the time, died in this short war. Thus, the persecution syndrome
appears to have played a very significant role for South Africa’s as well as for Israel’s
apartheid elites.219 Especially the Afrikaners after 1902 are in many ways similar to the
European Jews in Israel after 1945. And apartheid in the narrow sense, i.e. South Africa after
1948, is therefore very similar to events and structures in Israel/Palestine since 1948.
Similarly, they also make the truly (or relatively) indigenous, the innocent, suffer for wrongs
done to them by others.
Of course, these past traumatic experiences and past victimizations of apartheid
perpetrators and their ancestors do not justify a single human rights violation carried out under
apartheid conditions, but they are important pieces of information from the interpretive and
strategic (or diagnostic and therapeutic) points of view. Palestinians, for example, should be
aware of the important roles of the Nazi genocide of Jews in Jewish mentalities. 220 To deny or
doubt the existence of that genocide against Jews, as is sometimes done in the criticism of
Israel, is a great disfavor, not only to Jews in general – who are, after all, not necessarily
Zionists – and not only to truth and justice, either. The Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma, and
others, is one of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated and it always needs to be
seen as such in this context too.
For lack of a better word, there is something ‘inventive’ about racism, when seen as a
psychological phenomenon. It constructs extremely elaborate justifications for its own acts of
oppression, murder and theft, including religious and pseudo-scientific ones, which could be
interpreted both as evil manipulations and as collective psychoses. These ‘psychoses’ do not,
however, stay put in the mental world, like the overwhelming majority of individual
psychoses do. Unlike most (?) individual psychoses, they are also state- and elite-sponsored
infirmities. They slam down on others, on real people, real communities, cultures, and even on
nature.
Aletta Norval, for example, refers to South African directives to white women as the
‘Beginnings of a Security Psychosis’. The evidence she presents is in the document, ‘Women
Our Silent Soldiers’, published by the Federal Council of the (ruling) National Party in South
Africa in 1978/79, which instructs white women to: ‘[m]ake a study of Marxism in your own
family, social or political circles and you will be shocked to learn under what guise the enemy
works in the circles in which you move’. The document further informs readers:

218
Iliffe 1995: 127-159; Ankomah: It’s Time to Pay, 1999: 16-19
219
McGregor: Israel Should Learn from the Boers, 2001; Iliffe 1995; Ross 1999: 72f.
220
There are actually two main versions of the Nazi genocide of Jews in Jewish mentalities: the one that really
took place, and the one that the ‘Holocaust Industry’ has created since 1967 and which has unfortunately become
the stronger one. See Finkelstein, N. 22003: 3ff. and Chapter II.9.3 below.
170

‘[C]ounter-offensive’ action has to be taken against domestic employees by

checking their identity documents for falsification; by ‘visiting’ their ‘dwelling
places’ regularly to establish whether ‘strangers’ were ‘harboured’ there; by
being on the look-out for literature of a Communist origin and books containing
manuals for terrorism; by inspecting the contents of suitcases and trunks for
false bottoms in which machine guns could be smuggled; by paying attention to
clothes not obtainable in South Africa; and in the rural areas, by being on the
look-out for ‘surfaces of footpaths that might have been disturbed’. Lists of
banned publications were provided to assist women in their quest for the safety
of their kinfolk.221

Although the paranoia appears to be real enough, apartheid psychoses do not seem to
make their main carriers ill in quite the same way that an individual psychosis does. On the
contrary, the carriers, i.e. the oppressors, empower themselves, enrich themselves and
flourish, even after apartheid (in a political sense) is long gone. They do, however, also seem
to suffer from fear, harden emotionally and lose much of their humanity. Their natural fertility
and birth rates plummet. And so the question whether they really are happy or not is, in my
opinion, well worth asking. In the next section we will look at the comparatively high rates of
suicide and mental disorders within the oppressive minority racial group. In my opinion the
individuals who are not prone to guilt feelings and bad conscience lead lives full of options
and opportunities aside from all the material wealth which their unfortunate compatriots of
different races lack; but even aside from the moral dimension these lives will still exhibit
uninspired and uninspiring emptiness and meaninglessness. Furthermore, the single common
denominator of all varieties of schizophrenia (including paranoia), the occurrence of
hallucinations, is omnipresent in apartheid.
In his last book, Edward Said dealt with Sigmund Freud’s last book, his interpretation
of the origins of Judaism. According to the Jewish Austrian psychoanalyst’s original and
partly compelling arguments, Moses, the legendary founder of Judaism, was not a Jew (how
could he have been?), but an ancient Egyptian. The collective Zionist identity of Jews as a
people, however, denies and represses the (normal and healthy) open system character and the
ultimate indefinability of ethnic or racial groups, at present especially through the modern
state of Israel. It treats ethnicity or race as a closed system, despite the obvious facts of human
coexistence and the co-mingling of all groups, represented by ‘Moses, the Egyptian’, in
Freud’s reading. In his foreword to Said’s book, Christopher Bollas describes how this
repression is correlated with hallucinations; ‘positive’ ones, for instance, Jews projecting their
own violence into the Palestinians, or, one might add, hallucinations (or more gently:
conspiracy theories) about always being victimized or persecuted, about Jews being unable to
commit atrocities, or about the divine selection or chosenness of Jews, as well as ‘negative’
hallucinations about people (Palestinians) who are not perceived (as people) at all. According
to psychoanalysis, in Bollas’ interpretation, this object relation is not only ‘toxic’ but
‘psychotic’.222

221
Norval: Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse, 1996: 203ff. Further on the psychopathology of apartheid:
Abashiya-Malepe: Apartheid und was sie bedeutet: Die psychologischen Effekte der Apartheid auf ihre Opfer
und die Änderung der verschiedenen Einstellungen ihr gegenüber, 1977.
222
Bollas: Introducing Edward Said, 2003: 5f. Bollas points out that the idea goes back to Said 1992 (1979); see
for example p. 82: “...all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is,
the functional absence of ‘native people’ in Palestine...”, see also 85f. Of course, Jews are far from being
completely deluded about being persecuted and victimized. Thus, judeophobia, especially European anti-Jewish
acts and attitudes, must also be held responsible for any Israeli apartheid psychosis. It must be reiterated in this
context that, although massive structural pressures mount to help cause mental illness in apartheid societies, there
must still be a measure of personal responsibility in apartheid killers. In fact, there is strong evidence that
suggests that neither state terrorists nor non-governmental terrorists are usually (any more) insane (than anyone
else). See N.N.: Terrorists Are Not Crazy, Says UK Psychiatrist, July 9, 2004. See also Balles: A World of
Psychopaths – The Superiority Complex of Psychopaths – and Israel and the US, 2006, and footnote 756 below.
 171

Many of the perpetrators are therefore driven insane by the system; and so are many of
the victims. Palestinian nationalism is not as destructive as Israeli nationalism is, but the
former does not have the tools of destruction that the latter has. As Jacqueline Rose points out,
however, in her afterword to Said’s thesis on Freud (with regard to both Palestinians and
Israelis): ‘the most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat it.’ 223 This should not
be interpreted as putting Israeli and Palestinian nationalism on the same moral level. One is a
perpetrator, the other a reaction. One is overwhelmingly exclusive, the other (mostly)
inclusive. But in individual cases the effects can be the same, especially in cases involving
physical violence. Nationalism kills, though it also saves lives by giving them meaning under
oppressive conditions. And, historically, that goes for Whites as well as for Blacks, for Jews
as well as Arabs. Jewish nationalism, for example, gave meaning to the lives of many Jewish
survivors of the Nazi genocide. It was precisely at the moment when Zionism became a
military strategy to de-Arabize Palestine and to steal Palestinian land that Zionism became
racist and criminal. Afrikaner nationalism similarly helped Afrikaners persevere under
atrocious conditions in British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War. South
African nationalism among non-Whites, as opposed to tribalism, has saved lives for decades
there, black African nationalism is saving lives in Africa and elsewhere, and Palestinian
nationalism saves lives in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere.
Nevertheless, black South Africans have not responded in kind to white invasion,
ethnic cleansing, or racist expropriation, discrimination, and oppression. They have not
repeated the trauma imposed upon them. And neither have the Egyptians upon Greeks, nor the
Palestinians upon Jews. In individual cases of criminal acts, this may well have been the case,
but not wholesale or collectively, and certainly not in the way that the apartheid perpetrators
were originally themselves victimized.
Joel Kovel has offered another psychological explanation for the same symptoms in
apartheid perpetrators. It is related to Said’s and Bollas’, and it may or may not contradict
them in the end: Zionists have a bad conscience about their treatment of the Palestinians, but
they attempt to justify their behavior by denying the humanity of the victims. In this way
‘…conscience is directly turned into enmity, and its judgmental quality turns into paranoia.
This nasty complex turns against the victims of Israeli expansion, against other Jews, and
even against the Zionist state as this tries to contend with reality while manipulating its attack
dog settlers.’224

On the excluded presence of black people in Afrikaner art, specifically in the celebrated 1930s paintings of
Jacobus H. Pierneef, pictures of unspoiled, beautiful South African nature without any people, unless white, see
Jantjes: Art and History, 2010. Jantjes also refers to the ‘psychosis of apartheid’. See further Pappe 2010: 2f, for
hallucinatory aspects of Zionism, i.e. Israeli apartheid. Interestingly, a weak part of the make-believe, Central-
European-like world built by European Jews around Haifa and elsewhere in Israel is not the hallucinations – the
propaganda is apparently too effective for that – but the non-hallucinatory elements, e.g. the pine trees brought in
the early days of the state of Israel from Europe to Mount Herzl in Jerusalem and to Mount Carmel where they
burned down catastrophically in December 2010. See Greenberg: Forest Fire Fuels Review of Israel’s Tree-
planting Tradition, 2010. Not only the market economy and humanity do not like apartheid; nature does not like
it, either.
223
Rose, Jacqueline: Response to Edward Said, 2003: 77. See Kovel 2007: 163 for the argument that Palestinian
nationalism in Palestine today is excusable in the face of Israeli nationalism, which is not excusable or
forgivable, since modern Israeli nationalism generates racism. See Pappe 2010: 182 for the idea that Zionism
became criminal when it started dispossessing the Palestinians and de-Arabizing Palestine. See also Sands 2009
(2008) and footnote 198 above.
224
Kovel 2007: 181. Yet another related theory of Israeli psychopathology is the theory of ‘splitting’: Israeli
Jews frequently split the world into good people, ‘right, pure, moral, just, victimized’, and bad. They identify the
Jews as good and Palestinians as bad. There are no people who are mixtures of good and bad in this view. See
Rothchild: Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, 22010:
36, 39, and Hedges: Why Israel Lies, 2014. Finally, Gilad Atzmon localizes Zionist ‘schizophrenia’ among
Diaspora Jews, who want statehood for Jews, so that Jews can ‘be like everybody else’, like Italians, Germans,
Swedes, etc., though this is an inauthentic attempt at identity, which ends up as totally defined by negations. All
of these negations then make Jews unlike everybody else, i.e. unique, i.e. chosen (Atzmon: The Wandering
172

However we prefer to define or diagnose it, Israeli-Jewish nationalism remains an

acutely and overwhelmingly pathological phenomenon. Instead of applying Freud’s cure of
undoing mental repression, for instance, the Israeli army in 2004 started administering Delta-9
Tetrohydrocannabinol, the active ingredient of marijuana, to veterans of the Israeli armed
forces with post-traumatic stress disorders in order to suppress unwanted memories. No doubt,
it will help at least some of them through otherwise sleepless nights. But an end to the
occupation would be infinitely more successful. Moreover, suppression of memories is
exactly the disease that psychoanalysis treats. The state of Israel, on the other hand, is treating
the cure as if it were the disease, and thus, no doubt, creating new outbreaks of the mental
disease. Israel is anti-psychoanalytic in the Freudian sense. (What is the effect of the therapy
on the mental lives of these soldiers or ex-soldiers when they are awake?) Another effect of
marijuana, to relax the body and mind, is – however – illegal in Israel and harshly punished. If
soldiers who are not yet officially ‘traumatized veterans’ use it, they can expect to lose their
ranks or be thrown into military jail.225 There is ample evidence of double-bind, of potentially
schizophrenia-triggering situations, in this combination of policies, especially for young
soldiers. Even more kinds of double-bind situations are omnipresent in apartheid: the
terminologically demographic concoctions that make a 15 percent minority the most populous
‘nation’ in the country (South Africa), the denial of Palestinian history in the face of ruins of
Palestinian houses or even inside intact and stolen Palestinian houses. In my view, apartheid
contributes to and even creates schizophrenia and mental as well as physical and structural
repression, positive and negative hallucinations, and violence.

Love and Cooperation versus Crimes against Humanity, and Worse

Luckily, the techniques of racist and apartheid propaganda, and apartheid medication,
have not (yet) been refined enough to make a whole population, even an oppressive invading
racial minority, prone to its debilitating ideology and its destructive and criminal practices.
There are many members of the elite race who can see through the lies and the manipulations,
and who escape the collective madness; and there are some who decide to oppose injustice, to
fight apartheid, in some instances paying an extremely high price for that decision.
There are sometimes even examples of friendship, love, cooperation on equal terms,
and mutual cultural and economic enrichment across the divide, between the two main racial
groups in each apartheid society.226 But this investigation is not about that. My aim here is to

Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, 2011). See also Chapters II.9.3 and III.1 below on the specifics of the
Jewish superiority complex (to which some, but not all, Jews and some non-Jews are drawn) and its symptoms in
apartheid Israel/Palestine.
225
Heller, C.: Israel to Soothe Battle Trauma with Marijuana, 2004. Israel is also trying out
methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), also known as ‘ecstasy’, on war veterans and victims of violent
crime with behavioral disorders. See Kotler: MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy in Twelve People with War and
Terrorism-related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 2006. The greatest cause of death among Israeli
soldiers during 2003 was not Palestinian resistance or Palestinian violence, nor accidents or ‘friendly fire’. It was
suicide, yet another common symptom of schizophrenia. See Caruso: Suicide is the Leading Cause of Death in
Israeli Army, 2004.
226
See, for instance, Ridberg: Jewish Bomb Victim’s Kidney Saves Palestinian Girl, 2002; Immanuel:
Palestinian Boy’s Organs Give Israelis New Life, 2003; Holmes: A Jew No More, Israeli Woman Lives as
Palestinian, 2002. Ridberg reports how the kidney of a Jew killed in a Palestinian suicide attack was used by
physicians to save the life of a young Palestinian girl. According to Immanuel, the family of a Palestinian boy
from Nablus in the West Bank who died in an accident authorized the donation of the boy’s organs to Israelis
over the objections of the family’s neighbors, who were angered by Israeli occupation and attacks. Four Israeli
children survived due to the donation. Holmes describes a Jewish Israeli woman who fell in love with and
married a Palestinian, converted to Islam and resides in Palestinian-ruled Gaza City since 1990. The spouses
spoke Arabic with their children but Hebrew with each other. Similarly, the existence of a so-called ‘Coloured’,
i.e. mixed-race population in South Africa, six percent of the entire population, is testimony to mutually
beneficial interrelations as well, though not only so. Many Coloureds are of course the result of rape or otherwise
forced sexual relationships, by white men upon black women. (Some of the Coloureds are also descendants of
the Khoikhoi, the original inhabitants of the Cape, who were not classified as ‘Black’ by the Whites, and who
 173

detect a structure of violence and oppression, a structure that I believe is crucial and indeed
defining of such a society, despite some counter-instances on the levels of individuals, and of
relatively small and powerless groups. A strengthening of this kind of interaction, however, is
my primary wish, and we will look into some of the realistic (and some not so realistic)
possibilities for peace along with the search for a necessary minimum of justice in Part III.
South African Whites who were opposed to apartheid did in the end play an important role in
bringing down that odious system in their home country. There are at least as many Israeli
Jews adamantly opposed to apartheid in their country, but so far they lack resources to effect
change, for example, they lack the mass media dissemination possibilities that were
eventually (by the late 1980s) afforded their dissenting white South African predecessors by
the global media corporations and other global elites, and that is no accident (see Chapter
II.9.3). Indeed, many of them are in jail, for refusing military service, or kept busy with court
cases on the same or similar charges, or even on charges of treason. The courageous John
Vanunu, who outed Israel’s enormous nuclear arsenal in the 1980s, spent years in a solitary
confinement prison cell, and since his ‘release’ he is forbidden by an Israeli court order from
leaving the country or speaking to journalists or foreigners. (This is a country that calls itself
‘Western’. See Chapter II.9.3 below.) Other oppositional Israeli Jews are in more or less
forced exile, though of course by far not as many as the Palestinians, the majority of whom
are refugees.
As elaborated in the previous section, my whole investigation may seem to some as a
biased way of looking at apartheid, as a sole perspective, namely from the point of view of the
indigenous population. But I am convinced that the main perpetrators and their supporters and
allies desperately need to become aware of and realize this perspective. It may seem a shock
to some, but it is, in my opinion, the only way to achieving anything even approaching peace
on equal terms, which is the only basis for justice, which in turn is the only thing that can
guarantee a lasting peace. And I am in no way uncritical of resistance strategies, which have
left a lot to be desired, in all apartheid societies. Most of all, I have failed to see a
continuously prioritized agenda of human rights (or of cultural diversity or of biodiversity)
among the resistance groups, i.e. the moral high ground demanded by Edward Said.
Apartheid was first condemned as a ‘crime against humanity’ by the United Nations in
1966 (General Assembly Resolution 2202), then in the 1968 Proclamation of Tehran by the
International Conference on Human Rights, then in numerous other UN resolutions and
conventions. It was declared a crime against humanity in stronger forms of international law
in the Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions in 1977, and in the 1999 Statute
of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002. 227 I believe the same
label can and should be applied to my widened concept of apartheid, which is not diluted in
any way. It does not contain anything that lessens the scope or the severity of human rights
violations in comparison with South Africa from 1948 to 1994. On the contrary, it makes the
concept of apartheid inclusive of more instances of human rights violations, some arguably
even worse than those that occurred between 1948 and 1994 in South Africa, i.e. the
numerous overlaps with genocide. My definition is in the spirit of international law. From a
scientific, contemporary perspective, I am thus investigating a specific system or structured
pattern of grave human rights abuses, that also happens to be a crime against humanity.
My two modern examples, especially Israel’s brand of apartheid, might even be seen
as bigger crimes than ‘merely’ against Humanity. The production and partial use of ABC
(atomic, biological and chemical) weapons and the deliberate poisoning of soil, air, and water
are at least potentially crimes against Life itself. They could wipe out whole species and

suffered cultural genocide, as well as a nearly fully-fledged physical one, and of Southeast Asian slaves, once a
majority of Dutch Cape Colony inhabitants: kidnapped, transplanted and imported to South Africa by the Dutch
during the 17th and 18th centuries.)
227
Tilley (ed.): 50; N.N.: A United Nations Priority: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no date; N.N.:
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1999. See also footnote 4 above.
174

render vast areas of land and water unfit for life in any form, or in any advanced form, in
some cases for at least hundreds of thousands of years. It should be added, however, that
neither South Africa nor Israel invented any of the main varieties of ABC weapons as such,
although they certainly cooperated with the military powers that did (in particular the USA
and the other NATO powers) and have also worked further on and succeeded in developing
these particularly lethal, ignoble, dangerous, and most cowardly techniques of killing.
 175

1. Violence
This is the unknown grave
The one who died maintaining his might
His will had been so strong and musically inclined
His sad melody is coming out like smoke from the wood fire
Confessing
Who died last night
Who died this morning
And why.
One dangerous mind
And four million graves
Look down into that grave
And do not weep.
Skeleton confessing
The loss of music and culture and beliefs
Skeleton confessing
The age of lamentations
And the age of broken minds and souls.
I picked up the soil
From this unknown grave
And blew it in the wind
As to make reference one day
And I say Mayibuye iAfrica [Let Africa return]
(Vusi Mahlasela)228

The use of physical force fulfils multiple functions in the service of the oppressive
racial minority in an apartheid society. It breaks down counter-violence and resistance to
conquest and oppression, it helps clear space for more invaders, and it bullies, threatens,
intimidates, wearies and frightens the remaining conquered people, and any allies they may
make among the new arrivals, into humiliation, submission, servitude, cooperation and
collaboration with the new elite. In apartheid, the invaders are the ones collectively
responsible for starting the violence, and at least as long as an apartheid society exists, the
violence engendered by it never stops, although there are vicissitudes.
A second kind of apartheid violence, counter-violence, or ‘reverse’ violence,
perpetrated by the oppressed and their allies, must be seen as legitimate to some extent, not
only due to the Geneva Conventions, a pillar of international law that allows self-defense
against foreign invasion and occupation because of the ultimate provocation contained in the
very concepts of invasion and occupation, but also since it is simply not the case that any
adult members of an oppressive apartheid minority can be considered unequivocally as
civilians in the war that apartheid is.229 Almost all of them, including sometimes their

228
Mahlasela: When You Come Back, 2010 (1992)
229
Manuel Castells points out that, ever since Antonio Gramsci’s original analysis of the concept, ‘civil society’
is best considered to consist of people on the one hand, and extensions of state power on the other. ‘It is precisely
this double character of civil society that makes it a privileged terrain of political change by making it possible to
seize the state without launching a direct, violent assault.’ Castells: The Information Age: Economy, Society and
Culture, Volume II, The Power of Identity, 1997: 8f, quote: 9; see also Said: Orientalism, 1979 (1978): 6f. This
is true for all societies, but the extension of state power is no doubt particularly strong in a civil society
consisting of an oppressive racial minority which came to power through a de facto invasion and established a
state of its own, i.e. within the oppressive class in an apartheid society. Civil society is therefore comparatively
weak in an apartheid society. As I argued in the previous section, it is a highly mobilized as well as racialized
society, a society in a state of war. Of course, this should not be interpreted in any way so as to diminish the legal
and moral responsibilities of individuals belonging to the oppressive classes: on the contrary. They are not just
subjects of the state. They are also its most privileged class. They, or at least some of them, run and even own the
state.
176

descendants over many generations, even if these have left the apartheid country for good,
profit personally in some way or other from the gross human rights violations inflicted on the
indigenous people. In Israel, moreover, both (Jewish) men and women are conscripted to
military service. Resistance against apartheid can therefore be interpreted as self-defense. And
self-defense, to paraphrase Malcolm X, is not violence, it is intelligence.230
Nevertheless, only immediate and direct self-defense could in my opinion ever totally
exonerate someone from killing or maiming a fellow human being. By ‘immediate and direct’,
I mean in response to clear and present danger to human life. But it must also always be kept
in mind that most of the resistance against apartheid is non-violent in character. It would
simply not be intelligent or even near-at-hand to choose violent resistance as a first tactic or
strategy against such an obviously militarily superior and ruthless foe, at the very latest once
the initial conquest is completed. Unfortunately the world media hardly show or reflect upon
the non-violent resistance at all. They are mainly or only interested in showing bloodshed and
dramatic and sensational destruction as representative of the apartheid conflict, especially if it
has been carried out against the racial group with which the most influential media
gatekeepers, still mainly western, and still mainly pro-apartheid, sympathize (see Section II.9
below). Thus, Palestinian and Arab crimes against Israelis get more media coverage, just as
black crimes against white South Africans did and still do, than the vast majority of violent
apartheid (and epiapartheid) crimes, which are carried out against members of the indigenous,
non-White and non-Jewish populations.
Members of the oppressive apartheid minority, however, should in my view never be
totally exonerated from killing or maiming any member of the oppressed population (or
anyone else opposing apartheid) in an apartheid society, even if there is clear and present
danger, simply because they should not be there under those circumstances. Yet that is exactly
what happens most of the time: the vast majority of killings are carried out with full impunity
by the apartheid elites and their instruments, their robots and their pawns. No matter what
other circumstances there are, there can in my view never be any justification for an absolute
moral excuse, a clearing of all guilt, through reference to self-defense for any member of an
invading and oppressive racial group or any ally thereof for the killing or wounding of a
member of the oppressed one, or of anyone else actively or passively resisting or merely
standing in the way of the gross human rights violations that define apartheid. The Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa attempted and to some extent succeeded in
putting this tenet into effect by honoring victims of apartheid and by shaming those who
admitted guilt, although they were mostly also granted amnesty for their crimes. This was
done mainly for the purpose of national reconciliation, but perhaps also due to a heavily
Christian attitude towards the concepts of justice, sin, and forgiveness permeating the TRC,
and certainly also due to structural pro-White bias as a result of white military strength in
South Africa during the negotiations leading up to the creation of democracy and the TRC,
and additionally, of course, as a result of the centuries-old, brutally won, and still well-
entrenched white power throughout the world.
Apartheid cannot be excused – although some of its constituent crimes may thus be
forgiven or amnestied on an individual basis – because apartheid is and remains a crime
against humanity. Resistance against it, even armed resistance, however, is not. The only
exception is when people who can be considered unequivocally as civilians – such as any
children and many others who cannot be held responsible for apartheid – are targeted with

230
‘I don’t even call it violence, when it’s self-defense. I call it intelligence.’ Quoted in the motion picture, Do
the Right Thing, produced, written and directed by Spike Lee, 1989, a Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks
Production. (Concerning the name of Lee’s film production company: Forty acres of land and a mule were
initially promised to each freed slave by members of the US government, but the promise was never fulfilled.
The former US slaves and their descendants, like those of the British Empire and of all other European powers,
have to date received nothing at all in reparation for what is arguably the greatest crime against humanity in all
of human history. See further, footnote 858 below; Preface above.)
 177

deadly force by those resisting apartheid.231 In such cases of apartheid violence, the main
responsibility, the primary liability, can in my view no longer rest with the perpetrators of
apartheid, i.e. with the oppressive racial minority elites, although they must, in my opinion,
still carry some of the legal responsibility, even for such cases.
There is not just a grey, amorphous mass of crimes against humanity, each as bad as
the next. We tend to forget this, perhaps mainly because the powerful authors of crimes
against humanity so often cover their tracks, and even if they are caught they tend to either
find or conjure up ‘fall guys’, i.e. people who must take the blame and the fall for them. The
crimes, even the crimes against humanity, committed to resist apartheid were so far never
ultimately provocative, but, on the contrary, provoked crimes. Nor were they, as we shall now
see, ever of the magnitude of the crime of apartheid itself in terms of casualties and
destruction wrought, and they are never likely to be so, due both to the military inferiority of
the oppressed majority and to the exceptional criminal ruthlessness needed to set up and
perpetuate an apartheid system. The perpetrators of apartheid are so far responsible for the
vast majority of killings as long as apartheid lasts, especially for atrocities such as the
slaughter of innocent civilians, as well as for the vast majority of cases of other kinds of
violence.
A third kind of apartheid violence, as physical in content and effect as the other two, is
more complicated with regard to responsibility. I am referring to the violent effects of
apartheid elite ‘divide and rule’ policies as well as the indigenous responsibilities behind this
kind of violence, e.g. the ANC-Inkatha civil war in early 1990s South Africa, or the Hamas-
Fatah civil war in recent years. The perhaps least known of these kinds of violence is what I
will refer to as the ‘demographic war’, a term often used to label an aspect of the violence in
Israel and Palestine that is not readily subsumable under the category of physical violence
between Israelis and Palestinians but is nevertheless intimately related to the conflict. The
main form of physical violence in my concept of demographic war is ‘femicide’, a term
coined to call attention to the many instances in which women and girls are killed because
they are women and girls. Femicide is a category of systematic crime that is sometimes
carried out by women, but it is a patriarchal phenomenon: it is always in the interest, or in the
perceived interest, of male elites, and it is carried out for that reason.232

231
As can be seen throughout this section this happened, or most probably happened, in all apartheid societies.
Members of the oppressive minority in a racist state who are neither unequivocally civilians nor non-civilians,
but who are not directly threatening to kill members of the oppressed majority, can in my opinion not be
legitimate targets either. To target or even to kill them is not a crime against humanity, such as the murder of
children, but it is a crime. It is murder, or at least manslaughter, albeit with a few additional extenuating
circumstances, especially if the victims have the vote (as both South African White and Israeli Jewish adults did
and do), if the victims are armed, if they live on stolen land whose rightful owners have been murdered or chased
away, and/or if they are otherwise personally reaping the benefits of apartheid. Particularly if the rightful owners
were first chased away by the very same persons later killed, then killing them must certainly be considered as
something less serious than murder in the first degree. Both Palestinian and South African freedom fighters have
made themselves guilty of both kinds of transgressions. See, for instance, Al-Mughrabi: Amnesty Condemns
Palestinian Attacks on Israelis, 2002; N.N.: Israel and the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian Authority:
Without Distinction - Attacks on Civilians by Palestinian Armed Groups, July 11, 2002; Ackerman, G.: Amnesty
Criticises Israel, Palestinian Militants, 2003. See further, Part III, Sections 2-6 below, and footnote 21 above.
232
Abu-Lughod: The Demographic War for Palestine, 1986; Bishara, M.: Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid:
Occupation, Terrorism and the Future, 22002 (2001): 104-106 (chapter on ‘Israel’s Demographic War’);
Löwstedt: The Main Victims in the Israeli-Palestinian Demographic War Are Palestinian Women, 2005; Radford
& Russell: Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, 1992; Russell & Harmes (eds.): Femicide in Global
Perspective, 2001; Löwstedt: Femicide in Apartheid, in Pappe (ed.): Peoples Apart: Israel, South Africa and the
Apartheid Question, 2014 (forthcoming). I first became fully aware of the importance of femicide within
apartheid on Easter Monday 2005 in Jerusalem. During a very unusual lull in the second Intifada, no Palestinians
had been killed by Israelis over the Easter weekend, but three young Palestinian women were murdered by
Palestinians in ‘honor’ killings in Ramallah and Jerusalem. I experienced this as a continuation or extension of
the main apartheid violence, which is Israeli violence against Palestinians, but also as something else: as a form
of violence that straddles racism and sexism, and in which both victims and perpetrators of the killings are
178

In each of the three apartheid societies that are under investigation here, there is a
peculiar form of indigenous femicide, in Graeco-Roman Egypt female genital mutilation, in
South Africa ‘witch’-burnings, and in Palestine and Israel ‘honor’ killings. None of them are
unique to those countries or communities. The perpetrators, the murderers carrying out the
killings, are all indigenous in these instances. Mostly, they are related to the victims, except in
the case of South Africa, although they are mostly known to the victims there too. In Graeco-
Roman Egypt Greeks and Romans also practiced (mainly female) infanticide on their own
babies, a fourth form of femicide. All apartheid racial elites have practiced rape-murder of
indigenous women and girls, a fifth form. By deliberately withholding or preventing access to
existing pre- and postnatal medical services as well as childbirth facilities for indigenous
women, the racial elites of both apartheid South Africa and Israel have also indulged in a sixth
form of femicide (as well as ungendered racist infanticide, see Section II.6, below).
I believe the following arguments are strong enough to subsume these kinds of
homicide under apartheid violence without reducing them to apartheid violence. The only
exception is the fourth form, which is the only one targeting females of the elite race and
should be seen as a leftover from pre-apartheid Greek and Roman customs. (It is also
testimony to the remarkable tenacity and longevity of traditions of femicide, as we shall see in
the following.)
Due to the racist immigration pressure along with the ethnic cleansing, the indigenous
racial groups in apartheid societies invariably develop a higher birth rate than the invaders.
This may be seen as a kind of self-defense on the part of the indigenous: more fighters, more
votes, and more leverage with regard to socio-economic factors. (We will look at this in a
more detailed manner in the next section, on apartheid repopulation.) In order to keep up this
higher birth rate, over generations, indigenous women who do not marry early or who
intentionally avoid having (many) children are targeted with deadly violence as are those who
encourage young women to self-realization, i.e. to make something out of their lives aside
from marrying and having children. Apartheid South Africa and Israel have given rise to
indigenous population explosions, to some of the world’s highest fertility rates. Thus, both
indigenous men and women, but mainly women, are killed by representatives of the
indigenous patriarchy in the demographic war. The invaders and their descendants must, in
my opinion, be held responsible firstly for strongly prompting the high indigenous birth rates
and secondly for encouraging indigenous patriarchy in this way, whether it be conscious or
not. But, as is the case with violent resistance against apartheid, there are also indigenous
responsibilities for these killings, including what must be considered as reasons for charging
the perpetrators with murder in the first degree. There was of course indigenous violence in
each society before the apartheid invaders arrived, but the apartheid conditions have
exacerbated some kinds of that violence, and in some cases apartheid may have brought about
new kinds of violence between groups within the indigenous population. There are also, of
course, other forms of violence between indigenous individuals and groups, i.e. common
crimes, which should best be treated independently of apartheid.
The way in which indigenous men are violated, abused, exploited, humiliated, and
culturally emasculated makes it almost necessary for the apartheid elites to ensure that there is
a class of people, out of sight of the elites, whom indigenous men can terrorize in turn. If these
men did not have their own women and children, and other men, to oppress, then they would
certainly rebel sooner, more desperately, and more violently against the apartheid elites.233

Palestinian. I then drew the structural parallels for myself with femicide in South Africa and in Egypt almost
immediately.
233
Ross 1999: 159 makes exactly the same point: White males made sure that black women remained dependent
on black male income in apartheid South Africa, so that the black males could come home from their demeaning
jobs and experiences at the end of the day and take out their aggressions and frustrations on them rather than
attempt to overthrow the existing social and political order. See also Steve Biko’s extended treatment of this
issue, footnote 332 below.
 179

There would have been more suicidal and more lethal attacks, in any case more militant
activity.
Because of their superiority in military terms, but also due to their strongly racist
mindset, which, as we shall see later, includes an effective ideological dehumanization and
demonization of their enemies, and of their perceived enemies, apartheid perpetrators usually
carry out provocations as well as extremely disproportionate armed actions in response to
armed as well as unarmed, violent as well as non-violent resistance.234 Added to this is the
paranoid, and in effect sometimes genocidal, sentiment that members of the privileged race
have some kind of racial duty to keep the numbers of the indigenous people in check by
whatever means they have at their disposal, a far from uncommon disposition among leading
members of the racial elite. The ruling racial minority cannot expect its population to keep
shrinking in relative terms without expecting qualitative change. In this sense, there is and can
be no smooth or gradual development from full-blown apartheid into colonialism. Apartheid
violence is therefore also less continuous than, for instance, land ownership or demographic
apartheid developments are. Similarly, there is no gradual loss of formal state sovereignty.
Under apartheid, finally, life in general is overwhelmingly perceived by the members of the
self-reified, self-racialized class as a perpetual zero-sum struggle for survival, although there
are, especially in the modern world, more than enough means for survival available to all
human beings.

1.1. Invasion, Uprising, Clampdown, Female Infanticide and Genital

Mutilation
The Ptolemies controlled Egypt in the first place by their military
presence, consisting of military settlers on the land, garrisons in key
places, and requisitioning of housing from the indigenous population
for the troops. Greeks took over much of the better land. There was for
a long time no actual use of force, merely its presence and threat, and
the Ptolemaic regime can be described as douce rather than dure. But
it was all the same a regime in which force was the ultimate guarantor
of foreign domination, and actual force had to be used to repress
various rebellions.235

There were indeed several armed uprisings by the Egyptians, both under Greek and
Roman rule, and they were all eventually suppressed in bloody clampdowns. The most
famous and successful revolt took place in 207 BCE, when most of Upper Egypt (Egypt south

234
Hauser: ICRC Concerned over Casualties in Mideast Conflict, 2002. The article quotes the president of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, as being deeply worried about the Israeli use of
‘disproportionate force’ in the ongoing conflict. There is, however, a certain danger involved in this kind of
terminology, since it explicitly only blames Israeli retaliations for being over-reactions, not mentioning other
Israeli acts of violence and thereby implicitly suggesting that Israeli acts of violence are usually or in essence
retaliations, that Israeli force is disproportionate to Palestinian attacks. As we shall see in Chapter II.9.3, many
western mainstream news media help Israelis to spread this illusion by grossly mislabeling most Israeli acts of
violence as ‘retaliations’ or presenting them as such with other words, whereas in reality they are often simply
unprovoked acts of violence, carried out for reasons of racist hate or for (perceived) personal or collective Israeli
Jewish gain. However, acts of violence perpetrated by Palestinians, which are in fact almost always essentially
retaliations, are only very seldom seen or referred to as such abroad, but rather as provocations, as ‘attacks’. This
gross misrepresentation is mainly due to the victimization of all of us by apartheid ideology and by frequently
coinciding elite interests on a global scale, which go far beyond merely Israeli and Jewish interests. See further
Chapter II.9.3.
235
Bagnall 1997: 236f. In comparison with many other contemporary commentators, Bagnall seems to be rather
sympathetic towards the Greeks and Romans in Egypt. Among other things, one notices this in the quoted
phrase: ‘…force had to be used…’ (The Greeks could also have simply given up their own privileges.) See also
below.
180

of the Nile delta), and some additional communities in the delta, were liberated until 186
BCE.
Upper Egypt under indigenous rule during the Ptolemaic era should not be compared
to the South African and Israeli-Palestinian ‘Bantustans’, the small and fragmented ‘states’,
‘statelets’, or ‘state-like entities’ that were (and are) formed by the oppressive racial
minorities for the auto-policing of the oppressed majorities, among other reasons in order to
appease international criticism of apartheid policies and practices, in particular well-founded
charges of being anti-democratic, but also in order to lower white and Jewish, respectively,
police and security force casualties during armed confrontations, and, last but not least, in
order to deny citizenship and related rights (including rights to land stolen by the invaders) to
large portions of the indigenous population.
No, Upper Egypt was liberated in the real sense of the term, after over 120 years of
Greek apartheid, though apparently only due to a momentary military weakness of the
Ptolemaic state, which was also busy waging war in Asia at the time. There was support from
Nubia – much like Israel’s or South Africa’s independent neighbors – for the insurgents, who
instated two native Upper Egyptian kings during the two decades of indigenous rule. The
second and last ruling king during this 21-year long intermezzo, Ankhwennefer, was
eventually captured yet pardoned by the Ptolemies, an indication that they realized the
importance and potential counter-productivity of martyrization of leaders of the resistance, not
unlike the prevailing apartheid elite attitude towards Nelson Mandela, who also faced the
death penalty by an apartheid state nearly 22 centuries later and almost a whole continent
away, but very similarly had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment with hard labor
instead. As a whole, the partial victory over apartheid in 207 BCE could also be compared to
the liberation of most of Palestine from crusader rule by the forces of Salah ad-Din in 1187;
because soon the apartheid invaders would rule over Jerusalem again. (See Section I.4 above.)
Later (and possibly earlier) leaders of revolts, as opposed to Ankhwennefer, were
brutally tortured and killed. So were many of their followers, and many others, too. On at least
two occasions, Ptolemy V vowed to the ‘rebels’ that he would spare their lives if they gave up
their struggle. But after they had capitulated he broke his promise and had the subversives
executed anyway. The methods of executing Egyptians included the cruelest, slowest, most
tormenting and humiliating ways of killing known at the time. Some of the victims were
crucified, some were impaled on wooden poles, and others were dragged naked behind horse
carts until they died.236 So much for the ‘douce’ character of the Ptolemaic regime.
In 169-168 BCE, another major uprising erupted. It coincided with the invasion of
most of the country by Antioch IV, another ethnic Greek who ruled the Seleucid kingdom,
based in Syria, yet another inheritance of Alexander’s conquests and yet another society with
strong apartheid characteristics. Apparently, all Egyptians, with the exception of a small
number of priests,237 joined the Seleucid invaders to fight the Greek-led Ptolemaic
government forces. They were almost successful this time, but the combined Greek-Syrian
and Egyptian forces were still unable to take the capital, Alexandria, from the Ptolemies. Due
to Roman military intervention and political and diplomatic pressure upon him, Antioch
eventually retreated from Egypt. The Egyptians, however, recommenced their uprising shortly
afterwards, perhaps with some military aid from Antioch’s forces. The Greeks then mobilized

236
Huß 2001: 506-512
237
Parsons 2007: 32 mentions an excavated placard from the time of early Greek rule in Egypt, which “…says in
block capitals ‘KEEP OUT. THIS HOUSE BELONGS TO A PRIEST’ – a warning to marauding Greek
soldiers.” It appears that priests were chosen by the Greek invaders as collaborators at a very early stage of their
rule, or perhaps even before it. The most important difference between Ptolemaic and Seleucid apartheid may
have been that the Greek soldiers and settlers mostly lived in cities and towns in the latter. The more widespread
presence of Greeks in the Egyptian than the Asian countryside is likely to have made Greek rule more stable as
well as more intensely exploitative in Egypt. See Crawford: Kerkeosiris: An Egyptian Village in the Ptolemaic
Period, 1971: 51f.
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the Jews, the third largest racial group in Egypt at this time, who had their own reasons not to
support Antioch. He had earlier attacked Jews in Palestine. The violent conflict in Egypt
ravaged the country for another five years before Ptolemy VI, the Greeks, and the Jews finally
came out victorious.238 The Jews were richly rewarded for their loyalty towards the Greeks.
They now married into the upper Greek classes and gained access to the highest levels in the
administration, the military, and the royal court.239 At least during the immediately following
period, the Jews in Egypt seem to have risen in status above their intermediate ethnicity
apartheid counterparts, the Coloreds and Indians in South Africa and the East Asians and
(non-Jewish) eastern Europeans in modern Israel. But things would not remain that way.
Under Roman rule especially, but also during the rule of Ptolemy VIII, anti-Jewish pogroms
were carried out repeatedly.
The liberated Upper Egypt from 207 until 186 BCE was the only widely
acknowledged Egyptian-led state on that territory during the entire period of Graeco-Roman
dominance. Nonetheless, Greeks and Romans failed to ever achieve complete control.
Throughout the ten centuries of their rule, lawless bands persisted, especially in Upper Egypt.
Despite heavy punishment and perpetual military occupation, hold-ups and robberies were
never stamped out: ‘[B]rigandage remained endemic in Roman Egypt, inveterate and
ineradicable in good times, a menace increasing to near crisis proportions in bad.’ During the
beginning of Roman rule, especially, there were also, again, several desperate Egyptian
uprisings.240
Due to the fact that the dominant group is a minority, crudely basing its dominance on
violence or the threat thereof, complete control in the strict sense has remained an illusion
within apartheid societies. Therefore, a high level of civilian violent crime, which also
characterizes South Africa and Israel/Palestine, could empirically be considered a necessary
ingredient in such societies, even after the formal political system of systematic human rights
violations is no longer present, as in present-day South Africa. Violence begets violence, and
if it cannot be directed back at the real enemy, it will invariably be directed inwards,
victimizing the innocent and the relatively innocent.241 In Palestine itself, however, crime

238
Huß 2001: 553-567. Huß finds it ‘strange’ (553) that the Egyptians joined Antioch IV against the Ptolemaic
monarchy, although he is aware of the discrimination and oppression to which the Egyptians were subject at the
hands of the Ptolemies and of the other Greeks in Egypt. He could be referring to the fact that Antioch was also
Greek and was also an oppressive and racist ruler in a nearby country. But that is mere speculation on my part.
And I do not see how the situation of ancient Syrians, who had a vastly different culture and spoke another
language than the Egyptians did, could be so important to the Egyptians, more important indeed than their own.
Moreover, the proximity between Egypt and Syria two millennia ago should not be judged using today’s
massively improved transport and communication technologies, practices and standards.
239
Ibid: 590f. For example, a Jew and a Greek shared the supreme command over the Ptolemaic armed forces
during this time. See Clauss: Alexandria: Schicksale einer antiken Weltstadt, 2003: 61.
240
Lewis, N. 1983: 203f; Bowman 1996 (1986): 30f; Hölbl 2001: 307; Lembke, Fluck & Vittmann: Ägyptens
späte Blüte: Die Römer am Nil, 2004: 25; Green 2007: 127f.
241
Stoddard: South Africa’s Mbeki Faces Huge Crime Challenge, 2000: ‘In fairness to Mbeki and his
government, some of the biggest causes of crime in South Africa [which today has one of the highest rates of
violent crime in the world, perhaps even the highest], including poverty and income disparities, are legacies of
apartheid.’ And it goes further than that: ‘Apartheid society was also ridden with mental stress and violence.
Suicides were exceptionally frequent among white South Africans. Murder was a frequent cause of death among
Africans and Coloureds.’ Thompson 1990: 204; see also Abashiya-Malepe 1977. Mental disorders were also
spreading anew in the Holy Land following the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Israelis are jumpy about suicide
bombers, but the Palestinians are even harder hit. In 2002, an estimated ninety percent of Palestinian children in
the Occupied Territories suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, manifesting itself with aggression,
sleeping problems, loss of appetite and depression, all due to Israeli closures, bombings, and the shootings.
McAskill: Children Are New Martyrs of Gaza, 2002. See also Goldin: Palestinian Children’s Dreams Haunted
by Bloodshed, 2000; Holmes: Gaza Palestinians Speak of “World’s Biggest Prison”, 2001; Fahmy: Violence
Takes Toll on Palestinians’ Bodies, Minds, 2001; Gershberg: Permanent Vigilance Takes Toll on Israelis, 2001;
Heinrich: Nightmares Haunt Gaza Children after Missile Hit, 2002; Johnston: Gaza Children Fear Death from
the Sky, 2004.
182

levels, aside from Israeli assaults and Palestinian-Israeli femicide, are low. In the case of an
otherwise relatively crime-free society, I believe solidarity has prevailed in the face of a
common enemy, and also, so far, due to the lack of extreme metropolitan overcrowding, such
as the case was in both Graeco-Roman Egypt and in the crime-ridden townships of South
Africa. Although urbanization is accelerating rapidly in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,
especially in Gaza, mainly due to Israeli land theft and sabotage of Palestinian agriculture, it
has been taking place in the area for 10,000 years now already (Jericho in the West Bank is
commonly considered the first town in history), i.e. the Palestinian population and the
Palestinian society have had sufficient time and experience to adapt and to avoid a social
meltdown due to accelerated urbanization. This is a condition that may help bring an end to
apartheid there sooner rather than later. Factional indigenous fighting has been a great deal
less bloody between Palestinians than between South Africans, and possibly also less bloody
than the fighting between Egyptians under Greek and Roman dominance.
In late antiquity Egypt, following the onslaught of Christianity, religion became a
dividing factor often equal to race in importance. Violent clashes between the Pagan, Jewish
and Christian communities, especially in Alexandria, led to further divisions within the
population.242 Unlike the racial class divisions, which appear to have been planned carefully
and engineered meticulously by the rulers, the severity of religious divisions – which
developed loosely along racial lines (especially for the Jews, and a tendency of Egyptians to
adopt Christianity and of Greeks to stay Pagan (see Chapter II.9.1)) – seems to have been
unforeseen by the authorities. The religious conflicts became more difficult to handle than the
divisions originally imposed with purely racist apartheid. At first, Christianity developed
among Jews, and we are still not sure how it spread among non-Jews, though it appears it was
a grassroots movement rather than an elite or intellectual Egyptian or Greek movement. The
Christian doctrine of rewards for the meek and the oppressed naturally became an Egyptian
cause. Then, the Romans outlawed Christianity and the proselytes were persecuted and killed
en masse. As the tables turned, however, Christianity became the imperial state religion, and
all other faiths were now persecuted. Especially the ancient Egyptian and Greek faiths and
their mixed, originally state-imposed forms (see Chapter II.9.1) suffered. Followers were
killed with the same zeal as the Christians before them, and eventually the older religions

242
Haas, C. 1997: 9ff. Haas is important for pointing out that Alexandria was not the tolerant, cosmopolitan
melting pot as has been and still is imagined (see further Chapter II.9.1 below). I am not, however, quite happy
with the tenor of this investigation of social conflicts in Alexandria. Haas spends much effort on investigating
‘ethno-religious’ tension, but hardly ever mentions Egyptians as an ethnic or racial group during late antiquity
although all other groups are to him still definable at this stage, i.e. Romans, Greeks, Jews, Christians, and
Pagans. Only in the case of the indigenous majority does the author appear to reduce the racial group to its parts,
in his case to its religious communities, and for no good reason. Aside from being the indigenous majority, from
being of darker complexion and with other African features, aside from living in the poor part of town
(Rhakotis), aside from having unskilled jobs with low incomes, aside from being discriminated against
collectively precisely because of their common ethnicity, the Egyptians spoke Egyptian and then Coptic, not
Greek like the Greeks and the Jews, not Latin like the West Romans. The Egyptians must therefore have been
highly identifiable until the very end of Greek dominance. Haas’ authority for his ‘ethno-religious’ social
typology appears to be Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 CE), an upper-class Greek who is famous for combining
Christianity with Greek philosophy and for creating a dogmatic Christian doctrine. Clement wrote that
Christians, Jews, and Pagans are three separate peoples (laoi). Ibid: 8. This apparent reduction of Egyptians to
Christians and Pagans appears to me to chiefly serve the crude apartheid elite purposes of divide-and-rule, and
Haas appears to have fallen straight into Clement’s ideological apartheid trap (see also Preface above). In a direct
parallel, the South African apartheid elites split the black majority into Blacks and Coloureds, Zulu, Xhosa,
northern and southern Xhosa and Sotho, Ndebele, Pedi, Tswana, etc. In another parallel, the Israeli elites have
finally started referring to Palestinians as ‘Palestinians’ during the last couple of decades, and not just as ‘Arabs’.
Crucially, however, only Palestinians under Israeli military occupation are referred to as ‘Palestinians’.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are still referred to as ‘Arabs’ (‘Israeli Arabs’) and Palestinian refugees
outside Israeli rule, who still have a right to return to Palestine (and to compensation for suffering caused by the
Jewish state and its supporters) under international law, are referred to by Israelis as ‘refugees’ or, more often,
they are not referred to at all. See also footnote 5 above.
 183

were simply terminated. By this time the Egyptian religion had probably existed for over
4,000 years, probably longer than any other phonographically literate religion (‘book
religion’) before or since.
In the recent past, the break between racial and religious identity as the predominant
identity in Roman-ruled Egypt has certainly been overemphasized by many scholars. Being
Christian during late antiquity was thus seen by many of them as contradictory to being
Greek. This view is, however, in the process of being revised. The Greeks who turned
Christian in fact remained very much Greek, perhaps especially in Egypt and the rest of North
Africa, where they spoke Greek unlike the majority of the indigenous population. On the
whole, the Greeks also remained the privileged class. When Arabian forces finally ‘opened’ or
liberated Egypt in 642, many Egyptians, though Christian, joined the Muslim invaders rather
than defend a ‘Christian’ Egypt, which was in fact a Greek Egypt. And Greek soldiers and
settlers fled the country after nearly a thousand years of oppressive Greek domination and
rule.243 They knew they had been wrong, all along.
Race thus trumped religion, perhaps not as determinant of life in general during this
particularly de-secularized era, but at least as determinant of the class system in Egypt under
Greek and Roman rule. The following quote from the late Roman Imperial period illustrates
the racist and violent nature of the manner in which the European descendant elites treated the
indigenous Egyptians, whose land they had taken, and whose work they exploited
continuously:

The Egyptians are most of them rather swarthy and dark and
somewhat gloomy…They are lean and dryish, easily excitable in their
gestures, quarrelsome, and most persistent importunate creditors.
Among them a man blushes if he cannot show several weals on his
body incurred while refusing to pay tribute. And nobody has yet been
found capable of devising a torture [technique] which succeeds in
eliciting from a hardened bandit of that region his own name against
his will.244

There is perhaps another oppressive determinant for society in Egypt under Greek and
Roman rule that is stronger than religion, another dimension of oppression. The first example
of systematic violent assaults targeting indigenous women carried out by other indigenous
people in the context of demographic apartheid wars is in Egypt under Graeco-Roman rule.
The practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), sometimes referred to as ‘female genital
cutting’ or with the euphemistic ‘female circumcision’, may even have come into being for
the first time in history in Egypt (or thereabouts) during this time, though some researchers
suggest other places and times of origin.
FGM is the surgical removal of parts of the female genitalia, typically involving a
cutting away of parts of or the entire clitoris, usually perpetrated by female relatives of the
victim. An estimated 97 percent of all Egyptian women alive today have been victimized in
this way. Some other northeast African countries manifest even higher percentages. FGM is
usually performed without anesthesia; it is extremely painful and sometimes leads to the death
of the victim, for instance through hemorrhage, infections, or later due to childbirth
complications. Furthermore, it sometimes causes chronic pains and disabilities. FGM is a
patriarchal means of terrorizing and controlling girls and women and of lessening sexual

243
Schmitt: Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene: Politik und Philosophie, Hof und Provinz als
Handlungsräume eines Aristokraten bis zu seiner Wahl zum Metropoliten von Ptolemaïs: 24f, 50f. On ‘native
Egyptian’ aid to the Arabian invaders, or liberators, see also Riad: Egyptian Influence on Daily Life in Ancient
Alexandria, 1996: 38.
244
Ammianus, quoted in Isaac 2004: 367. By this time, the torture techniques had been developed, by the same
people against the same victim population, for centuries.
184

pleasure for women. It is classified as a human rights violation by the United Nations, but
there are still many countries that have not criminalized it.
The first written source on the subject, the geographer, Agatharchides of Cnidus, in the
2nd century BCE reports the practice taking place in eastern Egypt, on the Red Sea coast. The
earliest known probable material evidence of FGM, a mummified female who was almost
certainly mutilated in this way, was found in Nubia, just south of the Ptolemaic kingdom,
dating back to 200 BCE, i.e. a little before Agatharchides, but well into the period of Greek
rule, and, based on written and other sources, FGM is presumed to have come to Nubia from
Egypt. There are many well-preserved female mummies from earlier times, none of which
bear any signs of genital mutilation.245 The origins of FGM are, however, shrouded in
mystery. The earliest primary written source on FGM is the late ancient Greek geographer and
historian, Strabo, who, around 25 BCE, labels it an Egyptian and Jewish custom. If Egyptians
carried out FGM before Greek rule, it was almost certainly not of the worst kind, namely
‘infibulation’, which entails the excision of the entire clitoris, the labia minora and portions of
the labia majora.246 FGM is possibly the least lethal of all kinds of indigenous femicide
conditioned by apartheid. It was a weapon in the demographic war, but I do not think it was
consciously a weapon in this war to the same extent as the much more lethal and much more
targeted kinds of femicide that later became prevalent in apartheid South Africa and apartheid
Israel/Palestine. Nevertheless, the amount of women killed by FGM must now be in the
vicinity of if not beyond the death tolls of both ‘witch’-burnings and ‘honor’ killings, the
more modern forms of apartheid femicide, which will be investigated later in this section.
The arrivals of large numbers of Greek settlers in Egypt from the fourth century BCE
and onwards brought an unprecedented decline in indigenous women’s rights in Egypt, a
decline that lasted for the next thousand years, at the very least, more realistically, though:
until today. As we shall see in the following two chapters, racist immigration and violence
against the indigenous people result in enormous pressures on the indigenous women. They
end up forced by the indigenous patriarchy to marry early and have a maximum amount of
babies. This is a demographic war strategy. Girls and women who do not acquiesce and do not
‘join the struggle’ in this way are punished. All other indigenous girls and women are also
victimized, they become a kind of collateral damage, but it becomes important that they are
not too distracted by sex, one of the few pleasures not taken away from them by apartheid
invaders. Later, FGM continued without apartheid. It was a useful way for patriarchalism in
the region to control and use women and girls. Due to the unparalleled degree of women’s
rights in Egypt prior to Greek rule (see the next section), the introduction of demographic war
must have amounted to a serious collective trauma, although interracial violence must have
been far from widespread at the early stages of Greek rule. We will return to the patriarchal
aspect of Graeco-Roman apartheid in the following sections, especially in the realms of
repopulation, citizenship, and access.
For female members of the racial elite, however, apartheid can be collectively
beneficial, at least in the short term. The gruesome tradition of infanticide was brought along
by Greeks and Romans from their home countries to Egypt. Most of the victims were female.

245
See Mackie: Female Genital Cutting: The Beginning of the End, 2000; N.N.: History of Female Circumcision,
2005; Brewer & Teeter: Ancient Egyptian Society and Family Life, 2001; Robinson, B.A.: Female Genital
Mutilation (FGM) in Africa, The Middle East & Far East, 1998-2005; Ziegler-Zenie: In Search Of Shadows:
Conversations with Egyptian Women, 1988; Ingram: Battling the Scourge of Female Genital Mutilation, 2004;
DeMeo: The Geography of Genital Mutilations, The Truth Seeker, 1989. In the early 1990s the death rate of girls
subjected to FGM in Sudan was estimated at 10 to 30 percent. See Lightfoot-Klein: Prisoners of Ritual: Some
Contemporary Developments in the History of Female Genital Mutilation, 1991. As Abusharaf: Covert
Operation, 1998, points out, it has been claimed, especially by late ancient Greek authors, that Egyptians carried
out FGM prior to the Greek invasion of 323 BCE, but according to Abusharaf this has never been corroborated
by modern researchers. Much research, however, still needs to be done in order to find the origins of FGM.
246
Knight: Curing Cut or Ritual Mutilation? Some Remarks on the Practice of Female and Male Circumcision in
Graeco-Roman Egypt, 2001
 185

The Egyptians themselves did not practice it, and they often rescued Greek and Roman babies
from certain death. (The most popular method was exposure: unwanted babies were placed,
usually by their parents, on a garbage heap or somewhere similar, and were then abandoned
there.) However, the Egyptians were punished, at least according to the Roman law for Egypt,
if they rescued these Greek and Roman babies to bring them up as adopted children. They
were not punished if they enslaved them. We will consider some wider aspects of this in
Chapter II.9.1. Apparently, there were vicissitudes, but the practice continued, possibly
unabated, among Greek and Roman families until an imperial decree against infanticide was
issued by Valentinian in 374 CE. And even then, it took a while before the practice
subsided.247
The practices of femicide in Graeco-Roman Egypt, on both sides of the apartheid
divide, may also be correlated with large numbers of male fatalities, on both sides, linked with
the interracial apartheid violence. This is conjecture, but both in apartheid South Africa and in
Israel/Palestine the fighting by the indigenous groups so far was predominantly a male affair,
and it is not likely to have been much different in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Thus, both sides
would have re-established a numerical balance between the sexes through femicide. Of
course, polygamy would have achieved such a balance, too. But in Egypt like in South Africa
and modern Palestine, polygamy was very rare. In all three countries, the number of
indigenous men, the vast majority of men, who could afford more than one wife was and is
very low indeed, due to the discriminatory apartheid economy. Thus it is easy to
underestimate the overall significance of patriarchalism in indigenous apartheid victim
communities, especially if one restricts comparisons to cases of polygamy.
The extremely low number of white apartheid casualties in South Africa, and the more
gender-balanced casualty rate among the Israelis, where women are conscripted along with
men to do military service, could then help explain why there was no or very little femicide
within the invader groups in the modern apartheid societies. Of course, other factors play even
more important roles here. In Graeco-Roman Egypt women and babies (also mainly female)
had nothing even approaching human rights, even if they were members of the elite race,
whereas all white and Jewish lives, respectively, were and are, respectively, particularly
protected by apartheid South African and Israeli laws and other institutions and practices. This
was also a time in which Aristotle’s idea of mothers not contributing actively to the character
of the child was in high fashion. Since only men allegedly contributed actively to conception
and to life in general, elite race babies were therefore only really valuable if they were male
babies.
Returning now to the main theme, with regard to cycles of interracial violence,
Graeco-Roman Egypt and South Africa have more in common than what first, perhaps, comes
to mind: the millennium that lies between the Arab conquest of Roman Egypt and the
establishment of the Cape Colony. In both cases, two European military superpowers shared
resources and power in a rich, subtropical part of Africa. The first waves of Europeans – the
Greeks and the Dutch, respectively – declared independence from their European mother
countries (though the Dutch descendants did so later, i.e. during the 19th and 20th centuries).
Throughout the period of oppression, they also remained the majority of European settlers.
The Europeans fought one short major war between each other, the end of which established
the new, even smaller minority as (colonialist) rulers, i.e. the Roman and British ones. The
subjugation of a great majority of indigenous Africans provoked several armed uprisings, all
of which were suppressed by means of physical violence.
The respective differences in military technology are also similar. The Egyptian army
under indigenous rule used mainly bronze weapons. The Egyptians enjoyed little access to
iron ore, and even less to fuel, i.e. firewood, to smelt it. The Greeks – like the Assyrians and

247
Tyldesley: Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, 1995 (1994): 69; Lewis, N. 1983: 54
186

the Persians, the previous conquerors of Egypt – used superior weapons and armaments made
of iron.
Black South Africans also had iron weapons, notably stabbing spears, with which the
Zulu nation was able to repel an invading British colonialist army consisting of 8,000 soldiers
as late as 1879. Only three years later, however, the British returned victoriously to KwaZulu,
this time with machine guns.
The British, as well as the Dutch, and the ‘Afrikaners’, as the more independence-
minded Dutch descendants came to call themselves, had firearms since their first arrival in
South Africa. Thus, they were one step ahead of the Africans they subjugated in terms of
military technology, again corresponding to Graeco-Roman military superiority over the
Egyptians (firearms over iron, and iron over bronze, respectively).248
Yet, the military superiority went further than that. During the centuries that these
societies lasted, the respective armies were leading the world, or nearly so, in terms of the
development of military technology. This included state-of-the-art siege towers, ramming
devices and catapult artillery in Ptolemaic Egypt, which for a while was the world’s
undisputed leader in military technology. The largest war ships of the era, the so-called
‘triremes’, were built in Alexandria. Most of applied science under the Ptolemies was in fact
in the service of the military. But this period of world supremacy was short-lived, only about a
century or so, i.e. not unlike that of the British Empire (and perhaps the US Empire) two
millennia later. Ptolemaic Egypt was soon eclipsed by the Roman Empire and Yíng Zhèng,
the first Emperor of China, who developed these and other martial inventions further and
eventually became by far the most formidable military powers the world had ever seen. 249 A
very high level of military technology in relative as well as absolute terms is something that
both Egypt and South Africa under European and white rule also share with modern Israel,
with Israel, as we shall see, now closer to Ptolemaic Egypt, i.e. to the relative top weapons
developing and manufacturing power, than to South Africa.
The racial minorities in power in all of these societies based their power on their
jealously guarded military superiority – yet they seldom admitted this simple and very
obvious fact. They preferred the ideological explanations of basing their power on their
alleged overall biological, spiritual, or cultural superiority, so much so that they mostly
believed it to be true and often even persuaded considerable portions of the oppressed
majority to believe it to be true, as well.

1.2. Firearms, Stabbing Spears, the ‘Medical Battalion’, and ‘Witch’-burnings

In at least one important sense, the Whites introduced war into southern Africa. Of
course there had been armed conflicts before they ever appeared there, but only very few
people ever died in these ‘wars’. They were mainly cattle raids, which were more of a ‘manly’
sport than armed conflict. Whatever the role of commitment to peace among the indigenous
people may have been, we also know that the low population density throughout southern
Africa played an important role in keeping the region relatively peaceful.
That changed radically with the coming of the Whites, and not only because of their
greed, their own direct raids, their initial monopoly on firearms, and their wars of conquest.
248
Oliver: The African Experience, 1991: 169; Reader 1998 (1997): 188; McEvedy: The Penguin Atlas of
African History, 1995 (1980): 109. In the Soweto and other township uprisings, and especially in the Intifadas in
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the difference became much more marked and extreme. Palestinian
civilians, mostly armed with nothing but rocks, like their South African township forebears, were pounced upon
by the most modern ‘counter-insurgency’ tools and methods, including machine guns, tanks, helicopter gunships,
F-16 bombers, pilotless drones, and the offensive uses of hyper-modern airborne and ground missile launchers.
Many bystanders and totally uninvolved civilians, miles away from the action, were also killed and injured
because of the Israeli use of high-powered, high-speed and high-impact weapons and ammunition. See Ashrawi:
Anatomy of Racism, 2000.
249
Walbank 31992 (1981): 194f; Mojsov 2010: 19. On Ptolemaic military technology, see also Chapter II.7.1.
For South Africa and Israel, see Chapters II.1.2 and 1.3 below.
 187

The Dutch Cape government even formally allowed white militias to commit genocide against
the San in the 1770s. As elsewhere in Africa and in the Americas, volatile indigenous
(refugee) migrating pressures mounted due to the white invasions and brought the natives into
unprecedented bloodshed between each other, often hundreds or even thousands of miles
away from the white frontier. In South Africa itself, moreover, the demographic pressure
initiated by the Whites in the south of the country unhappily coincided with the slow
migratory movement of Bantu-speaking peoples from the north, which had been ongoing for
at least two thousand years.
An explosion of violence, almost certainly unprecedented in southern Africa, was the
result, as the shockwaves of the opposite mass migrations met, for instance in the indigenous
Zulu Wars during the 19th century, which saw the invention of stabbing spears in southern
Africa. The Zulus were remarkably successful due to military discipline and ethos and to the
introduction of the stabbing spear. Instead of throwing the spear once, as had been the military
(or fighting) tradition in southern and eastern Africa since time immemorial, the Zulus held on
to their unusually short spears during battle and engaged in man-to-man combat, an infinitely
more bloody, and successful, war technique. The use of the stabbing spear and the Zulu
military virtues of discipline and courage even led to the routing of an invading 8,000-strong
British army at Isandhlwana on January 22, 1879. The British, who ran out of ammunition in
the course of the battle, lost 1,800 men in a single day.250
Although population density was low in southern Africa compared to Europe, North
Africa or South and East Asia before the advent of the white invasions, it was high relative to
continents such as Australia, North America, or most of South America before the white
invasions there. The land was only to be stolen slowly. Other factors relevant here include the
white reluctance to dedicate overwhelmingly large troop contingents against South African
indigenous nations. The southernmost Bantu-speaking population group, the Xhosa, (who
were neither the southernmost indigenous metalworkers nor the southernmost domesticators,
the Khoikhoi were), were only subdued over a period of 175 years, which included nine wars.
The Europeans only advanced in the southeastern part of South Africa, against the Xhosa, at
an average rate of less than one mile a year.251 However, after diamonds and gold had been
found in South Africa during the second half of the 19th century and after the British had
introduced machine guns to Africa (following the Isandhlwana debacle), and the Afrikaners
Mauser rifles, the conquest picked up considerable speed and all of present-day South Africa
was under white rule by the turn of the century.
The main patterns of physical violence in South Africa under apartheid in the narrow
sense are still being investigated. Because of the widespread suffering during this period and
as a negotiating chip in the phased hand-over of power to democratic majority rule between
1990 and 1994, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was created. The idea was to
allow victims of these gross human violations to learn the truth about their suffering or about
the suffering of their loved ones. It was widely believed that by finding out the truth,
compensating victims and granting amnesty to those who committed gross human rights
violations out of political motives, reconciliation and improved historical knowledge would
result, and to some extent, this has proven to be the case.
Due to political pressures and limited time and money, the Commission was designed
to question the gross violations of human rights that took place during the most violent phase
of apartheid in the narrow sense, from 1960 until 1994. In doing so, the TRC examined the
reasons and factors which led to such violations, as well as taking into consideration those

250
Thompson 1990: 26ff. On the legalization of genocide for Dutch settlers, see Ross 1999: 23. See also
previous chapter. On behalf of the African National Congress, on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s
new Constitution in 1996, the then deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, said the San and the Khoikhoi ‘…fell victim
to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen…’ (quoted in Moran: Representing Bushmen:
South Africa and the Origin of Language, 2009: 10).
251
Diamond 1998 (1997): 397
188

who were affected by these acts, whether the victims themselves or their relatives, by
compensating them for their suffering with small, mainly symbolic, sums of money. Those
who committed the violations would be granted amnesty only if these qualified as politically
motivated and proportional to their assigned role in the conflict, and if they told the full story
why and how they committed their crimes. The victims and the perpetrators were of all groups
and races.
One of the most well-known cases covered by the TRC was that of the murder by
policemen of Steve Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness movement, who died in
prison in 1977 after having been tortured brutally and almost continuously, over a period of
three weeks. The five policemen who are widely considered responsible for his death have
continuously denied any direct involvement in his killing. First, they were exonerated by the
apartheid authorities. After apartheid had ended, however, a TRC investigation was initiated.
They sought amnesty but were turned down. They told the amnesty panel of the TRC that they
believe Biko’s death to have been an accident, an accident that took place after the prisoner
was beaten by the five policemen with a rubber hose, followed by 24 hours of chaining. The
beatings had resulted in brain damage, yet Biko received no medical treatment, since the
policemen felt he was ‘...arrogant, aggressive and he didn’t answer questions at all.’ Later,
state doctors found him fit to face further torture without an examination. This was an
innocent man, with high moral stature, who had never committed an act of violence, and the
authorities knew this. After being thrown naked and handcuffed into the back of a police van,
already half-dead from the brain damage and other severe results of the beatings, Biko was
taken in the van for a rough 1,200 km drive, from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria, where he died. In
spite of the incriminating testimony and the denial of amnesty by the TRC, no one has been
charged, to this day, with the torture, or the denial of medical treatment, or the murder of
Steve Biko.252
Torture was illegal in South Africa (as opposed to Israel prior to 1999), and since the
South African apartheid state was very successful in covering up its own abuses in this regard,
there are next to no quantitative data available. It is known, however, that the use of state-
sanctioned torture was very common; the TRC estimates some 100,000 South African
detainees were tortured from 1960 until 1994 by the state responsible for their well-being,
many of them children. It is also known that torture was often encouraged and sometimes
ordered from the highest levels of the security forces and the government, and that the amount
of deaths in police or ‘security force’ custody was very high, as well.253
Members of the armed wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe
(Zulu for ‘Spear of the Nation’; usually abbreviated as MK), also committed human rights
violations. It was not, however, responsible for any deaths until after its founder and first
commander, Nelson Mandela, himself had been jailed for life, only narrowly escaping the
death sentence. The Ethiopian army, the only one on the continent that had successfully
managed to withstand European invasion, had given Mandela, a lawyer, human rights activist,
intellectual and fugitive from South African ‘Justice’, eight weeks of military training, a gun
and 200 rounds of ammunition. After 48 years of peacefully resisting intensifying white
oppression, the ANC was outlawed in 1960, following the notorious March 21 massacre by
police of at least 69 protesters at Sharpeville. 186 others, including children, were seriously
injured. The protesters were unarmed and peacefully protesting racist passbook laws, which
had become a primary means of harassing and removing individuals oppositional towards the

252
Boyle: 25 Years On, S. Africa’s Slain Biko Sets a Standard, 2002; Thomasson: South Africa’s Biko Left
Chained for 24 hours - Police, 1998; Woods: Biko, 1978
253
The figure of 100,000 does not include convicted prisoners, who were also routinely tortured. See Tilley (ed.)
2009: 178; Pigou, Piers: Monitoring Police Violence & Torture in South Africa, Paper presented at the
International Seminar on Indicators and Diagnosis on Human Rights: The Case of Torture in Mexico, convened
by the Mexican National Commission for Human Rights, April 2002; Pauw, Jacques: Into the Heart of Darkness:
Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1997
 189

apartheid state. The protest was organized by the PAC, the Pan-African Congress, which was
outlawed along with the ANC and Communist Party directly afterwards in a move that would
be repeated countless times in the subsequent development of apartheid in South Africa and
Israel, that of blaming the victim (see Chapters II.9.2-3 below). Many of the Sharpeville
protesters were shot in the back as they were trying to flee, once the police, entirely
unprovoked, had started firing into the crowd. In remembrance of this event, March 21 as the
annual International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination was inaugurated by the
United Nations in 1966.
Only after being offensively driven underground did the ANC thus decide to switch to
a phased strategy of armed resistance, starting with attacks on unmanned military
installations. It was during this phase that Mandela was captured. He was later found guilty
for being involved with plans for attacks which could have or would have cost human lives.
The exceptional brutality of the apartheid regime put a lid on resistance during the rest of the
1960s. During the 1970s and ‘80s, however, thousands of South Africans, mainly youths, left
their country to join the MK in military camps set up in the countries north of South Africa, in
countries recently liberated from colonial and apartheid rule.254
One of the TRC hearings was concerned with the gross violations within the liberation
movement which the ANC committed at a detention camp in Angola, as a result of which at
least six people died during the 1970s and ‘80s. Other such acts included bombings
throughout the 1980s. The MK itself planned and executed 13 attacks from 1980 to 1988, in
which 23 people were killed and more than 350 were injured. 255 The deadliest attack took
place in Pretoria in 1983, when a single bomb took the lives of 19 people, leaving another 217
injured.256 Other anti-apartheid militants killed civilians in and around South Africa, as well.
It must be added, however, that these were very unusual attacks. The ANC and other South
African liberation movements on the whole were remarkably reluctant to engage in violence,
especially when compared to the force they were up against. It has been estimated that at least
one and a half million southern Africans were killed, directly or indirectly, by the apartheid
government and its defenders and allies from 1948 until 1994, many in easily avoidable
famines. We shall return presently to the horrendous death toll of the apartheid wars in
southern Africa.
It was widely known that South Africa possessed nuclear weapons from 1979 at the
latest. Israel, Britain and the USA were involved in the secret South African nuclear weapons
program, which was considered or portrayed as defensive by the involved governments
against a perceived Soviet threat against the racist and anti-Communist regime in Pretoria.
After the introduction of US sanctions on South Africa in 1986, illegal clandestine assistance
with arms deliveries and arms development came mainly from Israel, with unofficial US
blessings.257
The South African military’s secret chemical and biological weapons program,
‘Project Coast’, with a staff of around 70, produced weapons and poisons which were used to
assassinate at least hundreds of ANC members and other enemies of apartheid in South Africa

254
Mandela 1995 (1994): 274ff, 304ff; Thörn 2009 (2006): 127f; Thomas: South Africa Wrestles with Past in
Apartheid Museum, 2001. On the involvement and support by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the
apartheid regime’s intelligence agencies in the 1962 arrest of Mandela, who had gone underground in South
Africa, and which almost led to his execution, see Blum: The Men Who Sent Mandela to Jail, 2002; N.N.:
Exclusive: NSA, FBI, DIA Sued over Refusal to Disclose U.S. Role in Imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, 2014.
255
Schuettler: ANC Guerrilla Regret Deaths, Seek Amnesty, 1998
256
Ibid.
257
Saito (senior writer): The Road to the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, 1999: 198. The nuclear arsenal of South
Africa was scrapped on President F.W. de Klerk’s orders in 1993, a year before the introduction of democracy
and black majority rule. See also Hounam & McQuillan: The Mini-Nuke Conspiracy: Mandela’s Nuclear
Nightmare, 1995. The USA knew South Africa had conducted secret and illegal nuclear weapons tests in the
Indian Ocean with Israel on September 22, 1979, but did not admit it knew until 1990. See N.N.: SA, Israel
Carried out Nuclear Test in 1979, May 19, 2006.
190

and abroad. The covert army ‘Medical Battalion’ behind the program produced lethal screw
drivers, bicycle pumps, walking sticks, umbrellas and tear gas. It also produced ‘thallium in
beer, salmonella in sugar, paraquat in whisky’ and had further programs, some of them
probably implemented, to spread poisonous drugs and chemicals, cholera, botulism, anthrax,
and HIV-tainted blood among southern African Black civilian populations to pacify, sterilize,
incapacitate or kill them.258 According to the testimony of a former state agent, there were
orders to spread cholera and yellow fever by contaminating drinking water at refugee camps
in neighboring Namibia in 1988, prior to that country’s first democratic elections.259 The
leader of the ‘Medical Battalion’ was Wouter Basson, nicknamed ‘Dr. Death’, who has been
compared to Nazi Germany’s infamous Josef Mengele. We shall return to Basson’s plight a
little later.
The genocidal parameters and mind-sets were certainly present in this unit. Dr. Mike
Odendaal, a microbiologist on ‘Project Coast’, was quoted by The New Yorker magazine as
saying:

[O]ne of the major tenets of chemical warfare is that you don’t use
these things on your own soil. . . .the cholera in the Eastern Cape [one
of the regions most rebellious against both British colonial
domination and apartheid] probably came from my lab, and it
probably did kill old people and kids…I only read about it in the
papers and then was confronted about it at the TRC. No details have
come out but it was probably put in the water. That, again, is
something you produce to use in enemy territory, not on your own
people. And it doesn’t make any sense, if you want to make a dent in
the black population, to poison a couple of hundred people, putting a
strain on your own health services. You need to kill 10 million to
make a difference.260

258
Lovell: South Africa Truth Body Opens Chemical Warfare Hearing, 1998; N.N.: Apartheid Weapons Boss
Asked for HIV-Tainted Blood, May 24, 2000; The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 1998,
Vol. 2, Chapter 6c, Special Investigation into Project Coast: South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare
Programme. Some researchers have suggested that investigations should be carried out as to whether the plans to
spread HIV among Blacks, in South Africa and in the surrounding countries, were actually implemented by the
‘Medical Battalion’ or some other clandestine state death squad. It could help to explain the extremely high
incidence of HIV and AIDS infection in the southern African region, which is by far the highest in the world.
Africa south of the Sahara accounted for an estimated 15 million of the world’s total 21.8 million AIDS-related
deaths by 2001. Two years later, 29.4 million out of all 42 million people worldwide who were infected with
HIV were Africans. At this time, South Africa itself had more people living with HIV-AIDS than any other
single country, 5 million out of 45 million South Africans, i.e. one in every nine was infected. In the seven
southernmost countries of Africa at least one adult in five is now living with HIV, according to the Joint United
Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Southern Africa is home to about 30 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS
worldwide, yet the region has less than two percent of the global population. See N.N.: Factbox: Africa Ravaged
by AIDS Epidemic, July 5, 2002; N.N.: South Africa – Economic Powerhouse Ravaged by AIDS, July 8, 2003;
Reaney: World AIDS Deaths, Infections at New Highs, 2003. On these and related issues, see also Boateng:
South Africa: ‘Dr. Death’ on Trial, 2001. The Israeli apartheid regime’s secret service and international
assassination squad, the Mossad, has also been held responsible without being convicted for spreading
HIV/AIDS deliberately. 426 Libyan children were infected in a Libyan hospital in 1999, when Libya was one of
Israel’s main enemies. Scores of them have died since then from diseases and infections that normal immune
systems would have handled easily. For eight years, a Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses stood accused
of carrying out the crime at a children’s hospital in Benghazi. They were finally freed due to intense international
pressure in 2007, effectively ending the isolation of Libya by western countries. The US counterpart to the
Mossad, the CIA, has also been accused of the same crime. See Brunwasser: Bulgarian Nurses’ Case in Libya
Seems to Turn, 2006.
259
Swindells: South Africa Learns Secrets of “Dr Death”, 2000
260
Boateng 2001. Originally quoted by William Finnegan in The New Yorker magazine, January 15, 2001. On
the so-called ‘health services’ for Blacks in South Africa under apartheid, which in fact consisted of twice as
many family planning clinics as health clinics in 1991 and included forced sterilization, see Chapters II.2.2 and
6.2 below.
 191

Odendaal’s afterthought apparently makes it acceptable, even preferable, to kill ten

million Blacks (to make a ‘dent’), rather than just a few hundred. Of course, Odendaal may
also be speaking satirically here. But if he is, then there were other people close to him at the
time who thought, or nearly thought, this way. We will deal with the ubiquitous apartheid
motivation and justification by means of ‘demographic necessity’ for mass killings, especially
in South Africa and Israel, in the next section.
The revelations of (some) details about the extensive chemical and biological weapons
program, and indeed of its existence, are due to the TRC and could be considered one of its
greatest victories. Without its amnesty provision the world might never have known anything
at all about ‘Project Coast’ and the ‘Medical Battalion’.
Aside from the TRC cases, there are many other examples that demonstrate the
brutality and often illegality of physical violence practiced or condoned by the South African
ruling minority. Between 1948 and 1954, 104 Africans were killed and more than 240
wounded by the police in cases related to political demonstrations alone. By 1960, the
estimated number had risen to over 300 killed and 500 wounded, mainly by gunfire and
beatings. Compared to the more than 1,000 Palestinians killed by the state of Israel similarly
in 2002 alone, this is not a great number. It is, however, enough to warrant investigations,
especially since victims are still paying the price for these crimes today. In the Soweto
uprising, over 200 unarmed and peacefully demonstrating unarmed children and youths were
killed by police and soldiers on June 17, 1976, the first day of the uprising. The police also
injured hundreds of minors, arrested and imprisoned hundreds more, subjecting many to
brutal torture.261
In retrospect, it may be the greatest shortcoming of the TRC that it has concentrated so
much on physical violence, and left a great deal of structural violence out of the picture, in
both its hearings and its final reports. Nobody applied for amnesty, because none was needed,
for condemning millions to poverty, a lower quality of life and a shorter life expectancy. This
is all the more disturbing since it has been estimated that more than one-and-a-half million
people were killed directly or indirectly (particularly in famines that broke out as results of the
wars) by the South African apartheid (in the narrow sense) regime, but ‘only’ around 26,000
in South Africa itself during those 46 years.262 At least 98 percent of those killed were thus
outside the country, mainly in Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia. Many of these victims
were of course South African freedom fighters in exile, but there were very large numbers of
indigenous civilian and non-civilian victims in these countries as well. Partly because of the
continued absence of an operational International Criminal Court, due to the active resistance
from a few rogue states such as the USA, Israel, China, and North Korea, nearly all of the
crimes of South African apartheid were therefore in actual fact committed with total
impunity.263
261
Mandela 31990 (1978): 125; Bonner & Segal: Soweto: A History, 1998: 88-93
262
See African National Congress: Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1996, and Further
Submissions and Responses by the African National Congress to Questions Raised by the Commission for Truth
and Reconciliation, 1997. Chomsky puts the figure even higher: ‘During the Reagan years [1981-1989]
alone…US/UK-backed South African attacks against the neighboring countries killed about a million and a half
people and left 60 billion dollars in damage and countries destroyed.’ Chomsky: The New War against Terror,
2001.
263
With a 282-137 vote, the US House of Representatives backed a measure sponsored by the Republican Party
Representative Tom DeLay of Texas that would severely limit US participation in what he described as ‘a rogue
court’. See N.N.: EU Wants International Criminal Court Set Up Soon, June 11, 2001. At this time, 32 countries
had already ratified the court, which, based on the principles of Nazi war crime trials after the Second World
War (to a large extent initiated, formed, and carried out by the USA itself), will try individuals accused of the
world’s most heinous atrocities – mass murders, war crimes, genocide, apartheid, and other gross human rights
violations. Sixty ratifications were needed for the International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty to go into force. A
total of 139 countries had thus far signed it, signaling their intention to ratify. On April 11, 2002, the number of
ratifications rose to 66, and US resistance hardened as it reiterated its intention not to ratify the court, and even
192

For example, Wouter Basson (‘Doctor Death’) was charged in 2001 by South African
state prosecutors with – among 45 other crimes – the horrific crime of having around 200
prisoners of war murdered in South West Africa (now Namibia). The prisoners, members of
the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid South West African People’s Organization, SWAPO, were
summarily executed by Basson’s assistants by means of injections of muscle relaxants, which
made the prisoners’ hearts stop beating. Apparently, it had turned out that other execution
techniques, such as strangling, previously in use for such ‘operations’, were psychologically
taxing on the executioners.
However, the charges against Basson were dismissed by the presiding judge, Willie
Hartzenberg (who had been appointed during the apartheid era), because ‘the alleged crimes
had occurred in Namibia…and therefore could not be prosecuted in South Africa. Moreover,
they were covered by the indemnity granted by the South African administrator of Namibia at
the time of the country’s independence [from South Africa] in March 1990.’ Basson denies
having been involved in the massacres of SWAPO prisoners, and is still free. After a long
trial, Hartzenberg cleared Basson from guilt on all of the initial 46 charges on April 11, 2002,
but state prosecutors appealed the ruling. In June 2003, South Africa’s Supreme Court finally
ruled out a retrial. Possibly due to secret deals between the governments of the USA and
(epiapartheid) South Africa, reportedly in order to keep him and his know-how regarding
chemical and biological weapons out of touch with Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi’s Libya,
Basson still practised as a state-employed medical doctor until his suspension by the Mbeki
government in 1999 and was still running a successful, private cardiology practise in South
Africa at the time of writing. In December 2013, he was finally found guilty on four counts of
unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council of South Africa, but he has so far
not been sentenced.264
Due to legal circumstances such as these, not only the South African criminal justice
system, but also the TRC a forteriori disregarded entirely around 98 percent of the actual
killings directly and indirectly carried out by the apartheid regime and its immediate allies in
the neighboring countries from 1960 to 1994, and all killings prior to that. With regard to
apartheid in the wide sense, the TRC therefore dealt with far less than a single percent of all
the killings that actually took place due to apartheid in South Africa after 1960, and none prior
to that year. Maybe they together add up to the ‘four million graves’ to which Vusi Mahlasela
refers in the excerpt from his song, ‘When You Come Back’, which I quoted at length as the
beginning of this section. In any case, these vast imbalances, between killings dealt with and
killings that actually took place because of apartheid, and between physical and structural
violence, could be considered to be the greatest weaknesses of the TRC.
Without attempting to play down the domestic violence perpetrated and engendered by
the apartheid regime, it could be said that it rather successfully managed to ‘export’ its

threatened to withdraw its signature, a highly unusual approach to international law. N.N.: US Restates
Opposition to International Court, April 11, 2002. On July 1 of that year, finally, with ratifications from 74
countries, the court’s jurisdiction came into effect. The influential US-based rights group, Human Rights Watch,
criticized the US position in strong language: ‘This stunning hypocrisy sends a signal that the rule of law is only
for other people, not for US nationals’, Kenneth Roth, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. The
European Union also opposed the USA on the issue, but did not dare to use such straightforward criticism in its
official statements. See Monaghan: U.S.-EU Split on International Court Resurfaces, 2002. Along with the USA,
China, Iraq, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen, Israel’s parliament also voted against joining the court, realistically
fearing that many elite Israeli citizens may also face being charged and convicted on several counts by it. N.N.:
Israel Opts Out of International Criminal Court, July 1, 2002. See also footnote 184 above. It should be added
here that the ICC, deplorably, has failed to live up to its own standards during its first decade of work. Only
Africans, so far, have been indicted by the court. Equally appalling crimes or worse, carried out by, for instance,
Israelis throughout the Middle East, or US and UK citizens in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, have
been completely ignored by it. See Hoile: ICC: A Tool to Recolonise Africa? 2012.
264
Boateng 2001; Thomas: S.Africa Apartheid Germ Warfare Expert Not Guilty, 2002; N.N.: Retrial of Wouter
Basson Denied, June 4, 2003; Hugo: HPCSA Finds Basson Guilty of Unprofessional Conduct, 2013
 193

continuous war abroad, especially to the neighboring countries, actively setting up immediate
allies, namely marauding groups of corrupt and ruthless bandits, with the aid of the
Portuguese, as well as with the USA (UNITA in Angola) and Rhodesia (RENAMO in
Mozambique).265 The apartheid violence in South Africa itself, however, was largely
structural, i.e. of an indirect nature, though hardly less brutal. Divide-and-rule policies
originating with the white elites also led to much violence within South Africa. It started
already during Dutch times with the Khoikhoi, and, although discontinuous, it lasted until the
1990s with the struggle between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, which sometimes
became violence between the Xhosa and the Zulu, the two largest ethnic and linguistic groups
in South Africa. This violence was the bloodiest within the borders of South Africa between
1948 and 1994, i.e. during apartheid in the narrow sense.266
As the struggle in South Africa intensified, the levels of violence against women
increased, as well. They typically included rape and other kinds of violent abuse, among and
between both Whites and Blacks. From 1985, the phenomenon of ‘witch’-burnings started to
spread rapidly in rural black South Africa. It reached a climax in 1990, the year Nelson
Mandela was freed after 27 years in jail. Western liberal concepts, including the equality of
women and men, had been part of the general human rights policy of the main resistance
movement to which Mandela belonged, the ANC, since its inception in 1912, but in some
resistance cells where the struggle was particularly intense, human rights were sometimes
blatantly disregarded. People suspected of being collaborators with the apartheid regime were
sometimes summarily executed or assassinated. Occasionally, if collaboration could not be
argued persuasively, ‘witchcraft’ became the charge. ‘Witch’-burnings are still a problem in
today’s South Africa, mainly in isolated rural communities.267

265
Iliffe 1995: 257; Hanlon: Mozambique: The Revolution under Fire, 1984. Both UNITA and RENAMO are
still active in these countries, which were devastated by the apartheid offensives. They are persistent epiapartheid
phenomena outside the borders of the apartheid country. Similar to apartheid South Africa, Israel attempts to
‘export’ its civil war, for example to Lebanon, since the 1970s, and to the Palestinian territories outside of
internationally recognized Israeli territory since 1948. On the lies of the then president and the then secretary of
state of the USA, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, who said and maintained (among other things in Kissinger’s
memoirs) that they intervened militarily, by means of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in Angola as a
response to Cuban deployments there, see Kornbluh (ed.): Conflicting Missions, Secret Cuban Documents on
History of Africa Involvement, 2002. In fact, the Cubans deployed in Angola only after they had found out about
the closely coordinated South African invasion of the country from South West Africa (now Namibia) and the
covert CIA operation from Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) in order to aid Jonas Savimbi’s infamous
UNITA rebels against the Angolan government with a two-pronged advance. Cuba’s actions were thus in line
with international law, South Africa’s and the USA’s were not. On Kissinger’s support for apartheid South
Africa, see Biko 2004 (1978): 159. See also French: How America Helped Savimbi and Apartheid South Africa,
2002: 7, and Hitchens: The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2002 (2001): 99ff. The latter is a book containing some of
the evidence of the many crimes, including crimes against humanity, for which Kissinger could and should be
held responsible, but which are unlikely to be prosecuted in any event, due among other things to US military,
economic and political power backing up the arrogant US refusal to cooperate with the International Criminal
Court. See, further, footnote 263. Incidentally, Kissinger apparently also broke international law by secretly
allowing and even personally encouraging and prodding the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, to violate a UN
Security Council-brokered truce and attack Egypt and Syria during the hours after the 1973 war had officially
ended. See N.N.: US Let Israel Stretch 1973 Truce – Documents, October 7, 2003; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007:
44. He is one of apartheid’s supreme foreign collaborators, guilty of supporting, encouraging, and enabling
apartheid in two different countries. Of course there are many other individuals guilty of the same crimes in these
apartheid contexts, especially South African and Israeli officials and civilians, but in terms of effectiveness,
Henry Kissinger would in an ideal court perhaps stand out as the most culpable apartheid perpetrator alive. See
Gregory, D.: Speech at Amandla – Festival of Unity: A Benefit Concert for Relief and Humanitarian Aid for
Southern Africa, 1979: 14:06-14:17.
266
See footnote 214 above.
267
Simpson: Women and Children in Violent South African Townships, 1993: 3-13; Harnischfeger: Witchcraft
and the State in South Africa, 2000. Although fines and confiscations were common among punishments for
witchcraft in 19th century South African black communities, death sentences were apparently also sometimes
194

Executions of ‘witches’ were not an entirely new phenomenon to South Africa, but
they only became widespread towards the very end of the apartheid era. Though not as
dramatic as the peak period of ‘witch’-burnings in Europe and North America by Europeans
between 1450 and 1660268, the South African ‘witch’-burnings nevertheless amounted to a
countrywide scourge that has yet to be halted. It is now over a decade and a half since
apartheid was officially abolished. As with FGM in Egypt, it is impossible to say when the
first ‘witch’ was burned to death in South Africa. She could have been white or black and the
people who killed her could also have been white or black.
A common contemporary execution method for ‘witches’ in South Africa is the same
as that used for collaborators with the apartheid regime, so-called ‘necklacing’: a car tire is
placed around the neck of the victim and set alight, burning the victim to a slow and painful
death.269
The South African ‘witch’-burnings mostly victimize middle-aged women, but many
young women and men are also found ‘guilty’. Women are targeted at a ratio of between four
and five to one. As with Palestinian and Israeli acts of demographic war, ‘culture’ was often
used by lawyers and sympathizers in order to defend perpetrators against the charge of
murdering people, mainly innocent women, in this way, or, as the South African perpetrators
and their still numerous sympathizers and supporters say, of ‘killing witches’.270
At the same time as the White-run state and white civil society pressured black women
not to have children at all, for example by handing out masses of contraceptives among
Blacks, and, as we shall see in Sections II.2, and II.6, below, even punished them directly for
having children and ignored the health needs of the black population, the black resistance
movement pressured the same women to maximize the number of children instead. The latter
was known as the ‘Making Soldiers’ campaign.

All those opposing the wishes of the young men [who usually led the
resistance in rural areas] were reminded, that it was every woman’s
obligation to give birth to new ‘soldiers’, in order to replace those warriors
killed in the liberation struggle. The idiom of the adolescents referred to

passed and carried out. See Makhura: Missionary and African Perspectives on the Politics of Witchcraft among
the Xhosa and Zulu Communities in the 19th Century Cape and Natal/Zululand, 2003.
268
Hollister, McGee & Stokes: The West Transformed: A History of Western Civilization, 2000: 618-621. An
estimated 110,000 people were put on trial for witchcraft in Europe and its North American colonies during this
period. Around 60,000 were found guilty and executed. Here, again, we might conclude that demographic factors
played an important role. During this period in particular, the male European elites were interested in rapid
population growth at home in order to strengthen armies, expand territorial holdings, repopulate conquered
territories, and settle globally. Since then, the prevailing and constantly expanding economic system has kept
women systematically out of the market by not admitting traditional women’s work as work, while they have
also been systematically kept out of the state. More progress has been made against the state than the uneven
market conditions, but serious barriers still remain globally there as well. Capitalism is still a patriarchal as well
as a classist phenomenon. The origins of femicide, however, are much older. Femicide is no doubt as old as
patriarchy itself. See Radford & Russell, 1992; Russell & Harmes (eds.) 2001.
269
Scheper-Hughes: Children without Childhoods, 1995
270
Carstens: The Cultural Defence in Criminal Law: South African Perspectives, 2003. See Kahn 2000 and
Vromen 2001 (footnote 320 below) for a Jewish Israeli example of the ‘culture’ argument and excuse for
wishing to maximize Jewish population growth. Yet another factor, aside from culture, is the stage which
women’s liberation has reached in general. Thus, increasing violence against women is a sign of a global
patriarchal backlash as women are starting to systematically demand and gain equal rights. As Anthony Giddens
has argued persuasively: women’s worldwide struggle for equal rights is the most revolutionary and important
aspect of globalization. And it is a bloody revolution. Spousal abuse, rape, witch-burnings, crimes of ‘passion’
and ‘honor’ are all on the increase. See Giddens: Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives,
2000 (1999). Yet, this does not explain why ‘honor’ killings happen in some Muslim and Arab countries and not
in others, or why ‘witch’-burnings still take place in some countries but not in others. Although I am not
attempting to answer all these questions here, I believe that I can provide some of the beginnings of answers to
these questions.
 195

these patriotic efforts as ‘operation production’… [I]t was forbidden for the
271
girls to use contraceptives.

People (mostly women) who opposed this strategy or simply preferred other means of
liberation were often accused of witchcraft, as were many women who were perceived as
collaborating with the white authorities in other ways. The usual punishment for witchcraft as
well as for collaboration with the apartheid enemy, especially towards the end of the struggle,
was death.272 This included sophisticated, targeted femicide, unlike FGM in Egypt which is
indiscriminate blanket violence against women, almost without exceptions, and with only
occasional lapses into femicide. In South Africa, the women who are unlikely to play along
with the patriarchal game of demographic war are targeted, or ‘protected’ from the targets.
Again, however, apartheid is the backdrop without which this particular brutalization of
Africa becomes less understandable from a social scientific perspective.
As a result of these demographic wars, most of all, women’s rights and the notion of
the equality of rights have eroded disastrously, but additionally, due to the population
explosion, natural environments have been lost, and so have biodiversity as well as cultural
diversity, in South Africa as well as in Egypt.273
South Africa’s total population increased tenfold in just one century, namely, the 20th
century CE. Only just coming out of its demographic war, furthermore, South Africa is today
among our planet’s most violent countries. In relative terms South Africa has perhaps the
highest rape figure and the perhaps highest violent crime figure in the world. Symptomatically
for apartheid demographic war as well as for epiapartheid violence, as in most of the history
of epiapartheid Egypt, African (‘black’) women are the main victims of violent crimes in
South Africa today.274
Finally, direct violent attacks on Blacks by Whites in southern Africa are part of a
much wider, exceptionally strong, centuries-old European and white pattern – or even
tradition – of targeting African civilians with lethal military or paramilitary force, most of all
connected with the transatlantic slave industry, but also with the colonialist invasions of all
African countries (and perhaps also, much earlier, with Roman and ancient Greek atrocities,
although these attacks were mainly anti-barbarian in nature, i.e. they were also used by the
ancient southern Europeans against northern Europeans).
For instance, although the bombing attack on Guernica in 1937 by German and
Swedish aviators, on loan from Hitler and working for the fascists under Franco during the
Spanish civil war, has become widely considered as the first major aerial bombing attack
targeting civilians, there is a little known precedent: Chechaouen in Morocco was bombed by

271
Harnischfeger 2000; see also Ross 1999: 175ff.
272
Harnischfeger 2000
273
Lewis, N. 1983: 107f. is a description of how the Fayyum, the lake southwest of Cairo, has halved in size
since Greek rule. Its surface is today ten meters lower than in late antiquity. Yet, the arable land around it has not
increased (the land reclaimed from the lake would have made this possible), rather it has decreased due to
‘inexorable fiscal demands’ by the Roman authorities, which made farmers on the periphery of the arable land
have to give up against the encroaching desert. Similarly, there are huge cyanide-infested mounds of ground rock
lying around the city of Johannesburg and elsewhere on the Witwatersrand from the goldmines. The poisonous
substance was used to extract gold from the mined rock and has been left there by the mine operators. Nothing
has grown in or around these toxic mounds for up to a hundred years. The main environmental challenges so far,
however, stem from problems linked with the population growth, perhaps steeper in apartheid societies than
anywhere else. See Ross 1999: 144ff. In this chapter of Ross’ history of South Africa, titled ‘The Costs of
Apartheid’, Ross goes into some detail about the damage, for example about how previously lush and
agriculturally valuable areas, especially in the Bantustans, have been turned into treeless near-deserts due to the
South African elites’ apartheid policies. But he does not explore the causal factors in much detail and does not
mention at all the competitive demographic growth unique to apartheid, i.e. he does not appear to consider
demographic warfare a factor in environmental deterioration.
274
Stoddard: South Africa’s Mbeki Faces Huge Crime Challenge, 2000; The Rape Crisis Center (South Africa);
Amnesty International, Report 2005, South Africa
196

American mercenary pilots working for the French and Spanish colonialist invaders in 1925.
Although it was known by the attackers that there were no liberation fighters in the town,
bombs were dropped on it, killing and maiming many women and children. The Times
correspondent, Walter Harris, considered this attack the worst humanitarian catastrophe in
kind during the entire colonialist campaign in Morocco, although the European invaders were
also using poison gas and other since forbidden brutal methods in ‘combat’ during this war. A
modern-day commentator says: ‘everybody in Chechaouen knows of Guernica’, a town of
similar size with a similar number of civilian victims in those bombings, ‘but no one in
Guernica has heard of Chechaouen’.275
Africans, Muslims, and Arabs were and, to a great extent, still are non-victims,
ignored and forgotten, not only to South African Whites, but also to Whites in general and to
many others around the world. This has created a climate of impunity, useful for some of the
most persistent white intentions, i.e. power- and profit-seeking ventures, especially in Africa,
but elsewhere in the non-white world, too. Whether as a consequence of genocide, apartheid,
(neo- or traditional) colonialism, or imperialism, the very existence of victimization and
victims was, and sometimes still is, often repressed and ignored. This is an essential part of
the global geopolitical background from which apartheid was reinvented and revived in the
modern era, in South Africa as well as in Israel.

1.3. Death Squads, Torture, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Suicide Attacks,

and ‘Honor’ Murders
Although the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is still not usually understood as similar to the
conflict between Blacks and Whites in South Africa, the basic patterns are in fact the same,
and the superficial differences between apartheid systems, partly developed collaboratively
under a secret military and political alliance, under white and Israeli Jewish rule are used to
veil those patterns.

What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South Africa against

the majority black population? What if we had lauded the South
African white leadership as ‘hard-line warriors’ rather than racists?
What if we had explained the shooting of 56 black protesters at
Sharpeville as an understandable ‘security crackdown’ by the South

275
Lindqvist: Nu Dog Du: Bombernas Århundrade [‘Now You Died: The Century of the Bombs’], 1999: 9, 119.
In fact, the very first bombardment of civilian targets from airplanes took place already in 1913, by Spanish
pilots on a Moroccan village (ibid: 88). The first bombardment from the air of military targets was also
perpetrated by Europeans in North Africa, the Italians in Libya in 1911 (ibid: 4). Significantly, Europeans and
other Whites had realized the horrific potential of aerial warfare three years before airplanes were even invented,
and they had outlawed bombardment from air balloons in the Hague Convention of 1899 (ibid: 33, only Britain
voted against this part of the Hague Convention, while the USA played a ‘mediating’ role between what was still
the world’s leading military power and the rest of the world, ibid: 58). When airplanes came around, it appears
that it was just too good a weapon for the Whites to ban, especially since non-white ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’,
i.e. Africans, Muslims, Arabs, Indios, Vietnamese, and others, were then widely expected to become the only
losers in the process. They were not to become the only losers, but they were and still remain the main losers to a
kind of warfare that should have been and very well could have been banned from the very start. But it was not,
partly or mainly thanks to the leaders of the ‘free world’, the UK and the USA. Harris must have had a
premonition that the 20th would become the century of aerial warfare. Today 95 percent of war casualties are
civilian, whereas a century ago 95 percent of war casualties were military (see Philipose 2003). Much of this
dramatic reversal can be put down to the introduction of aerial warfare, which in my view is basically a kind of
warfare developed, carried out, and promoted by some of the worst war criminals and cowards in history, with
total impunity to boot. Some of the same kind of people, mainly north Atlantic males, but especially Americans
and Israelis, are now apparently developing drones and similar atrocities to make the 21 st the century of killer
robots. See footnote 408 below.
 197

African police. And described black children shot by the police as an

act of ‘child sacrifice’ by their parents? What if we had called upon
the ‘terrorist’ ANC leadership to ‘control their own people’. Almost
every day that is exactly the way we are playing the Israeli-Palestinian
war. No matter how many youths are shot dead by the Israelis, no
matter how many murders – by either side – and no matter how
bloody the reputation of the Israeli Prime Minister, we are reporting
this terrible conflict as if we supported the South African whites
against the blacks. No, Israel is not South Africa (though it happily
supported the apartheid regime) and no, the Palestinians are not the
blacks of the shanty towns. But there’s not much difference between
Gaza and the black slums of Johannesburg; and there’s not much
difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the occupied
territories and that of the South African police. The apartheid regime
had death squads, just as Israel has today.276

The problem of gross human rights violations has existed especially in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (Gaza and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem) from the
beginning of Israeli rule, mainly due to physical violence by Israelis against Palestinians, such
as indiscriminate killings, extra-judicial assassinations and legalized torture. Since the
outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Israeli armed forces have stepped up their
assassination activities, increased the shelling of residential and other areas, started bombing
and using drones for targeted as well as well as untargeted assassinations, used innocent
Palestinian civilians as human shields in attacks on other Palestinians, refined their methods
of torture and recruitment of collaborators, and used army snipers to fire into groups of
unarmed demonstrators. Palestinians, on the other hand, have resisted from the start and have
launched suicide bombings, missile attacks, and sniping campaigns against Israeli military,
paramilitary and civilian targets since the mid-1990s.
But the problem exists since before the very foundation of the modern state of Israel.
In the words of one of its insider critics modern Israel has always been ‘…an army with a
state’. After financing the takeover of Palestine by Jews and Zionist Christians over several
decades, the Zionists in Palestine planned and executed the ethnic cleansing of the country by
compiling the so-called ‘village files’. These were lists of Palestinian people divided into
groups: who to immediately assassinate in each village, due to political activities, opinions
and/or resistance leadership potential, and who to expel from the country and ‘only’ kill if
they resisted. Many (even more) innocent Palestinians were murdered along the way. The lists
were prepared over several years leading up to Israeli statehood with the aid of Jewish agents
and Palestinian informers. The destruction of the village Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, over a
month before the Jewish state came into existence, stands out with its brutality. Between 93
and 254 innocent men, women and children were killed and the village was razed to the
ground by the Jewish Irgun unit, headed by a man who would later become Israeli prime
minister, Menachem Begin. The village was situated outside the territory of the future state
that was to be assigned to the Jews by the United Nations. None of the villagers had ever done
anything against Jews. Rather, they were known for keeping friendly relations with
neighboring Jewish communities. But that was their mistake, apparently. The Deir Yassin
massacre became symbolic for the ruthlessness with which the Zionist project was planned
and carried out. As in South Africa, in several areas, on several occasions, Palestine was to be
emptied of its native population. The Palestinians were to cease to exist, at least as an entity
capable of self-determination. Deir Yassin is not unique. There were 23 further massacres of
Palestinians during the 1948 war, according to the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, perhaps

276
Fisk: When Journalists Refuse to Tell the Truth about Israel: ‘Fear of Being Slandered as “Anti-Semites”
Means We Are Abetting Terrible Deeds in the Middle East’, 2001
198

even more. In total, 531 Palestinian villages and eleven urban neighborhoods were ethnically
cleansed, and then usually leveled to the ground to make it appear as if Palestinians had never
lived there, as if Palestine was a land without people for a people without land. Apartheid is in
fact never far from genocide and sometimes, as in Palestine/Israel in 1948-49, the two
coincide. Crucially, the rest of the world was to be kept ignorant about these crimes, and most
of it still is.277
Other acts of genocide include the massacre of between 800 and 3,500 Palestinian
refugee civilians – men, women and children – at the Sabra and Shatila camps outside Beirut
in Lebanon on September 16-18, 1982, for which the Israeli state Kahan Commission in 1983
found the then defense minister, Ariel Sharon, ‘indirectly responsible’. The commission’s
findings eventually cost Sharon his job. The massacre took place following Israel’s invasion
of Lebanon, and was carried out by Christian phalangist militiamen allied to the Israelis, with
direct aid from the Israeli army which transported the murderers to the camps in direct
violation of a truce, and then actively prevented both fleeing survivors from escaping the
bloodbath and journalists from witnessing the carnage and Israel’s role in it. Israeli soldiers
and tanks surrounded the camps entirely on September 15 and installed checkpoints at
strategic locations and crossroads around the camps in order to monitor the entry or exit of
any person. The Israelis started the massacre by shelling the camps on the same day. Once the
phalangists entered the camps, reportedly under direct orders from the Israeli command,
Israeli aircraft and artillery lit up the night sky with illumination flares over the camps to
assist the other killers. Both the UN General Assembly and the UN Commission on Human
Rights in resolutions described the massacre as an ‘act of genocide’ and firmly placed
responsibility with the state of Israel. But Israel was never punished, and neither were any of
its soldiers or politicians. Although not immediately, Sharon was in a way rewarded by the
Israeli electorate for his work at Sabra and Shatila by being elected prime minister in 2001.
Other factors that played roles in his election were his continued staunch support for
internationally illegal settlement expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as minister
of housing during the 1980s – which earned him the nickname, ‘the bulldozer’ – and his
image of being tough against the Arabs in general.
An independent commission, headed by UNESCO’s Sean MacBride, found Israel
guilty of war crimes in Sabra and Shatila, but the report was practically buried and forgotten,
in much the same way as a quarter of a century later the Goldstone Report found Israel as well
as Hamas (though the latter of far fewer and lesser crimes) guilty of war crimes in the Gaza
War 2008-2009, but (as yet) saw no legal action from the international community, again
despite its legal responsibility to initiate such action. Sharon’s designated successor, Ehud
Olmert, carries the main responsibility for that Gaza War. Sharon’s part-time Likud Party
comrade, Benjamin Netanyahu, carries the main responsibility for acts of genocide in Gaza on
many other occasions, including the 2012 and 2014 Gaza wars. Neither Sharon, nor Olmert or
Netanyahu has faced any legal trouble, as yet, for these massive crimes. The Israeli historian,
Ilan Pappe, has accused Israel of being very successful with deceptive propaganda, lobbying
and intimidation to achieve such a blind-eyed treatment by the international community.278
From 2001 to 2003, the Belgian Judiciary pursued a court case over the Sabra and
Shatila massacre against Sharon. The charges included crimes against humanity. A law passed
in Belgium in 1999 had stripped all governmental and diplomatic immunity for perpetrators of

277
Said: The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, 2000: 157ff; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 96; Pace: Ethnic
Cleansing 101: The Case of Lifta Village, 2005; Pappe 2006: xiii, 17-22, 39ff; Pappe 2010: 184 (quote)
278
MacBride, Asmal, Bercusson, Falk, de la Pradelle, & Wild: Israel in Lebanon: The Report of International
Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the
Lebanon, 1983; Chehata: Opposing Apartheid: Palestine and the Experience of South Africa - with Ilan Pappe
and Ronnie Kasrils, 2010; Pappe: To the Family of the One Thousandth Victim of Israel’s Genocidal Slaughter
in Gaza, 2014; Rabbani: Israel Mows the Lawn, 2014. On the Goldstone Report, see also Telhami: Israel Seeks
to Keep the Goldstone Report Away from the Agenda of the General Assembly, 2010.
 199

war crimes and genocide, whatever their nationality and wherever their crimes were
committed. Yet, Sharon was never sentenced, the case against him was dropped by the
Belgian Judiciary due to intense US and Israeli pressure on another (!) arm of the Belgian
state (the government), and meanwhile, the pattern of gross human rights violations carried
out under Sharon (and all of his predecessors) continued unabated, in several aspects also
intensifying beyond even the most genocidal policies of the South African apartheid
regime.279

279
Lamb: International Legal Responsibility for the Sabra-Shatilla-Massacre, 1983; Nguyen: War Crimes Case
Filed in Belgium against Sharon, 2001; Siegel: After Nineteen Years: Sabra and Shatila Remembered, 2001;
Law Society: Palestinian and Arab Response to Mary Robinson, 2001; Blanford: Seeking Justice for Victims of
Sharon, 2001; Prince-Gibson: The Long Arm of the Law, 2001; N.N.: The International Campaign for Justice for
the Victims of Sabra & Shatila, no date; Beaumont: Profile: Ariel Sharon – Israel’s Old Bruiser, 2000.
Subsequent research has yielded that up to one thousand Palestinian civilians may have been taken to Beirut’s
Cité Sportif stadium after the massacres in the camps and murdered in the following twenty-four hours. See Fisk:
New Evidence Indicates Palestinians Died Hours After Surviving Camp Massacres, 2001). A major part of the
body-count problem is that the international community has never insisted on the kind of meticulous forensic
investigation of what happened in Beirut, as it has, for instance, in the cases of war crimes committed against
Europeans in the former Yugoslavia. The resolutions condemning Israel for the massacres are: UN General
Assembly Resolution 123 (A/RES/37/123) and the UN Commission on Human Rights Resolution
E/CN.4/RES/1985/4. Belgium never issued an international arrest warrant for Sharon. Following an appeal by
Israel, the judge handling the case was initially forced to suspend the case. Previously, ‘diplomatic tensions’ had
prompted Foreign Minister Louis Michel to propose ‘amending’, i.e. effectively scrapping the 1999 law. See
Castonguay: Belgium Suspends Sharon Probe Pending Ruling, 2001. Israel had argued that any proceeding
against Sharon breached international laws granting statesmen immunity from prosecution, that the probe
breached Israel’s judicial sovereignty because the case had already been decided by the 1983 state inquiry in
Israel, which found Sharon indirectly responsible for the deaths. Israel also questioned Belgium’s right to try a
foreigner for crimes committed abroad. But Belgium’s Deputy Public Prosecutor, Pierre Morlet, found no legal
foundation to these objections. See Nguyen: Belgian Public Prosecutor Backs Sharon Probe, 2001. In July 2001,
Elie Hobeika, a former Lebanese minister and the former leader of a pro-Israeli militia involved in the massacre,
announced that in order to prove his innocence he would testify against Sharon in Belgium. He repeated the offer
to visiting Belgian senators on January 23, 2002 and was assassinated outside his home in Beirut on the
following day. Lebanon’s president, Emile Lahoud, its prime minister, Rafik al-Hariri, its information minister,
Ghazi al-Aridi, and its minister of displaced people, Marwan Hamadeh, all accused Israel of being behind the
assassination in order to save Sharon from being found guilty in Belgium and also to create a state of anxiety in
Lebanon, due to the ongoing Palestinian Intifada. In a statement issued in Brussels, Belgian senators who had
met Hobeika the day before he was killed called him a ‘key protagonist who had offered to assist the inquiry’
and described his death as ‘an evident attempt to undermine the case.’ Later, a hitherto unknown, allegedly
Lebanese group saying it opposed Syria’s continued grip on the country claimed responsibility, calling Hobeika
a traitor for his allegiance to Damascus. (Hobeika had switched from supporting Israel to backing Syria in the
mid-1980s.) Major anti-Syrian groups in Lebanon, however, made no such claims, and could not even identify
the group named in the statement. N.N.: Lebanon Minister Fingers Israel in Hobeika Killing, January 24, 2002;
Logan: Bomb Kills Warlord Accused of Beirut 1982 Massacres, 2002; Nguyen: Lebanese Warlord Was Key
Witness in Sharon Case, 2002; Oweis: Lebanon Accuses Israel of Killing Warlord Hobeika, 2002; Spetalnick:
Fresh Spiral of Bloodshed in Mideast Conflict, 2002; Logan: Assassination Conjures up Lebanon’s Bloody Past,
2002; Linnebank & Moody: Lebanon Says Peace Impossible with Sharon, 2002. On June 26, 2002, a Brussels
appeals court threw out the lawsuit against Sharon, ruling that the ‘presumed author’ of the crimes has not ‘been
found in Belgium’, a strange formulation, to say the least. This ruling appears to be in direct contradiction to the
1999 law. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International consequently protested the decision, and a lawyer
representing the Palestinian plaintiffs brought the case to appeal at Belgium’s Supreme Court on September 26.
Nguyen: Belgian Court Dismisses Sharon War Crimes Suit, Reuters, 2002; N.N.: Amnesty Wants Justice for
Beirut Massacre Victims, September 25, 2002. On February 12, 2003, the Belgian Supreme Court called a halt to
all proceedings against Sharon, but it also ruled that Sharon could be charged anew once his term as prime
minister had ended, i.e. once his diplomatic immunity as head of government had been lifted. Israel responded by
immediately withdrawing its ambassador from Belgium and summoning Belgium’s ambassador in Israel to a
meeting to protest the ruling. Miles, T.: Belgian Court Says Sharon Can Be Probed after Office, 2003; Batrawi:
A State Above the Law, 2003. However, in September 2003, after much pressure from Israel and the USA, the
appeals court finally threw out the war crimes case against Sharon, ruling that it was beyond the jurisdiction of
Belgian courts. N.N.: Belgium Mends Israel, US Ties after War Crimes Spat, November 18, 2003
200

The fantastically cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like

so many human sardines into the Gaza strip, plus the nearly two
million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the
annals of apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb
South African homelands. They are used against Palestinians towns
and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by
Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed wire fence), which
also controls the entire water supply.280

How did this situation evolve? The 1948-49 war was followed by a UN-brokered
armistice, which resulted in more land gain for the Israeli Jews and a large number of
Palestinian refugees. The remaining parts of Palestine were divided between Jordan (the West
Bank) and Egypt (the Gaza Strip). Israel attacked Egypt in 1956, and in the 1967 and 1973
wars Israel conquered the rest of the Arab areas of Historic Palestine, adding the Sinai (which
was given back to Egypt in return for a peace treaty in 1978) and the Golan Heights, which
were taken from Syria. Israel also invaded Lebanon in 1982 and set up a ‘Security Zone’ in
the south of the country before unilaterally withdrawing from most of it in 2000, apparently
more due to military and image losses than to goodwill or for ‘peace process’ negotiating
strength. Since long before the establishment of the state of Israel, the Jewish-Arab conflict
has cost many lives, in several ways more intensely than in South Africa’s long apartheid
history (in the wide sense). But there has never really been any peace in or around
Palestine/Israel since the First World War, during which the British took control over the
country from the Turks.
Most of the perception of ‘Israeli-Arab’ violence in the rest of the world has been
focused on the shifting fronts between armies, whereas the violence inside Israeli-controlled
areas was rather successfully covered up by Israel and its allies for a long time. Violence
within Israeli-controlled areas became more visible internationally from 1987, however, with
the start of the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising. In spite of continued Israeli military
censorship, international news organizations and others were able to record human rights
violations, especially ones against Israelis, but increasingly also the ones carried out by
Israelis. The globalized ‘information society’ demanded more and faster news, and, just as
with the Soviet Union, South Africa, China and others, Israeli state censors and news
managers were unable to keep up with the pace.
Many more Palestinian civilians have been killed and wounded since then, mainly
whilst they were participating in riots and demonstrations. A great number of these civilians
were innocent of any activity that could endanger the safety and well-being of the country or
the state. However, the Intifada provided the Israeli army and police with pretexts to act in
any way they found necessary to control and suppress resistance, i.e. Palestinian civilians.281
At the same time, Israelis, including many civilians, were targeted with suicide bombings and
other violent attacks, mainly by the armed wings of the militant Islamist Palestinian Hamas
and Islamic Jihad movements, and by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the militant wing of the
mainstream Fatah political party.282
As with the South African resistance against apartheid in the narrow sense, many
Palestinians were also targeted, attacked and killed abroad, along with other Arabs opposed to
Israel. In 2000 Noam Chomsky estimated the combined number of Lebanese and Palestinians
killed directly by Israel and its ally, the USA, in Lebanon from the Israeli invasion in 1982
280
Said: Occupation Is the Atrocity, 2001. See also Pappe 2007 and Tilley (ed.) 2009: 192 on the continued and
recurring genocidal aspects of Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
281
See, for example, Amr, W.: Israeli Army Snipers Fire into Palestinian Crowd, 2001; N.N.: Israeli Army
Blasted for Lack of Non-Lethal Weapons, October 1, 2003.
282
On a remarkably conciliatory Israeli victim of a Palestinian suicide bombing, who survived horrific wounds
and a four-month coma after the attack, see Sites: Skin Deep: When a Suicide Bomber Took Kinneret Boosany’s
Physical Beauty, She Found the Beauty Inside, 2006
 201

and onwards at 45,000-50,000.283 Lebanon, indeed, had become an Israeli equivalent to

Angola, Namibia, and Mozambique since long before that invasion. Just like the thousands of
youths who had joined the MK outside of South Africa’s borders during the 1960s, ‘70s, and
‘80s, thousands out of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had been driven out of
Palestine in 1948-49 and their children, plus additional refugees since then, had organized
politically and militarily and now became the main targets and victims, along with innocent
civilian refugees, of the apartheid regimes’ exported wars. Five years before Chomsky’s, the
following estimates were made:

Human misery cannot adequately be conveyed in figures, and yet the

statistics give some order of scale. The Palestinian death toll from
1948 to 1993 was 261,000, with 186,000 wounded and 161,140
disabled. The refugees displaced in 1948 and 1967, and their
descendants, numbered 5.4 million by the early 1990s, according to
UN estimates. The civil wars in Lebanon which resulted from
complications of the Arab-Israeli conflict claimed a further 90,000
lives, 115,000 wounded, 9,627 disabled, and 875,000 refugees.
Egypt’s losses in five wars, (1948, 1956, 1967, 1968-70 and 1973)
came to 39,000 dead, 73,000 wounded, and 61,000 disabled, while 2.1
million people living in the Suez Canal area were displaced twice (in
1956 and 1967).284

These overall figures point towards a death toll so far comparable in size order to that
of South African apartheid (in the narrow sense). Many Jews have been killed in and outside
of Israel too, yet the overall ratio to the number of Palestinians killed is only estimated at
somewhere between 1-12 and 1-25, according to two learned commentators. The
unprecedented wave of suicide bombings that accompanied the Second Intifada, which started
in September 2000, at one point raised the relative Jewish death toll to nearly a quarter of the
total of killings in that uprising, though it has since dropped to less than a fifth, especially
since the main militant resistance movement, Hamas, suspended suicide bombings from 2004
onwards.285
Between December 1987 and November 1988, Al Haq286 reported 204 Palestinian
deaths in the West Bank. 180 of these deaths were a result of Israeli live ammunition fired at
Palestinians. The remaining deaths were results of the use by authorities of tear gas, beatings,
plastic- or rubber-coated steel bullets and other instruments. Most of the dead were between
the ages of 16 to 25; six of them were under the age of five. 287 The number of wounded is
difficult to obtain, for several reasons; the first being that many of the wounded do not seek
treatment in official hospitals due to fear of being arrested (if suspected of being involved in
civil unrest). Secondly, it is difficult to obtain any adequate reports on the wounded in Israeli
hospitals for ‘security’ and other reasons. Yet, even when records are presented, they vary. In
1988, former Defense Minister (later Prime Minister) Yitzhak Rabin stated that in less than
two years, more than 7,000 Palestinians were wounded. According to the Jerusalem Post,
however, a total of 3,000 people were wounded between 1987 and 1988. According to the Al
Haq report, finally, an estimated total of 20,000 Palestinians were wounded in Israeli attacks

283
Chomsky: The Current Crisis in the Middle East: What Can We Do? 2000
284
Heikal: Secret Channels: The Inside Story of Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations, 1996: 7
285
Brand-Jakobsen 2000; Herman November 25, 2002; Herman 2001 (see footnote 20); Herman: Road Map,
2003. Miftah: Special Report: Facts & Figures: Casualties and Material Losses during the Intifada
September 28th, 2000 – May 30th, 2010, 2010. See Part III below, on the long-term strategic irrelevance of the
higher relative Israeli death tolls due to the Palestinian suicide attack campaigns.
286
Al Haq, established in 1979, is an NGO affiliated with the International Commission of Jurists.
287
Al Haq: Punishing a Nation, 1988: 11
202

between 1987 and 1988 in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.288
According to Rabin, the use of plastic-covered steel bullets was necessitated by rubber
bullets and tear gas not being sufficiently accurate to hit stone throwers 30 meters away.
Plastic-covered steel bullets are being used widely even by soldiers who only have ‘a short
course in which they were trained to use the bullets’, resulting in a ‘six-fold increase in the
number of Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip’ in the first month after the plastic-covered
steel bullets were introduced.289
Since they were first introduced, human rights groups have condemned the use of
plastic- and rubber-coated steel bullets. They have been used routinely against people without
lethal weapons, possibly even mainly against people without any weapons whatsoever. In
2004, seventeen years later, the Israeli army first started considering lowering the velocity of
the bullets in order to lower casualties. The idea only came, however, when the Israelis started
considering riot control measures against Jews, namely settlers opposed to evacuating the
Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Assaf Heffetz, a former Israeli special forces colonel and
national police chief told Reuters: ‘Arab riots can easily turn deadly, demanding a strong
response, but that is not likely to be the case with any settlers who resist. . . . So the tactic will
have to be calibrated accordingly.’290 Not spoken but implied is the following assumption
behind this argument: Arab riots easily turn deadly because of the Arabs, not because of the
use of lethal arms against them, nor because of the theft of Arab land nor any other gross
human rights violations involved in the occupation or in the apartheid; i.e. Arab lives are
expendable, their rights are unimportant, Jewish lives and rights are not. There may (also) be
another racist idea at work here: that Jews would show more self-restraint than Arabs while
protesting.
The use of force in the Occupied Territories and Palestinian refugee camps also
occurred under conditions which were not related to protest activities, such as the numerous
assassinations and arrests of civilians without arrest warrants in their homes. Detainees were
often taken to remote areas, where they were beaten before being released. Soldiers had in fact
been ordered to break the bones of people involved in the Intifada. It is estimated by neutral
sources that up to 10,000 Palestinian children had bones broken by the soldiers during the
First Intifada. Many beatings in general take place when a person is already in detention,
when the use of force is no longer called for. Beatings were commonly aimed at the limbs,
joints and the head and were implemented with the use of wooden clubs at first. These were
later replaced by plastic and fiberglass truncheons, as the wooden clubs were found to break.
Beatings were almost always practiced by groups of soldiers rather than individuals. Many
Palestinians, on the other hand, were victimized merely for being in groups, sometimes as
small as six people, since strict limitations on the freedom of assembly were applied by the
occupation forces.291
There are other types of physically violent acts which are not categorized as ‘use of
force’ since they differ from the ‘official’ uses of force, for example, soldiers demanding that
people climb on electrical wires to remove stones on strings, where in some cases people died
as a direct result of electrocution. Phosphorous grenades resembling normal tear gas grenades
(in size and color) were used by the IDF, causing long-term injuries and disabilities. Last but
not least, syringes with unidentified contents were used on Palestinians during interrogation

288
Ibid: 12. A Palestinian-Israeli Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be well-advised to investigate
such discrepancies thoroughly. Referring to two until recently forgotten massacres of Palestinian civilians by
Israelis in Gaza in 1956, Paul de Rooij writes: ‘…future reconciliation will require a South African-style Truth
and Reconciliation Commission where the massacres at Deir Yassin, Safat, Jenin 2002, Gaza 2009, … [PR] and
Khan Yunis and Rafah 1956 are acknowledged.’ De Rooij: Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza”: A People’s Cartoon
History of Gaza, 2010. See also footnote 887 below.
289
Al Haq 1988: 16
290
Williams, D.: Israel Seeks New Non-Lethal Arms against Settlers, 2004
291
Al Haq 1988: 12ff; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 100; Karpel: The One who Makes People Talk, 2007
 203

by the Israeli authorities, in addition to different acts of physical and psychological

humiliation.292
Between December 1987 and September 1988, only two soldiers were found guilty of
murder and manslaughter. One of the reasons why few trials take place is the lack of
complaints because people fear the consequences of such complaints, both for the victims and
the lawyers representing the victims. This is mainly the case with physical violence not
resulting in death. Investigations into deaths are usually carried out by military police, and, on
rare occasions, justice does prevail. The repeated abuses of human rights during the uprising
serve as a reminder that these same abuses caused the rebellion to begin with.
During the first Intifada, more than 100 internal investigations a year were opened by
the Israeli military police. In the second major Intifada, which started in the year 2000, that
number shrank considerably. At the end of 2001, a total of only 59 military police
investigations, of which only 15 involved shooting incidents, had been opened since the start
of the Second Intifada 15 months earlier. Three criminal indictments of Israeli soldiers had
been handed down, but no one had been sentenced. By mid-2003, only 35 cases had made it
to court. One might safely say that the Israeli state thus indirectly encourages its soldiers to
commit crimes against humanity. At the same time, this was a much bloodier conflict than the
previous Intifada, to a large extent precisely because of this new climate of impunity, in which
Israeli soldiers felt free to shoot first and ask questions (if any) later.293
In what, at first, seems like an opposite development and a genuine improvement, the
Israeli Supreme Court on September 6, 1999 outlawed methods of physical force that had
been implemented legally and routinely in interrogations by Israel’s General Security Service
(GSS, today renamed as the Israel Security Agency, ISA). It meant the end of a unique and
notorious distinction of the state of Israel. Until then, it had for some time been the only
country in the world with legalized torture. The interrogation guidelines in effect until then
included the use of ‘violent shaking, holding and tying the interrogee in painful positions,
sleep deprivation, covering the interrogee’s head with a sack, and playing of loud music’. The
court decision thus ended legal torture of Palestinians in interrogation. But there were still
powerful voices for an amended kind of legalized torture, as the following account, from an
Israeli human rights group, bears witness.

Israel was the only country in the world where torture was legally
sanctioned; the guidelines allowing torture were drafted by a
governmental commission headed by a former Supreme Court Justice
and were approved by a governmental committee. A Parliamentary
292
Al Haq 1988: 37. A huge number of incidents and cases such as these remain unpublished and unnoticed
internationally, a circumstance which further underscores the eventual need for a TRC in Palestine and present-
day Israel. More on Israel’s unique legalized torture below.
293
Wilkinson: Israeli Activists Urge Army to Probe Civilian Slayings, 2001; N.N.: Israel Soldier Made Woman
Drink Cleaning Fluid-Court, June 23, 2003. In this particular case a soldier stood accused of forcing a Palestinian
woman at a checkpoint in Gaza to drink cleaning liquid at gunpoint. The woman survived the poisoning after
being treated at a Gaza hospital. Another incident involved five paramilitary border policemen who were charged
with torturing two Palestinians suspected of wanting to enter Jerusalem illegally. The border guards took the
Palestinians to an abandoned building and began to beat them, according to an indictment charging them with
assault and abuse. A member of the squad then urinated in a bucket, the contents of which were then poured into
the mouth of one of the detainees as a rifle was pressed to the Palestinian’s head. The guards also stubbed out
cigarettes on the hands of both Palestinians before releasing them, the indictment said. See N.N.: Israeli Police
Charged with Abusing Palestinians, September 28, 2004. In a further case, three Israeli paramilitary officers
from a border police unit confessed to forcing two youths to eat gravel, kiss their shoes, and to severely beating
the youths. N.N: Border Policemen Indicted for Abusing Palestinians, June 2, 2004. This indictment and the
confessions only came about after the results of the abuse had already been shown on television. Israeli human
rights groups such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel also report tacit approval by the Israeli army of
Israeli killings of innocent Palestinian civilians, e.g. through use of them as human shields, and of other war
crimes. See Heller, C.: Israeli Troops Violate Palestinian Rights -Report, 2003; Nasir: Israel Airstrike Kills 5;
Hamas Challenges Abbas, 2006.
204

committee and the State Comptroller were appointed to monitor

implementation of these guidelines, and the courts were called upon to
approve legal maneuvers to sanction them.
In their precedent-setting decision [to outlaw torture], the Justices
stated that, ‘If the state wishes to enable GSS investigators to utilize
physical means in interrogations, it must seek the enactment of
legislation for this purpose’…Following the decision, some public
officials called for enactment of a law that would allow the GSS to
continue to use physical force in its interrogations. Likud MK
[Member of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset] Reuven Rivlin
submitted a bill along these lines.
On 15 September 1999, the Ministerial Committee for GSS Matters,
headed by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, appointed a committee to
examine whether and how to incorporate into legislation interrogations
that include the use of physical force. In December 1999, the
committee (headed by Deputy Attorney General Manny Mazuz and
Deputy State’s Attorney Rachel Suqar) submitted its
recommendations to the government. The members did not reach
agreement on what legislation should be enacted, and submitted to the
prime minister different recommendations regarding appropriate
legislation.
On 15 February 2000, the head of the GSS, Ami Ayalon, announced
that he was withdrawing his demand for legislation allowing the use of
physical force in interrogations. Ayalon abandoned this demand
primarily because of the repercussions such legislation would have on
Israel’s international stature.294

Israel’s reputation is at stake here, not human lives or human rights. Yet, although
Israel has thus ended state-sanctioned torture in word and in principle, it has not done so in
deed. After the eruption of the Second Intifada in September 2000, and especially after the
election victory of Ariel Sharon in the following year, Israel was again looking to reintroduce
legal torture, thus once again making Israel the only country in the world with this dubious
distinction. The cases of suspected torture by Israeli authorities again skyrocketed and now
also involved more Palestinian children being victimized.295 A report on the mistreatment of

294
N.N.: Torture by the General Security Service, no date. Confessions acquired through torture are still
admissible in Israeli courts. See N.N.: Torture and Abuse under Interrogation, 2011, and Carter 2006: 197.
295
Mahnaimi: Sharon Set to Legalise Torture, 2001. See further Peled: Torture: Read It in the Israeli Press, 2007;
Seitz: Israel Continues to Torture Prisoners, 2001; N.N.: Israel: Palestinian Children Still Being Tortured in
Israeli Prisons, July 3, 2001. The latter report was published by the World Organisation Against Torture (known
by its French acronym, OMCT), the umbrella organization for 240 non-governmental organizations around the
world that oppose torture. It is the largest coalition of its kind. A year into the Second Intifada, the OMCT
slammed the Israeli General Security Services for illegally using sleep deprivation, shackling, forced squatting,
suffocation and beatings against Palestinians and also alleged that there had been deaths ‘during the interrogation
process’. It further cited death threats and other kinds of ill-treatment of Palestinian children and severe beatings
of Palestinian women. No Israeli interrogator, however, had been criminally charged and brought to justice. The
OMCT said the Palestinian authorities were also torturing Palestinians suspected of collaboration with Israel. See
N.N.: One Year After the Beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, OMCT Expresses its Deep Concern Regarding the
Deteriorating Human Rights Situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, September 28, 2001;
N.N.: Israel, Palestinians Accused of Torturing Inmates, September 28, 2001; N.N.: UNICEF Slams Israel on
Jailed Palestinian Children, November 20, 2001; Nebehay: Amnesty Accuses Israel of Torturing Palestinians,
2001; Nebehay: U.N. Rights Body Urges Israel to Prevent Torture, 2001; Heritage: Israel Holds Thousands of
Palestinian Prisoners, 2002. By the time this last article was written, Israel was also being accused of forbidding
prisoners to pray, blindfolding and tying up prisoners for days, even weeks, undernourishing them, exposing
them to heat and cold, torturing them in other ways and holding them for months without filing any charges
against them. Out of an estimated total 7,800 Palestinians who remained in Israeli detention centers at this time,
around 1,800 were held under ‘administrative detention’ – detention without charge or trial. Before the Intifada
broke out in September 2000, only nine Palestinians were held in administrative detention, though hundreds of
 205

Palestinian children in Israeli state custody underlines the brutality and the lack of minimal
respect for human rights and children’s rights manifested by the Israeli authorities.

Child prisoners are placed in a dirty, foul smelling solitary

confinement cell (200 cm by 150 cm) known as ‘zinzaneh’, the floor
of which may be wet or covered in human excrements. The cell may
either be almost completely devoid of light, or have light on at all
times. If the prisoner attempts to sleep, a guard will come and wake
him or her. Moreover child prisoners are often deprived of food and
not given access to toilets. . . during interrogations child prisoners are
tied, blindfolded and severely beaten. Moreover the methods outlawed
by the Israeli High Court are nevertheless used with children being
violently shaken, severe cases can lead to brain damage, tied to a
small chair in uncomfortable positions that force the body to cramp
for extended periods of time and exposed to severe heat or cold, for
example removing the prisoner’s clothes and locking him in a small
cupboard whereupon the air conditioning system is switch[ed] on to
produce extremely cold conditions. Furthermore there have been
several documented cases where prison guards have attempted raping
child prisoners, and if they fail to succeed the children are placed with
the adult Israeli criminal population whereupon they are sexual
assaulted and abused, under the watchful eye of the prison guards.296

A former state torturer, Carmi Gillon, was appointed Israel’s ambassador to Denmark
in 2001. His arrival there was met with demonstrations by anti-torture activists and a formal
criminal charge of torture by the Danish state. Gillon was accused of responsibility for at least
100 cases of torture against Palestinians when he was chief of the Israeli security service in
the mid-1990s (between the Intifadas, i.e. when there was comparatively little violence). After
his nomination as ambassador, Gillon had also made remarks to Danish television, reiterating
his support of the use of torture against Palestinians in order to stop terrorist attacks against
Israelis. Danish police, however, eventually dropped the charges, quoting statements by

thousands of such detentions have reportedly been carried out by the Israelis against Palestinians from the
occupied territories since 1967. The UN Security Council has also condemned Israel for its use of torture and
other kinds of violence illegal under international law. See, for example, footnote 855 below.
296
N.N.: The Torture of Palestinian Children under Israeli Occupation, February 22, 2003. See also Chehata:
Shin Bet - An Ingrained Culture of Torture and Deceit, 2011; N.N.: The Use of Torture against Palestinian
Prisoners in Israeli Jails, February 15, 2000; Bolender: Israelis Torture Arabs Too, 2004. On rape-murders of
Palestinian women by Israeli armed forces, see Shavit: Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,
2004; Pappe 2006: 208-211. An ultra-secret prison, believed to have been located in central Israel, and usually
referred to as ‘Facility 1391’, was believed to be the only prison in the country which was entirely closed to
visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Systematic torture was alleged to be routine procedure at
the prison, which was challenged by Israeli rights groups and a parliamentarian, after its existence had been
uncovered in 2002. See Goldin: Israeli Supreme Court Asked to Shut Down Secret Jail, Reuters, 2003. On June
2, 2004, the director of the Public Committee against Torture in Israel, Hanna Friedman, announced at the Bruno
Kreisky Forum in Vienna that she was now convinced that Facility 1391 had been closed. She suspended
judgment, however, on whether there were any further secret prisons in the country. It is almost ironic that the
USA decided to charge its state torturers in Iraq with serious crimes (once they had been found out and
publicized by the world’s mass media in 2004), while it continues to pay Israel military aid apparently without
even asking about the many documented cases of torture in Israeli military jails, documented not only by
Palestinian and foreign-based human rights groups, but even by Israeli human rights organizations, such as the
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and B’Tselem. See N.N.: Folter im Irak, Routine in Israel, May 24,
2004; Williams, D.: Israel Probes Army Abuse Claims in Photo Exhibit, 2004. The exhibition referred to in the
latter article was not closed down by authorities, but a video tape documenting abuses by occupation soldiers in
Hebron which was part of the exhibit was confiscated by Israeli military police. The exhibition’s organizers
accused authorities of wishing to hush up criticism of Israel’s actions in the occupied territories. Taking prisoners
out of occupied territory and charging children as adults are also illegal acts under international law, but Israel
does that, too. See Carter 2006: 197.
206

Danish Foreign Minister Mogens Lykketoft to the effect that Gillon’s diplomatic immunity
took precedence over the United Nations Convention on Torture.297
Like apartheid South Africa, Israel denied making or possessing weapons of mass
destruction, i.e. nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. An independent Japanese
investigation, however, concludes that Israel is a de facto nuclear weapons state.298 According
to another report, Israel produced a clandestine nuclear weapons program already in the 1950s
and has since then developed ‘hundreds’ of atomic bombs. In 1973, even US military
intelligence said it detected the ‘first signs’ of Israeli nuclear-related military objects, and says
it ‘believes’ that the country by now has many nuclear warheads. Since then, a near-consensus
on the subject has developed, although the most powerful voices still insist on denying the
obvious.

In 1986 the Moroccan-born Israeli scientist Mordechai Vanunu blew

the whistle on the activities at [the Israeli nuclear weapons research
and development site] Dimona, claiming it had produced ‘over 200’
nuclear warheads. Five years later a US Strategic Air Command
report said Israel had between 75 and 200 nuclear weapons. The
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) estimates Israel has ‘over 185’
nuclear weapons. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
estimates ‘over 100, but not significantly over 200’. The Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute estimates 200. In 2000, Israeli
MK Issam Mahoul broke the parliamentary taboo on discussing
Israel’s official policy of ‘nuclear ambiguity’ and stated that Israel
had 2-300 nuclear warheads. Jane’s Intelligence Review estimated in
1997 that Israel had over 400 thermonuclear and nuclear weapons.
The Campaign to Free Vanunu estimates 500 nuclear warheads.299

In September 2002, half a year before the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq,
Reuters News Agency stated ‘Israel is reported to have some 200 nuclear warheads and has
refused to allow international inspections of the kind the United Nations has demanded of
Iraq’. In spite of the overwhelming evidence and all of the unambiguous revelations and
admissions being made, the USA and Britain still refuse to admit officially that Israel has
nuclear weapons. Israel itself now neither denies nor confirms it has them. The USA has laws
against supporting countries that possess unconventional weapons, yet Israel receives more
military aid from the USA than any other country does or ever did. With regard to that,
hypocrisy is an understatement. The UN, meanwhile, has done little, due to the undemocratic
powers vested in the predominantly western nuclear giants, but in Security Council Resolution
487, of June 1981, it ‘…calls upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under
International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] safeguards,’ and Resolution 687 of April 1991
points out ‘…the threat that all weapons of mass destruction pose to peace and security in the
area and…the need to work towards the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the
Middle East’.300

297
Hockstader: Israeli’s Torture Remarks Cause Diplomatic Uproar, 2001; N.N.: Torture Complaint against
Israeli Envoy Rejected, September 4, 2001
298
Saito (senior writer) 1999: 198 and 69, 75ff; Chomsky 21999: 464ff
299
Sammonds: Israeli WMD, 2002; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 35f argue that the USA tacitly and hypocritically
approves of Israel’s nuclear arsenal of ‘upward of two hundred nuclear weapons’.
300
Sammonds, October 11, 2002; N.N.: Palestinian Delegation Attacks U.S. at U.N., September 17, 2002. See
also Gur-Arieh: Mideast Nuclear War, 1998; N.N.: Israeli Nuclear Arsenal a Mystery to UN Watchdog, February
25, 2004; N.N.: LA Man Accused of Shipping Nuclear Parts to Israel, November 26, 2001. The latter article
describes a case in which criminal charges were launched against Richard Kelly Smyth, who faced 15 counts of
violating the US Arms Export Control Act by illegally shipping nuclear triggering devices to Israel in 1980-82.
He also faced 15 counts of making false statements to the US government. When asked about them, Israel said
that the devices were not intended for nuclear weapons use, and that it returned ‘a substantial number’ of them
 207

Between 1987 and 2003, the IAEA appealed to Israel to sign the nuclear non-
proliferation treaty 13 times. All of these attempts were ignored by the Jewish state.301
Moreover, under US influence the UN and the international community are pressuring
countries such as Iran and North Korea to prove that they have no intentions of developing
nuclear arms and to abandon their nuclear weapons program, respectively. The presumption
of innocence, a basic right, has flown out the window in the case of Iran. But nothing is done
to contain Israel’s gigantic nuclear war machine. According to several analysts referred to by
the Reuters news agency, Israel is the world’s fifth largest nuclear weapons power. Israel also
possesses the most effective and powerful delivery systems: missiles, bomber airplanes and
submarines.302 Militarily, but not (yet?) politically, Israel has broken in among the Big Five,
the victors of World War II, who are the first five countries to develop nuclear bombs, the
largest arms manufacturers in the world, and who are the undemocratic veto powers in the UN
Security Council.
In 1981, Israel became the first country in the world to break the unwritten global rule
of not attacking nuclear power stations. In a totally unprovoked bombing raid, Israel reduced
Osiraq/Tammuz-1, to rubble. It was an Iraqi power plant under construction with the aid of
French scientists and under supervision by the UN body, the IAEA. In marked contrast, all
Israeli nuclear programs, civil and military, are in practice allowed by the UN and the
international community to continue to expand without any sanctions or controls by the IAEA
or by anyone else.
Iraq, however, was attacked and invaded 22 years later by a coalition force led by the
USA, unauthorized by the UN, officially because of US and British suspicions of Iraqi
programs for the development of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, which ‘could’ become a
threat to the USA and the UK, and (later) due to US insistence on ‘liberating’ the country;
unofficially, though, for a host of different, possible reasons, including US and UK corporate
control over and/or military access to the country’s vast oil wealth and other rich resources,
blind revenge for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA, a general anti-Muslim and anti-
Arab policy, and, last but certainly not least, an end to Iraqi support for the Palestinian
uprising against the favorite ally of the USA. It resulted in what I believe is a hitherto
unprecedented success for an apartheid state with exporting its apartheid violence. As far as I
know, many Palestinian refugees have been killed in Iraq (by Americans, Iraqis, and others),
but not a single Israeli has been killed in the Iraq War, now raging since over a decade,
although Israel remains the main beneficiary of it, at least in military and political terms.303

after Smyth’s indictment. See also Williams, D.: Leaks and Peeks Key to Israel’s Nuclear Ambiguity, 2003, in
which Israel’s desire for increased international tension is implied by the Washington-based watchdog group, the
Arms Control Association, which says Israel’s ‘opacity’ with regard to its weapons of mass destruction is similar
to that of the Soviet Union, which unnecessarily hastened US nuclear programs and made the world a less safe
place.
301
N.N.: IAEA Chief Urges Israel to Scrap Nuclear Weapons, November 26, 2003
302
Giacomo: Arabs Say World Ignores Israel’s Nuclear Program, 2003; N.N.: Factbox: Facts and Fears on
Israel’s Suspected Nuclear Arms, July 4, 2004. Personally, I am not in favor of any new country gaining nuclear
military capabilities – and Ukraine and South Africa have proven that nuclear weapons can be uninvented – but
proportionality must be observed here, too. Israel should not be protected from Iran by the ‘international
community’, and then expect it to accept that Israel is exempt from the same rules with which Iran is being
harnessed and punished. In my opinion Israel should be expelled immediately from the UN for its nuclear war
program alone, and all the more so for its continued perpetration of apartheid, torture, genocide, etc. To punish
Iran for (perhaps) developing nuclear weapons while Israel’s existing, enormous arsenal is ignored amounts to
hypocrisy, and possibly also to racism and islamophobia. All of these traits are unfortunately to be expected from
the USA today, but not necessarily from the United Nations.
303
Mearsheimer & Walt 2006; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 233ff; Harrer: Kriegs-Gründe: Versuch über den Irak-
Krieg, 2003; Wise: Liberation or Libation? Media Images, State Propaganda and ‘Happy Iraqis’, 2003; Abu-
Jamal: The War for Empire, 2003; Shalom: Iraq: War and Democracy, 2003. See also Leaper, Löwstedt &
Madhoun: Caught in the Crossfire: The Iraq War and the Media – A Diary of Claims and Counterclaims, 2003.
One could perhaps argue that the Congolese civil war in the 1960s (including the West’s assassination of
208

Three Iraqi people were killed in the 1981 attack by Israel on the Osiraq power plant.
The USA unofficially blessed the attack, which was sold to the world as a ‘pre-emptive
strike’, Newspeak for ‘retaliating in advance’, and to be used again in the following year’s
Israeli invasion of Lebanon (see Chapter II.9.3). The UN Security Council and General
Assembly resolutions, 487 and 36/27 respectively, strongly condemned the Israeli attack on
Iraq, which was carried out with US-supplied F-16 bombers, as an ‘unprecedented act of
aggression’ and Israel was requested by the international community to pay reparations to Iraq
for the suffered damages. Israel never complied with the request. The UN General Assembly
also called upon all states to stop supplying Israel ‘with arms and related material which
enabled it to commit acts of aggression against other countries’. But to this day the UN took
no steps to dismantle or even inspect Israel’s nuclear program, nor to sanction Israel or the
USA in any way because of the attack.304
Similar controversy surrounds Israel’s claim of not having any biological and chemical
weapons programs. Along with a few other countries, including Sudan and Syria, Israel has
not signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which bans the production,
stockpiling and use of biological weapons. In 1998, Israel’s High Court suspended
government plans to expand a top-secret scientific facility, because of widespread civilian
suspicions that it produces biological weapons. Residents (Jews) near the facility feared that it
might mean safety hazards for them. The plant, hidden behind a high wall in an industrial area
close to Tel Aviv, was said to have up to three hundred workers, 120 of whom were
scientists.305
In fact, Israel started developing biological weapons and other banned weapons of
mass destruction before it was even a state. It even used them, in the form of typhus germs
injected into the drinking water of the besieged Palestinian town of Akka (Acre), in the weeks
leading up to Israel’s declaration of statehood in May 1948. There were scores of Palestinian
casualties, and 55 British colonial soldiers, still officially in charge, also contracted the
disease. Attempts to contaminate drinking water for Gaza with typhus and dysentery germs a
few weeks later were prevented by Egypt, which caught two Israeli agents in the act and
executed them, without any protest from Israel, by now a state.
A new type of flame-thrower was also developed prior to statehood and used on
Palestinian people and property in the ‘war of independence’. Moreover, a new weapon used
to blind people without killing them was invented during this time, by none other than the
future president of Israel, Ephraim Katzir.306
Israel receives aid from the USA for several of its illegal weapons. After the 1992 El
Al cargo plane crash in a residential area in Amsterdam, in which at least 47 people were
killed, a Dutch parliamentary commission was set up to investigate the causes of several

democracy) was a similarly profitable war for South Africa, but the western powers obviously perceived
themselves as winners here, too, and they were probably more active than the remote apartheid power was in the
earlier case. See footnote 880 below.
304
N.N.: The Middle East in the Shadow of War: A Special Report of the Foundation for Middle East Peace,
Spring 2002; Prather: Can’t Rule Anything Out? 2001; N.N.: Osiraq / Tammuz 1, no date. Kovel 2007: 271 (end
note 2) points out that the Reagan administration did pay some lip service to the international community by
denouncing the Israeli act of aggression, but only because it happened to be supporting Iraq (under a certain
Saddam Hussein) at the time in its war against Iran. In fact, the attack on Osiraq has a precedent among flagrant
breaches of international law, namely in the 1967 war of aggression by Israel on its neighbors, as well as an
equally notable and notorious successor in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. In fact, these three acts of
aggression are the only ones considered together in Macartney: Preventive War Opens Way to New Rules on
Conflict, 2003. They are three of a kind, although there are surely other, earlier examples of this kind of
attempted justification of gross acts of aggression, which remain unpunished by the international community
although they break some of the most basic rules of international law and of civilized behavior.
305
Goller: Israel’s Biological Institute Plans Expansion, 1998. See also N.N.: World Must Pressure Israel over
Nukes-Arab League, October 1, 2003, according to which: ‘Experts believe the Jewish state has between 100 and
200 nuclear weapons, a stockpile of chemical weapons and an active biological arms program.’
306
Pappe 2006: 100f; 73f.
 209

deaths and injuries, including rescue workers’, the causes of which have still to be determined.
(El Al is the state-owned Israeli airline.) The commission did not find out much. However,
after a revealing article had been published in the Dutch daily, Handelsblad, in 1998, Israel
admitted that the plane had been carrying hydrofluoric acid, isopropanol and dimethyl
methylphosphonate (DMMP) — three of the four essential components of sarin gas. That is
the same nerve poison that was to be used by the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo Supreme Truth cult
in its infamous attack on the Tokyo subway, leaving twelve people dead and nearly 6,000 ill
in 1995. These three chemical components made up 190 liters of the crashed plane’s cargo
and were reportedly part of a total of 10 tons of suspect chemicals on board. An independent
Dutch nuclear research group discovered that the plane, among other things, also used
depleted uranium as ballast. Israel then claimed, however, both that the material was not toxic
and that it was to have been used ‘to test filters that protect against chemical weapons’.307 The
situation for Israel’s secret chemical weapons programs appears very similar to apartheid
South Africa’s ‘Project Coast’ and its ‘Medical Battalion’. No wonder. They may well have
been developed jointly, like the two countries nuclear weapons’ programs and other military,
paramilitary and (in)security force projects. In Israel’s case we know a little more under the
duration of apartheid, though much too little compared to the revelations that the TRC
eventually prompted in South Africa. Even the Israeli civil society knows very little, by all
measures.

The DMMP [carried by the El Al plane that crashed] was supplied by

Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and was
destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) at Nes
Ziona, near Tel Aviv. As MEI [Middle East International magazine]
noted in 1998, the IIBR is ‘the Israeli military and intelligence
community’s front organization for the development, testing and
production of chemical and biological weapons’. A ‘senior Israeli
intelligence source’ told the Sunday Times: ‘There is hardly a single
known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapons which is
not manufactured at Nes Ziona.’ The IIBR is not shown on maps, and
access to it was denied even to members of the Knesset’s foreign
affairs and defence committees, who were concerned about health
risks to the neighbourhood.308

The role of the USA in Israel’s development of weapons of mass destruction is one of
enabling and supporting, almost certainly also donating money, equipment and expertise.
However, as the USA invaded Iraq since 2003, officially due to alleged Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, and as it keeps threatening Iran and North Korea on the same issue, the rest of the
world can see right through the hypocrisy. Israel has effectively received a carte blanche from
the USA. Only these two countries are above international law. The natural resentment and
lack of respect from the rest of the world with regard to the double standards used (calling for
international law and international support more selectively with regard to the issues of war
that underpin apartheid while ignoring them most of the time) are likely to keep the USA and
Israel among the least liked countries in the world for a long time to come.309 The Israelis
307
Sammonds 2002; McBride: Dutch El Al Crash Report Said to be Critical of PM, April 21, 1999. The reason
the death toll could not be confirmed is that the plane crashed in an area inhabited largely by foreigners, some of
whom were illegal immigrants. The USA used a similar excuse when found out that it had practiced and
developed torture on innocent Canadian victims during the 1950s and ‘60s. The CIA claimed its ‘research’ was
aimed at preparing US soldiers for torture by Communists. See Klein 2008 (2007): 34, 38. Then, as in the 1990s,
this ridiculous claim was largely accepted by the mass media. The CIA eventually lost its court case against its
Canadian victims. The Israelis, however, were not even charged.
308
Sammonds 2002
309
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 36. See public opinion polls at least partly confirming this in footnote 832 below,
and in Carter 2006: 209.
210

have cordoned off Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and they are still able to convince
much of the world through the mass media (see Chapter II.9.3, below) that Palestinians are
sub-human murderers. But when it comes to weapons of mass destruction the international
community can see for itself that the USA and Israel are hypocrites, causing hundreds of
thousands of deaths and squandering enormous resources unnecessarily.
Not only ABC weapons are banned by international law. One of the most obvious
violations and war crimes perpetrated during the Second Intifada is Israel’s use of so-called
‘flechettes’ in densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip. Flechettes are dart-spraying shells
fired from tanks, grenade launchers or shotguns. International law does not prohibit the use of
flechettes in combat, but it is a violation once they are used against civilians or in civilian
areas. They are ‘illegal’ in populated areas because they are not accurate weapons. Flechette
rounds explode in the air and fling thousands of small, deadly, razor-sharp metal darts as far
as 300 meters in all directions. Flechettes look like ordinary nails with tiny, stabilizing fins on
the ends. So even if the Israeli army is not aiming at civilians, they are likely to become the
targets as well if they are anywhere within the 300 meters of where the flechette shell impacts.
The criminal irony is the fact that flechettes are only illegal when used in populated areas and
Israel only uses flechettes in the Gaza Strip, one of the world’s most densely populated areas.
Israel has been condemned by human rights groups for the practice, but its army still uses
them, admits that it uses them, but denies that it targets civilians even though the large
majority of Palestinians killed with flechettes have been civilians, including women, children,
journalists, and mentally ill people. So again, Israel is not only disregarding international law
but also making a mockery out of it by stating that it uses flechettes in combat only, although
the facts prove that the large majority of people injured or killed by usage of this cowardly
weapon are civilians living (and suffering and dying) in densely populated areas. 310
Another, similar kind of illegal weapon is the cluster bomb, a bomb that consists of
hundreds of small bombs that spread out on impact and either explode immediately or lie
around, sometimes for years, like landmines, and explode when touched. US law prohibits
their use in civilian areas, which, again, is where Israel uses them. Yet the Americans keep
delivering cluster munition to Israel, which uses it against Arab civilians and others in
Lebanon and Palestine. The Israeli military is even allowed to break US law.311
Lately, Israel has also emerged as a leader in hi-tech unmanned aerial vehicles, so-
called ‘drones’, which are used to hunt and kill people with camera surveillance and missiles.
Only the USA is known to use similar weapons for this purpose, and some of the technology
for the Israeli drones comes from Northrop Grumman, a US weapons manufacturer. An
unknown number of Palestinians – targeted individuals as well as bystanders – have been
killed and maimed with this weapon, unknown since Israel refuses to publicly ‘discuss
tactics’.312

310
Al-Mughrabi: Use of Dart Shells against Palestinians Condemned, 2003; Hauser: Israeli Army Says Bedouin
Deaths a Mistake, 2001; Hauser: Israel Said to Use “Silent Killer” Ammunition, 2001; N.N.: Israel to Probe
Cameraman’s Death, April 30, 2008
311
Brown: Damaging Congressional Silence on Israeli Violations in Lebanon, 2007
312
Williams, D.: Palestinians Fear Israeli “Hunter-Killer” Drones, 2004. As I witnessed myself in the West Bank
in 2004 and 2005, the air above the Palestinian Bantustans is frequently criss-crossed by these robot killers. In
2011, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said 825 Palestinians had been killed by drones since 2006,
though these killings started much earlier, whereas the New America Foundation said US drones had killed
1,807 militants and civilians in Pakistan alone. See Wilson, S.: Gaza’s Buzz of Death, 2011. Israel, however, was
the major exporter of drones, 41 percent of the world’s supply in 2012. See Morley: Israel’s Drone Dominance,
2012. See also footnote 408 below. See Deibert: Black Code: Surveillance; Privacy and the Dark Side of the
Internet, 2013: 176-187, on Stuxnet, yet another form of 21 st century warfare, a computer virus designed to
decapacitate an entire nuclear energy program, which was developed and used by Israel and the USA against
Iran, in what Deibert considers ‘…the first time governments [Israel and USA] have tacitly acknowledged
responsibility for a cyber attack on the critical infrastructure of another country, a de facto act of war through
cyberspace.’ (ibid: 17).
 211

Israel, it is true, is a small state, but its military budget is comparatively gigantic.
According to some commentators, Israel – a tiny country with some six million people,
smaller in size and population than Hong Kong – is the fourth-largest military power in the
world today. In any case it is among the top eight. This is largely due to massive military,
political, and economic aid from the USA. Israel, a rich country, is the only recipient of US
economic aid that does not have to account for its spending of that aid. And so, much of the
generous aid, though supposed to improve the economy, is no doubt used for weapons,
violence, illegal settlement activities, etc., i.e. for things that ultimately destabilize and hurt
the Israeli economy, aside from killing innocent people and massively violating human rights
in other ways. Since 1987, Israel annually receives around $3 billion in foreign aid from the
US government, more than any other country does. Year after year, more than half of that
sum, usually around $1.8 billion, after the outbreak of the Second Intifada, however, around
$2.2 billion, is direct military aid, again more than any other US client state receives or has
received. During the same time period, other kinds of aid decreased in volume. In 2002 and in
US government stipulations for 2003 and 2004, the military portion of the aid almost doubled
in relative terms. In 2003, the non-military portion was down to $600 million. In 2004
military aid had risen to $2.2 billion and non-military aid shrunk to $360 million. By this
time, the US had a record budget deficit. Federal US aid to Israel makes up 30 percent of all
US foreign aid. A quarter of the Israeli military budget is in fact paid for directly by the USA.
Every fourth bullet or missile fired by an Israeli, every fourth Palestinian killed, is therefore
actually due to courtesy of the US government and US taxpayers. (Of course the diplomatic
and ideological support by the USA is even more important for Israel. It is the duty of the
world community to prevent Israel from carrying out many of the human rights violations it
commits, including the theft of land, the expanding illegal settlements, and the attacks on
civilians. But through diplomatic, political and ideological as well as military and financial
support for the Jewish state, the USA effectively disables the rest of the world from carrying
out this duty.) The grand total cost of US state-supplied aid to Israel between 1949 and 1997
was $134,791,507,200. On top of this comes a lavish amount of private aid, in the form of
mostly tax-deductible ‘charities’, in actual fact the opposite, for Israel in the USA, which has
been estimated at $2 billion a year.
Apartheid is very expensive. In South Africa, it was largely financed by profits made
from gold and diamond mining and sales as well as by the white western or white South
African military and business powers. Its continued survival in Israel is largely financed by
the world’s sole superpower today. During the first 54 years of apartheid here, it was
estimated (by an Israeli newspaper) that more than half a trillion, i.e. 500 billion dollars from
government and private sources spent on its upkeep so far came from the USA, thus making
private sources the largest contributors.313 (And to ensure this steady cash flow, it seems,
313
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 28f; N.N.: U.S. Financial Aid To Israel: Figures, Facts, and Impact, Summary, no
date; Dubro: Payback Time, 2002; Judt: The Road to Nowhere, 2002; Goller: U.S. Asks Israel about Suspected
Rights Abuses, 1998; Wright: U.S. Goes Back into Israeli-Palestinian Talks, 2001; Scheer: Israel Economic
Reform Stymied by U.S. Aid, 2002; N.N.: Israel Readying US Aid Request, No Iraq Link-Source, October 21,
2002; N.N.: US Promises Israel $2.16 Bln Military Aid in 2004, November 21, 2002; N.N.: U.S. Will Seek $2.22
Bln Military Aid for Israel, November 3, 2003; N.N.: US Congress Panel Halves a Bush Foreign-Aid Request,
June 23, 2004. Edward Said claimed that the US taxpayers were actually providing Israel with $5 billion a year.
Said: Propaganda and War, 2001. In the same year, he further estimated the entire input of US taxpayers’ funds
into Israel at an unprecedented and unparalleled $92 billion. See Said: A Vision to Lift the Spirit, 2001. The
Palestinian human rights organization, Miftah, refers to the additional $2 billion of which Said speaks as ‘federal
loan guarantees’. See Miftah: US Foreign Aid to Israel, 2002. Dubro writes that the combined public and private
payments from the US to Israel amount to over half a trillion US dollars. In Scheer’s article, a deflecting insult is
levelled at socialism in the following manner: ‘ [W]hile politicians love the extra cash, and exert energy lobbying
for U.S. aid, analysts feel Israel relies too much on aid and that the infusion of money prevents the government
from making much-needed reforms to its socialist style economy.’ Needless to say, many ‘socialist style’
economies have managed perfectly well for long periods of time without US-supplied tools of killing or any
other kind of US aid, for instance Sweden from the 1930s until the ‘80s.
212

almost every US congressperson and senator has to be bribed, or be donated ‘election

campaign funds’, as they say, and often their competitors as well. So, of course, Israel has to
put a lot of this money back into the USA, creating jobs and other, less constructive things
there.)
Another estimate, reported by Joel Kovel, says US$ 1.6 trillion since 1973. Nobody
really knows the amount, because much of it is clandestine, because of tax evasion or because
of money laundering, and because of complex joint US-Israeli ventures, and simply because
Israel and the US Israel lobby does not want other Americans (or the rest of the world) to
know how much of their money is used to finance ongoing crimes against humanity, and how
expensive that actually is. But we do know that it is unprecedented and unparalleled.314
Israel, however, is also a main producer and distributor of arms, including its own
infamous Uzi machine guns, Kfir jet fighters, and Merkava tanks, and increasingly electronic
weapons and espionage, surveillance and weapons systems and components. From 2006 to
2007, according to Naomi Klein, Israel was the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. And in
2010, according to United Press International, Israeli arms exports brought the country a
record $7.2 billion, solidifying its position among the four top arms exporters in the world.
Israel is also the biggest foreign seller of arms to the USA, the world’s supreme arms buyer.
This development, making Israel more dangerous to world peace than apartheid South Africa
ever was, did not start with the ‘war on terror’ or the Second Intifada, although these events
have led to boom times for the Israeli weapons industry. A considerable portion of the South
African apartheid government’s military hardware and technology was in fact imported from
Israel (but much of it also came from the USA, Europe and Taiwan). After imposition of the
UN arms embargo on South Africa in 1977, the imports continued illegally, mainly from
Israel and Taiwan. The very extensive military cooperation between Israel and apartheid
South Africa – in fact a military alliance, although most of it was covert – also included joint
tests of nuclear weapons. Israel might indeed have learned about specific apartheid methods
of oppression – such as (mainly) non-lethal, but debilitating and humiliating violence against
large groups of unarmed youths, or techniques of torture – directly from the South Africans
(possibly in return for the military hardware deliveries). Most likely, there was reciprocal
assistance, certainly also involving the USA, with both military technology and
counterinsurgency methods and measures. Furthermore, there were massive separate and joint
efforts to keep both the alliance and the nature of the cooperation clandestine.315
Yet, Israel had more developed weapons from the start. It was the senior partner in the
military alliance, while South Africa presumably contributed mainly with apartheid know-
how, three centuries of direct apartheid experience, and with money:

Israel helped South Africa become a nuclear power. The Israeli

military attaché in Pretoria was a high-ranking officer who was a
member of the General Staff Forum (the only other Israeli military
attaché to hold such high rank was based in Washington). Israeli arms
were manufactured under license in South Africa.316

The international arms embargo on apartheid South Africa from 1977 undoubtedly had
an effect, and it might be used again against apartheid Israel. However, Israel has even more
of a war economy than South Africa did, so a UN-led weapons boycott against the Israeli war
314
Kovel 2007: 131
315
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 27; Chomsky 21999: 21, 26, 35f, 464ff; Beit-Hallahmi: The South Africa-Israel
Alliance, 1986-1988: Public Relations and Reality, 1990: 57-66; Gresh: Palestine – The View from South Africa,
2009; Kovel 2007: 192, 212, 277 (note 13). See also Polakow-Suransky 2010; Thompson 1990: 200; Klein 2008
(2007): 436; N.N: Israel Hits $7.2 Billion in Arms Exports, June 17, 2011.
316
Gresch 2009. These three powers, the USA, apartheid South Africa and Israel, are also the ones that
developed genocidal, shrinking native reservation policies; see Sections II.2-4 below. See also Venter, How
South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs, 2008.
 213

industry is probably a better and even more useful measure against Israeli apartheid than an
arms embargo.
The South African and Israeli apartheid ‘Defense’ Forces, in fact: ‘Offense Forces’,
are more like internationally organized, and exceptionally brutal crime groups than defensive
in essence. They display remarkable parallels with regard to physical violence. They both
reveal paranoid streaks and resort to indiscriminate shootings of unarmed civilians, including
peaceful protesters, medical relief workers, and journalists. They even target, shoot, kill, and
torture unarmed indigenous children, whose only ‘crime’ is to protest against being treated as
second-, third-, or fourth-class citizens and as non-citizens.
Of course, white South African and Israeli Jewish civilians are and have been legally
armed to an exorbitant extent too, as opposed to the indigenous civilians once the invasions
were complete. Due to this, Whites and Jews, respectively, have carried out many further
avoidable human rights violations against Blacks and Arabs, respectively. Usually these
crimes too go unpunished, again due to the elite use of a very elastic, and indeed acrobatic,
sense of the concept of ‘self-defense’. A corresponding state of affairs almost certainly holds
for Egypt under Greek and Roman rule, at the very least prior to 217 BCE. The victimization
of innocent civilians is the essence of oppression, and apartheid is no exception to that.317
Meanwhile, the ‘demographic war’ between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs,
another variety of the terribly destructive and wasteful victimization of innocent civilians, is
intensifying and gradually changing its character and form. In 1986, Janet Abu-Lughod’s
article, ‘The Demographic War for Palestine’, identified the basic ‘weapons’ in this war,
namely, racist violence and racially selective immigration and expulsion policies on the Israeli
side and high birth rates on the Palestinian side. However, the roles of patriarchy, i.e. of
systematic male sexism, in both the Israeli and Palestinian societies were left out of the
picture in her article.318
Four world records or peculiarities unique in the world, three of which are held by the
state of Israel or by Israeli Jews, and one of which is held by Palestinians, are among the most
conspicuous aspects of this war, although they are not generally known or much debated
publicly:
1.) Israel does not allow civil marriage. Only marriages performed by religious authorities,
who always refuse to wed members of different religions, are recognized by the state. Thus
Jews will always marry Jews, Christians Christians, and Muslims Muslims in Israel. There are
other governments and authorities in the region who do not provide the option of civil
marriage, including the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), but it has often been said that
Israel is the only ‘democracy’ with this legal peculiarity. (Although Israel is in fact very far
from being truly democratic, it has made its claim to democracy successfully, at least with
regard to the perception of its own Jewish population and to that of the ‘western’ powers. It
also considers itself as one of the ‘western’ countries, which the PNA, in contrast, does not.
None of the ‘western’ countries in common parlance, however, lack the institution of civil
marriage.)319
2.) Israel has the most racist governmental immigration policy in the world, basing access to
rights and privileges on legislation and policies referring to the ‘Jewish character’ of the state

317
Dadge (ed.): World Press Freedom Review, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, respectively, Article ‘Israel’; Goff
(ed.): World Press Freedom Review 1999, 2000, respectively, Article ‘Israel’; Bathish, N. et al.: IPI Intifada
Report: Press Freedom Violations in Israel and Palestine, September 29, 2000 - September 28, 2004, 52004
(2000); N.N.: Israel Annual Report, 2002, Reporters Sans Frontières. See further, Chapter II.9.3 below. On the
relative lack of arms among the indigenous in Graeco-Roman Egypt, see footnote 373 below.
318
Abu-Lughod: The Demographic War for Palestine, 1986
319
Chu: Religion Causes a Wedding Daze, 2003. On undemocratic, anti-democratic and other apartheid aspects
of the Jewish state, see also Bishara, A. 2001; Avnery: Israel: The Jewish Demographic State? 2002; Evron:
Demagography as the Enemy of Democracy, 2002; Palestine Solidarity Committee: Apartheid Israel and the
Struggle for a Democratic Secular Palestine, 2001.
214

of Israel and of all of its most privileged citizens and citizenship applicants. It also spends
considerable resources on getting Jews to immigrate to Israel and to Israeli-occupied
territories. This overall policy, which is also supported by influential and wealthy non-
governmental agencies and organizations, such as the World Zionist Organization, the World
Jewish Congress, and several important US lobby groups, is intimately related to the fact that
Israel is the only country in the world without internationally declared borders, and it is also
the only country in the world that is by law the home of a racial group, the Jews, rather than
the home of its citizens. And so, the immigration policy is correlated with Israel’s ongoing
territorial expansion, its racist state, and a slow but relentless policy of ethnic cleansing, of
expulsion or killings of Palestinians, as well as with Palestinian resistance against that policy.
The demographic war thus overlaps with what I here refer to as the ‘conventional armed
conflict’ between Israel and Arabs, a conflict in which male Palestinians are the main victims
by far.320
3.) Israel has the highest relative in-vitro fertilization rate in the world, the largest number of
fertilization clinics per capita in the world, and it is the only state in the world that fully
subsidizes fertilization treatment.321
4.) Palestinians exhibited one of the highest population growth rates of any nation in the world
in recent decades, peaking in the early 1990s. It has diminished considerably since then. In
Gaza it was reportedly 2.91 percent in the year 2014. During her lifetime the average
Palestinian Gaza woman gives birth to 4.24 children. In the early 1990s, however, she gave
birth to 7.73 children, at that time the highest fertility rate in the world. Gaza is now one of the
most densely populated areas in the world. In the West Bank, the rate of growth was also very
high – 3.48 percent in 2001, now 1.99 percent. The average Palestinian West Bank woman
gave birth to 4.9 children in 2001, 2.83 children in 2014. The growth of the ‘Israeli Arab’
population, i.e. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, was 3.4 percent on average per year in the
late 1990s – also one of the highest in the world. Israel’s growth rate as a whole, excluding
Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, but including the 500,000 illegal Israeli settlers
in the same territories, was only 1.29 percent in 2004, the lowest in the entire Middle East.

320
See Davis, U.: Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, 2003: 62f, 91-108; Landy: 90 Inca
Israeli-Jews: Recruiting for the Demographic War, 2003. See also Chapter II.2.3 below, on Israel’s immigration
policies. Yossi Alpher, the Israeli intellectual and former adviser to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime
minister, has pointed out that most Israelis now prefer ‘demographic solutions’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
– including forced expulsions of Palestinians and the creation of isolated Palestinian ‘Bantustans’ – to
‘geographic solutions’, i.e. to continued Israeli territorial expansion. This marks a departure from earlier
predominant modes of strategic thinking in Israel, in which the two kinds of ‘solutions’ were more often seen as
mutually reinforcing each other. It also means that the demographic aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
gaining in importance and urgency, even in comparison with the conventional armed conflict. See Alpher:
Demography Tops Territory in New Strategic Calculus, 2005. On ethnic cleansing, see also Levy: Erasing the
Past in Israel, 2005, and especially, Pappe 2006. On the power of Zionist lobby groups, especially the American
Israel Public Action Committee (AIPAC), see Alam: Israel’s Proxy War? 2003, according to whom Israel’s
proxy apartheid war against Arab nationalism in Iraq is not even fought by Israeli soldiers. If true, or to the
extent that this is true, it is a kind of war only waged by global superpowers until now. On the current Iraq War
as a proxy war by Israel and the Israel Lobby in the USA, see also Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 229ff.
321
Kahn: Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel, 2000. (Incidentally, the
preferred sperm donors in Israel are Aryan-looking or Ashkenazy, blue-eyed men.) In a thoughtful review of this
book, the reviewer, Galina Vromen, describes four factors commonly held responsible for Israel leading the
world statistics in these matters: ‘...the belief held by rabbis that children born to unmarried women are
considered legitimate and full Jews; the common perception among both religious and secular Jews in Israel that
it is worse to be childless than to be a single mother; the social and financial support the country gives to single-
parent families; and – least discussed but certainly not the least important – the fear that the Jews will be vastly
outnumbered by Arabs as reflected in demographic trends.’ One could easily draw the conclusions that the last
factor is in fact the most important one, and, moreover, that the reviewer would agree with this judgment.
Vromen: Pro-Natal, Par Excellence, 2001.
 215

Since then it has risen to 1.46 percent.322 (Entirely unrepresented in these statistics are of
course the high premature death rates of Palestinians and their low average life expectancy
compared to Israeli Jews.) The changes are significant, showing a Palestinian demographic
victory, which is, however, slowing down. Perhaps there will soon be three times as many
Palestinians as Israeli Jews. This is the most probable and peaceful extrapolation. Temporally
and geographically extended genocidal war is most likely the only event that could change
such a development as continued Palestinian growth at a higher but slowing rate.
A fifth peculiarity, and fourth distinguishing mark of Israel’s, that could be added to
the list is the following: No other country allows wives or life partners to have sperm removed
from a deceased man without prior written consent.323 This circumstance, along with the state
of Israel’s in-vitro fertilization policy, means a new stage in demographic warfare technology
has now been reached. New biological ‘weapons’ are being produced and used, but for old,
biologically racist, or traditionally racist, reasons.
In contrast, as late as 1986, the ‘demographic war’ between Israeli Jews and
Palestinian Arabs was still accurately described by Abu-Lughod as follows:

The weapon par excellence adopted by the Jewish community to enhance its
claim to Palestine was migration; the weapon of the Palestinian Arab
population to maintain its legitimate claim to the country has been natural
increase.324

Today, the Palestinian weapon remains the same, and it is a formidable one, the
perhaps highest ‘natural’ birth rate in the world. But the Israeli one has now changed:
migration remains the main weapon, yet new ones have been developed and devised, at a high
financial cost, and with dire long-term direct and indirect human costs. Bio-war has gone hi-
tech.
On the face of it, new state interventions such as the globally unique corpse sperm
removal policy – or the globally unique, entirely state-subsidized fertilization treatment, the
most utilized one in the world – are not racist provisions per se, but the vast majority of
Jewish citizens of Israel make these peculiarities (or world records) that Israel holds function
as institutionalized racism. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship only make up around 20
percent of the total population, and they do not use the fertilization and insemination
treatments provided by the state to the extent that Jews do, neither in absolute nor in relative
terms. They hardly use it at all since they have children at a much younger age, and have a
much higher birth rate than the Israeli Jews anyway. The high birth rate is something that
demographically and culturally unites all main groups of Palestinians: the Gazans and the
West Bankers, the Jerusalemites and the Israeli citizens, as well as the expatriate refugees.

322
Central Intelligence Agency (USA): The World Factbook, 2001, 2005 & 2014; Central Bureau of Statistics,
Center for Statistical Information, State of Israel, Prime Minister’s Office: The Arab Population in Israel, 2002.
Both of these sources should be read with great caution as they may mix ulterior motives into their numbers. For
a stark example of Palestinian population numbers manipulated by the Israeli/Jewish/Zionist far right, apparently
unsuccessfully devised to dissuade Sharon from carrying out his impending Gaza ‘disengagement’, see N.N.:
Arab Population in the West Bank & Gaza, January 10, 2005. See also Barkat: For First Time, Jews Are No
Longer a Majority between the Jordan and the Sea, 2005. It is important to point out, however, that the latter
‘leftist’ Israeli approach falsifies history already in its headline, with remarkably selective amnesia, which
obfuscates the fact that less than one-third of Palestine’s population was Jewish when the state of Israel was
founded on a part of the territory that is Israel today, not to mention most of the rest of Palestinian history, during
which Jews were not a majority between the Jordan and the Sea. On the latter issue, see Whitelam: The Invention
of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, 1996. On Israel having the lowest birth rate in the Middle
East, see Abi-Aad & Grenon 1997: 151, which also states that Israel only allows sterilization for health reasons.
323
N.N.: Israel to Let Wives Harvest Dead Husbands’ Sperm, November 13, 2003
324
Abu-Lughod 1986
216

Israeli Jews are (still) mainly fighting the demographic war with an unparalleled racist
immigration policy325, which takes much of the heat off younger Jewish women, enabling
them to get pregnant later than other women elsewhere in the world. There is no counterpart at
all to the Israeli immigration policy among Palestinians. The state of Israel controls all
Palestinian borders with plenty of military and paramilitary personnel, firearms, steel,
concrete, razor wire, and sophisticated electronics and software, including a maze of
oppressive legislation, to ensure that immigration to Palestine (outside the illegal Jewish
settlements) is practically non-existent, despite international law, e.g. the right of return of
Palestinian refugees, i.e. of the majority of Palestinians, who are not allowed to go home by
Israel. Palestinians in general are simply not allowed to be as racist as the Israelis are, (and
neither is anyone else, except perhaps the Americans).
And therefore, the main losers in this war are Palestinian women. Palestine’s high
birth rate, however, also has many other determinants that lie outside the causal factors behind
the demographic war. Gaza does not only have one of the highest birth rates in the world, it
also has one of the highest unnatural premature death rates. The birth rate therefore represents
a kind of ‘pre-emptive’ replacement of children. We will look at further factors influencing
the Palestinian birth rate in Section II.2.
The lack and practical prohibition of Palestinian immigration and the Israeli
prohibition of Palestinian repatriation, the forbidden return of Palestinian refugees, are
producing all kinds of pressures and expectations on Palestinian women to handle most if not
all of the demographic warfare against Israel, against overwhelming odds, including Jewish
and other non-Arab immigration, Israeli anti-refugee policy, and hyper-modern fertilization
and insemination aid. And still, Palestinians are prevailing, but at a terrible cost.
Palestinian men also suffer tremendously in the demographic war, as well as being the
main losers by body-count in the war of conventional armed conflict. They have to provide
for rapidly growing families in a shattered economy that exhibits an extremely high
unemployment rate, up to sixty percent in Gaza over the last fifteen years. They in their turn
have also suffered in their childhoods, as boys, especially in the hard-hit families.
Non-Palestinian (‘non-Arab’) Israeli men suffer the least direct effects of this war, to
whom the undisputed racial, political, military, and economic elites belong, but even they are
victimized, for instance as objectified and instrumentalized immigrants or as victims of
Palestinian violence. And like everybody else involved they become enveloped by a poisoned
atmosphere of hate and objectified personal relationships that contributes enormously both to
this war and to the conventional war. This applies especially to the settlers and the soldiers,
some of whom are little more than expendable pawns in the game of the elite Zionists.
But the first and most affected victims of this war are women, who are also reduced to
servants of the state and servants of the race. Their wombs, the very essence of their female
identities, have become instruments. They have become weapons. The demographic war has
been described as a ‘Battle of the Wombs’.326 It is, however, more than just a battle – it has
been going on for many decades already. In Egypt and South Africa it has gone on for
centuries. It is a war.
The demographic war is basically a sexist and a racist war. Are the Palestinians racist
in this war? Yes, there is racism among some Palestinian men and women against Jews. There
is racism in every society that size, and smaller. But the Palestinian racism is not organized,
certainly not as organized as the Jewish racism, which is exemplified not only in the racist
laws, but mainly in the Israeli occupation, expulsion, immigration, and settlement policies and
practices, in one word, in apartheid. The Palestinian racism against Jews, on the other hand, is
a deeply provoked racism, very much like racism against Whites among Blacks (so-called
‘reverse racism’) on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But although it may be more or less

325
Mikhail: How to Create a State: Israel’s Settlement and Immigration Policy, 2005
326
Foa: Letter from Israel: Battle of the Wombs, 2002
 217

understandable, racism is in essence unforgivable, even among Palestinians and Blacks.

Palestinian racism against Jews as a whole is also less conscious than the Jewish racism
against Palestinians, and more broadly, against Arabs. But there is unconscious racism on
both sides, and although this fact may sometimes make it more understandable, it still remains
affront against humanity.
The fourth presently unique fact, the high Palestinian birth rate, is often brought up in
the intra-Jewish debate, where it is usually referred to as the ‘demographic threat’327, or, even
more dehumanizing against Palestinians: the ‘demographic bomb’328. This means that, despite
the fact that the majority of Palestinians have been turned into refugees by the creation and
subsequent territorial expansion of the de facto state of Israel, a much faster growth of the
remaining Palestinian population than the Jewish one is likely to re-establish a considerable
Palestinian majority on the territory of Historic Palestine within a few years’ time. Due to this
context, the mere existence of Palestinians is perceived as an actual ‘threat’ by believers in the
Jewish state. There could not be a stronger negation of being ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
Palestinians are pronounced guilty as soon as they are born, or even before they are born.
Newborn Palestinian babies are considered as ‘threats’ and as constituent parts of a ‘bomb’.
But the predominance of this perception within Israeli Jewish society is seldom admitted in
the international, Jewish-Israeli-dominated, discourse.329
The actual death toll for Palestinian women goes well beyond the reported violence.
The true statistics of Palestinian women killed in the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict since
September 2000, for instance, is not known and will not be known by anybody, because so-
called ‘honor killings’ – killings of women who refuse to enter arranged marriages, or who
somehow have disappointed their husbands, fiancées, fathers or brothers in other ways,
supposedly in order to protect the ‘honor’ of the murdered woman’s family – are sometimes
not even registered as killings with the PNA. In countless death certificates the cause of death
is registered as ‘unknown’, although the cause is actually known, even by the authorities.
Perpetrators of such murders are thus often given full impunity. In some such cases, women or
girls who have been raped by a male relative are then murdered by the same or another
member of the family in order to ‘protect’ that family’s ‘honor’. In most cases of ‘honor
killings’, the people who carry out the murders are relatives of the victims. And usually, the
motives behind these murders are related to young women’s sexuality, for instance failure to
bleed on the wedding night, for being considered ugly and unfit for any man to marry. But
sometimes middle-aged women are also targeted, and, often, sexuality is not really involved at
all, except in the imaginations of the perpetrators, or even in the projected imaginations of
relatives or neighbors of the perpetrators. Girls can get killed for just chatting to male
acquaintances without a male guardian present, or for smoking in public.330 Thus, Palestinian
women are mostly killed by Palestinians. Yet, if we look deeply into this matter we will find
that the Israeli political, military, and even business elites do not mind at all that these women
are being killed, and that these Israeli elites could do much more to stop the killings by
removing some of their root causes, for which the Israeli elites must be held partly
responsible.
Beyond the bloody death toll, many Palestinian women generally lose lives worth
living. They do so mainly by lacking options, by lacking control over their own lives, by

327
Ashrawi: World Should Intervene to End the Israeli Apartheid, 2001
328
Abu Nimah: Defusing Israel’s “Demographic Bomb”, 2005
329
HaCohen: Looking Behind Ha’aretz’s Liberal Image, 2002; Tamari: Demographic Nationalism: False
Assumptions and Inevitable Truths, 2005. See also footnote 319 above, and Chapter II.9.3 below.
330
Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Femicide and the Palestinian Criminal Justice System: Seeds of Change in the Context
of State Building? 2002: 577ff; Macintyre: Hamas Admits Its Gunmen Shot Betrothed Woman in ‘Honour
Killing’, 2005; Al Haroub: The Murder of a Girl Due to Moral Reasons, 2005. See also N.N.: Honor Killing:
Killing of Women on the Basis of Family Honor, Aug 2002; N.N.: Case Study: “Honour” Killings and Blood
Feuds, no date; Sarhaddi Nelson: Mother Kills Raped Daughter to Restore ‘Honor’, 2003.
218

being expected to serve their racial community or nation in ways that severely preclude self-
realization. Not only Israel can be held responsible for that.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian activist against ‘honor’ killings, or
‘femicide’ as she prefers to call it, remarked on Palestinian TV about a 17-year-old girl who
had been gang-raped: ‘What are this girl’s choices? She can marry the rapist or some 65-year-
old man who will remove her shame or she can be imprisoned all the rest of her life in the
house or she can be killed. Ya bitmout, ya bitmout, ya bitmout – either she dies or she dies or
she dies.’331
Israeli women are much better off than their Palestinian counterparts in this regard.
They are also encouraged, expected, and pressured to give birth, but at a much higher average
age than Palestinian women are, for example with the aid of entirely state-subsidized
fertilization treatment. Whereas Palestinian women are generally expected to get married and
have children already in their teens, Israeli Jewish women are typically allowed to live their
own lives, to educate themselves and embark on professional careers, until those pressures
start making themselves felt when the women are already into their thirties. Moreover, unwed
or single Israeli mothers are not stigmatized as are their Palestinian counterparts. Finally, two-
thirds of the global Jewish population can still be persuaded, enticed, or pressured to become
Israeli citizens. Thus, in terms of this sexist pressure, Israeli women are treated with silk
gloves compared to Palestinian women, and even compared to white women in South Africa
until recently, who, as we shall see in the next section, were pressured by their apartheid state
in similar, though much more primitive ways.
In the vast literature that I have so far surveyed on parallels between apartheid South
Africa and Israel/Palestine since 1948 I have never come across a parallel drawn between the
black South African ‘witch’-burnings and the Palestinian ‘honor’ killings. Nor have I seen any
connections made between either of these practices in modern apartheid societies with female
genital mutilation in Graeco-Roman Egypt. But I think the parallels are much more than
coincidences. The three phenomena are correlated. In struggles where demographics are as
important as they are (or were) in these three conflicts, there is obviously a perceived need
among the powerful within the resistance movements as well as those in the oppressive racial
elites to keep ‘their’ women in line, so that the women may serve the ‘higher’ cause of
demographic predominance for their respective races.
The main way for women to serve their respective nations under these patriarchal
schemes is to produce a maximum amount of offspring. The demographic edge is then to be
used militarily, or politically (mainly in elections or demands for elections), or in business, as
the purely economic needs for the apartheid state to educate and promote people will switch
once a critical demographic threshold is overcome by the victimized racial majority. We shall
return to this economic condition in the next section.
Aside from the racist demographic strategy, there is also a social-psychological
dimension to femicide in apartheid societies. People often take out their anger over their own
oppression on those of the next lower rung of society’s relentless hierarchy, and this happens
frequently in apartheid societies. Steve Biko perceived it thus:

[T]ransport conditions are appalling, trains are overcrowded all the time,
taxis that they use are overcrowded, the whole travelling situation is
dangerous, and by the time a guy gets to work he has really been through a
mill; he gets to work, there is no peace either at work, his boss sits on him to
eke out of him even the last effort in order to boost up production. This is the
common experience of the black man. When he gets back from work

331
Quoted in Armstrong, S.: Honour’s Victims, 2000. A few days after this TV appearance, Shalhoub-Kevorkian
was attacked by unknown men who were armed with wooden sticks equipped with iron nails. She survived the
attack and continues to study and campaign against femicide, among other things through founding the Women’s
Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in east Jerusalem and Ramallah (http://www.wclac.org).
 219

through the same process of travelling conditions, he can only take out his
anger on his family which is the last defence that he has.332

Yet another aspect of femicide is its embeddedness in a real or imagined ‘cultural

tradition’. As the entire culture of the besieged indigenous majority is threatened – including
language, religion, and other more or less essential markers of identity – reactions to the
oppression can easily become both radical and desperate.
As mentioned above, there may also be a sex-balancing calculus behind femicide in
apartheid societies. Since so many indigenous (and in Graeco-Roman Egypt also
invader/immigrant) men and boys are killed or die otherwise, it may be felt that girls and
women have to be sacrificed in order to even out the demographic balance of the sexes.
Again, forced emigration of ‘surplus’ indigenous women and girls is not an option for the
indigenous patriarchal or neopatriarchal333 elites, simply because it could become popular.
More importantly, it would be adopting a pattern that closely resembles the ethnic cleansing
designs of the enemy, the racial apartheid elites.
Aside from demographic war and femicide, and aside from suicidal ‘conventional’
warfare, the radical despair can also be seen in the notorious ‘Xhosa Cattle Killing’ of 1856-7,
a largely self-inflicted disaster that took place after nearly half a century of continuous,
indigenous South African unsuccessful warfare against the white invaders. As the
southernmost Bantu-speakers saw their land and livestock slowly being taken by the
relentlessly advancing Whites, and as their freedom, dignity, self-determination and cultural
identity deteriorated, a new messianic cult appeared and spread quickly. It prophesized a
return of dead ancestors who would somehow abruptly end white presence in South Africa,
but only once the Xhosa killed their own cattle and destroyed their corn, i.e. once they
destroyed their own primary means of subsistence. The Xhosa had engaged in cattle culling
earlier in order to stop the spread of livestock diseases, at least some of which had been
brought to South Africa by white settlers. Over the protests of many non-believers around
400,000 cattle were culled by fervent believers in the prophecy, which resulted in a
devastating famine that cost an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 Xhosa lives. Another 40,000 had
to leave Xhosaland to look for work in the Cape Colony.334
Suicide attacks and femicide by Palestinians become understandable (though not
excusable) with this background. More than six decades of apartheid warfare and oppression
by Israeli Jews against them has weakened and radicalized them continuously, and every
single one of the employed methods and strategies of resistance has so far proven
unsuccessful.
Aside from femicide, demographic warfare is also evident in more innocent-looking
elite measures, which may even be identical across the apartheid divide. Both the Israeli

332
Biko 2004 (1978): 112
333
The neopatriarchal elites stem from the patriarchal ones, but they assume the trappings of seeming democracy
and of selected aspects of modernity. See Sharabi: Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab
Society, 1988.
334
Ross 1999: 52f. See McArthur: The Colonial Dynamic: The Xhosa Cattle Killing and the American Indian
Ghost Dance, 2005, for an astute analysis of the parallels between the South African disaster and a similar one
among Native Americans in the USA of the 1890s. The role of the genocidal mindsets of the white invader elites
is highlighted here (which makes the title of the article (‘Colonial’) unfortunate). For instance, white charities to
help the starving Xhosa were forbidden by Sir George Grey, the ruling governor of the Cape Colony – apparently
not out of direct racial hatred, but out of a reckless opportunism aimed to further his own career. Only one soup
kitchen had been opened for Xhosas by white settlers, who were not overly anxious to aid the rebellious tribe,
but it was closed down by Grey, who then decreed that such charities were ‘not requisite’, an act of genocide in
the current legal meaning of the term. Another focus of this otherwise thoughtful and well-researched article is
the role of opportunist indigenous leaders, who on both continents saw opportunities to extend their own power
with the aid of messianic millennarianism. See also Makhura 2003; Stapleton: Reluctant Slaughter: Rethinking
Maqoma’s Role in the Xhosa Cattle-Killing (1853-1857), 1993. On later avoidable famines in South Africa, see
Wylie: Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa, 2001.
220

government and the Ramallah-based nationalist Palestinian In’ash al Usra Society promised
social aid to families with more than ten children during the 1970s. (Israel only gave up the
scheme after its prime minister Golda Meir was shocked to find out that Arab families in
Israel had been the main beneficiaries of the program.)335 Obviously, the perceived need to
qualify as a majoritarian democracy is only a new requirement to apartheid elites, in Israel in
particular, but also in late apartheid South Africa. In both South Africa and Egypt,
demographic dominance was probably very consciously desired by the indigenous people,
especially the male elites, chiefly for military reasons, which, however, never turned out
decisive or successful, due to the vast relative superiority of the military technology used and
developed by the racial elites, along with their control or near-control over weapons
production and trafficking, their depopulation measures and assassinations of indigenous
leaders, and probably also because of their relatively successful repopulation of the land by
means of racist immigration laws and practices.
The ‘honor’ killing (murder) of the Palestinian girl, Yusra Al Azami, in her fiancé’s
car at a Gaza beach on April 10, 2005 by Hamas gunmen, with the official Hamas justification
of ‘moral reasons and the fight against corruption’, was a planned action by the militant
group. Many gunmen were in the Hamas car, as if it were a militant operation against Israelis
or collaborators. This is a direct parallel to the execution of ‘witches’ in South Africa by
‘necklacing’, the method also used to execute collaborators with the apartheid regime.336
But is there not a logical contradiction hidden here? How can Palestinians killing
Palestinians, or South African Blacks killing South African Blacks, or Egyptians killing
Egyptians, be part of strategies in demographic wars against their oppressors? Does not every
such killing imply a demographic loss for the racial group to which the victim belongs? The
answer is that this conflict has an additional aspect to it that works the following way: If
young women are allowed to follow their own hearts and start partnerships based on mutual
love and respect, then they would be unlikely to start producing children in their teens, but
rather realize and educate themselves and/or start professional careers before having
children337. And if some women in conservative communities embark on a new lifestyle in
this manner, then they could become role models to young women in the future, resulting
eventually in noticeably fewer teenage marriages and pregnancies overall and a noticeable
lowering of the overall birth rate. Thus, the sacrifice of independent-minded young women is
apparently seen – by their perpetrator relatives or neighbors and many other supporters – as a
price that a severely oppressed population must pay in order to keep growing at an
unparalleled exponential rate. The same goes for the sacrifice of middle-aged women and
even of male allies of the women’s liberation struggle as the South African example appears
to show. They are targeted mainly because of their actual or potential influence on others. The
young women, especially, must be protected from them, so that they can get on with their task
of producing ‘new soldiers’. In Egypt women’s lives were not sacrificed as directly as in the
other two countries, but still women’s health, happiness, and sexuality were sacrificed – and
still are being sacrificed – for the higher birth rate and for (other) patriarchal or neopatriarchal
interests.
These sexist, nationalist, socio- and psychopathological motivations, outlined above,
that are behind femicide are not necessarily the only ones. The value system behind ‘honor’
killings, for instance, is apparently powerful enough to prevent any negative effects for
murderers and it is perhaps even strong enough to reward them for their deeds. The same
applies to ‘witch’-burnings and FGM. There are deadly traditionalisms at work here.
Palestinian men (and many women) are thus keeping up the pressures on young
Palestinian women and girls. The exceptionally high Palestinian birth rate is a response to

335
Tamari July 4, 2005
336
Al Haroub 2005; on South Africa, see footnote 269 above.
337
Bhabha: Love, Marriage in a Time of War, 2004
 221

Israeli aggression, as we have seen. But it is not only that. Women are also being kept in line,
and indoors, for the simple reason of male dominance, as well as to fight the Israelis in the
long term by producing babies. The demographic war is not a one-dimensional conflict such
as the conventional armed conflict. Along one axis of the demographic war Israelis and
Palestinians are fighting each other, along the other it is patriarchy and neopatriarchy against
women and human rights. In a scathing comment on patriarchy in the anti-Zionist community,
the Palestinian intellectual and politician, Azmi Bishara, explains:

Some Arabs and Palestinians have internalised the logic of Zionist

demographic scare tactics to the extent that they see the slur of ‘demographic
bomb’ as something good. They boast of the Palestinian woman’s womb, for
lack of anything better to boast. Is this what our unified strategy has come
to? Aside from the primitiveness and backwardness of regarding women as
wombs the demographic factor is not, in itself, conducive to righteousness. It
embraces a racist vision that is not driven towards just solutions. Racism is
the basic motive for separation.338

Not only does demographic warfare instrumentalize people, treating human beings
themselves as quantities rather than qualities. It also makes individuals both replaceable and
expendable.339
Let us keep our concepts well-defined, though, in this context. Palestinians, and other
populations victimized by apartheid may be guilty of a separatist vision, separation, and even
of racism, against the racial elite. But only the latter are guilty of separateness, of apartheid.
‘Honor’ killings are usually first-degree murders, they are usually attacks on weak
victims by strong perpetrators, and murderers should be punished. In western countries, these
kinds of murders are usually called ‘crimes of passion’, and there, too, first-degree murderers,
usually men, are sometimes getting away with murder.340 However, there are extenuating
circumstances in the apartheid cases – even in instances of first degree murder such as
femicide – the most important of which, in this context, is the structural violence imposed on
Palestinians by Israeli demographic aggression and warfare. From this perspective, Israeli
apartheid may perhaps even be seen as guiltier than Palestinian patriarchy is for the femicide
against Palestinian women. But I will refrain from ranking the factors behind femicide in
apartheid societies.
The violence since 1948 is more than anything due to Israeli initiatives, which are
mostly carried out with full impunity from international as well as Israeli law. The prevailing
atmosphere and pattern of a near-absence of accountability and justice demanded of Israeli
armed forces, including the hundreds of thousands of illegal paramilitary settlers, has spread
to Palestinian society, where perpetrators and supporters of femicide and other crimes have
benefited from it. The same is true of South Africa. Lawlessness from above encourages
crime and raises crime rates directly as well as indirectly.
Turning now to the latest demographic trend: Palestinian fertility rates are dropping
dramatically. Israel is winning the demographic war on this front. Two decades ago the
average Gaza Palestinian woman had 7.73 children341. Today, as noted above, she has 4.24
children. The main reasons behind this change may well be that Gaza is becoming too
crowded, i.e. overpopulated, and that nutrition and overall health is declining as a result, i.e.
next to Israeli sieges, violence and closures. But many Palestinians are also expecting a
Palestinian state to appear in the territories that Israel occupied in 1967, and thus there is no

338
Bishara, Azmi: A Short History of Apartheid, 2004; see also Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002.
339
Khatib: Demography Negates Democracy, 2005
340
Armstrong, S. 2000
341
Fargues: Fertility as a Weapon in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, 2000. Fargues’ figure refers to the period
1991-1995.
222

longer such a strongly perceived need to compete demographically with Israeli Jews for
democratic, or even military, hegemony. If Palestinians will never get to vote alongside Israeli
Jews anyway, then the high Palestinian birthrates are not going to be needed, at least not for
this purpose. And if a two-state solution is found, then ‘new soldiers’ will perhaps not be
needed at all. The so far false promise of statehood for Palestinians by the Israelis and the
international community thus seems to be working in favor of Israel, at least in terms of
demographic warfare. In the same time, Israel’s total fertility rate has risen slightly, but it is
still 2.77, i.e. considerably lower than Palestine’s. It is possible, but by no means certain, that
women and men in Gaza are themselves making conscious decisions to gradually lower their
birth rates. But the structural context should not be forgotten in this complex matter. It also
has to do with improved education for women, and more women in the work force, in Gaza
and worldwide.
In short, we have three tiers of responsibility behind the form of femicide that we
witness today in Palestine, which I will refrain from ranking in terms of responsibility: first
the perpetrators themselves, often family members of the victims, second the Palestinian
National Authority, and other informal authorities which do not prosecute or punish
perpetrators as much as they could do, and third the Israeli elites, whose racist immigration
and settlement policies exacerbate and perpetuate the submission and victimization of
Palestinian women to patriarchally-dominated demographic warfare, and who eagerly
capitalize on any division within the ranks of their enemies.
Let us take a deeper look now at the immediate perpetrators. We have looked so far at
why Palestinian, black South African and Egyptian men under Graeco-Roman rule, as
collectives, commit, encourage or allow femicide. But what about individuals? Why do some
do it, while others do not? What is the mechanism or the psychological rationale that
perpetuates the process, generation after generation, century after century?
Although I cannot provide anything even approaching exhaustive answers to these
questions, I would like to explore them by means of the motto: ‘blaming the victim’, which I
believe will provide a further argument for the extenuating circumstance of apartheid
oppression in Palestinian femicide, and add to the argument that an end to apartheid would be
extremely helpful in bringing about an end to femicide, and perhaps not only in apartheid
environments.
Even in South Africa, apartheid, in the wider sociological sense, especially in the
economic sense, is not gone, although much progress has been made since 1994. But femicide
is still taking place there as well. And in Egypt, it is quite possibly the case that only femicide
is left in a sociological sense from the days of apartheid. (There were of course class societies
and other forms of oppression in Egypt prior to the arrival of the Greeks.) It is not essential to
my argument whether femicide is eventually found to be older than apartheid in Egypt or in
South Africa. Either a pre-existing form of femicide was kept alive and exacerbated by
apartheid in Egypt, as in modern Palestine, or it was invented there under apartheid rule by
Europeans, as may also have been the case in South Africa, or by the indigenous patriarchy.
One of Israel’s and its allies’ favorite pastimes, it seems, is blaming the victim: Israel
is illegally occupying Palestinian land because the oppressed Palestinian people rebel
violently against the occupation. The circularity of this pseudo-argument can become lost on
the distracted mass audiences around the world who are conditioned by most of the media
with global reach, as well as the allies and patrons of these media, to see Palestinian reactions
to Israeli aggression as unprovoked attacks, and Israeli aggression as more or less legitimate
responses.342 And the attempted justifications or excuses for rape or femicide are also exactly
that: blaming the victim. Of course this also relates to the quote from Steve Biko.

342
Ashrawi 2001; Ashrawi October 18, 2000; see also Chapter II.9.3 below.
 223

As Jacqueline Rose said: ‘the most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat
it.’343 Jewish Israeli aggression against Palestinians would probably not have happened,
certainly not to the same large extent, if it were not for the previous Nazi and other
judeophobic aggressions against Jews in Europe with excuses involving some sort of mystical
inherent and blanket blameworthiness of Jews. And, similarly, Palestinian femicide might not
have existed at all344 since 1948 if it were not for Israeli aggressions against Palestinians with
the perpetrators and much of the rest of the world perversely blaming the Palestinian victims
in the process. If Israel had not imposed itself on Palestinian land, society, and culture,
Palestine (and at least parts of some of the surrounding countries) could have started
developing a human rights culture earlier and extended all human rights to women in
accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. On the other hand, Palestinian femicide may also have taken place in an independent
Palestine, although I strongly doubt it would have taken place to the same extent. But in
hindsight, it is, of course, impossible to say.
The losses due to the demographic war in human terms are immeasurable, and in
principle directly comparable to the ‘conventional’ devastation wrought by apartheid, in South
Africa as elsewhere. Although I am a convinced anti-elitist, and I am sure he is too, the words
of Hugh Lewin rang as true in my memory for me in Palestine as they did when he explained
how apartheid destroyed a generation of black moral leaders in South Africa. Lewin is an
apartheid survivor who was tortured by the state authorities. When I visited him at the
Institute of Advanced Journalism in Johannesburg in June 1998, Lewin showed my students
and me examples of how the most intelligent and moral young people in black communities
around the country were identified, targeted, harassed, jailed, and often assassinated by South
Africa’s state powers during the apartheid era. Mearsheimer and Walt speak similarly of
Israel’s ‘…long campaign to kill, imprison, or marginalize a generation of Palestinian
leaders’.345
The people who make up most of the casualties in conflicts involving demographic
warfare, it seems, are particularly targeted not only if they are young but also if they have a
strong sense of justice, i.e. if they are morally intelligent. One of the main horrors of a
demographic war is that a second prong, kept running by the apartheid elites as well, but also
by the remaining indigenous patriarchal and neopatriarchal elites, attacks the most intelligent
and morally developed young people from another angle, an entirely gendered angle: Just like
the Palestinian boys and young men who go out to demonstrate against the unjust laws and the
unjust occupation (which are all illegal under international law) and get shot, young
Palestinian women, who believe in the just cause of making their own decisions about their
own bodies and their own lives, may also pay with their own lives.

343
See footnote 223 above.
344
According to Armstrong, S. 2000, ‘honor’ killings represent extensions of pre-Islamic sexist traditions which
were actually fought by the Prophet and most of his followers. They take place today in Palestine, Jordan,
Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and among communities stemming from these countries, i.e. in a
minority of Muslim countries whose combined populations account for a minority of Muslims worldwide.
However, there are still lethal, systematic sexist crimes against women in Iran, Bangladesh, Somalia, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, and India which go back to different traditions, as well, e.g. FGM, female infanticide, or
killings of widows, though all of these are also alien to Islam and to Christianity. In Palestine, for example,
femicide takes place in Christian as well as in Muslim families and communities, just as FGM does in Egypt and
elsewhere. The facts that Lebanon and Jordan are usually mentioned first along with Palestine when it comes to
‘honor’ killings and the intensity of these countries’ interactions with Israel historically suggest that Israel’s
demographic warfare has an effect on these neighbors as well as on Palestine. Most of the population of Jordan is
in fact Palestinian. There is a huge Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon as well, and the Palestinian
communities have high birth rates there too. (In richer countries (and in richer Palestinian families in Palestine),
however, Palestinian birth rates are not so high.) Israel’s demographic war on Palestine could thus also be said to
extend beyond the borders of historic Palestine.
345
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 236
224

As with white and black South Africa, we are dealing in Palestine-Israel with two
traumatized societies, not only traumatized by the violence of the last fourteen years, or the
violence of the last 46 or 65 years. I have found the origins of the demographic war extremely
hard to trace and pinpoint, in each of my three prima facie examples of apartheid societies.
Just like most conventional armed conflicts nowadays, demographic wars were never born
with any kind of formal declaration of war.
Furthermore, most Palestinians and most Jews live in their respective Diasporas.
During the last five or six generations, many if not most of them were born as refugees or
have themselves been made refugees, sometimes more than once in the same generation.
Maybe this shared experience can provide some of the common ground required for a
peaceful resolution to the entire conflict. Yet, whereas the Palestinians were exiled by the
Israeli Jews, the Jews who set up and built the state of Israel were not exiled by the
Palestinians, but by Europeans. That is a crucial asymmetry to always bear in mind while
appreciating this common ground.
Both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis now need serious long-term commitments from
the international community, not just short-term or interim measures from the USA and its
NATO allies, its G7 partners, and its permanent UN Security Council colleagues, and
certainly not Zionist commitments – the main financial, political, and ideological factor
stoking the flames of this war. Racism is a crime against humanity, and only humanity can put
an end to it. How can this be achieved? It is not difficult. What Israel has to do on a legal level
is to start by removing the portion of its Basic Law that proclaims Israel a Jewish state, and
then continue by repealing the many laws and practices that utilize this law as a linchpin for
racism, including the conspicuous absence of civil marriage. We will return to this theme in
Part III. In the next section we will look at the Israel Council for Demography (ICD) and its
policies, which will also have to be completely dismantled and abandoned. The state fortunes
squandered on Israel’s in-vitro fertilization procedures and similar measures can surely be
largely redirected, for instance to help empty all of the illegal settlements on Palestinian land,
to resettle the settlers elsewhere, to pull back the expensive occupation forces and end the
expensive occupation, to compensate Palestinian refugees as international law demands, or to
benefit the many poor and unemployed people in Israel today.
In fact, an immediate end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories since
1967, i.e. an implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, would defuse the
demographic as well as the conventional war, probably more dramatically than anything else.
An implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, demanding the right of return
of Palestinian refugees, compensation for their losses and/or the return of their property,
would improve things, as well. These long overdue legal (in Israel) and policy changes are
things that the international community should and could more strongly encourage and
pressure Israel to achieve.346 They would, in my opinion, do more than anything else to

346
Aside from the deep rifts in Palestinian society between men and women, one way in which Israel profits
from the Palestinian ‘honor’ killing system is the concomitant racist stereotyped depiction in the global mass
media of Palestinians and Palestinian society as ‘primitive’, ‘violent’, and ‘brutal’, thus providing a welcome
excuse for Israeli military rule and cruel policies against the subjugated Palestinian population. Another is the
use of sensitive information about Palestinian individuals’ sex-lives and the creation of such information by
Israeli secret services in order to recruit collaborators among Palestinians. Of course, the Israeli system of
oppression against Palestinians is a root cause of poverty, humiliation and despair, driving Palestinians into
activities such as collaboration, extortion rackets, prostitution, or femicide. See McGreal: Web of Betrayal,
Blackmail and Sex that Killed Two Lovers who Turned Informer, 2006; N.N.: An In-depth Look into the Dossier
on Collaborators – Palestinian Security Official: We Arrested 30 Collaborators in Two Months (in Arabic), 2004.
I am not excusing any Palestinian crimes in this footnote, but rather providing an interpretive political and
sociological context. See also N.N.: Dealing with Alleged Child Collaborators in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory in the Spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 2005. As with Palestinian perpetrators of
femicide, it is my opinion that convicted collaborators should be punished, yet treated under human rights law,
including the right to life.
 225

improve the situation, and to end the conflict and both its conventional and demographic
aspects outright.
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) is not powerless, although it is severely
limited compared to a genuine executive state power. It could be much more active against
femicide, not only by seeking more actively to apprehend and punish perpetrators but also by
improving laws347 and by assisting, encouraging and pressuring civil society to end this
gruesome tradition.
And that civil society is not completely dominated by men. I have myself witnessed
the existence of a Palestinian elite which is not entirely male, an elite that employs servants,
drivers, gardeners, and cooks, not unlike the occasional Egyptian under Greek or Roman rule
who had slaves, and the odd black South African, too, who owned slaves under white rule in
the Dutch Cape Colony, or ruled a ‘Reserve’, ‘Homeland’, or ‘Bantustan’ (see Chapter II.3.2
below) under white apartheid control. There are certainly elite indigenous women in Palestine,
whereas I have yet to find any in the other two apartheid societies. (Despite a certain kind of
celebrity status after the release from jail of her husband in 1990 and the end of apartheid laws
in South Africa in 1991, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela does not really qualify in my view as an
elite Black during apartheid. I believe the term, ‘notoriety’, describes her situation better.)
This may be significant for female emancipation, which perhaps has a better chance in
Palestine by not having to start from zero. The flip side of this coin is that elitism may at the
same time be more entrenched in Palestinian society as a whole, enabling the supreme
apartheid elites to divide and rule Palestinians along economic class lines more easily than in
the other two apartheid societies.
The PNA could and should introduce civil marriage, too. What better way could there
be to show that the state of Palestine, as opposed to the state of Israel, is to be non-sectarian,
anti-racist, pro-human-rights, and secular? It could also probably do more to insist on justice
against Israeli aggression in general, especially by ending signals to the Israelis and the
Americans that it is ready to agree to injustices in order to reach a negotiated ‘peace’ accord
with Israel.
However, the option of aggressively pursuing a state policy of eradicating femicide
may be laden with traps. It has been observed with regard to FGM in African countries, where
impending criminalization may have led to an increase in frequency due to stiffening of
resistance, and the idea that a cultural tradition under fire necessitates the mutilation of as
many girls and women as possible ‘before it is too late’, i.e. before it is criminalized and
punished. There are currently an estimated 80 to 130 million girls and women worldwide who
have been forced to undergo FGM, and it is not going to be easy to put an end to this
exceptionally resilient cultural tradition. The Palestinian and South African forms of femicide
are much less frequently practiced than FGM, yet much more directly lethal, and therefore
perhaps not fit for anything but more aggressive criminalization. Nevertheless, as Hallie
Ludsin demonstrates elegantly with regard to alleged witchcraft in South Africa, the rejection
of customary law (traditional culture) in favor of ‘common law’ – introduced by a foreign,
conquering power – can easily backfire.348
Furthermore, as Amnesty International points out in a report on the oppression of
Palestinian women by Israelis and Palestinian men: ‘…due to the prevailing attitude within
society towards victims of rape or sexual abuse, in some cases prosecuting the perpetrator is
not an option which the victim is prepared to consider as the case would become known and
she would be stigmatized.’349 As soon as criminalization approaches, such stigmatization may

347
Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002 concludes her case study analysis of six acts of femicide in the West Bank in the
following direct way: ‘…femicide is tolerated, if not encouraged, by the existing legal code.’
348
Mackie 2000; Ludsin: What South Africa’s Treatment of Witchcraft Says for the Future of Its Customary
Law, 2003: 62-110
349
Amnesty International: Israel and the Occupied Territories: Conflict, Occupation and Patriarchy – Women
Carry the Burden, 2005. (I find the use of the definite article in the sub-title of this report both misleading and
226

well start to intensify, and the criminals will be (even) harder to find and punish.
Perhaps only the Palestinians out of my three apartheid victim groups have the
opportunity of eradicating femicide unaided and without imposed interference. The influence
of international law, in this regard, however, could be both beneficial in strengthening the
hand of anti-femicide activism, but it could also become counterproductive, if generally
perceived as imposed by foreigners. Yet, eradicating femicide in Palestine is apparently not
going to be something that a state or state-like entity will be able to do unaided. Civil society
must be involved, at all levels.
At the same time, there is imposed interference from the other direction: the
demographic warfare pursued by the state of Israel and by much of Israeli Jewish society. The
noble cause of eradicating femicide in Palestine must also target this warfare as a whole,
including apartheid and racism, otherwise the struggle against femicide, again, seems doomed
to fail. Israeli rule is certainly not a solution to Palestinian femicide. It still goes on among
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and, as we have seen, it goes on partly because of Israeli
apartheid and racist discrimination in general.
The pessimistic conclusion that Palestinian femicide will prevail long after apartheid
has gone is easy to draw on the basis of the fact that femicide has survived previous apartheid
societies; in South Africa although it could be argued that economic, social and cultural
apartheid still exist there, but more obviously in Egypt. Graeco-Roman apartheid ended
almost one-and-a-half millennia ago, but female genital mutilation is still being practiced. In
fact, Egypt is the country with the largest incidence of FGM (in absolute numbers) today. Up
to 97 percent of Egyptian women alive today have been victimized, and many who should be
alive are not because the practice continues.350 The oppressive minority rule of Greeks and
Romans is gone, and Egyptians must themselves take responsibility for ending FGM in their
country. However, there are many other factors responsible that go far beyond the borders of
the country. Global patriarchy and neocolonialism have been identified as transnational
factors carrying a high degree of responsibility for the perpetuation of FGM in modern Egypt
by one of its foremost foes, Nawal El Saadawi: ‘And so, if you want to be provocative, you
could say that there is a connection between George Bush and female circumcision.’351 But to
further explore this multi-faceted and complex connection would take us far beyond the theme
investigated here.
There are crucial differences between apartheid societies as well as similarities. And
the future remains unwritten. Unlike the South Africans and the Egyptians, Palestinians may
yet defeat femicide before they defeat apartheid. Palestinian birth rates would almost certainly

unfair, due to the fact that so many Palestinian males are oppressed, killed and wounded in the conflict with
Israel.)
350
Heger Boyle, Songora & Foss: International Discourse and Local Politics: Anti-Female-Genital-Cutting Laws
in Egypt, Tanzania, and the United States, 2001: 524-544
351
El Saadawi: The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, 1997: 67. See also footnote 78 above. In Guatemala, a society
with an apartheid past and a strong, lingering apartheid legacy (see Section I.4 above), yet another main kind of
femicide is now plaguing the country. Young indigenous women, i.e. mainly women of child-bearing age, are
being raped and slaughtered at an alarming rate by members of organized crime groups, soldiers, and police, who
practically enjoy almost total impunity for these and many other crimes. A similar kind of femicide is taking
place in northern Mexico, near the US border. In both of these Western Hemisphere instances, the main victims
are poor, female factory- and sweatshop-employees. See Grais-Targow, Rita: Femicide in Guatemala, 2004;
Lakshmanan: Unsolved Killings Terrorize Women in Guatemala: Culture of Impunity Seen, 2006. I am not sure
if my analysis of the role of femicide in apartheid societies can be helpful in this instance, since members of the
oppressive racial minority are the main perpetrators in Guatemala, as opposed to my main three examples of
apartheid. Nevertheless, further analysis and preventive action are urgently needed. It seems to me that these
killings can be explained as combinations of femicide with genocide, rather than with apartheid. A closer parallel
to the apartheid cases can perhaps be provided by femicide against black women in the USA, where women are
also involved in a continuing struggle for human rights for members of their race and where violence against
women is also generally, so far, seen as unrelated to the political struggle against racism. See Santer: How
Domestic Violence and Political Activism Are Related: A Case Study on African-American Women, 2002.
 227

continue to plummet as a result. Would it be playing into the hands of the Israeli elites if that
were achieved? I do not think so. Although a certain edge might be lost in the head-to-head
demographic struggle, it would in my opinion lead to many more strategic advantages than
disadvantages for Palestinians to bring femicide to an immediate conclusion. The Palestinians
are already almost twice as many as the Israeli Jews. An end to Palestinian femicide would
end divisions in Palestinian society that Israel has prompted, provoked and brought into being
through its practices of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. And if Palestinian women and men
cannot really trust each other, whom can they trust?
The new unity brought about by an end to Palestinian femicide would strengthen
Palestinian society immeasurably. A demographic minority’s oppressive rule always depends
on the divide-and-rule method (usually along with military superiority through war
technology), and although there are many other ways in which Israeli elites try to sow or
encourage discord in Palestinian society, femicide has been the most violent, and thus the
most successful partly Israeli-induced belligerency between Palestinians so far. An end to
Palestinian femicide would also end much Palestinian self-doubt and needless shame and
embarrassment over this and perhaps other aspects of Palestinian culture. A further indirect
positive consequence of an end to femicide would be that the resultant diminished population
race would have a less disastrous effect on the natural environment, and the prevention of
environmental degradation (let alone the shortages of natural resources) could therefore
provide an additional incentive to end apartheid.
If advances are made against apartheid, they can only benefit the struggle against
femicide. The struggle against apartheid must therefore not be abandoned as long as femicide
continues to exist. But conversely, a campaign to eradicate femicide can only benefit the
Palestinian people in the long as well as the short term. Both femicide and apartheid should,
according to the view offered here, be seen as ultimate crimes, as crimes against humanity,
and as mutually unranked priorities with which humanity should deal, along with other
threats, in the struggle against oppression and for human rights and human dignity.
It should be borne in mind that there are pseudo-solutions to the problems investigated
here, which may appear to address the problem but are in fact creating new problems or being
counter-productive. To legally limit the amount of children allowed in a family, as in
overpopulated present-day China, is simply an instance of barking up the wrong tree. Women
have reproductive rights, and they are basic human rights. Although Gaza is even more
densely populated than (all of) China: if a Gaza woman really wants seven children, then
having them must be up to her, more than to any man or any group of men or other women.
To let Palestinian refugees ‘return’ only to areas presently under Palestinian National
Authority rule is another pseudo-solution. These areas are already overcrowded and they have
unacceptably high unemployment rates. Most of the refugees or their immediate ancestors
were driven out of what is today Israel and therefore that is the only place to which they can
return in the true sense of the word, and to which they must be allowed to return with dignity,
not only because of international law, which demands the Palestinian right of return (UN
Resolution 194). With any other ultimate destination the use of the word ‘return’ would be
hypocrisy. To play down Israeli responsibilities in order to direct all blame and more pressure
on Palestinian families and the Palestinian National Authority to end femicide is yet another
pseudo-solution. But so is the opposite ‘strategy’: to play down Palestinian responsibilities.
The problem of ‘honor’ killings is obviously much older than Israel. Therefore, I do not see
any priority among the three levels of responsibility for Palestinian femicide. This may seem a
pessimistic conclusion, as there is seemingly no simple solution. There is no logical or
practical single place to start attacking Palestinian femicide. But, at least, there is a solution. It
is known as human rights.
Both Jews and Palestinians, both in Palestine/Israel and in the Diasporas, both men
and women, both state or pseudo-state authorities and civil society, need to tackle their own
racist and sexist warfare directly and immediately. I have argued here that male Israeli Jews
228

carry more responsibility for this demographic war and that they therefore have to do more;
they must change their ways more in this regard than the Palestinians or the Israeli Jewish
women do. And therefore, they also have to become main targets of proactive peace-making
efforts. But all participants on all sides need to change. Perhaps the three tiers of responsibility
for Palestinian femicide identified above should be brought to bear on every single case of
femicide. But that is not the thesis that has been argued here. Perhaps Europe, for once, could
serve as a role model in this regard, with how it abolished ‘witch’-burnings during the 18th
century through enlightenment and education (as well as general enrichment, which was
largely due to the impoverishment of others, especially non-European slaves at the time, i.e.
not a trait to follow). But that is also not my proposition in this context. Rather, there will be
no peace in the Middle East worth the name until the demographic war is ended along with
the conventional armed conflict.
Beyond the three forms of systematic apartheid violence we have now studied, there is
a fourth form of apartheid violence, namely, between members of the racial elite. Although
there have been assassination attempts and even sensational assassinations of two apartheid
prime ministers, Hendrik Verwoerd and Yitzhak Rabin, in both cases by extreme racists for
whom apartheid was apparently not enough oppression of and violence against indigenous
people, there has never been systematic apartheid violence between Israeli Jews or between
white South Africans. The British who fought the Boers were not (yet) South Africans; they
were British citizens and British imperialists/colonialists. (My own great-grandfather was one
of the British soldiers, and he did not stay in South Africa but went back to England.)
Systematic apartheid violence is either interracial or it takes place within the indigenous
community. We shall come back to this issue in Part III.
Lastly, Sasha Polakow-Suransky has contended that Palestinians have targeted and
killed more Jewish civilians with lethal force than South African Blacks targeted and killed
White civilians.352 This may be true for the period from 1948 to the present. But if one instead
chooses 1652 as the beginning of apartheid, of racist minority rule, in South Africa, as I do,
then one may seriously doubt the veracity of this claim. Both in absolute and even in relative
numbers, Blacks in South Africa may well have targeted (and maybe also killed) more Whites
than Palestinians Jews. The genocides of Khoisan groups took place during the 17th and 18th
centuries, just like the mass killings, displacement and repopulation measures in Palestine
took place especially in the late 1940s. And we should not forget in this context that Israel has
also launched multiple, unprecedented acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the
Palestinians since the end of South African apartheid, since 1994. It has disengaged from
Palestinian labor while sabotaging the Palestinian economy (see Chapter II.5.3 below),
encircled the indigenous ghettos with concrete walls and razor wire, continuously shrinking
the Palestinian reservations as the Palestinian populations within them are growing, frequently
harassing and shooting, and occasionally bombing them with jet bombers, helicopters,
missiles, artillery, and drones. As a whole, Black South Africa was not driven that close to
genocide, i.e. like that of Native Americans or Australians, although Khoisan groups certainly
were, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, and, to some extent, in the cultural sense, the
surviving ones still are. But since 1990 there is a lot more speaking for classifying Palestinian
‘violence’ as self-defense. Without in any way wishing to justify a single Palestinian murder
of a Jewish civilian, and there are quite a few of those, too, I believe Polakow-Suransky is
mistaken with his categorical statement.
In summary, Israeli apartheid reveals its most destructive aspect by widely denying
Palestinians the most basic of all rights, the right to life. This is done differently under
different circumstances. Being a young male Palestinian under Israeli military occupation is
one of the closest things to an a priori death sentence for a healthy human being in the world
since the end of the Second World War. 2001 was the cruelest year so far for the Palestinians

352
Polakow-Suransky 2010: 239
 229

in almost 35 years under military occupation, according to a leading Palestinian rights group,
the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights. In that year alone, ‘excessive
force’ by Israelis killed nearly 700 people, 100 of them children, a slow massacre. In the
following year, however, the death toll was even higher; it rose to over a thousand
Palestinians. The methods used to kill them varied from bombarding civilians from military
planes, high-power bullets penetrating stone house walls and ‘accidentally’ killing people in
their homes, to targeted assassinations by death squads, summary executions of captives,
deaths by means of torture during interrogation or incarceration in Israeli military prisons, and
many further entirely avoidable deaths due to bureaucratic red tape or individual Israeli
soldiers, for instance in ambulances held up at roadblocks, or by the criminal (yet invariably
unpunished) use of Palestinian human shields during Israeli army operations. In 2014, finally,
at least 1,893 Palestinians, more than 73 percent of whom were civilians, at least 429 of whom
were children, were killed during the first month of the third and bloodiest Gaza war since
2008. This month’s carnage also saw 67 killed on the Israeli side, three of whom were
civilians.353
Still, Palestinians are not just victims. (And neither were the Egyptians under Greek
and Roman rule, nor the black South Africans under white domination.) In terms of apartheid
violence, they are also perpetrators, both against Israeli Jews and against other Palestinians,
especially girls and women. Compared to the levels of Israeli violence, and also with regard to
the Israeli origins of violence in modern Palestine, however, Palestinians are victims to a
much larger extent than Israeli Jews are. And, as in apartheid South Africa and Graeco-
Roman Egypt, that additional extent does not merely make a quantitative difference but also a
qualitative one. Apartheid violence is systematic, and it is a crime against humanity. True,
some of the violence perpetrated by resistance fighters also amounts to crimes against
humanity. But the more serious crime against humanity must be the one that falls under the
responsibility of the invader and invader-descendant apartheid elites and of their soldiers,
paramilitary forces, police, allies, and collaborators.
We will return to violence throughout the remainder of this investigation. Violence
permeates apartheid and remains its deepest root and its most vicious symptom.

353
N.N.: Palestinian Rights Group Slams Israeli Occupation, May 6, 2002; Heller, C. July 22, 2003. A year later,
the human rights group, Amnesty International (AI), said at least 1,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli
soldiers during the year 2002, and that most of these killings had been unlawful. Palestinian militants had killed
420 Israelis during the year, in relative terms a huge amount, at least 265 of them civilians. According to AI, the
presence of international human rights monitors could have saved many lives. Palestinians and large constituents
of the international community have also continuously called for monitoring of the conflict by intergovernmental
or non-governmental agencies, but Israel will not allow any such thing to take place in Israel or in the territories
it occupies since 1967, and the USA has chosen to look the other way, as usual. See Ackerman, G.: Amnesty
Criticises Israel, Palestinian Militants, 2003. The only conceivable reasons behind these refusals are that Israel
does not want the human rights violations it commits scrutinized or even known, and that it certainly knows that
the human rights violations it commits are by far both more numerous and more severe than those that
Palestinians commit. See N.N.: Gaza Fighting Resumes after Ceasefire Ends: Ten-year-old Child Killed in Gaza
City, while Three Others Died Following a Drone Strike in Khan Younis, 2014, on the more recent escalation.
230

Interlude: The Other Gross Human Rights Violations in Apartheid

The Pervasiveness of Apartheid
Any theoretical treatment of gross human rights violations must include more than just
the occurrence of physical violence, although the latter tends to dominate headlines, mass
media reports, and the talk of politicians with regard to recent apartheid societies. Section II.9
will deal with one of the reasons why the mass media are often subtly pressured or harshly
influenced to focus on physical violence and to marginalize or even to eliminate all other
aspects of the oppression, or the war, in their coverage of apartheid. South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was exemplary by pointing out the inadequacy of
understanding apartheid as merely a kind of physical violence through its inclusion of
hearings on business, labor, judiciary, health, faith community, prisons, compulsory military
service, children and youth, women, and the mass media under apartheid.
Yet these hearings barely scratched the surface of a massive problem and never led to
any grants or denials of amnesty – only to a few limited, and barely audibly mumbled
apologies by apartheid perpetrators with elaborate qualifications and extremely careful
maneuvering and safeguarding against potential legal precedence effects. 354 Powerful white
South African civil institutions, especially business organizations, as well as individual
civilians, apparently made sure that any blame of Whites for apartheid would be shouldered
by the state alone. And the state, in its turn, made sure that the amnesty provisions would
leave all, or nearly all, individual state-employed perpetrators judicially blameless, as well.
Only a few lower echelon individuals (some of them black policemen) with plenty of blood on
their hands would suffice as scapegoats, as pars pro toto objects of blame, hate, and
retribution for the majority population of the country and the world.
By not having punished or even sanctioned any of those more or ultimately
responsible, South Africa – as opposed to the United Nations – still does not really consider
apartheid to be a crime against humanity, not even a crime, but implicitly swallows the lie that
apartheid was a number of ‘mistakes’. In his response to TRC questions about widespread
torture, blessed, organized, and perpetrated by South African state employees, the last
apartheid president of the country, F.W. de Klerk, stated:

I’m not saying we were perfect…I’m not saying we didn’t make

mistakes. Detailed operationalisation (of security policy) takes place
at a much lower level…that is where, either through over-zealousness
or a male fide approach, where things get out of hand. History has
subsequently shown that, as far as the policy of apartheid was
concerned, they were deeply mistaken. None of these unconventional
projects was intended to lead to any gross violations of human
rights…but…they did create an atmosphere conducive to abuses.355

354
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 1998: Volume 4; Saunders: Business Apology for
South Africa Apartheid, 1997; Phahlane: South Africa Media Denies Collusion with Apartheid State, 1997
355
Quoted in the TRC Final Report, 1998, Volume 5, Chapter 7: Causes, Motives and Perspectives of
Perpetrators. It should be added that de Klerk took several initiatives in the dismantling of apartheid laws and in
paving the way for a transition to democracy, and, also, that he subsequently made several further statements
expressing regrets about apartheid, and also an apology to God for apartheid, an unaddressed apology for pain
and suffering caused, but no apology in an unqualified way to the victims of South African apartheid. See,
further, N.N.: How South Africa Avoided a Bloodbath, no date; Speed: FW Pleads Innocence: The National
Party Has Refused to Acknowledge Its Role in Apartheid Atrocities, 1996. See del Vecchio: The Israeli
Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: The Territorial Dynamics of the ‘Apartheid Analogy’, 2011, for a
similar approach to de Klerk’s: ‘This study argues that the violations of human rights and the acts of domination
and discrimination are the result, rather th[a]n the intent, of the specific territorial objective of separation and
control.’ (Ibid: 35) I sympathize with del Vecchio’s careful and caring attempt to avoid demonizing Israeli Jews
or South African Whites, but I still hold the apartheid form of separation and control to be a very serious crime
that should carry with it criminal liabilities, and some forms of punishment, if only in a symbolic form, that will
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In spite of itself, the TRC perpetuated the focus on violence and ‘security’ as more
than just the main issue, namely, as the only apartheid issue that really counts.356 At least in
practice, ‘gross human rights violations’ were limited to ones that involved actual, physical
violence, and ones perpetrated by the government and its allies were in official terms largely,
or even fully, ‘unintended’, except, of course, sometimes on the lower levels, when things got
‘out of hand’. This is precisely the way apartheid’s politicians, soldiers, businesspeople,
defenders, sympathizers, and allies want it to be treated and misunderstood.
Another main reason why apartheid is thus reduced to violence is that violence often
becomes the only possible form of resistance, and the victims of apartheid can then be blamed
for the entire conflict. We have seen numerous examples of that in the previous section. The
TRC hearings investigating killings or abuses ordered by the ANC or by Mandela’s former
wife, Winnie Mandela, seem to me to have attracted at least as much media attention around
the world as the ones about crimes perpetrated by apartheid’s defenders. Accountability must
apply, but proportionality must also be observed.
Under apartheid conditions, the laws, the courts, the executive and legislative powers,
as well as the market, are all stacked against the conquered majority. The playing field of
apartheid is never even. Violence is of course the very last, and most desperate, resort. Every
single member of the oppressed majority knows that the invading minority has set up its
oppressive system on the basis of military superiority. But counter-violence, usually carried
out in full awareness that the losses will be huge, often seems to be the only possible option
for the oppressed majority, aside from acquiescence, which may well mean little aside from a
more or less slow death without dignity.
After the fact of conquest, the indigenous therefore often feel cornered and more or
less pushed into ‘instigating violence’, i.e. fighting back, and that is the moment when the
oppressors can grab the opportunity and perform a little extra genocide on the side without
world condemnation and even without any bad conscience whatsoever among its own people
and supporters. Now, it is the apartheid elite which is seen as ‘retaliating’ or ‘responding’ (see
Chapter II.9.3), as defending itself, as implementing security policy. Furthermore, as the black
South Africans, the Palestinians, and presumably also the Egyptians under Greek and Roman
rule found out: if you can not even stage an unarmed, peaceful protest without getting killed
or targeted with lethal force in return, there appears to be little else to do than to proceed with
armed resistance. And any assurances by the soldiers or politicians of ‘peace talks’ or a ‘peace
process’ must therefore be regarded as hypocrisy, that is, as long as the underlying reality of
apartheid is not removed.
Armed resistance may be provoked even more directly by the elites, as the following
passage on alleged Israeli provocation of Palestinian militancy prior to the outbreak of the
Second Intifada in September 2000 suggests:

Arms sales [to Palestinian militant groups] by the Israeli mafia,

connected either to the Israeli army or directly to Israeli intelligence
services through collaborators, were phenomenal in scale at this time,
being a trap for leading the Palestinian factions into civil war. The
spread of arms in the occupied territories acted as bait to encourage
the Palestinians to become militarized…357

at least deter future groups of humans from implementing or trying it out again. See footnote 846 below for
reasons not to treat Israeli apartheid as an ‘analogy’ to South African apartheid. Aside from these two major
points of criticism, del Vecchio’s study is, in my view, well-informed, and ultimately, very useful for
understanding especially the diachronic aspects of the conflicts.
356
See, for a typical example, Scheer: Israel’s Sharon Says Security Top Budget Priority, 2001.
357
Saleh: Mixed Record of Intifada, 2002. I have not been able to corroborate (or falsify) this record of events
through any other sources, and I feel that this account should be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, it is
well known that many if not most of the firearms used by Palestinian militants are bought directly (in a much
232

Violence is the main issue in my view, too, but dealing with it must include the fact of
invasion, of where, when and how the violence between the racial groups of an apartheid
society once actually started. Moreover, violence is not the only issue. It is not the only gross
human rights violation to occur under apartheid. The crime of apartheid, the crime against
humanity, is not only the physical violence – although it sometimes even overlaps with
genocide – but a pervading structure which reaches into all areas of life (and death).
Yet, apart from extremist ideology, e.g. the dehumanization of the adversary or
incitement to violence (see Section II.9 below), violence is the only gross human rights
violation which can also be perpetrated and carried out by members of the oppressed,
indigenous majority under apartheid. (The repopulation through relatively natural means by
the oppressed is not the same as the repopulation through relatively unnatural ones by the
elites, as we shall see presently.) Seven other equally important realms of human rights
violations are carried out only by apartheid perpetrators from the elite race. That is why
violence is the only theme of apartheid that is talked about as a gross human rights violation at
all by so many members of the oppressive minority, its allies, and its descendants.
The other themes are often subtly and cleverly repressed, unless of course there is
dehumanizing content in the thought of the resistance with regard to the oppressors, in which
case the victims of apartheid are again accused, somewhat perversely, but still very cleverly,
of racism. For example, a Macedonian during the second century BCE complained in a letter
to the authorities that an Egyptian employee had mistreated him at Alexandria’s Serapeum,
the greatest temple at the time, dedicated to a god that had been created by the apartheid state
as a syncretism of Egyptian and Greek gods. The reason behind the mistreatment, according
to the Macedonian, whose name was Ptolemy (though he may not have been related to the
royal family), was that he was Greek. The letter of complaint was addressed to Dionysios, the
Greek strategos, the powerful military administrator of the region. In any case, says one
present-day commentator, Ptolemy would certainly not have mentioned the reason unless he
was sure that it would have an effect on Dionysios.358
Although the violent crimes committed by the invaders are both fundamentally and
ultimately unprovoked as well as overwhelming with regard to numbers – numbers of both
crimes and victims – effective propaganda, made possible to a large extent by wealth
exploited and stolen from apartheid victims, can thus rally world opinion, or at least elite
world opinion, around the cause of the invaders. This is exactly what is happening today with
regard to Israel and some of its supporters, who have been very successful in relating
Palestinian thought to Nazi thought and Nazi misdeeds, i.e. in deliberately confusing
victimized with victimizing thought, although they are in reality essentially opposites of one
another.359
Unfortunately, due to the shortage of time and funds made available by the initial
conditions and political pressures leading up to the South African TRC’s formation, it was not
given a chance to investigate such aspects of apartheid comprehensively. There was also
widespread, systematic shredding of actually and potentially incriminating documents by
security forces personnel and others during the years of negotiations leading up to the first
democratic elections in 1994. If that had not happened, we might very well have been in a
better position not only to prosecute apartheid crimes in South Africa, but also to improve the
country under epiapartheid conditions, and additionally maybe even to understand and
counteract Israeli oppression of Palestinians in a more effective way, to prevent human rights

less conspiratorial way) from individual Israeli soldiers, who sell weapons for financial reasons. See, for
instance, Heritage: New Generation of Militants Emerges in West Bank, 2003. On US funding of anti-
democratic thugs in Gaza in 2006 and 2007, see Rose, David: The Gaza Bombshell, 2008.
358
Huß 2001: 589f.
359
Said: Low Point of Powerlessness, 2002. See also Chapter II.9.3.
 233

violations by both sides, and thus to save lives.360

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

The Ugandan military ruler, Idi Amin, was behind the very first TRC in 1974. He had
been moved to set it up because of pressures from abroad and from human rights groups
within Uganda. Upon completion of the final report, however, Amin would not let it be
published nor bring about any of its recommendations.
Since then, TRCs and similar institutions have been a great deal more successful. The
Chilean Truth Commission’s report (1991) became, among other things, the foundation for
the Spanish judge Balthasar Garzon’s arrest warrant and the subsequent detention of General
Augusto Pinochet in Britain in 1998. The former military dictator and subsequent ‘Senator for
Life’, was eventually released from Britain and returned to Chile (due to pressure by Britain’s
far-right forces, including Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister), and although he was
never charged, Pinochet then lost his grip on power in Chile. He was inconvenienced and
publicly defamed by the incident, abroad as well as at home. Indeed, it seems as if the only
thing that saved him from prosecution in Chile was his lawyers’ claim that Pinochet was
suffering from dementia.361
The Argentinean commission’s final report (1984) became a bestseller and led to the
indictment and prosecution of many generals. Guatemala’s Historical Clarification
Commission (1994-1999), with which we dealt in Chapter I.4 above, was also much
acclaimed. Since then there have been or are TRCs, or at least truth commissions, in Bolivia,
Brazil, Canada, Chad, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, East
Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Germany (in the former DDR), Ghana, Greensboro (North
Carolina, USA), Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria,
Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, and the Ukraine, some of which only recently started their work.
Additionally, Bosnia, Serbia, Mexico, and Burundi have reportedly at least started to consider
setting up their own commissions. There are also calls for a US Truth Commission, for its role
in the genocides and the subjugation of Native Americans, racist slavery against African
Americans, the infringement of the civil rights of African Americans and other minorities, as
well as US atrocities in Vietnam and other nations. Sweden and Norway have also been urged
to form TRCs on their 500-year-history of discrimination and ethnic cleansing against
‘Travelers’, including the Roma. I agree with all of these calls and would like to suggest
another one on the genocides of the indigenous Sami people and their cultures over the last
millennia in all of Scandinavia. This may seem far-fetched, but a small and slow genocide or
ethnic cleansing is still a genocide or ethnic cleansing, and in Scandinavia, it is still ongoing.
The languages, cultures, and in particular the mobility of the Sami still earn resentment from
the mainstream, Germanic-speaking, settled, and agricultural Scandinavians.
Yet, no TRC so far has been more talked about than the South African one (1995-
1999). This is partly because it is the only one so far that has had the power to grant

360
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 1998: Volume 1, Chapter 8, The Destruction of
Records, 1998; Harris: “They Should Have Destroyed More”: The Destruction of Public Records by the South
African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990-1994, 1999.
361
Cooper: Chile and the End of Pinochet, 2001. On the active US role, especially the active role of the US
Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in the apparently Pinochet-led coup d’état against the government of the
democratically elected President Salvador Allende, and in the ensuing military terror regime in Chile under
Pinochet’s apparent leadership with continued US support, see Hitchens 2002 (2001): 55ff; Bachelet: New
Transcripts Point to U.S. Role in Chile Coup, 2004. On the closely coordinated US corporate and state pressures
against democracy and self-determination in Chile, see Klein 2008 (2007): 49ff. Regarding the dementia claim,
see N.N.: I Was a Democrat, Says Chile’s Pinochet, November 24, 2003, in which the former dictator
(apparently lucidly), three years before his death, explained in an interview that he had no regrets, that he had
nothing for which to apologize, that he had always been a democrat, and that he was now writing his
autobiography.
234

amnesties. Its hearings were also publicized more widely, especially through television and
radio. The victims and perpetrators, as well as the Commissioners, included some of the
household names of the global media.362
Moreover, as we saw in the previous section, the South African TRC had some
spectacular successes, including the uncovering of the South African apartheid army’s
Biological and Chemical Warfare unit, and some equally spectacular shortcomings, e.g. losing
the mandate to investigate 98 percent of the killings perpetrated between 1960 and 1994 by
the apartheid army, police, and paramilitaries, which took place outside South Africa’s
borders, or to determine the responsibilities of white racist business practices, South African
and western.

The Rest of this Book

My nine apartheid categories interact and overlap considerably. For instance, any kind
of forced segregation, whether of citizenship, land, or access, will involve at least potential
violence. For a member of the majority to tap into the (confiscated) water reserves of the
dominant minority will involve the risk of being arrested and prosecuted, or possibly even
attacked and killed – most likely with impunity – in a police or army ‘operation’ or vigilante
act. Another example of overlapping would be the intertwining of violence and ideology: The
killing of a member of the privileged minority will spark a typical ‘response’ from an
apartheid state, which will kill ten or so members of the majority in retribution. Nowadays,
the mass media controlled by the minority and/or its allies will typically give the killing of the
sole minority member equal coverage in space (print media) or time (audiovisual media) to
the other ten or so killings, often more. It will also display qualitative bias, generating
sympathy in the typical media consumer for the victim belonging to the oppressive minority
and even anger and hatred towards the victims of apartheid on his or her behalf. (See Section
II.9 below.)
Nonetheless, despite the overlapping and the occasional contradictions, e.g. less
violence but more propaganda, I believe that there is a system of apartheid policies and
practices within each apartheid society. Frequently, this system does not seem to be entirely
conscious, neither among perpetrators nor victims nor among outside observers. The fact of
oppression itself, however, seems always, or nearly so, to be obvious to the oppressed, but not
to the oppressors, nor to the collaborators. To disentangle the essential strands of apartheid
and to overcome some of the many intentionally and unintentionally erected obstacles
presented to its explication as a rather simple system are some of the strongest reasons for me
in carrying out the research behind this investigation.

362
Hayner: More Than Just the Truth, 2001: 38f. Heyner emphasizes the need for criminal trials aside from the
TRCs. See also Webber: Peru Seeks to Heal Wounds with Truth Commission, 2001; Yates: Truth Commission
Set for Traumatised East Timor, 2002; N.N.: Kenya Plans Truth and Reconciliation Commission, February 13,
2003. See further Collins: Timor-Reconciliation: East Timor Man who Torched Town Seeks Forgiveness, 2002;
N.N.: East Timor Says No Reconciliation without Justice, June 17, 2002; Cespedes: Peruvians Tell Truth Board
of 1991 Slaughter, 2002; Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, Greensboro, NC, 2006, Cox: Truth
Commissions and Archives, 2008, Hazell: Sanningskommission Måste Ge Resandefolket Upprättelse, 2011,
Amnesty International: Truth Commissions, 2013, and Section III.6 below.
 235

2. Repopulation
Apartheid Israel can be defeated, just as apartheid in South Africa was defeated.
(Winnie Madikizela-Mandela)363

The policies of apartheid governments under any circumstances include the

encouragement of immigration of racial minority members – both of the dominant and of
some ‘intermediary’ minorities, in particular of the Jews into Egypt, of the Indians into South
Africa, and of the East Asians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans into Israel. There is also,
invariably, official encouragement of raising birth rates of the dominant minority, and, as we
have just seen, a multitude of cases of ethnic cleansing, i.e. killings and expulsions of
members of the indigenous racial majority. Why are these policies such conspicuous and
persistent features of apartheid governments?
To put it simply: the more oppressive and the richer people are, the fewer children they
produce – statistically and relatively speaking.364 All apartheid societies exhibit much higher
birth rates of the oppressed populations than of the oppressive ones. The striking differences
to the current non-apartheid societies in the First World or ‘developed countries’ are that the
indigenous there are both rich and in a majority, whereas most of the recent immigrants (not
invaders) have significantly higher birth rates and lower average incomes as well. High birth
rates appear to be correlated especially with poverty, but also with being oppressed. When
Jews were poor and oppressed in Europe during the 19th century, for instance, the Jewish
population increase was much higher than that of the rest of Europe. In Israel today, however,
where Jews are rich and oppressive, i.e. the opposite of most of the previous generations of
Jews in Europe, from whom most of them originate, they have the lowest birth rates in the
Middle East, despite almost hysterical programs to reverse this trend, repopulation programs
created, implemented and enforced with both state and non-state Zionist efforts.365
Among rich countries, apartheid countries exhibit demographic dynamics
diametrically opposed to those of non-apartheid countries. In today’s western Europe, for
example, the recent immigrants are predominantly Eastern Europeans, Turks, and Arabs; in
the USA they are mainly Latin Americans and East Asians.366 Apartheid countries, on the
other hand, have explosive birth rates and population growth rates, which other rich countries
do not have. This has a very negative impact on the overall economy or economies, as well as

363
SAPA (South African Press Association): Apartheid Israel Can Be Defeated, Says Winnie, 2004
364
Fargues 2000. Perhaps the only exception of a demographically significant group that does not have a higher
fertility rate than the class of people that oppresses it is provided by slaves, especially by the victims of racist
slavery, as in the Americas from the early 16th until the end of the 19th century, where slave families were
routinely split up, oftentimes by the systematic sale of fathers around the time of the birth of the child. In rural
Louisiana in the 1850s, for example, mothers and fathers were the first familial members to be split up during
slave auctions and sales. The separations of children from their mothers or from their siblings were apparently
more frequently viewed as having a tendency of damaging the goods, the enslaved people, and thus of lessening
their exchange and utility values, more so than the separation of slave mothers from slave men with whom they
had had children. This practice also served to dehumanize the slaves, especially women and girls, who were
often used as sex slaves as well as forced labor. See Tademy: Cane River, 2002 (2001): 118, 192. Slaves are
obviously poor and oppressed, but under such extremely cruel conditions, when couples are systematically
separated due to pregnancy or childbirth, and the women and girls are repeatedly raped, they seem to produce
fewer children, like the rich and oppressive classes of people do otherwise. The systematic extermination of
long-term hope for black people in the Americas, the murder of the notion that their children, or their children’s
children, may be able to live better lives than they themselves are living, is one of the reasons that the
transatlantic system of racist slavery ranks with the Nazi Holocausts and the genocides of Native Americans
among the worst crimes against humanity ever, even worse than apartheid, where ways out of the torture were at
least more imaginable and thus reflected in higher indigenous fertility rates and demographic growth. Other
reasons are the sheer numbers of people killed, cultures destroyed, and the combined time of continuous criminal
white activity in the Atlantic triangle, i.e. in Africa, Europe and the Americas. See also my Preface above.
365
Kovel 2007: 32. See also Chapter II.1.3 above.
366
See Giddens 2000 (1999): 75ff.
236

on the natural environment. From a moral point of view, apartheid is simply much worse than
any anti-immigrant policies in Europe or the USA, at least since World War II. As repugnant
as the selfish, and racist, new far-right wing in Europe is – for instance in the populism of
Austria’s Hans-Christian Strache or France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen – it is, so far, not in the same
league as the crimes against humanity perpetrated by each National Party leader in South
Africa or each Likud, Kadima, and Labor leader in Israel.

Israeli politicians and intellectuals, even those self-proclaimed as ‘the

left’, have revealed a degree of racism or ethnic exclusivity that made
the far-right parties of Europe sound as humane as Mother Teresa.
The crucial difference, however, is that in the case of Israel, the
immorality is aggravated by the fact that, unlike the foreign
immigrants to Europe, the ‘other’ is in fact the original inhabitants of
the land.367

Having as many children as possible becomes one of the main virtues and one of the
few avenues of legal resistance for the oppressed population in an apartheid society – and not
only there – for a variety of reasons. So many children and youths are killed by the elites and
their armed forces. For the racial majority, moreover, life expectancy is short, and social
security for the aged is either insufficient or non-existent, public health services likewise (see
Section II.6 below). Last but not least, a growing demographic preponderance of the majority
will, as will be shown, eventually force the oppressive minority to retreat, for military as well
as political and structural socio-economic reasons. In South Africa, it even played an
important role in making the perpetrators give up apartheid.
The only ways for the elites to counteract indigenous growth-rates is to periodically
kill natives, either directly (see previous section) or indirectly, by means of so-called
structural violence. To the extent that repopulation is a gross human rights violation, it is only
so when perpetrated by the apartheid elites. One example of this is the apartheid state’s
condemnation of large indigenous population segments to land that cannot possibly support
them, as can be witnessed clearly with the creation of Bantustans in South Africa as well as in
the territories occupied by Israel, where the best land as well as most of the land was (and is
being) reserved for minorities of white and Jewish settlers, respectively. That is also one of
the main themes of both sections immediately following this one which deal with the
apartheid categories of Citizenship and Land. Another possibility is to sterilize the natives or
induce birth defects, either directly, as was the case with the forced contraceptive injections of
female factory workers in South Africa (see below) and the covert programs of the South
African ‘Medical Battalion’ (see previous section), or indirectly, e.g. by targeted exposure of
the indigenous to toxic pollution, as in the occupied Palestinian territories (see below). Yet
another, less immediately violent, way to keep the oppressive minority from shrinking – in
absolute and/or in relative terms – is by means of racially selective, i.e. discriminatory,
immigration and so-called ‘naturalization’, as well as granting of visas, residence and work
permits (see Section II.3 below). This is a universal feature of apartheid societies, and in my
view yet another variety of structural violence, at least as long as those immigrants are
receiving privileges that are not extended to the indigenous population.
A way of counteracting racial mixing, which in the face of faster population growth of
the indigenous majority will lead to a long-term weakening of the minority, is to simply ban
or at least actively discourage interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations. This is
another normal state of affairs in apartheid societies. A further reason to do so is of course
ideological. Apartheid rests on a hypostasizing, racist division of society into hierarchically
ranked, racialized groups. If reality does not correspond to the theory of separate and
367
Barghouti, O.: On Refugees, Creativity and Ethics: Commemorating the Second Anniversary of the Intifada,
2002. See also Davis U. 2002: 146ff.
 237

distinguishable races (which is never strictly the case), then it is so much worse for reality.
For instance, as we saw in the Mandela quote in Chapter I.6 above: if two people with the
same two parents display skin colors or hair textures different enough, then they must belong
to different races, although they have the same two parents, and they (full brothers and sisters)
will therefore not be allowed to live in the same area.
Finally, a presumed, indirect way of achieving raised birth rates is sexism. The South
African government, especially, encouraged white women not to pursue careers or even seek
employment but to marry early, stay at home and to raise future generations of masters. All to
no avail. The black population still grew faster. The male white rulers therefore often saw
themselves obligated to organize and carry out massive depopulating activities, i.e. direct or
indirect killings of indigenous people, instead. The Israeli elites are currently working
together on very similar schemes, as will become evident below. In this sense, apartheid
repopulation is a continuation of physical violence, of depopulation, by other means. Once
again, as with physical violence, this section shows how close and similar apartheid is to
genocide. Colonialism, on the other hand, does not repopulate the colony, at least not to the
extent that it depopulates the indigenous population share for that reason.
Unlike total genocide, however, apartheid creates masses of refugees. Repopulation
and settlement policies hatched and realized by the conquerors hinder or make impossible the
repatriation of refugees, another reason behind their popularity among apartheid elites, who
then barricade themselves behind the latest technology in segregation, surveillance, and
weaponry, and move those barricades according to strategic imperatives. Although genocide
and apartheid are different, they do share a great deal of common ground in ethnic cleansing.
Apartheid repopulation developed almost seamlessly into genocide in most parts of the
Americas, especially in North America, and in Australia.
Repopulation measures vary significantly, both between societies and at different
points in time. From this perspective, apartheid and racism themselves are thus more
strategies than positions, more processes than structures. Total repopulation is of course
tantamount to genocide or, at the very least, total ethnic cleansing. As long as repopulation
practices are aimed towards partial removal of the indigenous, they are apartheid policies. In
this sense, the difference between genocide and apartheid is gradual, due to a multitude of
reasons, such as time lag and different kinds of discrepancies between policy and practice. But
when apartheid repopulation policies are perceived to fail, as they seem bound to do in the
long run, authorities will usually revert to violent tactics, often with genocidal aspects, as in
the occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel from the fall of 2000. The only other alternative
is ending apartheid altogether.

2.1. Bringing in the Civilians

Alexander the Great intended the new capital of Egypt, named by himself after
himself, to be the ‘commercial pivot’ of his far-flung empire. It was the first time Egypt had a
capital on its Mediterranean coast. Alexander was mainly interested in tapping into the hugely
profitable Mediterranean trade: ‘[H]e thought that the city would prosper…and would bring
the wealth of Asia to Europe. Whether he also envisaged the exploitation of the land of Egypt,
in the Pharaonic manner that the Ptolemies were to perpetuate and develop, we cannot tell, but
it is natural to suppose that he did.’368
In order to accomplish all of this, the Macedonian rulers required more than just
military and political administration personnel, which was how the Persians, and the
Assyrians before them, had ruled Egypt colonially (or as a province) during the previous
centuries.369 The Macedonians now also brought about massive immigration by Greek civilian
settlers, an entire commercial class as well as an aristocratic or potentially aristocratic class of

368
Fraser: Cities of Alexander the Great, 1996: 174, 175
369
Assmann 1996: 462
238

landowners. They did this by offering financial incentives for Greeks and Macedonians to
immigrate, just like the apartheid elite Whites in South Africa and the apartheid elite Jews in
Israel/Palestine would do many centuries later.

The coming of the Greeks created, in effect, a social revolution,

overlaying Egyptian society with a new dominant elite. Through the
first century of Ptolemaic rule Greek immigration continued on a large
scale – from mainland Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, the Aegean
islands, the Greek cities of Asia Minor – a heavy concentration in
Alexandria, but also penetrating all parts of the Nile valley. In their
wake came others too, even the odd Roman, but most conspicuously,
in the middle of the second century BC, great numbers of Jews.
Numerically, of course, the Egyptians remained far superior to the
aggregate of all these immigrants...370

Peter Parsons estimates the racial Greek minority to have made up a population of
around 300,000 against an Egyptian majority of approximately seven million, i.e. 4.3 percent.
J.G. Manning, however, has a much higher estimate, a ten percent Greek minority under
Ptolemaic rule.371 This would mean between 23 and 9 Egyptians per Greek in Egypt, in some
contrast to two Palestinians per Jew in the current Palestinian context, and four black to one
white South Africans half a century ago, but nine to one at present. In physical terms,
therefore, Israel appears to be the most genocidally inclined as well as the most successful at
ethnic cleansing of the three societies under investigation. In terms of speed, compared with
the other two apartheid societies, but also with, for instance, the white-led genocides and
settlement of North America, Israel’s is also a comparatively rapid form of ethnic cleansing.
As noted above, there was only one Jew per 20 Palestinians in Palestine as recently as 1881.
Today there are more than 20 Israeli Jews per 20 Palestinians in Historic Palestine, though
only 10 per 20 in the international context. In relative terms, historically speaking, Israel is a
society practicing ethnic cleansing of indigenous people, of Arabs, very successfully.
Greek-dominated Egypt, on the other hand, appears closest to a colonialist system. But
the demographic estimate for Graeco-Roman Egypt is uncertain, in any case more uncertain
than the prevalent estimates for apartheid South Africa or Israel/Palestine, and we should be
careful not to rush to this conclusion. The strong role played by governmentally employed
foreign mercenaries in Ptolemaic apartheid seems to support such a small relative number
estimate of racial elite people.
Many of the Jews in Egypt were mercenaries in the service of the Macedonian king.
Jewish mercenaries in fact had already served in large numbers in the Persian occupation of
Egypt, and it is possible that many of them simply switched sides following the Greek
takeover and then stayed on in Egypt. Some Persian mercenaries would also eventually serve
370
Bowman 1996 (1986): 122; Vasunia: The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander,
2001: 270. During the second century BCE, at the height of power of the Ptolemaic apartheid state, the historian
Polybius (36.17.5-10) complains that Greek men in general are increasingly becoming childless, and of Greek
population shortage. He puts this down to men’s refusal to marry and the use of infanticide (see more on the
latter below). Walbank 31992 (1981): 165f. Green (2007: 90f.) adds an egoistic-economic dimension to the target
of Polybius’ argument, namely, that Greek men in Polybius’ time increasingly think life without children is less
burdened by responsibility and it is cheaper to stay childless. Is Polybius also implying that Greek women are
being impregnated by (non-Greek) male slaves and servants? If so, why? According to Aristotle’s pseudo-
biology, very much the fashion during this era, men are active contributors to conception, women merely
passive. This could be the reason Polybius mentions males but not females. The complaint about Greek males’
childlessness could thus both be what it appears to be (to Walbank and Green) as well as part of a more or less
conscious elite attempt to sow xenophobic suspicion and even paranoia in Greek male minds. In the recently
colonialized Zimbabwe, well on its way into a state of apartheid with its concomitant demographic obsessions, a
related, racist mass hysteria among Whites led to executions of many innocent black men for alleged rape. See
McCulloch: Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935, 2000.
371
Parsons 2007: 36; Manning 2010: 138
 239

in the Macedonian king’s army. A sizeable civilian Jewish population then developed in
Ptolemaic Egypt, especially in Alexandria, and the Jews became the third largest racial group,
in a middle position of the racial hierarchy,372 very much like the Asian and Colored groups in
South Africa, and the non-Semitic Asian or non-Jewish European groups in modern Israel.
During certain periods, however, it appears that the third races were more loyal to the
apartheid rulers in Egypt than in modern Israel or in South Africa. From the point of view of
the oppressors, this also appears to have been necessitated by the demographic ratios,
apparently much lower than in apartheid South Africa and Palestine/Israel.
As in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, a comparatively rapid population increase
among the indigenous also posed a constant threat, probably even more threatening, to the
relatively small apartheid minority’s privileged position in Egypt under Ptolemaic rule.
Although the Ptolemaic state feverishly encouraged further immigration from Greece as well
as imports of third race labor (mainly slaves, but also free civilians such as Jews from
Palestine and elsewhere, and also many non-Greek mercenaries), the demographic trend could
not be reversed. At the end of the third century BCE, things came to a head. In a war against
the Seleucid kingdom, another Greek-led kingdom, based in Persia and Syria, King Ptolemy
IV saw himself forced to arm numerous Egyptians for the first time to fight in his army.
20,000 indigenous soldiers were called up by the monarch in 217 BCE. It was a costly war,
and the economy started to sag. The first to suffer more were the Egyptians, whose protests
became increasingly daring as some of them were now armed, knew how to fight, and knew
how the Greeks (and others) fought. This led to a hardened stance of the security
establishment. Social unrest and several attempts at rebellion were the natural consequences,
and finally a civil war broke out which led to the independence of Upper Egypt under
indigenous kings for 21 years.373
This was a potentially fatal child disease for apartheid on the scale of world history.
As far as I know, none of the latter-day emulators of the Ptolemies, such as apartheid South
Africa, the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, Guatemala under Spanish descendants, or modern
Israel, ever repeated the mistake of arming so many indigenous people at once. During the
first 100 years of Roman rule, Egyptians were again strictly prohibited from joining the army.
But then things changed, yet again, but only in a very controlled fashion. There were black
policemen in South Africa, and even (lightly armed) black mercenaries in the Bantustans.
Through implementation of the Oslo accords, the Palestinian authority was also armed lightly,
under strict Israeli and US supervision, apparently in order to police the radical Palestinians,
but perhaps also in order to provoke a Palestinian civil war, and possibly even to encourage
Palestinian anti-Israeli militancy and armed Palestinian resistance, which could then become
pretexts for Israeli clampdowns and further ethnic cleansing.
There is some evidence to suggest that the Macedonian rulers intended to establish a
biological race of dominators like the South African and Israeli apartheid elites were to do in
their societies. The choices in race of mercenaries, in as far as they were choices, provide us
with one clue to this end. During the height of Ptolemaic power, in the third century BCE, the
Alexandrian garrison probably consisted mostly of mercenaries from Gaul, i.e. from Europe
north and northwest of Greece, as well as from Crete. In fact, the mercenaries mostly or
always seem to have come from the north, in any case from outside Africa. Once a racist
system of domination has been set up, it makes much sense for the elites to ensure that the
racial classes do have different appearances: ‘…to a superficial observer the difference
between native and Greek (that is, ‘Alexandrian’ as a general term) held good’.374 And a

372
Koch 1993: 488; Bowman 1996 (1986): 123; Bingen 2007: 209; Crawford 1971: 41f. According to Green
(2007: 125) the fabulous wealth in the hands of the Ptolemies enabled them to win any civil war and almost any
war against invaders by means of buying mercenaries, many mercenaries.
373
Walbank 31992 (1981): 119; cf. Iliffe 1995: 271ff.
374
Fraser 1972: 81. Affluent women in Egypt under Roman rule even applied white lead to their faces to bleach
them in order to appear whiter, according to Parsons 2007: 113. This is the first example of skin bleaching in
240

superficial (as well as largely false) view of cultural and biological differences is exactly what
racism is.
Secondly, slavery in Greek-ruled Egypt was racist in kind, too. A Ptolemaic royal
edict from 180 BCE states that slaves ‘…are to be registered at or before the age of fifteen,
with the names of their mothers.’ As in most if not all slave societies, many slaves in
Ptolemaic Egypt were fathered by the slave-owners, and they were quite obviously not to be
raised to become free men and women, since ‘the recording of their mother’s name only was
an indication of their illegitimacy’, i.e. they were not legitimate children of their free Greek
fathers.375 Unlike the Islamic and indigenous African, including ancient Egyptian, versions of
slavery, the Greeks in the Ptolemaic state obviously wanted to make sure that the blood of the
upper classes, the free classes, remained unadulterated by the blood of slaves. This is
essentially the same racist system of slavery that would later be used by the Dutch in South
Africa and by all Europeans and their (supposedly) pure-blooded descendants in the Western
Hemisphere: powerful and rich fathers disowning their own children and using them as free-
of-charge labor on a daily basis or selling them. I am not aware of any racist system of slavery
prior to this Greek one in Egypt.
Similar to Britain in South Africa, Rome was ostensibly mainly an occupying force
and an administration in Egypt. Both Rome and Britain arrived in and conquered entrenched
apartheid societies centuries after the Greeks and the Dutch, respectively, had set themselves
up as the main apartheid minority. Interestingly, they both perpetuated vast arrays of
privileges for the previous waves of European invaders as well as discrimination against the
indigenous Africans. They did this although they had to fight the former in wars in order to
assume control over the countries.
So why did the Romans not attempt an alliance with the Egyptians against the Greeks,
why did the British not invite the black South Africans (on a large scale) to help fight the
Dutch and their descendants? The answers are complex. First of all, the new invaders were,
and knew that they were, by far militarily superior to both the racial minority and the
majority, whether the latter two were isolated or united. Second, the minority was armed and
militarily as well as politically organized, as opposed to the oppressed majority, which lacked
weapons, was militarily unorganized and politically split as a result of the previous centuries
of oppression and divide-and-rule practices. Therefore the marginal losses for the imperial
forces would be even smaller if they ganged up with the oppressive minority against the
indigenous majority, which is what happened, in both cases. Third, the Romans and the
British realized that they could make larger profits from exploiting the work of a majority than
from that of a minority, the latter of which was largely an idle class, unskilled in and
unaccustomed to the most exploitable kinds of work. Fourth, there was classist and racist
contempt. This is why the British and Romans should also be seen as responsible for
apartheid, and not just for colonialism, in South Africa and Egypt.
According to the ancient historian, Klaus Koch, the Roman ‘apartheid provisions’ for
Egypt were not fully racialized, but nearly so. Now the Romans alone constituted the upper
class. According to him, the upper middle class consisted of urban Greeks. Urban Jews were
classified as a lower middle class, whereas Egyptians and rural Greeks made up the lowest
stratum of society in Egypt under Roman rule.376 It seems, however, as if Koch was a little

history, as far as I am aware. It would later be used by upper-class western European women and men during the
height of racist slavery, i.e. during the late 18 th century CE and since then. Today, however, it is used mainly by
disadvantaged women of color. More on the occasional symptoms of biological racism among classic-era and
late-antiquity Greeks in Chapter II.9.1 below.
375
Fraser 1972: 84f.
376
Koch 1993: 589f. Lewis, N. 1983: 18f, however, analyzes the middle class as consisting of both urban Greeks
and Jews without differentiating between them. Lewis also differentiates between ‘Egyptians’ of different status,
with the non-urban Greeks at the top of this social ladder. I believe the racial ladders are flexible according to
situation in any apartheid society, although the main thrust of the law in apartheid South Africa, for example,
 241

unspecific with this description. The rural Greeks may indeed have been treated on a par with
the only favored class of Egyptians, the priests. But it seems unlikely that they sank all the
way below the level of Jews to the level of normal Egyptians. We shall see many examples in
the following of how even the rural Greeks were privileged, unless of course they had mixed
Greek-Egyptian ancestry, in which case they were assigned the lower status, i.e. the
‘Coloureds’ of Egypt were sometimes ‘Black’ in South Africa’s apartheid terminology, or an
inferior status of their own.
The Romans, then, basically decided to let the Greek elites, especially the major land-
owners, who were all urban Greeks, continue their oppression and exploitation of the
indigenous and of the lesser minorities, as long as substantial portions of the profits were
taxed and went to Rome and to the Romans stationed in Egypt. The Romans ran Egypt as a
colony or province, but the apartheid features remained strong, not only with regard to the
substantial Greek minority, but also in favor of a smaller, Roman one. Alexandria would
remain the second largest city of the empire and therefore it was of immense importance over
and beyond Egypt’s pivotal role as wheat producer for the empire. Just like the British in
South Africa, the Romans also made sure that there was a Roman civilian element in Egypt.

The flow of immigrants probably never dried up completely. Later on

Romans or Italians were perhaps attracted by trade or stayed on after
completing military or administrative service...377

It is not known to what extent intermarriage between members of the different racial
groups was prohibited by law, but it seems that prohibition at first must have increased with
time, as it did in South Africa. The first waves of both Greek and Roman invaders were
soldiers, i.e. men. By the time European women had been brought to Egypt, authorities and
the racialized Greek social elites were able to increase the racist pressures: ‘Greek tradition, as
well as the laws of some of the older Greek cities, discouraged intermarriage. Only beginning
in the second century [BCE], and generally among the lower classes, did some intermarriage
occur.’378 In Alexandria, especially, ‘marriages with non-Greeks were disapproved of by
Greeks’ throughout the Graeco-Roman period.379 Similarly, the Greeks in Egypt and
elsewhere during the late classical and the entire Hellenistic period “were always quick to
mark the product [of a marriage between a Greek and a non-Greek] hybrid…as ‘half-
barbarian’…as ‘bastard Greeks’…Where such marriages were contracted within a Greek city
the offspring were usually to various extents politically disabled and formed a category of
their own”.380 For most intents and purposes, it seems, the people of mixed Graeco-Egyptian
race in Ptolemaic Egypt were of equivalent status to the ‘Coloureds’, the unfortunate mixed-

must be said to favor Whites over Asians and Coloureds over Blacks. Although a handful of white families and
individuals were forcibly moved with the implementation of the Bantustan schemes, over three million Blacks
were also forcibly moved.
377
Bowman 1996 (1986): 209. Alexandria may again have outgrown Rome during the late Roman period,
starting in the mid-3rd century CE. See Clauss 2003: 221f.
378
Pomeroy, S.B.: Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities, 1997: 217f.
379
Fraser 1972: 71f, quote 71. This was also the prevailing pattern in the Ptolemaic colony of Cyrene, in present-
day Libya, which Ptolemy I annexed to Egypt in 322 BCE. The lower-class Greek soldiers and colonialists were
allowed to marry Libyans and some did so: “As in a number of other Greek colonies in remote areas, the
colonists were permitted from the outset to intermarry with the women of the surrounding Libyan tribes, and this
permissive legislation, probably not infrequent in the early days of Greek colonization was re-enacted…by
Ptolemy...It would, however, be wrong to suppose that the practice of racial intermarriage penetrated the upper
strata of society, or that Cyrene became a city of ‘mixed-Greeks’.” Fraser 1972: 787. Intermarriage happened,
but it did not change the overall demographic profile, and thus it even played into the hands of the powerful, who
had another possibility of divisive rule in this way. According to Lembke et al. 2004: 25, Alexandrian Greeks
under Roman rule were prohibited from marrying Egyptian women, and any Egyptian who referred to his/her
father as a Roman would be relieved of a quarter of his/her property.
380
Fraser 1972: 71f
242

race people in apartheid South Africa.

In some cases, people were punished directly for marrying across the racial lines, in
other cases they were punished indirectly: their possessions were confiscated; their children
acquired a lower official status. Moreover, Greek demographic growth was rewarded,
Egyptian punished. This last condition is perhaps even the main reason why Roman rule over
Egypt should be seen as more of a continuation of apartheid than an introduction of pure
colonial rule. It is shown in the following selection of marriage laws imposed by the first
Roman emperor, Augustus, on the recently conquered population and even on some of the
invaders themselves, namely, those bold enough to marry Egyptian women:

§ 38. Those born of an urban Greek mother and an Egyptian remain

Egyptians but inherit from both parents.
§ 39. If a Roman man or woman is joined in marriage with an urban
Greek or an Egyptian, their children follow the inferior status.
...
§ 45. If an urban Greek marries an Egyptian woman and dies
childless, the fisc appropriates his possessions; if he has children, it
confiscates two-thirds. But if he has begotten children of an urban
Greek woman and has three or more children, his possessions go to
them; if two children, a fourth or a fifth [to each]; if one child, a half.
§ 46. Freedmen of Alexandrians may not marry Egyptian women.381

Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter II.9.1, unwanted Greek and Roman babies, left to
die on garbage heaps by their parents, were often rescued by Egyptians. The Roman
authorities would punish those Egyptians who adopted such babies, but they would not punish
Egyptians who enslaved them. It is possible that racism, i.e. the distaste for interracial
biological mixing and a strong wish to counteract its long-term effects upon the demography
of the country, was one of the main reasons behind this legal peculiarity.
Nevertheless, the law often differs from the situation on the ground. At the same time
as racist pressures from the state increased, the number of Greeks in Egypt was growing
rapidly (mainly due to rigidly state-controlled and state-financed immigration, as in South
Africa and modern Israel/Palestine), and so were the points of contact with the Egyptians.
Direct control over the Greeks in Egypt and over interracial encounters must therefore have
decreased with time, despite elite attempts to counter this development. As a result, there was
a ‘…gradual Egyptianization of the Greeks of the middle and lower classes who were outside
the citizen-body’. The most unprivileged Greeks consequently appear to have had the least to
lose from fraternizing and mingling with the Egyptians, although racist baggage must have
made this relationship, too, fraught with difficulties.382
381
Quoted in Lewis, N. 1983: 33. § 45 proves that the Romans cynically encouraged Greek population growth in
Egypt. § 46 may have been a way to prevent the most rebellious subjects, the Egyptians, from forging ties with
former and current slaves, imported into Egypt (as in the Americas and in South Africa), which could have
resulted in an alliance dangerous to Roman rule. After all, the slave revolt in Italy under Spartacus, the rebel
gladiator, lay only four decades back. It had lasted for years and traumatized Rome’s elites and was perhaps the
second most successful large-scale slave revolt in history after Haiti’s liberation led by Toussaint l’Ouverture,
nearly two millennia later, which is the only known successful large-scale slave revolt to date. (It has also led to
Haiti becoming the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere today: among other things a lingering
punishment by white powers for overthrowing white supremacy and racist slavery, and indeed for being the first
country in the world to outlaw racism; see Wambu: Our Debt to Haiti, 2010). South African apartheid elites
similarly made sure that the indigenous and imported races were segregated, and Israel can be expected to
attempt to do the same, once its recently imported third-race laborers truly settle in Israel, in case they ever do.
382
Lewis, N. 1983: 131. There is also fraternizing and mingling with the indigenous people by poor Whites in
South Africa and poor Jews in Israel, perhaps especially among the homeless, but I do not know if this is the
most socialized economic class within the elite ethnicity across the racial divide. There are also many affluent,
well-educated Jews opposed to apartheid. But if it is, then the homeless and other poor people obviously should
 243

In general, intermarriage between the two main racialized groups, the Greeks and the
Egyptians, was frowned upon, partly outlawed, and punished, but it may nevertheless have
been more frequent than racial intermarriage in both South Africa (in relative terms) and
Israel/Palestine (in both relative and absolute terms).383 The reason behind this is, however,
unlikely to have been more benevolence or less malevolence from the apartheid elites, but
rather the low percentage of Greeks, merely between four and five percent if we are to believe
Parsons, ten percent if we are to believe Manning, of the overall population. More male than
female Greeks are also likely to have made the long, arduous, and dangerous journey from
Greece to Egypt, and thus interracial marriage here would possibly have faced less intolerance
than in later apartheid societies.

2.2. ‘Family Planning’ and Circumscribed Immigration

According to historian John Iliffe the most basic ‘underlying historical process’ from
1886 (the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand which initiated rapid industrialization) until
the end of apartheid in South Africa a little over a century later was demographic growth.
During that time the country’s total population grew from about 3 or 4 million to 39 million.
At the ‘root’ of the many factors that contributed to the downfall of white political supremacy,
he writes, was population growth.384 By this he means both overall growth and the equally
dramatic relative growth and decline of the black and white racial groups, respectively.
The white population share sank from 21 percent of the entire populace in 1951 to 16.9
percent in 1970 and 13.7 percent in 1995. Today it is 9.6 percent. In relative terms, it has
halved in half a century. It lost more than a third of its relative size during apartheid in the
narrow sense. In the same periods the black portion grew from 68 percent to 70.6 percent and
76.3 percent, respectively. The Coloured and Indian populations remained roughly the same at
a combined 12 percent.
‘The change took place despite white immigration and feverish official attempts to
encourage large families among whites and contraception among Africans [Blacks] – in 1991
South Africa had twice as many family planning clinics as health clinics’, Iliffe explains.385
We shall return to the disastrous health conditions for Blacks, including the forced injections
of contraceptives in black women, in Chapter II.6.2. They further underscore the cynical and
brutal, yet ultimately unsuccessful, attitudes and repopulation policies and practices of the
South African government until 1991.
The South African elites did not limit the immigration of strong young men from
surrounding countries (including the Bantustans), however, since they were needed by the
white profiteers as miners and in many other underpaid professions (see Chapter II.5.2). But
the white elites made it practically impossible for these black immigrants, who did not receive
citizenship, to bring along their families to South Africa. They refused to issue visas or passes
to family members and, moreover, housed the workers adjacent to the mines and factories in
the notorious hostels, in which men only were allowed to stay. This awful situation in turn
encouraged a huge prostitution industry, which has had a lasting impact in the form of
spreading HIV-AIDS, another reason why civil society-led apartheid must be held
accountable and responsible for human rights violations during and after apartheid. If HIV-
AIDS was spread intentionally by the ‘Medical Battalion’ or any similar elite unit or
individual, then the Johannesburg prostitutes would have been the most likely place to start.

become a focus or perhaps even the focus for peace initiatives, preferably, of course, if they can become
relatively enriched and empowered simultaneously.
383
Klinkott: Griechen und Fremde, in Weber (ed.) 2007: 233-236
384
Iliffe 1995: 271. If Fredrickson, as I believe, makes too little of demographic development in his comparative
analysis of South Africa and the USA (see Section I.4 above), one could perhaps say that Iliffe makes too much
of it. The domestic and foreign resistance to South African apartheid in other ways than black population growth
should in my opinion be considered as of equal importance, at the least.
385
Ibid.: 281
244

Criminal civilians were thus involved in the spread of this disease, and so were South African
voters, i.e. Whites, and white civil society at large, including civil servants, the business
community, the media, etc., for voting other ‘respectable’ criminals, who were pulling the
strings, into power. These criminals were additionally at least indirectly responsible for letting
the disease spread in other ways, as we shall see.
Moreover, at the same time, the South African white elites did exactly what the
Ptolemies had done before them and what the Israelis would do simultaneously and later: try
to entice Europeans to immigrate to the country out of a basic motivation of greed – a recipe
for disaster in the long run. In Israel, the range of motivation might be somewhat wider, to
include the self-styled pioneering adventurers and the religious zealots, none of which, by the
way, make things any easier for the indigenous people, the targets of the focus of destructive
demographic engineering.
Obviously, the growth of a modern economy in South Africa made apartheid
increasingly untenable under the long-term demographic conditions, i.e. the persistent growth
of the black population within South Africa’s borders. Blacks were needed not only as menial
labor, but increasingly also in more skilled occupations and even in managerial ones. As we
will see, this meant that some Blacks would have to be allowed education, and that some of
them would even have to be encouraged to become educated. Since education was strictly
segregated according to race, however, black colleges and universities had to be built,
equipped, staffed, etc. This all turned out extremely costly. Teachers’ colleges obviously had
to be less segregated, and that had to be justified against the law of the land. And the apartheid
state was already groaning under international sanctions and boycotts at this stage. In addition,
the relentless spread of industrialized capitalism in the world during the 20th century CE made
South African Blacks, now in their tens of millions, increasingly interesting for international
as well as national capital as consumers of mass-produced commodities.386
Rapid and competitive population growth becomes normal in apartheid, causing
increasingly severe conflicts over resources and space. Both the people, including the
invading settlers, and the natural environment suffer tremendously under the strain. But of
course the people who suffer the most are the indigenous. As with the initial invasion and all
subsequent physical violence, the basic blame for the apartheid population race and its grave
consequences must be placed squarely with the invading oppressive minority.
The white South African elites saw racial mixing as the worst of evils. White-Black
marriage and sexual intercourse had been outlawed in fits and starts since the first white
settlements in the 17th century. Sex between Black and White was again banned in 1927. With
the 1950 Immorality Act, sex between White and Non-White was also prohibited. In 1957,
finally, ‘intimacy’ between members of different races was outlawed. To kiss someone of the
other race could now land one in jail.387
This aspect of apartheid was brought to the extreme by the South African apartheid
state, and I know of no legal parallel to this anywhere else. However, it is still a difference of
degree rather than kind. In both South Africa and present-day Israel ‘[p]arents classified as
black [or Israeli Arab] could be told their children were coloured [or from the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian Territories together with their one parent from the same territories] and must
therefore live in a separate area.’ In South Africa, additionally, children of the same parents
might be split up according to official classification decisions of racial identities. Not only are
mixed-race families discouraged, outlawed, or made impossible – families of the targeted
racial groups are also intentionally and systematically split up, in Israel and apartheid South
Africa and in apartheid Egypt, as in racist slavery.388
386
Ibid: 281f; N.N.: Statistics in Brief 1997, 1997; Reader 1998 (1997): 674
387
Lester 1996: 112. The Nazis banned extramarital interracial sex as well as intermarriage, but, as far as I know,
not officially ‘intimacy’ between members of different races, perhaps, though, in order to legally facilitate rape
and murder-rape of women belonging to the unwanted races. See Fredrickson 2002: 124.
388
Tilley (ed.) 2009: 155. See also Chapter II.3.3 below.
 245

In 1957, some of the powerful Whites with foresight already realized that they were
fighting a losing battle with regard to the population race, but they took to such extreme
measures (and many more of which we know little) to prolong their dominance as long as
possible, criminal intent and mindset all the same. We will return to this issue in the contexts
of citizenship and work in apartheid South Africa.
The apartheid immigration policies were detrimental to the country in every possible
way, as the following brilliant analysis, comparison, and even personal connection with Israel
explains:

Immigration to South Africa worked contrary to the normal rules

whereby host states can cream off the brightest and best from other
countries and immigrants struggle against intense competition – and,
not infrequently, prejudice – to make a place for themselves in their
adopted countries. If you couldn’t cope with the competition at home,
South Africa offered a warm welcome and sheltered employment – as
long as you were white. This did no favours to the gene pool and
skewed the society further against the forces of reform. In Palestine
today, the words of war uttered in strong South African and American
accents by Jewish settlers during the past turbulent months speak of a
similar scenario. The law of return requires Israel to accept any Jewish
person, regardless of their ethics or ability. As well as immigrants of
talent and principle this must include bigots and losers. The
settlements in particular attract fanatics: the nobody from New Jersey
who acquires an heroic new role in a narrative that puts him at the
forefront of a biblical struggle. Israel and the old South Africa
illustrate the dangers of the state based on ethnicity, where there is the
notion of a particular ethnic group which prospers at the expense of
the perceived lesser races.389

Of course there is racism, structural and personal, in immigration bureaus around the
world, but the unique features of apartheid South Africa and present-day Israel are their
exceptionally strong structurally racist aspects and their preference towards, and active
encouragement of immigrant racists, as long as the latter belong to or wish to and are able and
allowed to belong to the privileged racial group. The healthy challenges to societies presented
by normal immigration are thereby eliminated or at least minimized. This is the main reason
why the white population share is sinking so fast in South Africa at present. Of course there is
some white flight, but now the normal immigration from neighboring countries has finally
started again, for the first time in the three-and-a-half centuries since Whites started settling in
the Cape.

2.3. Statisticians, Gynecologists, and Settlers

The state of Israel now has an 80 percent Jewish majority among its citizens. Yet,
there are still almost twice as many Palestinians as there are Israeli Jews, most of the former
now being classified by the United Nations as refugees with a right of return.390 That is the
main reason why Israel does not (yet) qualify as genocidal, but remains an apartheid society,
although the degree of ethnic cleansing achieved is very high by all standards.

[H]ow did Palestinians become a minority in their homeland when, in

1900, the Jews constituted less than 10 percent of the population, and

389
McGregor 2001
390
According to the Palestinian Census of 1997, there were an estimated 7,921,000 Palestinians worldwide in
that year. That included a total of 3,711,000 inside Historic Palestine. See Palestinian Bureau for Statistics, no
date.
246

in 1947, on the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel, less than
one-third[?] . . . [A]ll Jews are treated as de jure Israelis who enjoy a
permanent ‘right of return to the land of Israel.’ Thus, the Israeli state
has decreed that Jews, irrespective of their citizenship, are the
legitimate claimants to historical Palestine, and deny this right to its
indigenous inhabitants.391

Beneath this tidy and cruel process of ethnic cleansing, however, is a demographic
situation equivalent to that in Graeco-Roman Egypt and in white-ruled South Africa. The
indigenous inside the conquered land multiply faster than the invaders, their descendants and
their selected immigrants. There are now 5.1 million Jews and at least 4.9 million Palestinians
in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and a Palestinian majority is expected before 2020. The
Palestinians under Israeli rule are bouncing back from being primarily victims of genocide
and ethnic cleansing, from having been made a minority in their home country, to being
primarily victims of apartheid, an oppressed indigenous, racial majority, but at a terrible price,
as we saw in the previous section.
From 1967 until 1997, Israel outlawed and often harassed and arrested Palestinians
gathering population statistics. It recently put the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem at
180,000, about 30 percent of the total 670,000 population of Jerusalem. Commenting on the
first legal census carried out by Palestinians in 1997-1998 and released in June 2000, the
senior PLO official Faisal Husseini said: ‘In 1967 there were 55,000 Palestinians in
Jerusalem; now there are over 300,000. Israel underestimates the number of Palestinians in
Jerusalem for political reasons’. After thus coming to a tally almost twice the size of the
Israeli estimate, he also said: ‘all Israeli attempts to Judaise Jerusalem have failed and
Palestinians’ resistance to being pushed out of the city are represented in the statistics.’ The
next Palestinian census that was published claimed that there were 348,586 Palestinians in
Jerusalem in 1999, twice as many as the Israelis admitted there were. Israel appeared
increasingly desperate about this situation. Between 1967 and 1998, 5,768 residency permits
of Palestinians were confiscated by Israel, 778 in 1998 alone.392 These are or were original
and indigenous Jerusalemites, as opposed to the people now replacing them, and in many
cases receiving their land and houses from the apartheid state of Israel.
The difference in population growth could in fact be considered one of the chief
causes behind widespread Israeli trigger-happiness and paranoia in general. In Jerusalem,
population growth among Arabs is three times that of Jews, and the projections of a Jewish
demographic study, released two days before the outbreak of the Second Intifada, are that
Arabs will increase from 30 percent to 40 percent of Jerusalem’s entire population by 2020.
During recent years, Israeli ethnic cleansing efforts against non-Jews, especially Palestinians,
have been redoubled everywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories (and increasingly in
Israel itself, as well), but they have centered on Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and the ‘Seam
Zone’, the Palestinian land between the separation wall and the 1967 border of Israel. The
ghettos and intended ghettos for non-Jews: Gaza and parts of the central Palestinian
highlands, are on land that is of little agricultural or other value, like the non-White areas in
South Africa.393

391
Younis: Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements, 2000: 8f.
392
Amr, W.: Census Shows 330,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem, 2000; Amr, W.: Census Shows More Palestinians
in East Jerusalem, 2000. Husseini emphasized this issue again at a speech in Vienna on November 29, 2000, in
which he projected a demographic 50-50 relationship between Israeli Jews and Arabs by the year 2010 and a
two-thirds Arab majority in Historic Palestine by 2045. For Jerusalem, see further Hauser: Jerusalem is
Explosive Issue at U.S. Peace Summit, 2000. As the 1999 census was published, Husseini said the Israeli
confiscations of residency permits had gone down slightly in 1999. See Amr, W. December 20, 2000.
393
Tilley (ed.) 2009: 199-205; N.N.: Arab Population Growth Outpaces Jews in Jerusalem, September 26, 2000.
Interestingly, no Roman province had its census made so often or so regularly as Egypt. Parsons 2007: 165 calls
the census ‘the grandest cog in the machine’ of exploitation in Roman Egypt, and, of course, the exploitation
 247

Having projected a two-third Arab majority in all of Historic Palestine by the year
2045, the same Faisal Husseini remarked more generally on December 5, 2000, that: ‘In 2045,
Israelis would probably have to elect a Palestinian Nelson Mandela as their Prime Minister
since Palestinians would make up the majority of the population in the Jewish state.’ 394 This
projection does not even include or provide for the majority of Palestinians who are still
refugees outside of Historic Palestine. Only massive genocide may yet help Israeli Jews keep
their demographic dominance, but even with its closest allies controlling most of the global
mass media as well as the United Nations, Israel is unlikely to be able to resort to this option
unnoticed or unpunished.
Instead, the Israeli government pursues active repopulation policies as aggressively as
it can, exacerbating tension, causing deaths and human tragedies on a small scale only as
compared to full-blown genocide, yet somehow perhaps aware that it is fighting a losing
battle, similar to that of apartheid South Africa’s Whites during the 20th century. According to
the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics some 13,000 more Jewish settlers moved into the
Palestinian territories in the first nine months of 2000, the period leading up to the Second
Intifada. In sum, there were now around 350,000 Jewish settlers in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. The Israeli pressure group ‘Peace Now’ commented with dismay that the number
of settlement buildings in the Palestinian territories had shot up 50 percent since Israel and the
Palestinians signed the 1993 Oslo agreement on Palestinian ‘autonomy’, to be implemented in
precisely those areas. To any objective observer, it was obvious that Israel was not at all
interested in giving back the areas that had been promised to the Palestinians and that was
demanded by international law. On the contrary, Israel was systematically stealing more land.
In a report highly critical of the Israeli government, the group said settlers built some 32,750
housing units in the Palestinian territories from September 1993 through July 2000.395

Another unique manifestation of Israeli racism is the blatant and

sinister policy of ‘demographic engineering.’ To maintain the ‘Jewish
character,’ or the ‘purity’ of the state of Israel, the Palestinians have
been depicted and dealt with as a ‘demographic threat.’ Proposed
‘remedies’ included calls for forced birth control and ‘population
management,’ to ‘transfer’ and expulsion of whole communities, to
the racist and punitive unilateral ‘separation’ scheme currently being
advocated.
In Jerusalem, land expropriation, ID confiscations, home demolitions,
withholding of building permits, and the importation of settler
colonies within and around the city have become constant elements of
Israel’s demographic engineering through ethnic cleansing.396

These words by the Palestinian legislator, Hanan Ashrawi, sum up the situation as
‘unique’. There is no question that this has been done before, as can also be seen in the title of
the entire text, presented at the World Conference against Racism in August- September 2001,
from which the quote above was lifted – ‘World Should Intervene to End the Israeli
Apartheid’ – but in today’s world, Ashrawi is correct: Israel definitely stands alone in its
blatant practice of apartheid.

functioned as tax oppression, but the census was no doubt also a way for authorities to monitor and control the
demographic developments for military reasons, like modern South Africa and Israel.
394
Amayreh: Faisal Husseini: Israel Will Disappear If It Continues to Ignore Palestinian Rights, 2000; also cited
similarly in D.H.: Understanding the Breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, 2002. Palestinians with
Israeli citizenship, around 19 percent of the Israeli population, also exhibit a ‘much higher birth rate’ than Jewish
citizens. See N.N.: Sharon Accuses Palestinian Govt of Murder, Lies, February 24, 2004.
395
N.N.: 13,000 More Jewish Settlers Arrived in Palestinian Territories in 2000, December 11, 2000; Carter
2006: 149f.
396
Ashrawi August 28, 2001
248

Repopulation in Israel also takes forms similar to both South Africa under white rule
and to even more sinister oppression in the Third Reich, namely in the form of the ‘population
management’ to which Ashrawi refers. This is a further dimension to the demographic war
treated in the previous section. Next to racist depopulation, immigration and fertilization
measures, there is a wide range of additional efforts by the Israeli elites to make Israel and
Palestine more Jewish and less Arab.
The Israel Council for Demography (ICD), which comprises top Israeli gynecologists,
public figures, lawyers, scientists and physicians, met in the summer of 2002 to ‘encourage
the Jewish women of Israel – and only them – to increase their child bearing, a project which,
if we judge from the activity of the previous council, will also attempt to stop abortions’
according to Gideon Levy. ‘[M]ethods to increase the Jewish fertility rate and prevent
abortions’, and ‘techniques to encourage abortions and reduce the birthrate among Arab
women’, were both to be ‘at the center of the committee’s discussions’.397
Another commentator, Will Youmans, remarks that ‘[t]his obsession is binary and
inverse: they want more Jews and less Palestinians.’ A state policy which aims to outlaw
abortion for Jewish women and encourage abortion for Arab women needs to emphasize the
differences between these two kinds of women, preferably by considering them as belonging
to different races or even different species (see Chapter II.9.3 below). Moreover, the ICD
encourages all-Jewish pregnancies by offering tax breaks, ‘housing benefits and other
government grants’, as well as further discouraging mixed marriages, (as if they were not
already enough discouraged, i.e. made practically impossible, except for some people who
marry abroad). The ICD is first and foremost one of the numerous examples in which Israel
remains a racist state. But it is also a sexist state: almost all of the ICD participants,
deliberating and consulting about laws governing women’s bodies, like the dominant political,
military, religious, and economic elites in Israel in general, are male.398
A remarkable parallel among many between apartheid South Africa and Israel is the
following: Just as South Africa had twice as many family planning clinics as health clinics for
Blacks in 1991, surely a world record in the opposite of health care, the state of Israel, within
which the oppressive racial group is a large majority, had more fertility clinics per capita than
any other country in the world ten years later. Israel also has the world’s highest per capita
rate of in-vitro fertilization procedures. Unlike any other nation in the world, fertility
treatments are fully subsidized by Israeli national health insurance. It is crucial to realize here
that these phenomena are not the result of unusually high rates of infertility in Israel. Israelis
are in fact no less fertile than other people.399 They are the result of, and an aspect of,
unmistakable apartheid.
For non-Jews, especially Arabs, Israeli immigration policies prior to the outbreak of
the Second Intifada became ‘…increasingly restrictive. Many immigrants are unable to marry,
since Orthodox rabbis (who alone are authorized to perform weddings in Israel) refuse to
officiate at what they view as mixed-marriage ceremonies. An Israeli who wishes to marry a
non-Jew must leave the country to marry. And even then the Interior Ministry may not accept
the validity of such a marriage. Prior to the outbreak of the Second Intifada, it declared that
non-Jewish spouses could not enter Israel under the Law of Return, but had to apply under
regular immigration rules.’400

397
Levy: Wombs in the Service of State, 2002, quoted in Barghouti, O. 2002.
398
Youmans: Understanding the Existential Threat: Israel’s Demographic Obsession, 2002. See also Foa
December 2, 2002. Similar to the ICD in goals is EFRAT (www.efrat.org.il/en/), an organization calling for an
end to abortions for Jewish women, and Jewish women alone, in Israel. In 2005 it was an organization endorsed
and supported by the then Israeli president, Moshe Katzav, as well as by the then former prime minister,
Benyamin Netanyahu. See Parry: Haaretz.com Runs Ad Discouraging Jewish Abortions as “Only Solution” to
Arab Population Growth, 2005.
399
Kahn 2000; Vromen 2001
400
Szamuely, George: Laws of Return, New York Press, December 14, 1999
 249

On June 18, 2003, a new law passed a first reading in the Israeli Parliament, the
Knesset, although it was compared by a minority of oppositional Knesset members, Jews and
Palestinians, to the Nazi Nuremberg laws and other racist laws forbidding interracial
marriage, such as those in apartheid South Africa and in the USA. The law forbids
Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who marry Israelis, whether Jews or Arabs, from
ever gaining Israeli citizenship, thus making residence and even employment more difficult.
The law also targets children of marriages between Israelis and Palestinians from the occupied
territories, who will be denied citizenship and residency and forced to leave Israel after the
age of 12. Aside from several Knesset members, human rights organizations such Amnesty
International, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Human Rights
Watch, and intergovernmental organizations such as the UN Human Rights Commission
(UNHRC), the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD), the
UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (UNCEDAW), the
European Parliament, among others, have also condemned the law as racist. The ‘temporary’
law, which only referred to Palestinians from the ‘region’ and not to any other group of
people, remained in force for three years. It then became permanent by passing a Supreme
Court vote in 2006. Human rights groups who tried to influence High Court judges to drop the
law were severely hindered by the fact that there is no guarantee of equality in Israeli law, a
highly inconvenient fact for anyone who is not Jewish. Since 1993, 22,000 Palestinians have
applied to be united with their spouses in Israel but only 6,000 have been allowed to do so.401
And from now on, no one will be allowed at all. The differences to South Africa are of course
huge from a legal point of view. Interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations are not
formally banned in Israel. But in practice, the results – racism and racial segregation – are
fully equivalent to apartheid in South Africa and elsewhere.
So why is Israel so racist? The only remaining plausible answer is that there is a
hysterical fear among elite Jews of becoming part of a racial minority. ‘We have to bring over
here in the coming 10 or 12 years another million Jews,’ Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon
said in 2001 as he tried to drum up support for increased immigration of Jews in Israel from
the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. ‘We have by
the year 2020 to create a situation where most of the Jewish people are living here. If we want
them to stay Jews, if we want them to be Jews, then they have to live here…Every effort
should be made to bring Jews over here,’ he added.402
In the following year, the Israeli government decreed an $8,650 enticement per
immigrant to lure Jews from Argentina and France to immigrate to Israel. Argentina was
suffering from a deep financial crisis at the time, France from a government and media
‘prejudicial against Israel’, according to the Labor party ex-foreign minister, David Levy, who
supported the project.403
401
Cook: Israel’s Marriage Ban Closes the Gates to Palestinians, 2006; Urquhart: Palestinians Married to Israelis
Lose Court Battle for Residency, 2006; Abuminah: Israel: One More Step into Open Apartheid, 2003; N.N.:
Racist Legislation, January 18, 2005; Laor: Racism by Any Other Name, 2005; Dadoo: Love and Marriage in
Israel: Palestinians and Non-Orthodox Israelis Need Not Apply, 2004
402
N.N.: Israel’s Sharon Urges Jewish Migration to Homeland, February 27, 2001. Later in the same year,
Sharon publicly reiterated his plan, provoking an angry response from the Palestinian general delegate to Britain,
Afif Safieh, who commented: ‘It is a dangerous dream, a nightmare. He is a pyromaniac on a powder keg.’ Israel
had already attracted almost one million immigrants over the previous decade, illegally placing many of them in
settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. See N.N.: Sharon Says Wants One Million More Jews in
Israel, November 7, 2001. Despite Sharon’s and many others’ efforts to this effect, immigration to Israel dropped
28 percent in 2001 and then a further 27 percent in the first six months of 2002. The violence during the Second
Intifada and a worsening economic recession appeared to be the main factors behind the change. Britain and
France were the only two original home countries of immigrants to Israel that manifested an increase in output in
2002. Russia presented the biggest drop. N.N.: Immigration to Israel Down 27 pct, August 13, 2002
403
N.N.: Heftige Israelische Kritik an Französischer Presse und Regierung, Utl.: Levy: „Voreingenommenheit“
gegen Israel stärkt Antisemitismus - Neue Prämie für Französische Einwanderer, January 22, 2002. In 2004,
many prominent French Jews, including France’s grand rabbi, Joseph Sitruk, the head of the umbrella group of
250

Previously, during the late 1980s, Israel was concerned over the large amount of Jews
from the Soviet Union who were immigrating to the USA, claiming to be political refugees
from Communism. With the aid of political lobbying, it persuaded the USA to not offer these
people refugee status, since they could count on automatic Israeli citizenship under the racist
Israeli Law of Return.404
During the Second Intifada, Israel also made it easier for Gentiles to convert to
Judaism. With an estimated 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who had
converted to non-Orthodox Judaism without being recognized by the state as Jews, everything
changed after a 2002 Israeli Supreme Court ruling, after which they too were allowed to join
the Chosen People.405 One could say that due to this, for the first time in perhaps a
millennium, though certainly not for the first time ever (see Chapter II.9.3 below), Judaism
has again become a missionary religion, like, for instance, Christianity and Islam. The targets
of the missionary activity are, so far, almost exclusively Europeans, and thus slightly different
in appearance from the indigenous people. There are also some ‘new’ African Jews allowed
into Israel under the Law of Return, quite possibly for window-dressing purposes (‘Israel is
not racist’), but also in order to do work in Israel that European Jews do not wish to do. And
they do not look too much like West Bank Palestinians anyway. In a not so distant future, if
the present demographic trends continue, it would not be surprising if an increasingly
desperate Israel were to relax the restrictions on its missionary activities further to include
large numbers of other people than Europeans or descendants of Europeans. As with regard to
violence, the parallels to Graeco-Roman Egypt and apartheid South Africa are difficult to
oversee.
As in South Africa, however, the demographic trend of relentless growth of the
oppressed, indigenous majority seems irreversible in the long run. It is not surprising that the
Israelis voted Sharon, with his long record of killing Palestinians, into power in 2001. Only
genocide seems able to reverse the demographic development that is so typical for apartheid
societies.
A slow kind of genocide can be achieved by means of environmental degradation and
toxification. It is of course a rather desperate measure, since invading minority settlers as well
as occupation troops and administrators could also eventually suffer from such practices.
Nonetheless, it is being used as a weapon by the Israelis today. Perhaps their strategy involves
first planting poison, and then removing it once the indigenous have been killed or have left in
order not to be killed or be disabled by it themselves. There might also be considerations
involved that include coldly planning some damage upon the first settlers, and then relying on
hope that the poison will become diluted and less toxic. Whatever the motivation and
calculations, the Israeli strategy to this end crucially entails removing the agricultural base of
food production for the indigenous as a first step. In 2001, Palestinian Environment Minister
Youssef Abu Safieh accused the Israeli leadership of intentionally and actively pursuing this
policy:

We have found 249 sites which Israel uses to bury its industrial waste
in Palestinian territory. Israeli forces have swamped fields with

Jewish organizations in France, Roger Cukierman, and the former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn,
started to object to the idea of having their communities approached by hundreds of Israeli government agents
urging them to leave their homes for Israel. The Jewish Agency, which promotes emigration of Jews to Israel,
the Israeli Immigration Ministry and the Israeli government had previously all agreed between themselves on the
plan to pressure French Jews to come to Israel. At present, France has the largest Jewish community in Europe
with an estimated 600,000 people. Strauss-Kahn even criticized Israel for meddling in France’s internal affairs.
See Louet: French Jews Criticise Israel Bid to Woo Immigrants, 2004; Heneghan: Israeli Bid to Woo French
Jews Shocks Jewish Leader, 2004.
404
Immanuel: Lost Generation of Russian Immigrants Find Peace, 2003
405
Greenberg: Israeli Court Rules on ‘Who Is a Jew’: It Backs Non-Orthodox Conversions, 2002; Evron:
Demagography as the Enemy of Democracy, 2002
 251

sewage, ruined 1,745 hectares of productive agricultural land, and

pulled up 300,000 olive trees, palms and vines.406

Some of the additional consequences of this include the loss of thousands of poultry
and livestock, as well as of water wells and of irrigation systems. The Israeli army has caused
further environmental deterioration of Palestinian land through its illegal policy of demolition
of Palestinian homes.
According to Amnesty International, Israel destroyed 3,000 Palestinian houses in the
first three-and-a-half years of the Second Intifada. Most of the home demolitions were carried
out against innocent civilians, ‘…usually…without warning, often at night, and the occupants
are forcibly evicted with no time to salvage their belongings’. The human rights organization
also criticizes Israel for destroying Palestinian houses that are built without permits from the
Israeli state, since Israel ‘systematically’ denies Palestinians, including Israeli Arabs, building
permits in order to steal their land.407
A remote-control variety of the Caterpillar bulldozer that destroys Palestinian homes
for the Israeli army has been developed by the Israelis with the aid of American technological
expertise and was reportedly first put to use in 2003. It is feared that the unmanned bulldozers
could cause even more damage than the manned ones have done so far – especially to human
beings. Bulldozers have killed several Palestinians and others, such as the US peace activist,
Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop a
Palestinian home demolition by Israelis in Gaza on March 16, 2003.408
The Israeli army had also attacked the Palestinian Environment Ministry building in
Ramallah on three occasions since the Second Intifada began, according to Abu Safieh. Along

406
N.N.: Sharon Ruining Palestinian Environment - Minister, October 5, 2001. See also Rinat: Settlement
Sewage Kills Off 200 Olive Trees Grown by Palestinians, 2005. The Israeli state also stands accused of using
such methods against Arab citizens of Israel inside Israel, see N.N.: Adalah Continues to Seek Criminal
Investigation into ILA [Israel Land Administration] Following Further Spraying of Toxic Chemicals on Naqab
Crops, 2003.
407
Quoted in N.N.: Israel Razed 3,000 Homes Since Intifada - Amnesty, 2004
408
Rabinowitz: Remote-Driven Bulldozers Join Israeli Army Arsenal, 2003; Heller, C.: Israel to Get Remote-
Control Bulldozers--Institute, 2003. See also N.N.: U.N. Aide Warns Caterpillar Over Sales to Israel, June 16,
2004. In response to accusations by the UN human rights investigator, Jean Ziegler, that its bulldozers are used
to violate human rights, Caterpillar says its sales to Israel comply with U.S. law and are conducted through
Washington’s Foreign Military Sales Program. Home demolitions by the Israeli army usually come with about
ten minutes’ warning, only enough for Palestinian families to make sure that all residents get out of the home
safely – or not. See Johnston: Israeli Bulldozer Crushes Paralysed Man in Gaza Home, 2004. And see Sparrow:
Killer Robots, 2007: 62–77, for the argument that the indiscriminate use of this kind of weapon should be banned
as a war crime, because, with regard to killings, persons (and not just robots or machines) should be able to be
held responsible. The unethical essence of killer robots is similar to that of child soldiers: who is to be held
responsible when they kill? But just like aerial warfare which could have and should have been made illegal in
the Hague Convention of 1899, we might have a century of warfare in front us now, in which robots do most of
the killings. The terminator is already upon us. The hundreds of casualties of robotic killings, including many
innocent civilians murdered in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere, mainly by the US and
Israeli armed forces’ killer robots, may just be a foretaste of what is to come. See also footnote 312 above.
Lately, bulldozers from car giant Volvo have taken over some of the Israeli dirty work in this regard. Volvo
trucks are also being used for other illegal Israeli enterprises such as building the apartheid wall or transporting
tanks to invade Lebanon. Volvo equipment is also used by Israel’s illegal occupation regime to transport
prisoners. This is extremely disappointing as well as embarrassing to me personally, as I worked for Volvo, the
Swedish car and truck manufacturer, a combined 11 months and my father did so for almost three decades. See
Nieuwhof: Volvo: Evading Corporate Responsibility, 2007; Nieuwhof: Photostory: Volvo Equipment Used in
House Demolitions, 2008; Cronin: Volvo Equipment Enabling Torture, Facilitating Occupation, 2010; Nogueira
& Davidson (Directors): Roadmap to Apartheid, 2012. On the New York Theater Workshop’s cancellation of the
production of ‘My Name Is Rachel Corrie’, a piece based on Corrie’s diaries, a few weeks before opening, see
Redgrave: The Second Death of Rachel Corrie: Censorship of the Worst Kind, 2006. On this (the play was
eventually run half a year later for a limited run) and the cancellation of the play in Toronto and Miami, see also
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 186f.
252

the same lines, the human rights organization, Miftah, noted that most Jewish settlements in
the Occupied Territories ‘have not developed sewage treatment plants; which implies that
sewage is often allowed to run into the valleys, threatening neighbouring Palestinian towns
and villages in terms of agriculture and health.’409
The position of an intermediate racial group – not indigenous, and generally not the
subject of as harsh oppression as the indigenous – is in the process of being taken up at
present. There are already hundreds of thousands of mainly blue- and pink-collar workers
from ‘third countries’ in Israel, many of them from Romania, Thailand, Nigeria, China and
Lebanon. Of course, they are not Jews, and therefore second-choice, though much preferred as
employees by Israeli employers and most of the Jewish nationals, rather than Palestinians or
other Arabic-speakers. These new intermediate races also have their exact counterparts in
South Africa (above all, the ethnic Indians and the descendants of South East Asian slaves) as
well as in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Jews and other non-Africans). Noam Chomsky was one of
the few western observers at the time who emphasized this as one of the principal causes
behind the eruption of the Second Intifada.

An efficient mechanism of strangulation and control, closure [of the

Palestinian areas] has been accompanied by the importation of an
essential commodity to replace the cheap and exploited Palestinian
labor on which much of the economy relies: hundreds of thousands of
illegal immigrants from around the world, many of them victims of the
‘neoliberal reforms’ of the recent years of ‘globalization’. Surviving in
misery and without rights, they are regularly described as a virtual
slave labor force in the Israeli press. The current Barak [then Israeli
prime minister’s] proposal is to extend this program, reducing still
further the prospects even for mere survival for the Palestinians.410

Repopulation could thus be described as partial, indirect and gradual genocide. The so-
called ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ camp in Israel – represented for instance by the pro-torture
activist (see Chapter II.1.3) and former Shin Bet (secret service) chief, Ami Ayalon – favors a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This would in his view be a means to
show the world (and the Palestinians) that Israel does not really wish to wipe out the
Palestinian people. Sixteen months into the Second Intifada, Ayalon told the Reuters news
agency that an Israeli military victory would be a disaster for the Jews. In what initially seems

409
See footnote 406 above; Miftah Fact Sheet, Israeli Settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
(Updated), 2002.
410
Chomsky: Al-Aqsa Intifada, 2000. On sex slavery in Israel, see Goldin: Sex Slavery Alive and Well in the
Holy Land, 2001; Plumb: Israeli Film’s “Promised Land” Is Sex Slaves’ Hell, 2004. On the wider notion of
‘pink-collar workers’, i.e. underpaid, mainly informally (i.e. illegally) employed people – mostly women – in
service professions from the Third World, working for wealthy employers, clients or customers, and on their
crucial importance in the globalized economy, making the inevitable slums in the global cities as
internationalized as the capital that flows through them, see Sassen: Globalization and Its Discontents, 1998 and
further Bauman: Globalization: The Human Consequences, 1998. See also N.N.: Expatriate Workforce in Israel
Jumps since Intifada, June 7, 2001. According to this article, the Israeli Labor Ministry itself stated that the
foreign workforce, whether legally or illegally employed, grew from 76,000 people at the beginning of the
Second Intifada to 248,000 in June 2001. That means there were 172,000 new arrivals in only nine months’ time,
and that excludes all the Jews and others who were naturalized under the racist ‘Law of Return’. That is nearly
640 new non-Jewish foreigners every day, during a period of near-civil war. In my view, this must have been
planned by Israeli state and business elites long before the uprising erupted. In the same time period the
Palestinian workforce in Israel (those without Israeli citizenship) virtually disappeared after having been an
estimated 70,000 in September 2000. 20,000 of these Palestinians used to work in Israel with permits and about
50,000 without permits. However, a report issued that same week by the International Labor Organization (ILO),
a United Nations agency, said Israeli officials had told a visiting ILO team shortly beforehand that some 120,000
Palestinians (also referring only to those without Israeli citizenship) worked in Israel before the Intifada. There
obviously seems to be strong propaganda value for the Israeli state in manipulating these figures.
 253

like a genuine change of heart, the former head of Israel’s secret service criticized the (even
more) heavy-handed tactics employed by his successors against the uprising. Ayalon said
Israel must now take the risk ‘…to vacate the [occupied] territory in order to allow for the
Palestinian state to be created.’ But he continued in a different, painfully familiar vein: ‘It’s
not a matter of yielding to Palestinian hostility. It’s a matter of preserving Zionism’, he said,
citing Palestinian population growth which he said would ultimately make Jews a minority
within Israel’s borders in case a single-state solution were pursued, or, alternatively, if the
present situation were perpetuated.411
A similar point was made by Yossi Beilin, a former Labor Party justice minister and
one of the authors of the 2003 Geneva Accords, intended to bring peace through the so-called
‘two-state solution’: “We have little time to lose before we face an old (apartheid) South
Africa situation where Palestinians would demand, ‘One man, one vote’. It would be the end
of Zionism.”412 Mark his words: democracy would be the end of Zionism (and that is why
Beilin rejects the former).
Another publicly proposed final Israeli solution for Jewish demographic concerns
today goes by the innocent-sounding name of ‘transfer’, the euphemistic labeling of which is
an attempt to take the offensiveness out of ‘expulsion’, to which the plan really refers. In a
March 2002 opinion poll, no less than 46 percent of Israeli Jews said they favor some sort of
‘transfer’ of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, for example to neighboring
Jordan. The simple calculation behind this kind of reasoning is the following: The expelled
indigenous population could now easily be replaced with imported workers, perhaps more
easily than in any previous apartheid society. This is due to racism, such as in the Americas or
in Australia, where the indigenous people were disposed of, but also to intensified
globalization making migrant labor more readily available, cheaper, and in larger numbers
than ever before, but it is of course equally due to Zionism, which is all about importing Jews
to Palestine, and getting rid of Palestinians in Palestine. And thus, Zionism is
indistinguishable from racism.
Many Jews in Israel also believe in the necessity of ‘transferring’ Palestinians with
Israeli citizenship, the so-called ‘Israeli Arabs’, from Israel in the narrow sense. The term
‘transfer’ is also being used increasingly by Zionists instead of ‘expulsion’, because it
expresses the perspective previously only propounded by ultra-nationalist Israelis that ‘many’
Palestinians would leave ‘voluntarily’.413 It could also shield people from the obvious fact that
expulsions of Palestinians have been ongoing since 1948. ‘Transfer’ of Palestinians from their
home country would thus appear to be a new phenomenon.
According to a more recent opinion poll, nearly 64 percent of Israeli Jews wanted their
government to encourage Israeli Arabs to emigrate. 55 percent saw them as a threat to
national security, 45 percent supported limiting Arab rights to vote, and 49 percent said
Israel’s treatment of its Arab minority was ‘too favorable’.414
Of course, the ‘transfer’ began long ago. By November 2002 it was seen to be
emptying Palestinian villages in the West Bank through terrorist actions perpetrated by
complicit Jewish settler paramilitaries and the Israeli army. Rural areas in the West Bank in
2003 looked very much indeed like many Palestinian villages and towns in Israel in 1948:
411
Williams, D.: Former Security Chief Warns Israel on Use of Force, 2002
412
Quoted in Heinrich: Demographic Change Spurs New Mideast Peace Efforts, 2003 (parenthesized addition in
original quote).
413
Hammond: Mubarak Voices Palestinian Fears of Expulsion, 2002
414
Johnston: Israeli Jews Want to Encourage Arabs to Leave-Poll, 2004. The Center for National Security
Studies’ Gabriel Ben-Dor, who conducted the survey, spoke in this context of a rising ‘level of xenophobia’ in
Israel. This choice of labelling for racism is in itself interesting and symptomatic for the whole problem.
Palestinians are apparently not just of a different race. The few who have citizenship are seen even by more or
less brainwashed social researchers (or military propaganda employees) – who are part of the recently arrived but
dominant ethnicity – as foreigners (xenoi) in their own land, in fact just like the indigenous black South Africans
or the Egyptians under European rule.
254

ghost towns. People were slowly but surely being removed forcibly, by direct violence, as
well as indirectly, by the destruction and removal of the infrastructure necessary for a
dignified life and for long-term physical survival. The first step here is forced urbanization.
Many Palestinians can no longer survive in rural areas, mainly due to Israeli terrorism, which
targets the foundations of their livelihoods, and they are therefore forced into the cities. There,
too, chances of finding jobs are slim, and, finally, emigration and exile become the ultimate,
and seemingly logical, solutions.415

415
Cook: Finishing the Job, 2002; Algazi & Bdeir: Transfer’s Real Nightmare, 2002; See also Reinhart:
Sophisticated Transfer, 2003, who describes Israeli army ‘rehearsals’ for the expulsion, involving the rounding
up of horrified Palestinians in refugee camps and loading them on to trucks. This is how many Palestinians were
expelled from ‘Israel proper’ in 1948. Both the Israeli decision-makers and the Palestinian victims are well aware
of this: ‘On April 2 [2003] at 3 AM, a large force raided the refugee camp of Tulkarem, blocked all the roads and
paths with barbed wires and announced on loudspeakers that all males aged 15 to 40 must go to a certain
compound at the center of the camp. At 9 in the morning, the army began to transport the gathered males to a
nearby refugee camp. This time it was only a staged scene, and the residents were allowed to return after a few
days.’ Note the very intentional intimidation and the blatant disregard for elementary human rights by those
responsible for this apparent ‘rehearsal’.
 255

3. Citizenship
We do not have to identify the characteristics of South African apartheid in the civil rights
discrimination in Israel in order to call Israel an apartheid state. It is best that we not try to
evade the truth: The Citizenship Law’s existence turns Israel into an apartheid state.
(Amos Schocken)416

This is where the sovereign, independent political entity as the typical state of
apartheid comes into the picture, and where the uniqueness of apartheid becomes more
obvious. After all, invasion, violence and repopulation are among the characteristic traits of
many genocidal and some colonialist societies, as well as in the apartheid settings we have
looked into so far.
The independent state will make citizenship a very important and malleable
bureaucratic tool in the hands of the political and military apartheid elites. I am not denying
that citizenship can be an efficient repressive and racist tool for majoritarian self-rule and
colonialist governments as well. It is only more cumbersome and less flexible as a strategic
resource in a colonialist setting, where it is used against a majority, though more flexible in
the self-rule setting, where it can only be used, however, against a minority.
The institution of citizenship is therefore a more useful instrument of oppression in
apartheid states than anywhere else. It can be used in a flexible way against the majority of a
population. However, the condition of political independence is a tricky one for the definition
of apartheid, and in general, as well. Although independence is an all-or-nothing affair in the
formal sense of international law, it is not so in practice. The Bantustans in South Africa and
the projected and de facto Neo-Bantustans in Palestine are perfect examples of a formal
independence, which is or can be useless or worse to its citizens in practice. Conversely,
colonies such as those of the Netherlands and of Britain in South Africa and elsewhere were
not formally independent, yet in many ways independent in practice.
It is a well-known apparent paradox of the present stage of general political
development that the power of the state is not centered in its middle, but, rather, on its borders
and peripheries, including immigration offices, airports, embassies and consulates. That is
where states have total discretion with granting and revoking citizenship, residency and work
permits, visas and asylum, as well as diplomatic immunity and diplomatic mail. None of these
are officially considered human rights anywhere in today’s world, and neither is that
minimum of political self-determination, voting, nor the other rights and privileges that
sometimes come with citizenship, e.g. health care, pensions, and the many other kinds of
social security. In our currently globalizing society, in which migration increases steadily,
democracy is becoming a casualty, as fewer and fewer residents (including law-abiding tax-
payers) get to decide which representatives will rule them directly and administer their tax
money.
The political crimes of Israel against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories pale in relative significance, relative not only to the violent, economic, etc., crimes
against the occupied people, but also to the fact that these political and inhuman injustices are
currently becoming commonplace elsewhere, or rather, everywhere. Nevertheless, they are
clearly crimes from a moral point of view, as well as under international conventions, for
instance by violating Articles 1, 2, 7, 8, 15, 21 and 28 of the United Nations’ Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.417 The specific crime against humanity embodied in the
peculiar institution of apartheid citizenship is the veritably perverse situation that the most
indigenous people to the country are the most alien people to the state that rules or controls it.

416
Schocken: Citizenship Law Makes Israel an Apartheid State, 2008. Amos Schocken is the publisher of
Ha’aretz, Israel’s second largest newspaper, and an important fixture in the Israeli intellectual landscape.
417
See Sassen 1998: 81ff; Hardt & Negri 2000: 109ff; Torpey: The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance,
Citizenship, and the State, 2000; Bauman 1998.
256

Interestingly, all three apartheid societies under investigation incorporated a few of the
indigenous among the citizens, far from enough, of course, to enable them to remain a
majority. The books were respectedly cooked to make it appear institutionally as if the
invading minority were instead a majority. This was not to mean equality of rights for the
indigenous groups who did enjoy citizenship. On the contrary, they still suffered
discrimination, though not as much as the vast majority of the indigenous who were denied
citizenship altogether. This was and is another means of successfully dividing resistance: to
make the indigenous non-citizens envy their citizen brethren, the select few from their point of
view, and sometimes perhaps even to the point of treating them as collaborators or traitors. It
is also an elite way of telling the critics of apartheid that racism does not exist, since (under
the breath: some) privileges are extended to (some of) the indigenous. When accused of
racism, the apartheid elites will thus always have counter-arguments and -examples. But the
indigenous citizens and the indigenous non-citizens also suffer in partly different ways. In
particular, the indigenous citizens of an apartheid state are under more pressure with regard to
cultural genocide. For instance, just as urban Egyptians under Graeco-Roman rule and urban
South African Blacks would be the first to forget their languages; urban Palestinians with
Israeli citizenship today are threatened with losing theirs. And that is not the whole story,
either. Sometimes the full force of apartheid violence only comes down on those of the
indigenous who are nearest the perpetrators in a physical sense. And the former are often
those with citizenship. If legalization of this violence is attempted, then the concept of
citizenship is emptied of its contents, and replaced by ‘nationality’ or the like, and a racially
defined group of people are turned into enemies of the apartheid state. Unfortunately, such
attempts are frequent and very often successful.

3.1. ‘Greek Ancestry on both Maternal and Paternal Sides’

As in South Africa and Israel, much of the oppressive segregation was expedited
through citizenship, which was reserved for almost all Greeks and a few others, but only in
the last resort for Egyptians:

[A]lmost all Egyptians would be excluded in the early period, though

it later became increasingly possible for individuals to attain entry and
subsequently, in some cases, Roman citizenship. The Jews were also
systematically excluded, although they possessed their own particular
(though lesser) privileges...418

The importance of identity control in apartheid societies can hardly be over-

emphasized. It serves the triple purpose of control, harassment, and humiliation. Just as in
later apartheid societies, including South Africa and modern Israel, the official identities,
especially of indigenous individuals, were controlled and checked frequently by
representatives of the Ptolemaic state. If anyone of the former lied to authorities about their
name or their ‘homeland’ (for Greeks invariably Greece, for Egyptians almost always Egypt),
s/he faced a death sentence as a consequence. The law determining this punishment remained
in place throughout the Ptolemaic period.419
418
Bowman 1996 (1986): 209; cf. Shipley: The Greek World after Alexander 323-30 BC, 2000: 215
419
Bingen: Hellenistic Egypt: Monarchy, Society, Economy, Culture, 2007: 61. In fact, the system was a little
more complicated than that: Athenians had Athens as their ‘homeland’, Macedonians Macedonia, Thracians
Thrace, Persians Persia, and Egyptians, i.e. anyone who had at least one Egyptian ancestor in the male line, the
nome (province) to which they ‘belonged’. Thus the adminstrative categories ‘Greek’ and ‘Egyptian’ were
actually veiled by the authorities, although of paramount importance for them, not at all unlike ‘White’
(Afrikaner, British, and others) and ‘Black’ (often Homeland: KwaZulu, or Bophuthatswana, or Ciskei, or
Transkei, etc.) in apartheid South Africa, or ‘Jew’ (or ‘those to whom the Law of Return applies’) and ‘Arab’ (or
‘Israeli Arab’, or from the West Bank, or from Gaza, or from areas A, B, or C within the occupied Palestinian
Territories) in apartheid Israel/Palestine.
 257

In order for a non-Greek to gain citizenship, the person appears to have had to more or
less repudiate his own culture so as to prove loyalty to the Greek, and later the Roman,
Crown. A formal education in liberal arts and athletics, called the ‘ephebate’, was officially
necessary in order for a person to gain citizenship. Yet, some racially Greek citizens
apparently lacked the ephebate degree. Moreover, although this education – the language of
instruction of which was invariably Greek – was a pre-condition for citizenship, not even all
of the Egyptians and other ‘Orientals’ who had absolved the ephebate were granted
citizenship. Mostly, however, one only could become a citizen if one was born of citizens.420

Citizenship of the Greek cities [in Egypt] was carefully controlled and
limited. The citizen body was divided along traditional Greek lines
into tribes and local units (demes), with distinctively Greek names.
[The demes were named after Greek gods, and Greek mythic and
semi-mythic figures.] They had citizen assemblies, councils,
magistrates and other civic institutions such as gymnasia, although
these did not betoken any real degree of democratic government. The
general ambience in such places is well illustrated by a decree from
[the city of] Ptolemais in which the presidents of the council admit
someone to citizenship, enroll him in a tribe and deme and grant him a
crown and maintenance at the public expense, a fine example of the
invariable practice of providing public welfare only for those who did
not need it.421

The institution of citizenship was thus, among other things, one of the many
machinations that make the rich people richer, and the poor poorer. The list of the privileges
of citizens, well into the Roman period as well, goes on and on: ‘Not merely the right to
participate in Greek games, but official recognition of superior status to Egyptians and others,
certain reductions in tax liability, guarantees of better treatment under a judicial structure
which systematically linked social status and legal privilege, the possibility of a share in the
largesse which might be offered to citizens by a monarch or an emperor.’ 422 The racism
embodied in this system of citizenship is unmistakable, and it rhymes well with what was
pointed out about the racist system of slavery in the service of apartheid repopulation in the
previous section.

There would have been some dangers of those traditions [‘Hellenic

traditions’] being contaminated, if the citizenship had been made too
easy for natives and [non-Greek] foreigners to acquire. There were
indeed cases of naturalization, but the new citizens were usually
chosen in Hellenic circles. They were sometimes soldiers from the
regular army, which had preserved its Macedonian and Greek
character. Moreover, the statutes of the cities placed obstacles in the
way of mixed marriages, doubtless because they would have
diminished the purity of the blood. The charter of Naucratis refused to
recognize marriages between citizens and natives as lawful. . . Was it
different in Alexandria? It seems that great importance was attached to
purity of the race, since the citizenship was refused to the illegitimate
son of a citizen, and in the Roman period Alexandria certainly did not

420
Fraser 1972: 77. Lewis, N. 1983: 40 describes how citizens of the thirty-odd regional capitals were
exclusively of Greek stock. Any Egyptian ancestry, at least in the male line, disqualified applicants
automatically. This was still the case after 600 years of apartheid.
421
Bowman 1996 (1986): 125. See also Parsons 2007: 107, and Fraser 1972: 44ff. on the names and
compositions of the demes.
422
Bowman 1996 (1986): 210
258

have connubium with the Egyptians...423

The Roman system of citizenship at first sharpened the racism and classism of the
Greek one: ‘All in all, a system of civic privilege and obligation tied to birth and wealth...The
right to enter this order depended on the ability to show Greek ancestry on both maternal and
paternal sides...’424 Thus, the Romans favored the Greeks in the same way that the British
would the Dutch and other Whites in South Africa.
Of course, there was now a new and even more superior kind of citizenship than the
Greek one. Yet, slowly but surely Roman citizenship became more inclusive. At the
beginning of Roman rule in Egypt, only Alexandrian citizens had special status along with the
Romans. Later, more and more Greeks based in the other cities and in the countryside gained
citizenship. The last to benefit, however, were the Egyptians applying for Roman citizenship.
Few in numbers, they even had to attain Greek citizenship before they could apply for the
Roman one. According to one ancient source, the Egyptians were the only ‘aliens’ (i.e. non-
Greeks and non-Romans) in Egypt who had to go through this lengthy and expensive
procedure. The number of Egyptians with either Greek or Roman citizenship at any time
during the first half of Egypt’s apartheid millennium must have been minuscule, if not even at
times zero. Thus, the essential paradox and untenable characteristic of apartheid is starkly
revealed; the most indigenous people are the most alien, and the more indigenous you are, the
more alien you are.
Then, in 212 CE, Emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to almost all of the
free (i.e. non-slave) inhabitants of the empire. From now on, the formal line of class division
was between honestiores and humiliores, the upper and the lower classes, which also,
however, maintained the privileges of birth and wealth.425
Egyptians were thus still discriminated against, but it is hard to say how badly they
fared on an ideal overall scale of oppression. Perhaps their lot from Caracalla’s rule onwards
could best be compared with that of Blacks after having been freed from slavery in the USA
in 1865, or with that of Blacks in South Africa since 1990, or with that of Palestinians who are
formally under Palestinian Authority rule since 1995. But even from Caracalla’s rule onwards
the citizens were mainly Greek.
The racial lines of separation were in any case blurred considerably in law. Egypt, at
least Roman-ruled Egypt, therefore went through the opposite process as compared with
South Africa: from being an apartheid society by law into becoming one mainly in practice.
(If, on the other hand, South Africa had remained a British colony, nearly two hundred years,
until the introduction of democracy in 1994, like almost all other British colonies in Africa, it
would probably have mirrored Egypt’s development under European rule during antiquity
quite closely.426)
423
Jouguet: Macedonian Imperialism and the Hellenization of the East, 1996 (1928): 323
424
Bowman 1996 (1986): 126. In Chapter I.4, we saw how this kind of racism, which admits the possible
inevitability of racial mixing, was and is also dominant in Liberia, in Guatemala, and indeed in the rest of Latin
America, although here either the paternal or the maternal side would, could, and will often suffice.
425
Ibid: 127f; Bingen 2007: 289; McCoskey 2004: 326. Just like the elite Jews in modern Israel 2,000 years later,
the Romans in Egypt prohibited indigenous people from doing military service, though only up until Caracalla’s
reign. See Lewis, N. 1983: 20. On the dangers of over-emphasizing the marginal or occasional fluidity of racial
categories in Greek-ruled Egypt, see McCoskey 2002: ‘…the categories of “Greek” and “Egyptian”… [were in
fact] conceptually distinct and indeed representative of inverse positions of social power.’
426
On the consequences of Caracalla’s reform for Egypt, see Parsons 2007: 215. It probably had more effects in
Egypt than elsewhere, though little changed in the hierarchy of races. On British colonies in Africa see Iliffe
1995: 233ff. The British and the French, as opposed to the Portuguese, the Belgians and the South African
Whites, were keen on establishing friendly relations with the new rulers in de-colonialized Africa. Already
before World War II, the former had cleverly realized and carefully calculated that keeping the colonies, with
their demographic and political pressures, would no longer be profitable for the colonialists. But they, along with
the US and other western powers, were also actively preventing any kind of African unity from developing in the
wake of colonialist withdrawal, thus reserving and protecting continental cooperation, coordination and unity,
 259

In neither case, however, is there a simple, uni-directional curve of steady increase or

decrease of racism. Although the British in South Africa abolished institutional racist slavery,
for example, they introduced the systematic urban segregation of races, the blueprint for
apartheid in the narrow sense, at roughly the same time. And although a few Egyptians gained
Roman citizenship from Emperor Caracalla, they did not gain what we understand as citizens’
rights today. For instance, they did not gain any voting rights or any social security. The value
of citizenship had become inflated by then, similar to the inflation of citizenship value in
modern Israel (see below).
Egyptian women were probably the group that suffered the most under Greek and
Roman rule. Although traditionally part of a mainly patriarchal culture, the women of Egypt
had enjoyed a situation throughout independent ancient times, i.e. during the preceding three
millennia, during which the extent of their rights and privileges remained unparalleled in the
ancient world. (I reject the terms ‘Dynastic’ and ‘Pharaonic Egypt’, because they are
misleading and imprecise. The Ptolemaic rulers also called themselves ‘Pharaohs’, and they
also constituted a dynasty, and a long-lived one, as well. I therefore prefer to use the more
accurate description, ‘independent ancient Egypt’.)
Women in independent ancient Egypt were judicial persons with no need for male
guardians; they were treated as equals to men by the courts and most probably also by the law;
they practiced professions at almost all levels of society, also repeatedly serving as heads of
state, something that never happened in any of the other great civilizations of antiquity, save
some ancient Sudanese and Yemeni civilizations. I am, however, unaware of any Egyptian
women who might have served as grand-viziers, i.e. as heads of government, as prime
ministers. Women disposed freely over their own property, they were in general free to
choose sexual and marriage partners, and often themselves initiated divorce proceedings.
Egyptian women in fact often carried away more property from a divorce than their husbands
did. Virginity seems never to have been a precondition for marriage, as it was and sometimes
still is elsewhere and in Egypt today. Women, moreover, decided themselves over who should
inherit their belongings after they died, also a feature unheard of in the rest of the ancient
world. Egyptian children carried their mother’s name as surname, perhaps as often as they
carried that of their fathers. On the name issue, the status of women in ancient Egypt has not
even been surpassed in the modern world. On the other issues, Egypt was presumably most
often behind post-World War II democracies with their relatively fair treatment of women, but

which were simultaneously being developed in Europe and North America, as guarded and unique western
privileges. Thus we have today the established European Union and NAFTA, as well as NATO, but an African
Union which is still only in the starting blocks. Ibid. and 246ff. Due to the arbitrariness of colonial-era borders –
sometimes also drawn intentionally in order to physically split up existing polities potentially or actually difficult
to master for the colonialists, such as the Nzima between the British (Ghana) and the French (Ivory Coast), the
Maasai between the British (Kenya) and the Germans (Tanganyika), or the Bakongo between the French Congo,
the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola – Africa could have and should have achieved a postcolonial
economic, military, and/or political union much more easily and much sooner than Europe, North America, or
the North Atlantic. Yet, the parliament for Africa only became reality in 2004, half a century after the European
Parliament appeared and even longer after an African one was first suggested by Africans. (See Boyle:
Legislators Look Forward to Pan-African Parliament, 2002; N.N.: Pan-African Parliament, no date.) It is not yet
a democratically elected parliament, and the African Union is still very far from being a union like the European
one. Apart from fearing the potential power of such a union and its probable resentment over committed or
assisted colonial, neo-colonial, apartheid, slavery-related and genocidal oppression and atrocities, NATO
countries were also interested in keeping bulwarks against Communism in the remaining colonies and in the
apartheid South of the continent. Those, and the profits that could be made in countless ways by transnational
corporations based in NATO countries, are the main reasons for the numerous post-colonial assaults on Africa by
NATO powers. The assaults by Communist non-Africans were fewer, though also deadly and even genocidal in
Ethiopia with its 1980s famines, which could indeed be blamed largely on the Soviet Union, but also of course
on the Communist Ethiopian elites themselves. The other Communist non-Africans in Africa also did some or
even much good, especially the Cubans (see footnote 76 above). Others sometimes displayed colonialist and
racist streaks, but these mainly appear to have been of a politically opportunist character. See also Reader 1998
(1997): 649ff; Mbeki 2012.
260

not far behind.

With the Greeks, however, came an opposite, extremely sexist social system, also
probably without parallel in the ancient world. Greek men, Greek custom and Greek law
treated women as property, on a par with children, slaves, and inanimate objects, i.e. with no
legal rights whatsoever. Only men were citizens. Like the women in Afghanistan under
Taliban rule, women in ancient Greece were not allowed to leave their homes unless
accompanied by a male guardian, usually husband, father, brother, or son. Although this
practice may have many origins, it is perhaps worth pondering on whether Alexander the
Great, his army, and the semi-civilian colonialists and apartheid settlers they left behind first
brought the practice to Afghanistan, and to what extent the Taliban is a European creation;
also of course with Anthony Giddens’ definition of fundamentalism in mind, namely as a
beleaguered tradition reacting to (eurocentric) globalization.427 In any event, when Greek
culture and politics were imposed on the ancient Egyptians, following Alexander’s conquest
of their country, it spelled bad news for the Egyptian women.

Unfortunately, during the Graeco-Roman period when the Greek

laws, customs and language started to have profound influence on the
Egyptian way of life, the women’s right to equal status was slowly but
surely eroded away. At this point many Greek families settled in
Egypt and closely cloistered Greek women…started to live side by
side with the free-born Egyptian women. . . . By the Roman period,
[Egyptian] women had lost many of their former rights and privileges,
so that although continuing local customs allowed them to remain less
suppressed than the women living in Rome, they were nowhere near
as emancipated as their Dynastic [pre-Ptolemaic] forebears had
been.428

Racially Greek women in Graeco-Roman Egypt, on the other hand, saw their lot
somewhat improved. Compared to what they and their sisters had been suffering at home in
Greece, this amounted to a small revolution, though their rights were still very limited from
the Egyptian point of view. But, at least, they were now able to leave home without a male
guardian. Unlike Egyptian women, they still needed legal guardians, but they were allowed to
own property, and they were for the first time allowed to be the main beneficiaries of their
husbands’ wills. As during independent ancient Egyptian times, there were even a few women
among the Ptolemies who actually did become regent queens, despite male primogeniture.

427
Giddens 2000 (1999): 67. In the mid-third century BCE, the Greeks appear to have developed a full-blown
apartheid society in northern Afghanistan, the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom or Bactriana, named after the classic
Greek name for the region, Bactria. At the height of its influence, Bactriana stretched into parts of India,
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The Greek invaders and their descendants comprised the racial elite
minority, as in Egypt; they lived separated from the indigenous people, as in Egypt, and the locals were of ‘lower
status’, as in Egypt, at least in the capital, Ai Khanum. Like the Greeks in Egypt, the Greek settlers of Bactriana
were also very keen on keeping their classic Greek culture and language alive, although they also kept some of
the indigenous bureaucracy and middle class from the previously conquered state, as a less underprivileged
indigenous class, like the Greeks in Egypt. Local and Greek religion also appear to have been mixed, as in
Graeco-Roman Egypt. The kingdom ceased to exist around 125 BCE, but one of its offshoots lasted in India until
10 CE. See Bernard: An Ancient Greek City in Central Asia, 1994; N.N.: Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, September
1, 2007.
428
Tyldesley 1995 (1994): 44. On Hypatia, see Parsons 2007: 195. Strangely, many Egyptian women appear to
have changed legal status voluntarily in order to be handled under Greek law (in particular to be forced to have a
male guardian) rather than Egyptian law, and we do not know why. A puzzled Tyldesley guesses that this was
done ‘...perhaps in the hope that others might mistake them for sophisticated Greeks rather than provincial
Egyptians.’ Ibid. Her conjecture seems far-fetched, but so does every other explanation. It seems at least possible
that these choices by Egyptian women, although they appear to be so, were not truly voluntary after all. Perhaps,
for instance, they were attempts by women to help gain Greek citizenship for themselves or their children, or by
mothers (and/or fathers) in order to enable their daughters to dodge genital mutilation.
 261

After over 700 years in existence, the Museum in Alexandria, or one of its successor
philosophical schools (see Chapter II.7.1 below), even hired its first and only female lecturer,
Hypatia, a mathematician and philosopher who was, however, later lynched for not being
Christian, and perhaps partly also for not being male, and perhaps partly also for being Greek.
The emancipatory changes certainly would not have been possible without the Egyptian
precedent; they possibly brought some improvements for women outside of Egypt, but only
little for Greek women in Egypt and, apparently, only misery for Egyptian women.429

3.2. The Bantustans: Fragmentation of Indigenous People

The South African institution of citizenship itself did not play a great apartheid role
until the 1970s, with the formation of ‘Homelands’, or ‘Bantustans’ as they were also known.
During this time, South African citizenship – or rather the inferior version of it: South African
third-class citizenship – was revoked from millions of black people due to one condition only:
the color of their skin. Prior to that, however, Africans were not granted full citizenship either.
An inferior kind of citizenship had been granted by the British to a few Cape Africans who
were allowed to vote. Other Blacks faced serf-like conditions under which they were usually
not granted permission to leave the country or to other normal exercises of the freedom of
movement. The British introduced the vote in regional elections for a few individually land-
owning Blacks with a certain minimal income and at least the rudiments of literacy in the
Cape province, but this was revoked in 1936.430
One of the most racist aspects of South Africa’s legal system was the exploitation of
black non-citizen migrant workers, eventually including millions of black Bantustan
‘citizens’, and the simultaneous heaping of privileges on white immigrants. Already during
the 19th century this policy was implemented for diamond and gold mine workers from the
neighboring countries (initially colonies or ‘protectorates’), especially from Lesotho,
Swaziland, Rhodesia, and Mozambique. And it was in use until the very end of apartheid.

Before 1994, immigration policy was a naked instrument of racial

domination. Until 1991, the official definition of an immigrant was
that he or she had to be able to be assimilated into the white
population. By definition, therefore, Africans were not considered
immigrants. Rather, they came to South Africa as temporary contract
migrants...431

429
Ibid; See also Bingen 2007: 135f; Kreuzsaler: Der Rechtsalltag von Frauen im Spiegel der Wiener Papyri,
2005: 1-18; Pomeroy 1997; Schulze: Frauen im Alten Ägypten: Selbständigkeit und Gleichberechtigung im
häuslichen und öffentlichen Leben, ²1988; Wenig: Die Frau im Alten Ägypten, 1969. See Green 2007: 94f. on
paradoxical advances for Greek women in general during the Hellenistic age. After having come in contact with
many new cultures during and after Alexander’s conquests, it appears the Greeks loosened restrictions on their
own women. The paradox is only apparent: Greek men were now able to exploit non-Greeks, men and women,
more than before, and so Greek women profited, or better: experienced relief, due to this. The film, ‘Agora’
(2009, directed by Alejandro Amenábar), which is based on the life and death of Hypatia with many fictional and
speculative elements added, shows the gender, religious and class tensions of late ancient Egypt quite well.
However, the racial element is completely missing. For instance, the protagonists all speak English in the film,
although Alexandria at that time would have been quite evenly divided between Greek, the upper-class language,
and Coptic, the language of ethnic Egyptians, and also the language of the Christian mob that would eventually
murder Hypatia, who was no doubt a Greek-speaker. In the film, skin color also appears evenly distributed
between the classes and the religious groups, another criterion for a racial harmony that did not exist. See
Chapter II.2.1 above, especially footnote 374.
430
Mandela 1995 (1994): 96; Wilson: African Decolonization, 1994. On the political aspects of the South
African Bantustans, see especially Biko 2004 (1978): 88-95.
431
Crush: South Africa: Policy in the Face of Xenophobia, 2008. Countless migrants died during their sometimes
weeks-long marches to underpaid, often clandestine work in South Africa through crocodile-infested rivers and
lion- and leopard-rich savanna. Similarly, many forcibly exiled Palestinians and/or Palestinians from the
Occupied Territories have been killed trying to sneak (back home) into Israel, often for underpaid, sometimes
262

From the 1960s, the ten Homelands (Bantustans) were made into ‘self-governing’
areas, and four were granted ‘independence’ by the South African government during the
1970s, and a further one in 1981. South Africa itself was the only country that ever recognized
these ‘countries’, too weak – economically, politically and even culturally – to become truly
independent in any sense of the word. White capitalists were forbidden by the South African
government from investing directly in any business venture in the Homelands.
In actual fact, the creation of the Homelands was a trick, invented by the apartheid
regime for two main purposes. The first was to answer the powerful wave of de-
colonialization that had swept through Africa during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, leaving South
Africa, South West Africa (until 1991) and Rhodesia (until 1980) as the only three countries
out of the fifty-four countries of the African continent under formal white minority rule from
1975 onwards. Only a single African country, Ethiopia, had really been politically
independent fifty years earlier. The South African government now hoped to appease
increasing numbers of critics abroad with this strategy but failed to do so. Secondly, the South
African government saw the creation of Homelands as an opportunity to expel unwanted
masses of Blacks from their home country, to deny them any rights and benefits and indirectly
to condemn them to a slow death. By 1980, population density in the Homelands, which were
undeveloped and had land of very little agricultural value, was 23.8 per square mile. In South
Africa as a whole (including the Homelands) it was 9.1 persons per square mile. (Obviously,
it would have been even less without the Bantustans.)
It was the manifest strategy and policy of the government to divide and rule, to force
almost all Blacks into the separate Homelands, and to treat Blacks that were or could be
needed by the economy in South Africa as visitors, with less rights than South African (black)
citizens, i.e. with practically no rights. Just to make sure, the South African Whites placed
their collaborators on the thrones or at the helms of the Homelands, with undemocratic
governments, of course. That way, absolutely no political trouble could be expected from
them, despite the deliberate pre-programming of acute crises, including mass starvation, coups
d’état and counter-coups.432
Still, there were some pieces of agriculturally useful land within the designated
Homelands. But the former had been taken and occupied long ago by white farmers. Instead
of handing them back to the Blacks, however, the government created borders around existing
white farms, as well as continuous and easy access to these for the farmers from the rest of
South Africa. And as a result: ‘Nearly every Homeland consisted of several pieces of land,
separated by white-owned farms. Bophuthatswana had nineteen fragments, some hundreds of
miles apart; KwaZulu comprised twenty-nine major and forty-one minor fragments.’433
The parallel to the situation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip at the outset of the

clandestine work. In the latter case, however, the ‘illegal migrants’, i.e. the indigenous workers or ‘visitors’, are
usually killed or murdered by people, especially by Israel’s notorious paramilitary border guards.
432
Thompson 1990: 191ff; Lester 1996: 126ff. Actually, there were some elections early on in the Bantustans,
see Biko 2004 (1978): 143. Similarly, democratic elections have taken place at early stages in the Palestinian
Bantustans, mainly perhaps as a result of Israeli and US pressures, which must be seen as resulting in their turn
from divide-and-rule Bantustan or Native reservation policies and experience. Spickard 2005: 15 calls the South
African Bantustan policy ‘…a frank imitation of U.S. Indian reservation policy’. See also Section I.4 above on
this parallel.
433
Thompson 1990: 191. See also Mandela 2002 (1965): 55-57. In total, the Bantustans consisted of eighty-one
large and 200 smaller parcels of land, according to Tilley (ed.) 2009: 255. At least during one period, the
‘sovereignty’ of the Bantustans extended to 6 feet underground. See Biko 2004 (1978): 91. South Africa’s white
mineral extractors apparently did not want to repeat the oversights inherent in US grants of reservation lands to
the indigenous people there, grants which were torn up when valuable minerals were found under the
reservations. The USA has not honored a single treaty with the Native Americans. Similarly, Israel is very
interested in underground resources such as water under the West Bank Bantustan(s). See footnotes 568-574
below.
 263

Second Intifada could hardly be more obvious or stark: “Divided into about 63 non-
contiguous cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140
settlements…with their own road network banned to ‘non-Jews’, as Arabs are referred to,
along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, cockroaches and grasshoppers…”434
Seventy fragments of land here, sixty-three there. This small numerical difference is
inessential, especially when compared with the dehumanization of the chosen enemy, but also
with the arrogance of these forms of land theft. Land confiscation, expulsion, non-contiguity,
and surroundedness are the keys here, and there. As far as I know, only apartheid South Africa
and modern Israel with their Bantustans, and modern Israel and the USA with their native
reservations, have ever come up with such a comprehensive, opaque, and time-consuming
system of stripping an indigenous majority of people of their land and their rights. It is no
wonder that no other countries have been as close to modern Israel – politically,
diplomatically, militarily and culturally – as apartheid South Africa and the USA. They all
chose like-minded friends.

3.3. From Bustan to Bantustan to Native Reservation and the Law of ‘Return’
‘Israel’s Law of Return had [originally] enabled anyone who either had a Jewish
mother or who had converted to Judaism to acquire immediate Israeli citizenship. However, in
1970 the Law was amended to enable anyone who only had a Jewish father, a Jewish
grandparent or simply a Jewish spouse also to claim Israeli citizenship.’435 It was obvious to
authorities by this time that Israel’s repopulation program was going to run into the South
African (and Ptolemaic) dilemma. The indigenous were multiplying faster than they could be
expelled or killed and replaced with newcomers. At the same time as the Bantustan policy of
apartheid South Africa was being hatched, Israel also decided to split up the indigenous by
means of selective and eliminative citizenship. But this was a new kind of citizenship in the
long history of apartheid. It distinguished nationalities between citizens, so that only Jewish
nationals would receive full rights and privileges by the Jewish state.

Political incorporation is one of the most effective means of

neutralizing a political challenge. The granting of citizenship to
Palestinians inside the 1948 boundaries was, indeed, astute. This,
however, was less a reflection of Israeli leaders’ adroitness and more a
reflection of Palestinians’ weakness. The political incorporation of
Palestinians posed no threat to the existence of the Jewish state: On

434
Said, August 16-22, 2001 (see footnote 280). Israel has grudgingly allowed certain measures of democracy
and self-government in its Bantustans, under the influence of idealist (but severely misguided) Israeli, US, and
European liberals and others. However, the ‘democracy’ and ‘self-government’ allowed the Palestinians does not
extend to curtail Israeli measures of ethnic cleansing, such as daily killings and land theft with impunity. Nor are
Palestinian expatriate refugees, or the majority of Palestinians, allowed to partake in any elections or
‘governments’ of their fragmented home country. See Löwstedt: The Most Important Difference between the
Palestinian and the Iraqi Elections? 2005. On the ‘monumental efforts’ to make 66.7 percent of all (black)
Africans in South Africa from a map that only contained 39 percent of the same group 25 years earlier, see del
Vecchio 2010: 83ff.
435
Szamuely 1999. According to some Israeli immigration officials, several hundred Arab families that had fled
or moved to Jordan after the establishment of the state of Israel had now returned and taken up Israeli citizenship
for themselves and their families by 2001. Interior Minister Eli Yishai saw this as a ‘devious way of getting Arab
refugees to return to Israel’, and a ‘threat’ to the ‘Jewish character’ of the state, although Israeli law actually
allows any former citizen to return. Yishai therefore instructed ‘ministry legal advisers to look into ways of
changing legislation in order to reduce the number of Arabs who receive Israeli citizenship by marrying Israeli
citizens’ and for establishing quotas for the return of former citizens. See Mualem: Yishai: Let’s Restrict
Citizenship for Arab Spouses, 2002. The article also quotes Deputy Interior Minister David Azulai telling the
Knesset in the same week that 246,037 non-Jews had received Israeli citizenship since 1988. Of these, 221,428
were from the former Soviet Union, and most probably without exception of course in solidarity or collaboration
with Israeli Jews in their war against the Palestinians.
264

the eve of the [1987] intifada, Palestinians composed 18 percent of

Israel’s population and less than 13 percent of Palestinians worldwide.
The astuteness of Israeli policy makers does appear, however, in the
distinction between ‘citizens’ and ‘nationals’, which effectively denies
even Palestinian citizens of Israel a broad range of rights and benefits
reserved for Jews. Thus, by granting parastatal agencies control over a
variety of social and economic functions – including land ownership
in the state of Israel – which they discharge solely for the benefit of
Jews, Israel is shielded from charges of discrimination when non-Jews
are excluded from those benefits.
Similarly, having granted control over matters of ‘personal status’ to
the religious Authorities, and lacking provisions for civil marriage, the
Israeli state effectively deters intermarriage between Jews and non-
Jews without legislating prohibitions.
Thus, the Israeli state has achieved ends comparable to apartheid
without drawing similar condemnation. That is, until 1967 when Israel
began to rule territories with a majority Palestinian population.436

The last sentence highlights the return to ‘normal’ and brutally state-imposed apartheid
in Historic Palestine. It should be kept in mind that the Israeli military occupation of the
remaining Palestinian Territories from 1967 onwards also shares characteristics with both
colonialism and genocide. Yet here too it is predominantly an apartheid system, characterized
by the vastly preferential treatment of people of a certain race and discriminatory, oppressive
practices, on the other hand, against the indigenous majority, which is rendered stateless by
Israel in blatant contradiction to international law.

Israel has established a system of segregation and discrimination, in

which two populations living in the same area are subject to different
systems of law. While Palestinians are subject to military law and
usually tried in military courts, Israelis who commit the same offence
in the same place are subject to Israeli law and tried in civil courts
inside Israel. Jewish settlers enjoy all the rights of Jews in Israel,
including complete freedom of movement, speech and organisation,
participation in local and national (Israeli) elections, social security
and health benefits, etc. For Palestinians, on the other hand, even those
living a few hundred metres from Jewish settlements, freedom of
movement is limited. They cannot, obviously, vote to curtail the
powers of the IDF [the Israeli Defense Force] and they do not enjoy
Israel’s social security or health benefits. In Afrikaans they call it
apartheid.437

436
Younis 2000: 14. See also Tilley (ed.) 2005: 161, and footnote 166 above on the closest parallel in Graeco-
Roman Egypt to Bantustans, the Egyptian temples with their right of asylum for Egyptian tax refugees.
437
Felner: Apartheid by Any Other Name: Creeping Annexation of the West Bank, 1999; Tilley (ed.) 2009: 217-
219. I have refrained from creating a separate section on apartheid law, since I believe that the practice of
apartheid by far outweighs the law in importance, and that it is more structured at a macro-level than the law is,
especially apartheid law. Sometimes the law will contradict practice and sometimes the judiciary will resist
biased government directives, as in South Africa. This may even make a difference between life and death as in
the treason trials against Nelson Mandela. The judges in his cases had joined the judiciary before 1948 and
showed more allegiance to British traditions, more sensitivity to contemporary western sentiments about the
notorious trials and perhaps also a more cunning insight into the potential propaganda value of a martyrization of
Mandela for black resistance than the executive powers did. See Mandela 1995 (1994): 260f. Yet the relationship
between apartheid laws and apartheid practices is not and never was a defining moment of apartheid. (See also
Cilliers 1998.) Its occasional adversary aspects are rather like other unessential inner (potential) tensions in these
societies, e.g. the exploitation of white labor by white South Africans, or ‘Black-on-Black’ violence in that
country, i.e. something that is contingent and mainly dependent upon the constantly changing overall situation.
Israel, which shares so much with apartheid South Africa, even seems to make a point out of formulating its laws
 265

Just as the Basic ‘Law of Return’ plays a paramount role in Israel’s racist repopulation
policy, the Basic Law text proclaiming the ‘Jewish character of Israel’ is equally important for
its policies of discriminatory, racist citizenship. They are eminent instances of the
unmistakably apartheid character of the executive, legislative and judiciary powers of Israel.

The doctrine that Israel is the state of the Jewish people in Israel and
abroad, not of its citizens, is now part of the Basic Law of that
country, and one Supreme Court Justice stated publicly that ‘it is
necessary to prevent a Jew or Arab who calls for equality of rights for
Arabs from sitting in the Knesset or being elected to it.’438

Israel was in fact required by the United Nations, as a precondition for Israel’s
statehood, to introduce a democratic Constitution (UN General Assembly Resolution 181
(II)). Instead it introduced a ‘Constitution, Law and Justice Committee’, supposed to produce
such a Constitution, and today, 65 years later, it has still to introduce democracy. The Basic
Laws that fly in the face of democracy are in direct contradiction to other elements of Israel’s
chaotic body of law, which only extends some equality to some of the Palestinians under
Israeli rule.439
In his book, ‘Apartheid Israel’, Uri Davis analyzed four classes of citizenship in Israel,
of which only the most privileged are Jews, all Jews. The second-class citizens are
Palestinians who were not expropriated by the state in 1948-49 and their descendants, now
amounting to 750,000 people. The third-class citizens are Palestinians who were expropriated
by the state since 1948 under the Absentees’ Property Law in 1950, a law legalizing outright
theft of Palestinian property. These third-class citizens are referred to in the Israeli law as
‘Present Absentees’, Newspeak for internally displaced refugees. They and their descendants
are a quarter million-strong at present. The last group consists of the four-and-a-half million
refugees who should be Israeli or Palestinian citizens under international law but are not even
allowed to return to their home country, nor receive citizenship, nor have they received any
compensation for their expropriation from Israel as international law stipulates. Many of these
Palestinians are only surviving under appalling conditions in refugee camps around the
Middle East. Many are stateless.440
One could add a fifth class, i.e. the four or so million Palestinians in the Israeli-
occupied territories. Their rights are ignored continuously by Israeli law, and by the
international community, but not by international law. Yet, the power that decides their fate is,
above all, Israel. They are the ones being shot and bombed by Israelis, and they are often
employed by Israelis at the lowest, often illegally low, wages. Since 1967 they have not been
able to claim citizens’ rights in the territory they call home. They are basically stateless.
Of the one million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, i.e. those with second- or third-
class citizenship, many complain of being treated like aliens in their own country and that of
their ancestors, but they are a minority and their protests and pleas for justice, even for partial
improvement, mostly fall on deaf ears. There are today 30 laws in Israel that privilege Jews
over other Israeli citizens in various ways. During the first 18 years of Israeli rule all
Palestinians who had not been killed, expelled or who had not fled were forced to live under

as differently from the South African racist laws as possible, apparently in order for its apartheid system not to
be ‘found out’ as such. The Israeli state and other Israeli elites are easily able to achieve the same or similar
results by other means. As we have seen here, the religious institutions, especially, have proven useful in this
sense. See also Preface above, footnote 442 below, and Davis, U. 2003: 82ff.
438
Herman: Israeli Apartheid and Terrorism: Part 1, The Reality, 1994
439
Davis U. 2003: 65ff. The UN demanded of the future Jewish state a Constitution ‘guaranteeing all persons
equal and non-discriminatory rights in civil, political, economic and religious matters and the enjoyment of
human rights and fundamental freedoms’, quote from UN Plan of Partition, Article 10, Ibid: 66.
440
Ibid: 88f.
266

harsh military rule. In 1956 forty-nine unarmed Israeli Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli
elite soldiers in the village of Kfur Qassem for allegedly violating a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
During the 1960s, things improved, but on Israeli terms. Many so-called ‘Israeli Arabs’ now
speak Hebrew better than Arabic. They are discriminated against in employment, land and
other issues, as we will see presently. In 1976, six Israeli Palestinians were killed by police
while protesting government land expropriations. And in 2000, thirteen unarmed Israeli
Palestinians were killed by Jewish mobs and police with impunity after the outbreak of the
Second Intifada. Another 17 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship were killed in the same way
in the following six years.441 The following are words from Uri Avnery, a dissident Israeli
Jew, who nonetheless leaves out the Basic Law text about the Jewish character of Israel (out
of the first sentence):

[A]part from the Law of Return, which gives a ‘Jew’ and his family
(but not to Arab refugees) the absolute right to come to Israel, no law
discriminates between a ‘Jew’ and a non-Jew. But this is only make-
believe: numerous laws accord special privileges to persons ‘to whom
the Law of Return applies’, without mentioning ‘Jews’ specifically.
This is so self evident, that all state officials act accordingly without
even being aware of it. The ‘Israel Land Authority’ distributes land to
Jews, not to Arabs. All state development projects include Jews only.
Among the hundreds of new towns and villages set up since the
founding of Israel, not a single one was established for Arabs. There
is no Arab minister in the Government, no Arab judge on the Supreme
Court bench.442

By comparison, Blacks in the USA – who make up a smaller minority than

Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in relative terms (12 and 19 percent, respectively) – still
face structural and personal discrimination on an enormous scale, but they are no longer
subject to any of the harsh legal conditions that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, not to
mention what those without that citizenship (the vast majority of Palestinians) must endure.
Most recently, even black Supreme Court judges, black government ministers, and a black
president have all appeared in the USA. At the same time non-citizen Palestinians are still
being treated by Israel like Native Americans in reservations during the last two centuries.
The Palestinian Authority enclaves in the West Bank are shrinking just like the Native
American reservations during the last two centuries. It is becoming rather obvious that Israel
is going one step beyond apartheid in this respect. The sabotage of the Palestinian economy in
general, and Palestinian agriculture in particular, is also reminiscent of the indirect but very
much intended white genocides against the Native Americans, for instance the slaughter of
bison to the brink of extinction, millions of animals left to rot on the prairie, in order to starve
and wipe out the last independent Native American Plains Peoples.

441
Cook, J.: Why There Are No “Israelis” in the Jewish State: Citizens Classed as Jewish or Arab Nationals,
2010; Amr, W.: Israeli Arabs Feel Alienated in Israel, 2001; Johnston: Yassin Killing Fuels Anger in Israeli
Arab Protest, 2004; Yacobi: Separate and Unequal, 2008. See also footnote 170 above. The commander of the
frontier guard unit that murdered the 49 Israeli Palestinians in Kfur Qassem was ‘…brought to trial, found guilty,
and then punished with a fine of one piaster (less than one cent).’ Said 1992 (1979): 105; Pappe 2006: 202.
442
Avnery: Israel: The Jewish Demographic State? 2002. Nearly two years after Avnery wrote this, Israel
appointed its first Arab Supreme Court judge, Salim Jubran. N.N.: Israel Appoints Arab to Supreme Court, May
7, 2004. There is actually a strong parallel between Israeli and South African apartheid laws in the sense of the
Avnery quote. In his introduction to Mandela 2002 (1965): xi, Quayson writes about South Africa: ‘Each
repressive law gathered force from the ramifications that lay well beyond its parameters and which coincide with
the negative implications of other apartheid laws.’ The racism is thus sloppily hidden in both countries’ laws,
which were of course introduced after state racism had essentially started becoming illegal internationally. One
does not have to be a legal scholar to recognize the racism in the laws, or the system of laws.
 267

In 2002, Israel announced it planned to take the unprecedented step of revoking the
(already underprivileged) citizenship of three ‘Israeli Arabs’ suspected of links to ‘terrorist
groups’. The move followed a plethora of ongoing harsh punitive measures against
Palestinians, including politically motivated trials, the demolition of houses belonging to
suicide attackers and the forced exile of members of their families from militarily occupied
territories, officially in order to curb attacks by militants. Both of the latter, of course, fly in
the face of some of the most central judicial axioms worldwide, including the very definition
of a judicial person. But such details were of little concern to the Israeli government, in spite
of international condemnation. The Palestinian parliamentarian in the Knesset, Ahmed Tibi,
who (still) has Israeli citizenship, said Arab citizens were being unfairly targeted and
portrayed as far more involved in anti-Israeli attacks than was the case. ‘The struggle of Arab
citizens (of Israel), the Palestinian struggle, is political, public...within legal procedures’, he
said. ‘They [the Israeli Jews] view the citizenship of Arabs as a gift with conditions.’ Israeli
left-wingers and legal experts called the Israeli law draconian and a violation of civil rights
which would hurt the country’s international status, noting that citizenship had not been
revoked for two of Israel’s most notorious prisoners, who are of course both Jews: Yigal
Amir, who was convicted of assassinating prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and
Mordechai Vanunu, who was jailed for leaking information on the country’s nuclear program
in 1986 and ‘released’ under strict rules in 2004.
On September 9, 2002, the first case of Israeli citizenship being revoked from a
Palestinian (a so-called ‘Israeli Arab’) accused of planning suicide attacks on Jews was
implemented. The loss of citizenship now means that Nahad Abu Kishaq, if he is ever freed
from jail, is banned from living on Israeli territory, where he was previously eligible for state
health care and other rights, such as the right to vote. In a first reaction to the news, the
Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the practice contradicted international human rights
conventions and demanded that legislation should instead be introduced to deny the interior
minister the power to revoke citizenship and rights of residency.443 If proven guilty of abetting
the murder of civilians, Abu Kishaq should of course be denied full amnesty at an ideal and
just TRC for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But in my opinion he should not have to serve as
much prison time as Ehud Olmert, Benyamin Netanyahu, or Ehud Barak should.
At the same time, a much more extensive program for revoking potential citizenship
was being put into practice. Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who had been caught
working in Israel without a work permit or who were married to people with foreign
citizenship, were to be expelled – to the country of the spouse’s citizenship. As I already
stated in the introduction to this section, the arbitrariness of state powers and the extent of the
racism in their policies with regard to citizenship is most likely unparalleled by any non-
apartheid societies. On July 31, 2003, finally, the law to deny citizenship and permanent
residency to Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens was passed by the Knesset, the parliament
of the Jewish state. Any children over the age of 12 of such couples will also be denied both
citizenship and residency permits and will ultimately also be expelled from Israel – legally.

443
N.N.: Stripping Israeli Arab of Citizenship Causes Outcry, September 10, 2002; Ridberg: Israel Revokes
Israeli Arab’s Citizenship, 2002; Gershberg: Israel Plans to Strip “Terrorists” of Citizenship, 2002; N.N.:
Citizenship Annulment Threats in Israel Draw Fire, August 7, 2002; Hauser: Israel to Charge Fatah Leader
[Marwan Barghouthi] with Murder, 2002; Goldin: Fatah’s Barghouthi Defiant in Israeli Court, 2002; Gershberg:
Palestinian Leader Defiant as Israel Indicts Him, 2002; N.N.: Israelis Scream Abuse at Fatah Leader in Court,
October 3, 2002; N.N.: Israeli Army Destroys Palestinian Militants’ Homes, August 13, 2002; Heller, J.: Israel
Set to Deport Militants’ Relatives to Gaza, 2002; Al-Mughrabi: Israel Dumps West Bank Deportees in Gaza
Vineyard, 2002. Israel also routinely expels Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, an area which is
generally poorer and much more densely populated. In this case, neither charges nor trials are deemed necessary
by the Jewish state to justify such punishment by the authorities. ‘Suspicion of militant activity’ is considered the
crime. See N.N.: Israel to Expel Three More Palestinians to Gaza, October 15, 2003; Al-Mughrabi: Israel Expels
West Bank Palestinian to Gaza, 2003; N.N.: Israel Expels Three West Bank Palestinians to Gaza, November 23,
2003; N.N.: Israel Expels Eight Palestinians to Gaza -Sources, December 4, 2003.
268

The law only applies to Palestinians, not to any other ‘foreigners’. It was enforced despite a
‘gamut of international conventions the country has signed’, along with an outcry from a host
of human rights organizations worldwide, and in blatant defiance of the Middle East
‘Roadmap’ to peace, which was supposed to normalize Israeli-Palestinian relations at this
time. Israeli breaches of the truce also continued with targeted killings, and killings of
Palestinian bystanders, as well as continued house demolitions and settlement expansions.
Some Palestinians fought back as well – thus also violating the Roadmap – but, as usual, not
anywhere near to the same extent as the Israeli violations. The law, first designed as
temporary, had been extended for the fifth time in 2008 after having been valid continuously
for 5 years.444
When limited Palestinian self-rule was introduced by means of the 1994 Cairo
Agreement, Hanan Ashrawi criticized the agreement for legalizing apartheid in Palestine at
the same time as it was being scrapped in South Africa. She pointed out the irony that the first
sign of Palestinian ‘independence’ in this development was the establishment of a Palestinian
police force, a sign of Bantustan dependence more than anything else. Palestinians should
police themselves, mainly in order to protect Israelis. Not only Israelis and Americans should
be blamed for this, but Palestinians, too, in particular the ones in the PLO leadership who have
gone along with the process of Bantustanization.445
The policy of the Israeli government became ‘amazingly similar’ to the Bantustan
program in South Africa, according to well-known Israeli journalist and critic, Akiva Eldar,
when a plan for withdrawing settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip was announced by the
Sharon government in 2004. The government wanted no more responsibility (as if it had ever
taken that seriously) for the fenced-in natives, yet it insisted on keeping its control over them,
among other measures, by completely controlling all borders and the coastline around, and the
airspace above the 1.3 million-strong mostly refugee Palestinian population. The Gaza
withdrawal did nothing from the perspective of international law with regard to ending the
status of the Gaza Strip as illegally occupied by Israel. The arrogant disdain among the rulers
for democratic decisions became embarrassingly obvious when Sharon decided to ask, not the
inhabitants of Gaza, nor the Palestinians as a whole, nor the Israeli people (who would have
supported full withdrawal), nor the Israeli parliament (which would also have supported full
withdrawal), but the members of his own right-wing Likud party for their permission to clear
Gaza of Jewish invaders on the ground. Not even the ruling South African National Party sank
that low, although it had a much larger percentage of voters than Likud ever had. In 1992 the
NP under De Klerk asked the entire white electorate (but not one black person) for permission
to extend voting rights to the Blacks and erase racism from the Constitution.446
Whether the Palestinian Bantustans are eventually recognized by Israel or not is
basically unessential. They already exist, for all practical purposes, especially for the supreme
apartheid purposes of violence and repopulation. Palestinian criminals, non-criminals, and
police are killing each other, while Israelis are killing Palestinians as well. More than eight-
ninths of all Palestinians are still denied citizenship, citizens’ rights, and human rights, in

444
Goldin: Israeli Citizenship Law Splits Arab Families, 2003; Huggler: Israel’s Marriage Law, 2003; Cook:
Racism Reinforced, 2003; Singh: Slow Ethnic Cleansing, 2002; Williams, D.: Israel Govt Memo Admits
Flouting “Road Map”-Source, 2003; Schocken 2008. On a repetition of this Israeli theme, see Miftah: Who
Broke the Ceasefire (First)? 2005. On Israel’s sabotage of the Roadmap by means of ‘appalling’ and
‘unacceptable caveats’, that would make Israeli acts of violence and incitement acceptable whereas all acts of
violence and incitement by Palestinians be deemed violations, see Carter 2006: 178, 207, 243-247.
445
Ashrawi: This Side of Peace: A Personal Account, 1995: 292f.
446
Eldar: Bantustan in Gaza, 2004; Steele: More Carnage in Gaza as the US Mutters its Disapproval, 2004. De
Klerk received a 69 percent vote in favor of reform through the referendum. Mandela 1995 (1994): 598f. Likud,
on the other hand, voted against so-called ‘Gaza withdrawal’. In response, Sharon went on to form a new party,
Kadima, without a political program, to win voters from both Likud and the ‘leftist’ parties, and to implement the
so-called ‘Gaza Withdrawal’. After this had been accomplished, he fell into an irreversible coma following a
massive stroke and later died.
 269

Israel, in Palestine and beyond, by Israel, including its civil society. Meanwhile, of course, the
Israelis are slowly but surely taking over the territory of Historic Palestine.
270

4. Land
Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles
to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land.
(Jimmy Carter)447

Land dispossession and land confiscation can be described as gross human rights
violations, because land is not only a contributor to economic development, but also to
cultural and personal development, whereby individuals and groups acquire a sense of identity
and belonging.448 Land segregation (through confiscation) is a necessary and sufficient
condition for racial segregation and difference, as it is the physical parameter which divides
people.
During the last 5,000 years, agriculture has been a continuously shrinking part of the
economy of civilized society. Metallurgy, the manufacture of consumer goods other than
food, war, tourism, money laundering, improvements in transport, energy transformation
systems, communications technologies and a host of other developments have taken turns in
becoming the mainstay of economies, progressively shrinking the role of agriculture to what
is now below five percent of the current gross domestic products of industrialized countries.
Lately, we have been using new terms to describe the societies we live in, e.g. ‘industrialized’,
‘atomic’, ‘information’ societies, all the while forgetting that our food, the real bottom line of
society, still comes from agriculture. Not until we produce most of our food synthetically in
factories will we in fact move out of agricultural society in this physical sense and into a truly
industrial or otherwise post-agricultural society.
A glance out of the window of an airliner at normal cruising altitude will also quickly
remind us that we do still live in agricultural societies. Apart from providing us with almost
all the food we need and consume, agriculture also still takes up more space than any other
man-made invention or activity. In this sense, agriculture and the question of who owns or
controls the land takes on added significance, beyond the mere statistics of economists. The
Lebensraum (space to live), which often motivates and often becomes an excuse for genocide
and ethnic cleansing, is yet another aspect of land that is not recognized enough in recent
economics, even in political economics.449 Land expropriation can also be a gross human
rights violation because it can and in many cases does make the dispossessed people starve
and suffer severely in other ways.
In all three regions that I chose to study here, land was lost by the natives as a result of
the invaders being more advanced militarily. The forms that the conquests took on the ground,
however, vary from case to case, and over time. In all cases, however, there were some
indigenous people, often but not always collaborators, who were able to hang on to their land,
but it was usually both less land than their invader counterparts, and worse quality land, as
well. The currently ongoing land dispossession of Palestinians by Israelis is less of a parallel
with Graeco-Roman Egypt or South Africa. It resembles more closely the dispossession of
Native Americans during the 19th century, when all of the land came under white control in
the USA. South African Bantustans did not shrink or disappear continuously as the Palestinian
and Native American reservations do. Today, Native Americans only make up one percent of
the US population, and they only ‘control’ parts of the country that the Whites are not
interested in currently. Whenever the Whites found something that interests them there, such
as gold or uranium, however, they have been sure to expel the indigenous people, yet again.
(See Chapter I.4 above.) Similarly, the Zionist expropriation of Palestinians and theft of
Palestinian land has strongly genocidal characteristics.

447
Carter 2006: 208
448
Cf. Lester 1996: 8ff.
449
Löwstedt 1995: 77-80
 271

4.1. ‘Clearing’ Land and Facilities for the Immigrants

All of the arable land in Egypt simply became ‘crown land’, i.e. personal property of
the Ptolemaic kings and queens, although the economic aspect of land was more complicated
than that. The relatively small Greek portion of the population was not very interested in
expelling Egyptians unless Egyptians were a real nuisance. It was more interested in
exploiting them. With a mercantilist-style system – an ultimately state-controlled economy
with many additional characteristics of a market economy – Ptolemaic Egypt’s main mode of
exploitation was fiscal. In an initial land reform, the king handed out farmland to Greek
soldiers, 100 auroras to each cavalryman and 30 auroras to each infantryman, who in turn
usually became landlords to the in situ Egyptian tenants or serfs, who were then forced to pay
land-rent to the landlords (for working their own land) as well as taxes to the state. Not unlike
European serfs and slaves centuries later, many of the millions of landless Egyptian
agricultural workers were prohibited from traveling anywhere, at least during some parts of
the year. The Ptolemies also used numerous foreign mercenaries, many of them Jews,
Europeans, and Persians, in their armed forces and gave them grants of land, as well.Yet
pockets of land owned by indigenous people continued to exist throughout apartheid, just as it
would later do in South Africa, and as it still does in Palestine, and, to a much lesser degree, in
Israel.450
In many instances, the land was probably not taken in a formal sense from the
Egyptians, but from the previous Persian occupiers. We know, however, that the new capital,
Alexandria, was erected on the site of up to 16 existing Egyptian villages, only one of which –
Rhakotis, originally Ra-Kedet – remained populated by Egyptians. Rhakotis later grew into a
large, crowded slum, eventually making up approximately a quarter of the area of the
metropolis, although the Egyptian element amounted to considerably more than half of the
total of the capital’s population, very similar to Johannesburg over two millennia later, where
three-quarters of the population was confined to Soweto, and a few additional townships and
other locations.451 The Egyptian temples were the only indigenous institutions able to keep

450
Koch 1993: 488; Bowman 1996 (1986): 123; Clauss 2003: 72; Billows: Kings and Colonists: Aspects of
Macedonian Imperialism, 1995: 169ff; Bingen 2007: 192, 222; Hölbl calls Ptolemaic Egypt ‘the first known
example of true state mercantilism’, Hölbl 2001 (1994): 28. Clauss 2003: 70-72, however, calls the Ptolemaic
system a ‘plan economy’ due to its state monopolies on numerous branches of production and trade. Bingen
2007: 157ff. argues against both of these labels as anachronistic and inaccurate. Manning 2010: 124 points out
that Egyptian private land ownership persisted in parts of southern Egypt, which remained the part of the country
over which the state had the least control. The initial royal grants of land to Greek soldiers ‘…served to to pacify,
in theory, troublesome areas. . . This class of landholding evolved into hereditary tenure [and presumably also
ownership] leaving Greeks, in the main, in a better position on the land than their Egyptian counterparts.’ This
racist rearrangement of land ownership was then carried over into the Roman period as the land of Greek
soldiers, and of descendants and other heirs of Greek soldiers, was then classed as ‘private’ land under Roman
rule. Ibid: 161
451
Hellström: Alexandria – En Hellenistisk Metropol, 1997: 13; Clauss 2003: 57. Fraser believes the ethnic
Greek historian and geographer, Strabo, who – 300 years after the foundation of Alexandria – suggested that it
was built on a previously largely unpopulated site. (Fraser 1996: 186). One might as well believe at face value
the former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who more or less apparently alleged that there were no
Palestinians in Palestine until 1948. (See footnote 466 below.) Interestingly, Fraser seems to have taken the other
main source on the origin of Alexandria, pseudo-Calisthenes’ ‘Life of Alexander’ (to which Hellström also
refers), much more seriously in his earlier, massive monograph on the city. There, he also wisely concludes that
Strabo and pseudo-Callisthenes do not necessarily deliver mutually contradicting testimonies. Fraser 1972: 5f.
Compared to the most populous city in the world, ‘largely unpopulated’ could well have been meant to include
16 relatively sparsely populated villages, especially when one considers what lay before Strabo’s eyes: the
largest city in the history of mankind. At least one further ancient source, Pausanias, nevertheless held Rhakotis
to have been a ‘small town’ before Alexandria was imposed upon it. See Brazil: Alexandria: The Umbilicus of
the Ancient World, 2002: 37. Currently, there is evidence that suggests that Rhakotis – a Greek name; originally
Ra-Kedet – which had been founded more than 700 years before Alexander, was an important port city with a
temple, and even, perhaps, considered as a burial place for the last indigenous Egyptian king, Nektanebo II,
before the Greek conquest. See Kamil: Alexandria before Alexander, 2002; Véron, Goiran, Morhange, Marriner
272

considerable portions of their previous wealth, including agricultural land, although they too,
gradually became impoverished through Greek and especially Roman land seizures and
confiscation, though in fits and starts. There were also other Egyptian private owners of
land.452
The entire system of lop-sided and racialized land ownership and exploitation of
indigenous agricultural and other workers was essentially carried on during the Roman and
Byzantine eras, gradually becoming even more unequal: ‘…the first three centuries AD saw
an extension in the power and prosperity of the landed elite in the cities. . . the continued
concentration of property in later centuries, and also in the Byzantine period, saw a narrowing
of that elite.’ Just like in South Africa and Israel 2,000 years later, the indigenous people were
specifically and explicitly prohibited from buying land, at least during the first 100 years of
Roman rule.453
Especially Alexandria, the new capital city founded at the beginning of the Ptolemaic
era, was divided spatially, in an oppressive manner, between Greeks (and later Romans) on
the one hand and Egyptians on the other. There were also separate Jewish quarters and even
separate quarters for Greeks of different origins. The impoverished Egyptian quarter of
Rhakotis was situated at the south-western end of the city, not unlike Soweto – an
abbreviation for South West Townships – in, or rather outside Johannesburg, a perversely
populated apartheid city with one million inhabitants (mainly white) within city limits but
with three million in its main black suburb. Rhakotis, which housed half of Alexandria in a
quarter of its area, was also the part of the city that was farthest away from the coast, i.e. from
the center of commerce and trade, from the harbor. In this regard, as in so many others, it is
like the Black and Colored townships of Cape Town or the poor Black and Latino quarters of
the large coastal cities in another country with massive, systematic, and oppressive racist
segregation, i.e. New York (Harlem and the Bronx), Chicago (South Side) and Los Angeles
(East LA and South Central). They are all safely away from the coast and the harbor, from the
point of view of the racial elite. Johannesburg, of course, has no coast or even a river. Via
Canopica, the widest street in Alexandria, 30.5 meters wide, four times wider than the city’s
other streets, separated the racial communities as a demarcation line, similar to the current
‘Apartheid Wall’ in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank (see Chapter II.6.3 below).
The Egyptians in the southwest were kept at a maximum distance from the royal palace and
from the rest of the Greeks in the northeast. And they were also kept separated from the Jews,
who lived in the east of the city.454

& Empereur: Pollutant Lead Reveals the Pre-Hellenistic Occupation and Ancient Growth of Alexandria, Egypt,
2006; Choi: Underwater Traces of City at Alexandria Emerge: It Existed at least Seven Centuries before
Alexander the Great Arrived, 2007. Not surprisingly, J.G. Manning ignores these discoveries, as well as the
sordid details of the founding of the city by Alexander, and writes: “The Ptolemies are directly responsible for
some of the greatest achievements of the ancient world, not the least of which is the building of Alexandria – the
first ‘urban giant’ of the ancient world, home to the greatest center of learning in Mediterannean antiquity and to
the famed lighthouse, among many other significant monuments.” Manning 2010: 205. On some of the not so
glorious aspects of the ‘center of learning’ at Alexandria, see Chapter II.7.1 below.
452
Walbank 31992 (1981): 107ff; Manning 2010: 161ff.
453
Alston, Richard: The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt, 2002: 345 (quote); Lewis, N. 1983: 27, 57
454
Haas 1997: 2, 29, 49, 165; Clauss 2003: 25. (Today, 23 centuries later, Rhakotis is apparently still poor.)
Alston states that from the Roman period ‘...there is no evidence to suggest any notable division of areas between
ethnic groups.’ Alston 2002: 153. His only positive example of mixing, however, is in a residential area which
‘appears’ to have been shared by Greeks and Egyptian priests (ibid.), who, as we know, made up the only
privileged indigenous group under Greek and Roman rule. It can hardly be said to be a good argument for his
hypothesis. Moreover, Alston almost contradicts himself by later stating that ‘There is some reason to believe
that there was a measure of ethnic segregation in the cities of Roman Egypt.’ He then, however, dismisses it as a
survival from Ptolemaic times, which only further begs the question (ibid: 172). In 262 CE, during a nearly full-
blown civil war between the Egyptian south of Alexandria and the mainly Greek north of the city, Via Canopica
was referred to as more difficult to cross than the Sinai desert (Clauss 2003: 209f). On oppressive, racist,
residential segregation in US cities and an apparently unheeded warning over the subsequent bloody and
 273

Just as in apartheid South Africa, or in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, the

rural population in apartheid Egypt was driven to find work in the cities. When the tax burden
became unbearable, in particular, the peasants would try their luck there. However, Ptolemy
VI introduced a measure that would become a notorious, and indeed a hated symbol of
apartheid in South Africa, two millennia later. Peasants were only allowed into cities for 20
days. If they became involved in a court case during their stay in the city, Ptolemy decreed,
the case would have to be concluded within five days. Moreover, judges were to oversee and
further limit and regulate urbanization by administrative means, so that a sufficient number of
peasants stayed in the countryside to work the land.455
Throughout the period and throughout the land, soldiers also seem to have been a
constant nuisance to the indigenous. Aside from their main functions in rural areas as a kind
of police and feudal lord, they would simply confiscate and rearrange a house or parts of it
whenever they saw fit and usually did not bother to reinstate its original arrangement once
they were ready to leave, if they ever did leave. No form of compensation was ever paid to the
Egyptians who suffered from this practice, which would sometimes also involve acts of
physical violence against the indigenous, original inhabitants.
None of this was due to lawlessness but to another decree granting the soldiers these
extreme freedoms. The law was introduced by one of the first two Ptolemies, who apparently
felt insecure about relying militarily on short-term contract mercenaries, as all rulers of Egypt
– indigenous or not – had done since the 9th century BCE. With this new decree, however,
there would be many soldiers who stayed in service longer, and the amount of soldiers who
stayed for good also increased. In addition, as the profession increasingly became hereditary,
the mercenaries would gradually start turning into a caste of aristocrats and landlords, largely
loyal to the royals.456
The Arabian invasion of Egypt brought about the end of the apartheid land regime.
The Muslim liberators did not confiscate Egyptian land, although villas of the Greeks who
fled in the 640s were taken. Unlike the Greeks in Egypt, unlike the Whites in South Africa
(and the western hemisphere), unlike the Jews in modern Palestine, the Arabians were foreign
invaders who perpetrated neither genocide nor apartheid upon the indigenous population of
Egypt.457

destructive LA riots, see Hamilton: Apartheid in an American City: The Case of the Black Community in Los
Angeles, 1987.
455
Huß 2001: 594
456
Walbank 31992 (1981): 116f; Blomqvist 1997: 63f. Manning 2010: 82 suggests that some Egyptian priests
also came close to becoming an ‘aristocratized bureaucracy’. Interestingly, though, the transformation into an
aristocratized society was never fulfilled, neither for Egyptians nor for the much more privileged Greek proto-
aristocrats. This ‘failure’ to become a feudal or otherwise aristocratized society, in my view, makes Graeco-
Roman Egypt more of an apartheid society, or racial, or racist society, than a class society. A close parallel to the
practices of Ptolemaic soldiers can be seen today in the Israeli army requisitioning, i.e. occupation, of civilian
Palestinian houses on nominally Palestinian land. When their military use, if any, is no longer required, they are
often left littered and partly damaged by the soldiers, for no apparent reason, and with no compensation or
apology offered. Moreover, moveable, valuable Palestinian property has often been stolen during such operations
by individual Israeli soldiers, including the commanding officers, again without compensation or apology to the
victims. A handful of Israeli soldiers have been given short jail sentences for having been found out, apparently a
cosmetic move by the Israeli army in response to domestic and international criticism amid daily reports of
looting and destruction of Palestinian homes by Israeli soldiers during the beginning of this century. See Hauser:
Israeli Withdrawal Leaves Debris of Incursion, 2001; Ass’adi: Bitter Memories after Israel Quits Palestinian
City, 2001; Batrawi: Occupation: Only Teddy Bears Sleep in Peace, 2002; Williams, D.: Israeli Army under Fire
for Looting, 2002; Ass’adi: Israeli Soldiers “Share” Palestinian Family’s Home, 2002; Sherwood: Palestinians
Returning Home Find Israeli Troops Left Faeces and Venomous Graffiti, 2014.
457
Sijpesteijn 2007: 455. Nor did the Muslims impose their religion on the indigenous people, except in a very
slow and indirect way. The only kind of severe oppression introduced, of which I am aware, was taxation of the
indigenous Egyptians to finance the further expansion of Islam and Arab culture and Arab rule. This could and
probably should be seen as a kind of colonialism, and it did lead to violence, as well. Ibid.
274

4.2. Dispossession and Selective Urbanization

In South Africa, land dispossession started before the Khoikhoi and the San were first
deprived of their land by Whites in the 1600s. Land dispossession was firstly a result of
indigenous competition for grazing land and hunting and foraging grounds. Increasingly,
Bantu-speaking agriculturalists then trickled into South Africa from around 2,000 years ago,
but, presumably due mainly to low population density, competition for land was certainly not
(in the wide sense) ‘genocidal’ or ever intense in character until the Whites showed up in the
17th century. Before then, Khoisan groups remained spread rather evenly across the country,
but after the arrival of the Whites the Khoisan started to disappear, especially from the South,
due to ethnic cleansing and flight as well as to White-borne diseases.
An additional dimension of land dispossession in South Africa began in the 1870s
after the discovery of diamonds and other minerals, when competition for land intensified
further. In the 1880s and 1890s, industrial development flourished following the discovery of
gold, leaving small sharecroppers out of the market, which resulted in the increase of squatter
areas. This was the case for both black and white small sharecroppers, yet due to the fact that
racist attitudes, practices and laws against the Blacks already existed, authorities ensured that
white squatters would live in better conditions than non-Whites. In 1913, a Land Act was
established which limited black land ownership to 7 percent of the entire land area, forcing
many Blacks to leave their own land, their ancestral lands, and move into reserves. With the
1936 Land Act, the black population as a whole was allowed to own a maximum 13 percent
of the land, presumably in order to sustain 66 percent of the population. This racist law
remained in place until the end of apartheid.458 As we shall see, its intent and extent is in
relative terms even more racist in its current Israeli reincarnation.
Today, still, Whites conversely make up less than 11 percent of the population but
hold more than 85 percent of the land, including nine tenths of the country’s productive land.
By the year 2000, only 0.81 percent of commercial farmland had been redistributed in six
years of democracy as opposed to an initial state-set target of 30 percent over the first five
years of democratic rule.459 The Department of Land Affairs then radically changed its tune
and instead vowed to transfer 30 percent of agricultural land back into black hands by 2014.
Five percent of this land had changed hands by late 2002. But six years later, the number was
still only five percent. The land department had said in 2002 that it needed around 26 billion
rand ($2.54 billion) a year to meet its new target, but currently it only received one billion
rand. Many Blacks had by now grown angry at the slow pace of restitution, which is based on
the ‘willing-seller, willing-buyer principle’. White landowners have inflated prices and used
lawyers to drag out the legal processes, making it all but impossible for the cash-strapped state
department to buy the stolen land back from them. Moreover, ‘troublesome’ black farm labor
tenants are still being evicted, as if apartheid still ruled. Roger Roman, a white South African,
commented: ‘Far more [black] people have been evicted [from white-owned farms] since
1994 than have benefited from land reform in the same period.’ On the other hand, resentful
violence against white farmers is also rampant. There were nearly 2,000 attacks on them in
2000 and 2001, 282 were killed. Many of these murders, however, appear to be simple,
criminal acts, committed for personal gain. Finally, in these days of global food price hikes,
South Africa has now become a net importer of food after having been a food net exporter for
decades. US and EU farmers, buoyed by their own generous state subsidies, are competing
South Africans, white and black, who are at the mercy of rogue, global capitalism, out of the
markets. White South African farmers are understandably not investing into the land which

458
Lester 1996: 59
459
Commey November 2002; Thomasson: Southern Africa Struggles to Redistribute Land, 1998; Seccombe:
South African Government Urged to Speed Up Land Reform, 2000. The need to rectify this situation, according
to the South African National Land Committee, is exacerbated by the fact that almost half of the country’s
population still lives in rural areas.
 275

they might soon have to leave. Roman concludes: ‘South Africa is once again proving that
that the neo-liberal, market-oriented, land reform programmes negotiated at the time of
independence [liberation from apartheid] are bound to fail.’460
The 1923 Native (Urban Areas) Act allowed ‘limited’ black residence in white areas.
Those who still lived in white areas lived without their real families in servants’ quarters,
called the ‘boy’s kaya’, situated behind the white people’s houses. The Act also meant that the
black population would not be eligible to utilize white-funded urban amenities. This
developed seamlessly into the apartheid era. In the meantime, some migrant Blacks were
allowed into white towns under the condition that they find work within two weeks. In 1948,
this was reduced to three days. A passbook system was implemented, and the passbook was
stamped to indicate the length of time one was permitted in an urban center. As opposed to
Blacks, Whites did not have to carry any passbooks, although they were nominally not
allowed into black areas either.461 If the Blacks did not find work in the minimal time allowed
them, they would be sent ‘back’ to the reserves, just like the Egyptians under Greek and
Roman rule, or the Palestinians under Israeli rule.
In the years that followed, segregation, as previously mentioned, did not only include
spatial divisions but economic and political ones as well. It must be noted however, that
segregation was implemented differently at different locations in the country. In Cape Town,
for example, one third of the population lived in racially mixed areas (in the 1930s), whereas
Durban was already strictly segregated according to race. An even more rigid and racist legal
framework for spatial segregation, particularly in urban areas, was thoroughly accomplished
by the time of the rise of apartheid in a narrow sense.
Whites not only deprived Blacks of the right to land and their freedom of movement,
but also extracted South Africa’s natural wealth for their own benefit, leaving the rest of the
population physically and economically marginalized and dependent. Most Whites, as van den
Heever’s writings demonstrate, believed that this was their right, by virtue of occupation:
‘Boer and soil are bound together and the Boer is South Africa.’462 With dispossession having
been so successful for the Whites by the late 1880s, it was easy for them to dominate
industrialization and urbanization, as Blacks and other non-Whites were weak from the outset.
Both wealth and class depended primarily on race. From the beginning of the
twentieth century, the South African government had been resettling illegal black squatters.
But, on the whole, little attention was given to the squatter areas and little was done to
improve them, even after the war, when the economy was once again flourishing. This
indicates that the South African apartheid government in the narrow sense was not concerned
with the poorer classes of society, regardless of their color. But it especially neglected the
non-white population in the squatter areas. For instance, according to John Western, ‘...no
single government has created greater Colored resentment...and sense of injustice.’463
More than 79,000 claims for restitution of land taken since the 1913 Land Act –
which, in the words of Roman, ‘…legalised the land thefts achieved by war and superior
weaponry during the preceding 250 years’ (of white conquest in South Africa) – have been
lodged with the new, epiapartheid government, which is forced to buy the land back from the
white beneficiaries of apartheid at market prices. Needless to say, the process is a very slow
one. The ANC government of today is therefore facing increasing pressure to facilitate access
to fertile commercial land for the previously severely oppressed black majority.464

460
Roman: Time Bomb Still Ticking, 2009 (quotes: 41); Commey November 2002; N.N.: South Africa Lags
Behind Land Reform Target, October 22, 2002
461
Lester 1996: 85
462
Quoted in Lester 1996: 38
463
Western: Outcast Cape Town, 1981: 310
464
Thomasson February 11, 1998; Seccombe June 2, 2000; Isa: S.Africa Says Needs $2 Bln for Black Land
Claims, 2004; Commey: Land Reform Bites the Dust, 2008; quote: Roman 2009: 42. 56,400 of the 79,000 land
claims had already been settled at the cost of only one billion Rand by 2004. However, the remaining were the
276

In my opinion, one of the reasons why there is so much vehemence against Robert
Mugabe’s land reforms in Zimbabwe, in campaigns led by western powers, is not only that
powerful white landowners are reluctant to give back stolen lands to their rightful black
owners, but that land thieves everywhere in the world are afraid they will have to give back
the territories they have stolen. Not only white people have stolen land, and not only from
other racial groups. Thus, many non-Whites around the world have also joined in the
campaign, orchestrated by media tycoons sympathetic or identical to the white landowners,
against Mugabe (who is certainly no angel, but in this instance, among many others, has
turned out to be anti-apartheid), and against Zimbabwe and the dispossessed, landless
majority of the world.
Today, according to the New African magazine, 83 percent of South Africa’s land
(and 95 percent of the country’s economy) belong to people belonging to a ten-percent
minority of South Africans, to white people. Of course, some Whites are also landless, so it is
indeed a tiny minority that controls the country, but that minority is still overwhelmingly
white. This, according to Motsoko Pheko, is largely due to a kind of sellout by the ANC,
today’s ruling party, already in 1955, when the ANC launched its famous ‘Freedom Charter’,
a document that toned down and even contradicted the need for land and wealth redistribution
originally demanded in the founding principles of the ANC in 1912. This partial reorientation
of the ANC around western (north Atlantic) values such as ‘freedom’, and away from values
such as ‘economic justice’, is perhaps the most important transformation during its 100-year
history.465 Yet, even if the ANC has betrayed its own principles in this manner, one must not
forget the immense pressure under which the organization suffered at this time. It was barely
legal and harrassed, threatened, and sabotaged continuously by the greatest powers in the
region, the continent, and the world. And so, the blame for the cause of South Africa’s
persistently epiapartheid land and economic regimes should not be shouldered by its currently
ruling party alone, but mainly by its white land-owning class and its many allies abroad,
especially the UK and the USA.

4.3. Ethnic Cleansing of Non-existent People

To some Israelis, the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ never referred to anything or
anyone, so with the establishment of the state of Israel, no one was disregarded or
dispossessed. The other people who claimed the land, the Palestinians, did not exist in the first
place. Golda Meir, a founder and the fourth Prime Minister of the State of Israel (1968-1974)
contended that:

It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and in Palestine

largest and legally most difficult claims due to white investments into it during and (marginally) since apartheid.
Zimbabwe, which was conquered and seized by the Whites (the British) in a very similar way to South Africa
(see Section I.4), carried out a land restitution program between 2000 and 2002, which was unique in Africa. The
country’s judiciary attempted to block the move on legal grounds, western governments tried to block it with
economic and diplomatic pressure. The 804 white-owned farms first selected by the government made up around
10 percent of the prime farmland owned by the country’s one-percent white minority, a fact seldom reported in
western media. See, however, Chinaka: Zimbabwe Lists 804 Farms for Seizure, 2000; See also Seccombe: South
Africa Warns on Possible Zimbabwe-Style Landgrabs, 2000; Eisenstein: Namibia Says May Expropriate White
Farms, 2002. Later, Zimbabwe’s government identified a total of 3,041 white-owned farms for resettlement. The
combined area of those farms was around half of the country’s commercial agricultural land. See N.N.:
Zimbabwe’s Mugabe Says Land Resettlement to Continue, December 20, 2000; Esipisu November 11, 2002. On
the broader problem throughout the region, see Seccombe: Land Ownership Disputes Simmer in Southern
Africa, 2001. In Namibia, similarly, a post- and neo-colonial white minority which makes up a mere six percent
of the total population owned 75 percent of the arable land in 2004, 14 years after liberation from different kinds
of destructive white supremacist rule. See Esipisu: Namibia Says Starts Expropriating White Farms, 2004. In
2013, the New African magazine reported that Whites in Namibia control nearly 90 percent of the country’s
territory. Sasa: Landless in the Land of the Brave, 2013: 38
465
Commey 2012; Pheko: How the ANC Betrayed Its Founding Principles, 2012
 277

considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them

out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.466

Jewish immigrants established themselves in Israel, taking Palestinian land, using it

for grazing their animals, building on it, making it their own, so that by 1967 (when the rest of
Palestine became Israeli land) the Palestinians became entirely landless. Many Palestinians
had been forced to move to neighboring Arab countries (Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon) after Al
Nakba – the disaster (of Palestinian dispossession) in 1948 – whereby they became refugees.
If the UN had given Jews land that they actually lived on or owned in Palestine in
1948, they would have received no more than 10 percent of Palestine. If they had received
land according to relative population numbers, they would have received a third. Instead they
received more than half, including the best agricultural land, the only port, etc. 467 And since
then, the land grabs have only accumulated. Today, Israeli Jews, the racial elite minority,
controls well over 90 percent of Historic Palestine.
The premeditated confiscation of land began with the establishment of the state of
Israel, during which 531 Palestinian villages and eleven urban neighborhoods were destroyed,
depopulated and replaced by Israeli towns and settlements. Before this, Zionists and non-
Zionist Jews had legally bought land in British-held Palestine, and of course this still happens
today, in a legal manner, within the state of Israel. However, Palestinians are not allowed to
buy land in Israel, even if they are Israeli citizens. Since this is racist discrimination, and
racism is a crime under international law, the legality of some Jewish land purchases within
Israel should therefore come under debate. An estimated 70 percent of land belonging to
Palestinian citizens of Israel has been confiscated or made unavailable to them. Moreover,
Zionists have repeatedly tried to buy territory militarily occupied by Israel, although this is
illegal under international law (the 4th Geneva Conventions, to which Israel is a signatory).
This is especially taking place in east Jerusalem, where long lines of middlemen are arranged
so that it first appears that not Israeli Jews, but foreigners, are buying the land.468
Crude land confiscation, land theft, is also still taking place today, after 60 years of
occupation, and fifteen years of the ‘Arab-Israeli peace process’, which was supposed to put
an end to further confiscation of Palestinian land.469 During the Intifadas, even more

466
Quoted in The Sunday Times, London, June 15, 1967. The perpetuation of this very consciously created myth
and/or obfuscation can still be seen today. In a highly unusual opinion article for this newspaper – Lewis, A.: At
Home Abroad: The Price of Occupation, The New York Times, June 2, 2001 – the author relates: “When I wrote
critically of the settlements in a recent column, I got letters and messages seeking to justify them in the most
fantastic terms. One dismissed Palestinians as a nonexistent nation - people who had ‘crept into the country from
Egypt, Jordan and Syria.’ . . . Other readers insisted that Jewish settlements in the occupied territories were built,
as one put it, ‘on unwanted, unclaimed property.’ Can such readers really be ignorant of the pain suffered by
Palestinians who have seen their olive groves bulldozed to make room for settlements?”
467
Pappe 2006: 31
468
Palestine & The UN: 50 years of Historic Injustice, 1998: 2; Miftah: Palestinian Jerusalemites Targeted
Again, 2005; Pappe 2006: 223; Tilley (ed.) 2009: 263. Similarly, Dutch settlers in the Cape Colony sometimes
stole cattle and sometimes bought it in the Cape Colony. Land was not for sale in pre-White South Africa, but of
course it became a much fought-for source of wealth, just as in Palestine. See N.N.: Oppression Of Khoikhoi and
Xhosa, no date.
469
Erlanger: Israelis Are Settling on Private Territory: Palestinian Land Seized, Report Shows, 2007; Kiley:
Palestinians Driven Out by Israeli ‘Apartheid’, 2000; N.N.: Gulf Media Slam ‘Racist’ Israeli Buffer Zone Plan,
February 23, 2002. Erlanger reports that 32.4 percent of the land stolen for Jewish settlements was privately
owned Palestinian land. Of course, collectively owned land was stolen in the remainder of the cases, but the
point is that Israel, like the other European or euro-descendant land thieves around the world, has considered it
preferable to steal land from collectives, rather than from individuals. Indigenous individuals who claimed
private land in societies that traditionally preferred collective land ownership or collective tenure were mostly
collaborators with the Europeans, who only respect individual land ownership, if at all. By de-solidarizing with
their own race, they become useful tools in the hands of the oppressors. Nonetheless, a third of Israeli land theft
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is illegal even under the unjust Israeli law. The traditional Palestinian
voluntary musha’ system of rotation of plots of land under community ownership, which ensured that no peasant
278

settlements were being built than previously. By 1988, more than 70,000 Israeli settlers were
living in West Bank and Gaza, acquiring control over 40 percent of the land. Yitzhak Shamir,
the former Israeli prime minister, declared at the time that there would never be any domestic
or international force which would prevent Israelis from building settlements anywhere in the
land of Israel, by which he also meant land illegally occupied by that country’s armed
forces.470 In 2002, according to the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, Jewish settlements
controlled nearly 42 percent of the West Bank and 40 percent of the Gaza Strip. Moreover, the
Israeli army has retaken vast areas since the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Over 40 percent
of the land in the occupied territories is now for 460,000 Jewish settlers, less than 60 percent
for over 3 million Palestinians, when and if the Israeli army retreats.471 By 1996, east
Jerusalem alone had become the home of 150,000 to 200,000 new Jewish settlers.472 In 2007,
the UN reported there were 460,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem, all of
them illegally.473
One of Israel’s goals is to acquire as much of the land as possible, to secure and extend
its dominance in the Holy Land. The main ‘justification’, i.e. excuse, for the expansion has
always been security: security for the Jewish state. At the same time, however, it aims at
minimizing Palestinian developments in the region. Large amounts of money provided by the
Israeli government and others, such as the World Zionist Organization and the USA, have
been spent in support of settlement expansion. Between 1968 and 1986 alone, the capital
investment reached a total of $2 billion.474 Due to this being a governmental policy, it became
legal under Israeli law for settlements to expand, although it flies in the face of international
law. Israeli expansion is taking place for security as well as for the improvement of the
inhabitants’ well-being – the Israeli settlers’. The following description of that policy comes
from Tanya Reinhart, an Israeli professor of linguistics, who actively opposed the occupation:

I believe that even much before its present atrocities, Israel has
followed the South African Apartheid model. Behind the smoke
screen of the Oslo ‘Peace process’, Israel has been pushing the
Palestinians in the occupied territories into smaller and smaller
isolated enclaves – a direct copy of the Bantustans model. Unlike
South Africa, however, Israel has managed so far to sell its policy as a
big compromise for peace. Aided by a battalion of cooperating
‘peace-camp’ intellectuals, they managed to convince the world that it

was impoverished relative to the others, was actually first attacked by the Ottomans towards the end of their rule.
But by the second half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling and desperately looking to
European imperialism for more profitable, i.e. exploitative and oppressive, schemes such as the forced
privatization of land. But it was not until the British Mandate, and then, especially, under Zionist rule, that the
musha’ system was destroyed in favor of private land ownership. See Pappe: A History of Modern Palestine:
One Land, Two Peoples, 2004: 15, 24; Abdel Jawad: Post-Zionist Interpretation, 2004. The buffer zone plan,
announced by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon on February 21, 2002, envisaged a military buffer zone, later
known as ‘the apartheid wall’, between Jews and Palestinians, up to 3 kilometers deep, with concrete barriers,
trenches, mine fields and electronic fences, to be set up on the Palestinian side of each of the numerous physical
racial divides. The Israeli excuse for the tightening of blockades and the barrier is that they are responses to
suicide attacks on territory held by Jews. Even some Israelis, however, concede that several suicide attacks took
place during blockades. Thus, Palestinian militants are always likely to find a way into Jewish-held territory. See
Ass’adi: Palestinians Say Israeli Checkpoints Stir Fury, 2002; Heritage: Analysis - Israel Buffer Zone Plan Will
Take Time, Has Flaws, 2002. More importantly, the buffer zone turned out to be yet another instance of Israeli
land theft. See Chapter II.6.3 below.
470
Al Haq 1988: 113. Especially in comparison with South Africa, the area is so densely populated that Jewish
settlement expansion necessarily entails confiscation of Palestinian land.
471
N.N.: Settlers Control 42 Pct of West Bank-Rights Group, May 13, 2002
472
Webb: Settlement Expansion Update, 1996: 26. Webb’s estimate is the higher one. The estimate of 150,000
Jewish settlers in east Jerusalem, cited in footnote 161, uses narrower city limits.
473
Dugard 2007
474
Al Haq 1988: 114
 279

is possible to establish a Palestinians state without land-reserves,

without water, without a glimpse of a chance of economic
independence, in isolated ghettos surrounded by fences, settlements,
bypass roads and Israeli army posts – a virtual state which serves one
purpose: separation (Apartheid). . . . But what Israel is doing under
Sharon far exceeds the crimes of…South Africa’s white regime. It has
been taking the form of systematic ethnic cleansing…475

Palestinians have probably been more violent than black South Africans against the
apartheid elites during the last decades. But Israeli Jews have been even greedier for land than
the white South Africans were, and they have also expelled many more indigenous people, at
least in relative terms, directly and indirectly.
Palestinians from Jerusalem do not have the right to buy land in Jerusalem from the
State of Israel. They are considered ‘residents’, not ‘citizens’ of Israel, just like the
‘Homeland’ South Africans were officially considered ‘visitors’ in their own country,
sometimes even in their own place of birth. Similarly, in Ptolemaic Alexandria, Egyptians
were considered ‘indigenous’, but Greeks were ‘citizens’ and ‘genuine Alexandrians’. In
Roman-ruled Alexandria, likewise, there were ‘true Alexandrians’, on the one hand, and
‘Egyptians’, on the other.476
Those Arabs who still own land and property in Jerusalem owned it prior to the 1967
occupation. Therefore, if Palestinians wish to buy and sell land in east Jerusalem, then they do
it privately. Yet all Jerusalem Palestinians must still pay a land tax to the Israeli government
in addition to income tax. The tax revenues for this land tax are then used by the authorities
almost exclusively for the development of Jewish areas.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in rural areas face similarly blatant state-imposed
measures to deny them, not only of their citizen’s rights, but also of their human rights, and to
exploit them economically at the same time.

Israel’s Agricultural Settlement Law of 1967 expressly forbids Jewish

leaseholders of state lands from subleasing them back to Palestinian
Christians and Muslims. Moreover, in 1965, the Israeli parliament
passed the Planning and Construction Law, which zoned all land in
Israel as residential, industrial, or agricultural/nature reserve, and
forbade construction on all agricultural land. The law was retroactive,
which meant that designating any area as ‘agricultural’ immediately
made all its pre-existing buildings illegal. Dozens of historic and
ancient Palestinian villages in existence long before the creation of the
state of Israel in 1948, were subsequently designated ‘agricultural’ by
the Israeli government, making them ‘unrecognized’ and illegal.
‘Unrecognized’ Palestinian villages in Israel receive no access to
water, electricity, sanitation, or roads. Nevertheless, the Palestinian
residents of these villages are forced to pay taxes to Israel, which
reserves the right to demolish these historic sites at any time.

475
Reinhart: Academic Boycott: In Support Of Paris VI, 2003. In this article, the author applauds the brave
boycott of Israeli academic institutions by Marie Curie Université Paris VI due to Israel’s making academic life
impossible in the Occupied Territories, and due to Israeli academic institutions not lifting one finger to stop it.
The boycott predictably ran into serious trouble for the esteemed French university. “Bodies ranging from the
Jewish Lobby to conservative parties came up with the standard anti-Semitism accusations. ‘Several hundred
protesters, including the philosophers Bernard Henri-Lèvy and Alain Finkielkraut, a leading Paris politician, the
Nazi-hunting lawyer Arno Klarsfeld and Roger Cukier, the president of the Jewish umbrella organisation CRIF,
waved banners and chanted slogans outside the campus entrance’ (The Guardian, January 7, 2003).” Reinhart
2003. On a similar and even wider boycott in Britain, see Kasrils & Brittain: Both Palestinians and Israelis Will
Benefit from a Boycott, 2005; Curtis &.Taylor: Second Opinion, 2005.
476
Walbank 31992 (1981): 113; Davis, Simon 1951: 69f; Haas 1997: 60
280

Coincidentally, no Jewish villages became ‘unrecognized’ as result of

this law.477

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, after his first election victory in 1996,
announced his full support for the ‘right’ of Jewish settlers to move and live wherever they
wanted in the Palestinian territories (which were by then in part officially controlled by the
Palestinian Authority and no longer under Israeli control). Netanyahu’s government allocated
NIS 900 million (approx. $300 million) for the 1997 budget to the expansion of Jewish
settlements. In 2002, prime minister Ariel Sharon echoed that sentiment by declaring that:
‘The rights to the land of Israel are Jewish exclusively’, referring to both the state of Israel
and territories it captured in the 1967 war. He reluctantly added: ‘But all living there are
entitled to rights.’ Sharon left it at that, failing to explicate what rights he was willing to
extend to non-Jews.478 It appears that the rights to vote or to survive Israeli army attacks, to
move freely, to keep one’s land, and many others, were not among the rights he envisaged for
Palestinians after 35 years of continuous Israeli military occupation.
The so-called ‘Oslo peace process’, initiated in 1993, achieved greater segregation,
because when given self-rule in certain areas, the Palestinians from these areas were no longer
permitted access to areas under Israeli rule, including east Jerusalem. (The region is now
divided into three parts: Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, including some areas, which are still
under Israeli rule, but will supposedly – some day – be returned to the Palestinians). Thus, the
Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza are not allowed to enter Israel. People have
become isolated from the rest of the country. This does not only harm the Palestinian
economy (many people from the West Bank worked in Israel prior to this division but are now
no longer allowed to do so); their freedom to move and thus to integrate the scattered self-rule
areas was also compromised.
The Pass Laws present another parallel between South Africa and Israel, with the
bureaucracy of segregation attaining new heights in present-day Israel. A more essential
difference is contained in the fact that segregation was the chosen option of the main players
in the Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’.479 In terms of the South African transition from
apartheid, this puts current Israeli-Palestinian relations into the 1976-1981 phase, when South
Africa granted ‘independence’ to the ‘Bantustans’ or ‘Homelands’. Similarly, the territories
granted to the Palestinians are of little interest to the Israelis. They are widely dispersed, and
they are not centers of economic development. To a large extent, the Israelis are also making
sure that they never will be centers of production or trade. The Israeli government uprooted no
less than 100,000 trees in the West Bank and Gaza during the first three months of the Second
Intifada. Many of these were olive and citrus trees and the losses incurred were estimated at
US$127 million.480 Moreover, the Palestinian Homelands are landlocked, except Gaza, which
only started work on its first harbor in the year 2000 and was forced by Israeli army
demolitions to abandon the project in the following year481, and they have no water resources

477
Muhaisen: Israel Is the World’s Last Apartheid State! 2002. See Pappe 2006 for the confirmation of and
proof supporting the charge that Palestine has been and is subject to ethnic cleansing of its indigenous
population.
478
N.N.: Sharon Unrepentant on Israeli Claims, Army Conduct, September 14, 2002
479
Amr, H.: Palestinian and South African Elections Compared, 1996: 19-22
480
Ass’adi: Israel Uproots 100,000 Trees in West Bank and Gaza, 2001
481
‘In September [2001] Israeli tanks rolled into the [harbor] site…and flattened the work site buildings. Israeli
officials say the action was taken because Palestinians were using the area to fire mortar shells at a nearby Jewish
settlement. Palestinians say it is collective punishment for their uprising against occupation.’ Subsequently, the
crucial financial backing from France and the Netherlands, needed to start the harbor project, was cancelled,
although a new project in the future was not ruled out. The reason given for the cancellation was ‘security
concerns’. In a parallel development, the runway of Gaza’s only airport was torn up for the third time by Israelis
in December 2001 in what also appeared to be a case of collective punishment. Blair: Flags at Half Mast as Gaza
Port Plans Fade, 2001. During 2001 alone, the IDF destroyed an estimated 14.5 million euros ($12.8 million)
 281

of their own, now facing a blockade at which even foreign humanitarian aid workers get
murdered by Israel for meaning to help the besieged population of Gaza.
Similar to what the Whites did with the South African Bantustans, the Israelis also
ensured an economic dependency on a minimum of no less than 90 percent Israeli-made
products in ‘self-rule’ areas. This system keeps pumping Palestinian money into Israel and
leaves Palestinians at the mercy of Israeli product deliveries. 482 It was achieved not least
because of the cunning geographic positioning of the ‘self-rule’ areas, which are completely
surrounded by Israeli-administered areas, again precisely paralleled in the Bantustans in South
Africa, as well as in the Native reservations in the USA.
Even the number of Bantustans, ten in South Africa and ten (proposed in 2003) in the
West Bank (with an additional one in the Gaza Strip) speak for the depth of the inspiration
that South African elites provided to the Israeli elites. One may guess as to whether the
Israelis came up with the same number out of arrogance or unawareness. But the number ten
is no pure accident. It is simply in the nature of apartheid regimes – as well as genocidal
regimes, such as the USA – to divide the indigenous areas into a large number of isolated and
relatively small territories, which are strategically, politically, economically, and socially
surrounded by the racial minority’s or racial elite’s much larger and economically superior
tracts of land. It is basically the condemnation of a whole nation, the indigenous nation, to a
perpetual state of siege.483
Since 1967 Israel has demolished more than 2,000 houses in east Jerusalem alone, 350
of them for being built without permits, according to a European Union-funded research

worth of Palestinian projects funded by European Union taxpayers, the main financial donors to the Palestinian
Authority. In referring to a report on the damage, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said it was hard to see
how the destruction of civilian infrastructure financed by foreign donors could be related to combating terrorism,
which remained Israel’s official excuse for causing the damage. Aside from the destruction of the airport and
harbor, the Israelis had destroyed a forestry project, a counter-terrorism forensic laboratory, the Palestinian
central bureau of statistics, two schools, sewage, irrigation, road repair and housing projects financed by the EU.
See N.N.: Israeli Attacks Hit EU-Funded Palestinian Projects, January 22, 2002. On the following day, the
French foreign ministry spokesman, Bernard Valero, said that the EU might ask Israel to pay for the damage it
has inflicted on these projects. On January 28, the EU officially reserved the right to claim reparations from
Israel for the damage. In response, Israel reiterated its claim that the destruction was unintended, adding that it
would try to avoid it in the future. N.N.: EU Could Ask Israel to Pay for Damage, France Says, January 23, 2002;
Hauser: Israel to Try to Avoid Damaging EU Projects, 2002. Yet, only weeks later, the EU estimated that Israel
had destroyed many more millions worth of EU-funded projects in the West Bank during its April 2002 attacks
on Palestinian territories. The toll now stood at nearly 20 million euros ($ 17.6 million at that time) Similarly, the
UN relief and workers agency, UNRWA, announced that it also considered asking Israel for compensation to
repair nearly $4 million in damages caused by the Israeli military in UN-run Palestinian refugee camps before
the April 2002 incursions and subsequent reoccupations. UNRWA said the Israeli Defense Force had damaged
22 UN schools, four UN health clinics, two UN ambulances and four camp service centers. Repairs were needed
to 141 refugee homes that were destroyed and 1,800 shelters that suffered minor damage. This was in addition to
the more than 5,000 refugee homes damaged or destroyed by bulldozing and shelling since September 2000.
UNRWA also said its damage assessment did not include funds that would be needed to cover social and welfare
services for households without a breadwinner, physical rehabilitation for the injured and trauma counseling for
children who witnessed battles in the streets and in their homes. UNRWA chief Peter Hansen said Israel was less
responsive to calls for humanitarian access to victims than governments had been in other war zones such as
Bosnia, Chechnya, Angola and Sudan. See Leopold: UN Considers Asking Israel for Compensation Money,
2002; Butler: Israeli Attacks Hit EU-backed Palestinian Projects, 2002.
482
Related by television news correspondent Rula Amin on CNN International World News, February 3, 2001.
See also Blair: Palestinian Shoppers Urged to Fight Back at Israel, 2001. Similarly, there was a boycott of white-
owned supermarkets and shops in the Johannesburg area in the early 1970s. See Biko 2004 (1978): 78.
483
Eldar: Sharon’s Bantustans Are Far from Copenhagen’s Hope, 2003, even claims that Sharon proudly and
explicitly proclaimed to Italy’s former prime minister, Massimo D’Alema, that the South African Bantustan
model was to be imposed by him on the Palestinians. Eldar also points out that Israel came the closest ever of all
countries in the world to officially recognizing a South African Bantustan, but that strong US pressure made
Israel leave it at a diplomatic representation – rather than an embassy – of Bophuthatswana in Tel Aviv.
282

project.484 And this is in no way merely a ‘right-wing’ government activity in Israel. In the
first six months of Ehud Barak’s Labor Party-led premiership, Israel constructed 7,128 new
settlement units, more than were built in three years when Netanyahu of the extreme right
Likud Party was prime minister for the first time.485
It seems as if there is a basic division of labor between the ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’
governments of Israel. The latter steals more, the former kills more. But that division of labor
is not part of a genuinely democratic culture, as Israeli, American, and European elites are
fond of claiming, because the Zionist ideals and aims of both parties are identical, and they
both include the brutal maximization of Jewish-held territory inside and outside Israel. The
demos – the people – of Israel are not the people inside its borders, not the people under its
military control, not even its citizens, but its Jews.

(T)oday the Jewish National Fund, a member of the World Zionist

Organisation, administers 93% of the land of Israel. To live on land,
lease it, sharecrop or work on it, one must establish four generations
of maternal Jewish descent. In Israel, such a lineage is necessary in
order to enjoy elementary rights. We cannot mistake the
quintessentially racist character of such a state. Israel is an apartheid
state, founded on pillage and predicated on exclusivity. Rights flow
from ethnic and religious identity. . . . Land ownership in Palestine is
more unjust than it ever was in South Africa. At the height of
apartheid black people nominally ‘controlled’ 13 percent of the land,
in Israel the oppressed control only 2 percent.486

The theft of Palestinian land by Zionists and the state of Israel is one of the grandest
existing schemes of land theft. Yet, Palestinian refugees have in numerous cases held on to
their property deeds and even to the keys to their houses, some of which are now housing
Jews who never paid for the land or the house. Therefore, for many Palestinian refugees,
peace and justice can still come. Land, and even homes, can be given back again to their
rightful owners, and thieves can be punished. This makes the Palestinian peace even more
implementable than the South African one, and, of course, than the Egyptian one.

484
Ass’adi: Israel Increases Palestinian Home Demolitions – Report, 2000. After the Intifada broke out later that
year, Israel started an unprecedented run of Palestinian home demolitions. By March 2004, UNRWA, the United
Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, said Israeli forces had demolished 1,400 homes throughout Gaza, and
more than 900 in the city of Rafah alone, since the uprising began in 2000. Nearly 15,000 people had been made
homeless, according to UNRWA. Israel said the figures were exaggerated. Johnston: Palestinians Fear for
Homes at Gaza Border Hotspot, 2004. After this prophetic article was written, Israel completely destroyed at
least another 259 buildings and damaged many more in Rafah, killing scores of Palestinians in the process. As
opposed to Israeli media and outside world media, the mainstream news media in the USA hardly covered this
major world news event, except a little from the Israeli army perspective. See Parry: Time to Put the US Media
on Trial for Complicity in Genocide? 2004 and Chapter II.9.3 below. See Löwstedt 2004 on the strong merits to
Parry’s case for arresting and trying US civilian (as well as state) organizations and individuals, in particular the
Atlanta-based Cable News Network and some of its employees and managers, for abetting Israeli crimes against
humanity, although I also argue that the Parry’s label, ‘genocide’, is an exaggerated one for the purpose of a
general terminological, conceptual and legal overview of the nature of the crime. It should be and it is quite
enough to charge them with abetting apartheid, also a crime against humanity in international law.
485
Lyon: Barak ‘Far Worse than Netanyahu’ - Arafat, 2000
486
Palestine Solidarity Committee, South Africa: Apartheid Israel and the Struggle for a Democratic Secular
Palestine, 2001. See footnote 859 below, on the ANC’s staunch opposition to Israeli apartheid. Perhaps it does
not need pointing out, but, if anyone, surely, the ANC and other South African liberation organizations should
know what apartheid is, what it means, and what it does. And we should listen to them if they say apartheid
exists elsewhere in the world.
 283

5. Work
In a wage, a hidden war
(Johnny Clegg)487

Whereas the hard core of racist apartheid perpetrators, advocates, and defenders will
never stray far away from taking racism one or two steps further, i.e. from carrying out or at
least preaching ethnic cleansing or genocide, the more ‘moderate’ ones realize that hatred and
physically violent brutality are not as profitable as coldly planned and executed combination
of oppression, theft, and exploitation. In an optimized equilibrium between the latter three,
profits can be maximized and apparently bring enormous wealth as well as providing and
buying efficient short-term physical security to those in power. This is common knowledge in
educated Europe since the Ptolemaic era, at the latest. Educated, elite South Africans and
Israelis who had a hand in the apartheid architectures of their societies are very unlikely to
have missed this point.
A mixed free-market and state-controlled economy in each case of ‘successful’
apartheid also offers perpetrtators further opportunities to divide and rule, and prosper, for a
very long time indeed. Aside from being prevented by the apartheid state from developing
politically or economically, and aside from being physically isolated from each other, the
indigenous workers must fight each other for the scraps that are thrown at them or that are
unconsciously dropped by the almost perpetually feasting racial-economic elites. Masses of
indigenous people are kept unemployed on purpose, and, in this way, the wages are kept at a
minimum, or, rather, below it. The current unemployment level of 40 percent in Gaza is
mirrored by a 40 percent unemployment level in South Africa during the last decades of
apartheid there (and still today). The indigenous people are forced for mere survival purposes
to underbid each other for wages and other kinds of work contracts.
The sexes are segregated by apartheid economies, at least by the developed apartheid
economy. The indigenous women are mainly wanted for underpaid domestic work (and as
punch-bags and sex objects for men of all races), whereas the indigenous men are wanted
chiefly for underpaid, hard, dirty, and also often dangerous physical work. In South Africa,
masses of black migrant male workers were often only able to meet their families once a year,
for a few days. Black women not wanted for work in white areas and their children were
usually literally locked up in ‘Reserves’ or ‘Homelands’ where the poor quality of the land
made them less than self-sufficient agricultural workers and homemakers, dependent on their
husbands’ meager incomes from mining and other industrial or otherwise menial work.
The economies of Egypt and South Africa became almost colonial in character at the
zenith of their colonial masters’ powers. In economic terms, they started becoming specialized
at the behest of Rome and London. Egypt became the main wheat producer for the entire
Roman Empire, whereas the economy of South Africa became largely dependent on its
diamond and gold exports under British rule over a century ago. But, on the whole, we are
looking at diversified economies as hallmarks of apartheid countries, whether formally
independent or not. Starting already in the late 19th-century, South Africa experienced a full-
blown industrialization of its economy and society with railroads, cities, factories, and slums.
We are also looking at very affluent economies with extremely concentrated and extremely
unequally spread wealth in each instance of apartheid. This second hallmark of apartheid
economy is in fact even more important than the diversity of production and trade. The reason
for this is that both the profiteers and the primary victims remained the same, in generally
racial or ethnic terms, during the exceptional colony-like conditions. (So far, they have also
even largely remained the same in South Africa during epiapartheid conditions, largely due to
the liberated South Africa being forced to pay back state debts, actually owed by the white-
only regimes.) In Israel, the pattern is repeated yet again, although an added element of
487
Clegg: Work for All, first released on the album ‘Work for All’ by Johnny Clegg & Juluka, 1983
284

economic volatility accompanies the economically globalized Israel, which leaves its
economy (along with its political and even its military power) less independent than those of
its predecessors, a weakness that in and by itself could spell the end of this brand of apartheid
much sooner than in the other two countries.
In the occupied Palestinian Territories today, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, there is a new
kind of economy, based on the contributions by international aid organizations, governmental
as well as non-governmental, most of which is tied to fulfill conditions determined by the
donors, or by governmental restraints on those donors. Thus, a lid is kept on brewing
indigenous discontent over the more basic, yet entirely unresolved and unaddressed political,
economic, land, social, and cultural issues. This is a short-term illusion as well as a short-term
solution for a racist economy.

5.1. Tax unto Starvation

Ptolemaic Egypt manifests the most highly exploitative of all known systems of
oppression throughout antiquity.488 During the independent ancient period, i.e. Egypt between
ca. 3100 BCE and 332 BCE, the taxes of common peasants amounted to around 10 percent of
their harvests, at least during the parts of the independent ancient period that we know.489
Under Ptolemaic rule, however, taxes rose to around 16 percent (for the entire working
population, including traders, etc.) and at least 50 percent of the harvest, sometimes partly in
order to line the pockets of corrupt tax-collectors, which in practice meant that almost the
entire indigenous population now had to live close to minimum subsistence levels, if not
actually below them.490 An additional aspect of this hardship was that the Egyptian peasants
had to pay land-rent to the Greek soldiers (and other foreign mercenaries) who had effectively
become landlords by royal decree, as we saw in the previous section. The domestic economy
of Egypt was in the process of becoming monetized when Alexander arrived (a process that
had started already during the New Kingdom, a thousand years previously), and so a vast and
deliberately confusing variety of taxes, some in money, some in kind, and some in labor, were
levied on the Egyptian peasants, traders, and others, usually leaving Greek people exempt.
The rural Egyptians carried out almost all of the hard agricultural work in this agricultural
society (see previous section), whereas Greeks tended to be absentee landlords and mere
passers-by in the countryside during times of ‘peace’. During uprisings they were of course
there again as soldiers. Although there was internal economic competition between Greeks –
apartheid tends to make oppressors even greedier – Bingen points out: ‘the Graeco-
Macedonian milieu is united against the Egyptian milieu, the more united in that it is
simultaneously privileged and in a minority…’ The Egyptians often tried to get out of the
cycle of discrimination, toil and exploitation: ‘Flight, secession, anachôresis (withdrawal) and
strike are frequent phenomena’.491 But, as we have seen in previous chapters, this led to a
hardening stance and harsh repercussions by the Greek authorities. Starvation, banishment,
prison, and death were the usual consequences of such reactions. In short, the racist economy
was ‘not only a social… but also a legal and political reality’.492
Roman rule brought no relief for the Egyptians, rather the opposite:

488
Koch 1993: 488. According to Manning 2010: 125, Ptolemy II was probably the richest man in the world at
the time.
489
Iliffe 1995: 20
490
Ibid: 26; Lewis, N. 1983: 23; Bingen 2007: 122ff. As far as I know, the higher percentage estimate was never
paralleled or surpassed in colonialized Africa, not even in the equally productive colonialized economies during
the 19th and early 20th centuries CE, by which time technological progress presumably would have made an even
higher tax possible; cf. Iliffe 1995: 196ff, and Gehrke 1990: 66. Manning 2010: 127 estimates a much lower
taxation of 16 percent but agrees with me in principle, namely that ‘…the Ptolemies must count as among the
most impressive [I would have used ‘oppressive’] taxing powers and mobilizers of resources in antiquity.’ (Ibid.)
491
Bingen 2007: 194, 237 (quotes); Parsons 2007: 37
492
Koenen: The Ptolemaic King as a Religious Figure, 1993: 35
 285

Unfortunately...the profit principle proved no less irresistible to

Roman administrators, businessmen, and, all too soon, senators than it
had done to the Macedonians. The tradition, after all, was well
established. It had been what panhellenism was all about, as early as
the fourth century: a united ethnic crusade against the East, with
wealth and power as its objectives, cultural superiority (and Xerxes’
long-past invasion) as its justification. That had been the whole moral
basis of Alexander’s expedition, of the sharing of the spoils by his
successors. Material greed and racial contempt had been the fuel that
maintained Macedonians in power...493

After the Romans had established themselves as the new rulers, the Egyptian farm
labor had two upper classes of foreigners in Egypt to supply, aside from delivering the largest
share of food for the city of Rome itself, which had by now become the first city in human
history to boast a population of over a million people. The greed and contempt manifested by
the elites are remarkable. Throughout the millennium of its sway, the Graeco-Roman system
remained one of taxation, rather than payment of racially discriminatory low salaries, as most
of the exploitation in South Africa and Israel would turn out to be.

The bulk of the tax fell on the poorest of the population, with Roman
citizens and the citizens of the three Greek cities [almost exclusively
Romans and Greeks] exempt. Priests of the major temples were also
spared, though in general the temples came under increasing state
control. . . . The weight of taxation became so oppressive that there are
appeals by the collectors to their supervisors that whole villages have
fled or been so impoverished they can no longer pay. . . . At times of
crisis the tendency was to increase the oppression of the poor. The
second century physician Galen, writing on how disease spread among
the poor, mentions in passing that at times of famine the city dwellers
would strip the local countryside of its food, bringing starvation to its
inhabitants.494

The exploitation of the indigenous African population by the invaders from Europe
and their descendants took place in partly different ways in Egypt and South Africa,
respectively, but they were mainly different from an administrative and economic point of
view, and not at all from the point of view of the victims. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, the
workers suffered mainly by means of taxation and land-rent, in modern South Africa chiefly
through wage policies, though of course there were low wages for many Egyptians and
punitive and other kinds of exorbitant taxes for many black South Africans under apartheid, as
well, especially before industrialization picked up steam in the mid-19th century.

493
Green 1990: 648. Xerxes was a Persian ruler who attempted but failed to conquer mainland Greece in the fifth
century BCE.
494
Freeman, C.: Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Mediterranean, 1996: 439. Around one-third of
Rome’s entire wheat supply came from Egypt. See Clauss 2003: 84f; Iliffe 1995: 26; Lewis, N. 1983: 142, on the
almost colonial economy of Roman Egypt, centered on wheat exports. According to Clauss, Egypt annually
delivered 113,100 metric tonnes of grain to Rome, corresponding to 920 shiploads, i.e. to nearly three fully laden
ships a day on an average. Under Byzantine rule, this average almost tripled, amounting to 313,200 tonnes of
grain shipped to Constantinople every year. This stunning growth in output is almostly certainly mainly due to
the explosive population growth, typical of apartheid societies. It is due to more workers, rather than to agro-
technological developments or good climate conditions, or anything else, with the possible exception of more
brutal and efficient methods of tax collection. In the second century CE, the Romans introduced a kind of
collective punishment similar to their present-day Israeli apartheid counterparts: Any tax refugee’s debts to the
state were from now on to be paid by the village or the community from which the Egyptian had fled. See
McCoskey 2004: 326f. and Chapter II.3.1 above.
286

Black railroad workers during the 19th century earned half as much as Whites for the
same work.495 Towards the end of the century, black miners in the diamond fields at
Kimberley only received a fifth of the salary of their white colleagues. In the gold mines on
the Witwatersrand, finally, the difference was even greater. From 1898 until 1971, individual
Black workers on average earned a mere tenth of what white workers received. This was only
partly because Whites had a total monopoly on jobs officially labeled ‘skilled’ by the South
African Chamber of Mines.496
Thus, we have another curious contingent parallel between South Africa and
Ptolemaic Egypt: on the one hand a mean wage difference of five to one to the sole benefit of
Europeans, and on the other an apparent average five to one tax increase (for the Egyptian
peasants) to the sole benefit of Europeans (see the beginning of this chapter). This section
might actually just as well be called ‘Greed’, which by the way is also, in one way or another,
work. I am not implying that Whites are or were lazy. They generally kept very busy thinking
of and working out new ways to enrich themselves and make themselves feel superior,
successful (or whatever), and to keep their indigenous dependants dependent and
impoverished.
The racial groups in Ptolemaic times corresponded to professional classes, with the
notable exceptions of priests and slaves (see below, Chapters II.6.1 and 9.1). The Greeks in
Egypt were mainly soldiers, legislators, administrators, and merchants. Egyptians were mainly
peasants, service personnel, and other kinds of manual workers. There would be some Greek
city rabble, but never, as far as I know, landless Greek peasants.497
With regard to slavery, the Dutch Cape Colony and the first decades of the British
Cape Colony were similar to Rome before Augustus’ conquest of Egypt and to ancient Greece
before Alexander rather than to Egypt at any period. All four of the former societies were
based on slavery, either ideologically, like the ancient Greek states, or both ideologically and
economically, as in the other three states. To be based on slavery ideologically simply means
that the elite wants the economy to be based on slave labor and is working towards realizing
it. The ancient Greek city-states just did not yet have the military and political means to bring
this about. Greece and Rome are the first known slave societies in history in these two senses.
When and where slavery began, on the other hand, is not known.498
The reasons why ‘Hellenomania’, the passion for all things ancient Greek, broke out in
Europe and North America during the 18th and 19th centuries are an interesting and complex
matter, which is not part of the subject of this investigation, but one main factor was certainly
that elite Europeans and European descendants were now, again, basing large-scale economies
on slave labor. This had not been done for nearly 2,000 years. The racist mindset – the
indifference, contempt, and/or hatred towards the ‘barbarians’ or ‘the lower races’ – required
for keeping such a brutal industry running was provided, along with attempts at justifications,
by the ‘good old’ Greek authors, and to some extent by the Romans. But this time around,
even they were outdone. The end of the 18th CE century saw the height of the slave industry in
human history, with most of the profits going to western Europe, but increasingly also to the

495
Iliffe 1995: 180
496
Ibid: 272, Other industries had similar color bars preventing Blacks from being promoted or getting wage
raises. See Mandela 2002 (1965): 167.
497
Fèvre: Ptolémée 1er: Le Pharaon d’Alexandrie, 1997: 104; Bingen 2007: 225
498
Hall: Powers & Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West. 1992 (1985); Cartledge:
The Greeks, A Portrait of Self and Others, 1993: 135ff, 148. Along with Ancient Greece and Rome and the Cape
colonies, all other known slave-labor-based economies in world history were also run by either Europeans or
descendants of Europeans, they were: the Caribbean, Brazil, the ante-bellum South in the USA (and the previous
British colony there) and the Third Reich 1942-1945. See Hall 1992 (1985): 31; Fleck: Bonn Says WW2 Slave
Labour Claims are Obsolete, 1997; Hunt, P.A.: Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek Historians, 1998: 214.
 287

USA, and the entire last half-millennium saw a worldwide pandemic of virulent racism
against people of African descent, also unparalleled in history.499
Due to Marxism and other theories of oppression, slavery has come to be seen as the
most primitive kind of systematic oppression in the production process. I do not share this
view unconditionally500, but it will do for practical purposes in this context. The economic
aspect of oppression in the Cape Colony, especially, took its beginnings in massive land
appropriation, genocide and enslavement: ‘The Cape Colony was one of the most rigid and
oppressive slave societies in history.’501 The enslavement of indigenous Khoisan survivors
was disguised under a nomenclature which termed them ‘servants’, whereas the term ‘slave’
was reserved for imported slaves from Asia, Madagascar and Mozambique. These imported
slaves rapidly became a majority in the Cape Colony’s entire population.502
In Graeco-Roman Egypt, this background of economic exploitation was also
important, since slavery continued to exist as a significant part of the European economy. Yet,
it was no longer as basic as it had been and remained both in Greece and in Rome. ‘Only’
around ten percent of the population in Graeco-Roman Egypt consisted of slaves. The
Macedonians instead took over the forms of fiscal exploitation that the Persians and,
ultimately, the Egyptians themselves had already established in Egypt, centuries before
Alexander’s conquests.503 They did sharpen it, however, to an extent thus far unseen. In fact,
many Egyptians were part-time slaves, at least during Roman times, forced to carry out
menial work, such as stone quarrying and mining, for up to three months a year.
Furthermore, economic exploitation under the Greeks and Romans – in interaction
with new forms of productive forces, including at times even steam engines – developed a
hitherto unknown form of exploitation. At least proto-capitalistic, ‘and possibly fully
capitalistic’, structures, with a population density higher than most industrialized states today,
appeared in Graeco-Roman Egypt alongside feudal forms and mainly domestic slavery.504
An economic parallel to that does not turn up in South Africa until the mid-19th
century. Until then, South Africa under white rule had overwhelmingly been an agricultural
producer based on slave labor with low population density. Israel, on the other hand, is a
relatively small country with high population density, that is, not unlike Egypt.
Independent ancient Egypt (before the Ptolemies) had possibly had the lowest rate of
slavery, probably never over ten percent of the whole population, of all known civilized
societies in antiquity. The standard explanation for this is, again, the high population density
in Egypt. Already in the fourth millennium BCE, it is estimated to have reached 200 people

499
Bernal 1987. See also Chapters II.9.1-2 below. Of course there were many others involved in the spread of
this pandemic, the Muslim Arab slavers along the East African coast in particular, but they were all outdone by
the all-white main owners and traders of human beings in the Atlantic triangle.
500
Cf. Löwstedt 1995: 81-85
501
Iliffe 1995: 124. See also N.N.: South Africa Says Countries Must Confront Slavery Past, March 22, 2001.
502
Lester 1996: 23ff. On the part-time forced labor in Egypt, see Clauss 2003: 131.
503
It would indeed have been stupid of Greeks and Romans to try to impose their own form of slave society on
Egypt, as Walbank 31992 (1981): 116 seems to suggest. See also Iliffe 1995: 26.
504
Alston 2002: 346; Oliver 1991: 52, 56. Alston lists the following preconditions of industrialism present in late
antiquity Egypt: ‘comparably flexible capital, long-distance trade networks, sophisticated retailing networks,
large and hungry urban populations…comparatively cheap, easy and safe communications, and proto-capitalistic
(and possibly fully capitalistic) management strategies’ (ibid.). Green (2007: 92) points out that the continued
reliance on slavery in the wider Hellenistic realm prevented further development of industrialization and
capitalism. Incidentally, the myth of slaves building the pyramids has been dismissed by egyptologists. The
pyramids were built by Egyptian wage-laborers, many of them periodic workers. Likewise, there is no
archaeological trace, nor any written evidence outside the Bible, of the first part of Exodus, that the people of
Israel were enslaved and imported by the ancient Egyptians. There are, however, indications that the ancient
Egyptians used prisoners of war as slaves. As for the second part of Exodus, see Freud: Moses and Monotheism,
1955 (1939); Sand: Israel Deliberately Forgets Its History, 2008, Sand 2009 (2008): 118-120, and, even more
essentially, Assmann: Moses the Egyptian, The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, 1997. See also
Chapter II.9.3 below.
288

per square mile. A general humanist ethics, however, is likely to have played a significant role
as well.505
Slave-labor-based economies, it is true, seem only to appear in advanced agricultural
societies where there is a perceived shortage of laborers, but some often forgotten, additional
prerequisites are ruthlessness and a basic disregard among decision-makers for human welfare
and human rights. Ancient Greece and Rome did not become the first slave-labor-based
societies out of economic and political necessities and pressures alone, but also out of
immense greed as well as deeply entrenched and widespread elitist and racist systems of
values.506
The perhaps harshest working conditions in Egypt under Greek rule were imposed on
the gold miners in the southern part of the country. Tens of thousands of people were brutally
herded into forced labor camps – not only criminals, but also many innocent people who had
been falsely convicted, and people who had fallen out of favor with the king. Interestingly, the
wives and children of convicts were sometimes also deported and used as laborers. 507 As we
have seen (Chapters II 1.3 and.3.3), collective punishment, mass deportations, and targeted,
harsh punishment of the families of detainees, convicts, or dead resistance fighters are
phenomena that still characterize apartheid today, especially in Israel and the territories it
occupies illegally since 1967.

5.2. Work to the Bone

Today’s legacy of South African apartheid ostensibly includes property and wealth
concentrated in white hands, debts incurred by the apartheid state that are being paid back by
‘liberated’ South Africa, as well as a forty percent unemployment rate. In the long term,
apartheid is not conducive to capitalist development, because of its many obstacles to free
trade, i.e. to the unhindered movement of capital, goods, services, and labor, but, like slavery
and genocide, it is conducive to making huge profits, off the backs of the many indigenous
and imported manual laborers. These large capital accumulations were largely wasted in
Ptolemaic Egypt on numerous wars, and on opulence and luxuries. Each of these three kinds
of wasteful behavior was present in South Africa as well, but many elite South African Whites
were a great deal more careful about reinvestment and mercantilist-style management of the
apartheid economy.
On paper, slavery in South Africa lasted from 1658 until 1834. As we have already
seen, it was an exceptionally brutal form of racist slavery, on which the entire economy of the
Dutch Cape Colony came to be based. But part-time slavery as well as slavery-like conditions
for non-white wage workers continued and reappeared throughout the period of white
supremacy.508

505
Karenga: Maat. The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics, 1995: 495ff;
Assmann 1995 (1990): 58ff; Tyldesley 1995 (1994): 14f.
506
Assmann 1996: 174. See also Chapter II.9.1 below.
507
Heinen: Geschichte des Hellenismus: Von Alexander bis Kleopatra, 2003: 87
508
Ross 1999: 23ff, 37, 39, 41, 45ff. In an excuse for apartheid, apparently on behalf of the South African and
US business communities, Thomas Hazlett surprisingly argues that apartheid is socialism, caused by white
industrial workers who wanted privileges against the wishes of the (all-white) capitalists and the black
indigenous majority and won that struggle from 1948 to 1994. In this strange argument, South African business
owners always saw clearly that black workers were sometimes going to be more efficient and contribute to larger
profits than white workers, and therefore they opposed apartheid. Hazlett does not bring any empirical data on
the voting behavior of white South African capitalists during apartheid, nor does he compare profit levels for the
capitalists before and after the fall of apartheid, and so his argument is weak. By denying Blacks all kinds of
rights, the white elites were obviously going to make larger profits than their competitors in other countries, who
were not able to legally employ workers under such cheap, indeed slavery-like conditions. But, of course, there is
something to the argument that the white elites, if rational in the self-serving sense of rational choice theory,
would be opposed to apartheid in the long run. This does not make apartheid socialism, far from it. Yet it does
point out a resemblance between common white working-class behavior in ‘National Socialist’ Germany and in
 289

After 1948, the economy relied heavily on wage laborers for the industries in South
African cities, such as Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. By then, black South Africans
were only allowed to stay in the ‘European cities’ as long as they offered their labor. The law
prohibited ‘…non-Europeans from owning or possessing minerals…factories and mills.’
Agriculture became more commercial and mechanized after 1948 as demand for black labor
decreased, and so the economic and political elites sent the workers ‘back’ to the reserves
(where they ‘belonged’ ethnically), even if they originally were not from there. The apartheid
strategy of sending masses of unemployed labor reserves into Bantustans that are too small to
accommodate the people is being repeated by Israel continuously today. Official arbitrariness,
hypocrisy and cynicism flourish with regard to apartheid authorities’ use of the idea of ethnic
‘belonging’.509
In the meantime, the material gap between Whites and non-Whites in South Africa
widened. By 1970, white manufacturing workers earned six times more than Africans did. By
1970, the real wage of African mine workers was less than that of 1911.510 Annual wages (in
Rand) in the gold mines in 1941 were 2,312 (for Whites) and 191 (for Africans), making the
ratio between white and African wages twelve to one. In 1971, the white annual real wage
was 4,379 Rand compared to the average African real wage of 209, a ratio of twenty-one to
one.511 On top of this, unemployment among the Africans increased in the 1970s. In real
numbers, black unemployment doubled between 1960 (1.2 million) and 1977 (2.3 million). At
the end of the 1970s a worldwide survey revealed that South Africa had the largest income
differences of all countries in the world.512
The situation in the gold mines was atrocious. They were and still are extremely
profitable for Whites and death traps for Blacks. The gold mines in and around Johannesburg
are the deepest holes in the ground that men have ever dug. By 1990, no less than 35,000
miners had died in accidents, almost all of them Black. Over the years, their families, and
those of many more miners injured or permanently sick, have received little or no
compensation at all. Despite the very dangerous and often extremely unhealthy work
conditions in the mines, and despite the huge profits made by the exclusively white owners,
black miners were still being paid wages below the poverty line. Largely due to the gold
industry, the Johannesburg stock exchange is today the 18th biggest in the world. Moreover,
under apartheid the black miners were subjected to routine humiliating room, clothes,
baggage, and body searches and even lived like captured wild animals in cage-like
compounds if they worked with mining the most valuable minerals. As pointed out above,
Blacks were forbidden from owning or possessing any minerals, among many other things.
They were also legally banned from becoming state prosecutors, magistrates, or
judges. Aside from an effective ban on Blacks becoming wealthy, there was hardly a single
profession open to Blacks, in which they could challenge apartheid in any way. Mandela, who
opened the first black law firm in South Africa with Oliver Tambo (who preceded Mandela as
head of the ANC), also describes how his and Tambo’s work was often made impossible by
state agents harassing them.513

National Party South Africa. See Hazlett: Apartheid, 2008. The idea of a ‘Labor’ Party in Israel that would want
more rights or better work conditions for indigenous workers is correspondingly remote.
509
Thompson 1990: 193; quote from Mandela 2002 (1965): 43. The unofficial figure of 40 percent
unemployment has remained rather constant since the end of apartheid. (In the USA, during the worst part of the
depression of the 1930s, ‘only’ 30 percent were jobless.) See Bremmer: Apartheid’s Gone, but Poverty Remains,
2006.
510
Thompson 1990: 195
511
Ibid: 246
512
Ibid: 195; Ross 1999: 154
513
Lepper & Robbins: Gold and International Sanctions against South Africa, 1990: 195ff; Mandela 2002
(1965): 43, 129. On the regrettable continuation of inhuman and indeed murderous mining interests in
epiapartheid, or neocolonial, South Africa, see Bond, P.: How the Marikana Movement Stunned Neoliberal
South Africa: Workers Massacred But Now Standing Stronger, 2012. The disturbing pattern reaches far back
290

Blacks were also banned from representing other workers, i.e. black trade unions were
effectively banned. However, white workers, not to mention employers, were well-organized.
Nevertheless, black workers organized themselves anyway and were able to negotiate a few
improvements from 1980 onwards against enormous obstacles set up by the authorities.
Frequent strikes by black workers from 1973 onwards also contributed to the downfall of the
apartheid regime.514
What choices did the Black workers really have before the 1980s, when international
pressure and a number of court victories had started empowering them? Not many. Before
apartheid in the narrow sense, there was only really one period when black workers were able
to try harder to achieve better conditions. After the Russian revolution of 1917, several unions
and leftist organizations were formed and in June 1918 ‘African’ (black) municipal workers in
Johannesburg started a strike for higher wages. The authorities responded harshly. 152
workers were jailed and sentenced to carry out their old jobs under armed surveillance. Later,
strikes by African workers were made entirely illegal.515
The factories also subjected Blacks to ‘slave-like’ working conditions. For instance, as
late as 1987, by which time black trade unions had become grudgingly allowed and had also
started to improve some of the working conditions for black industrial workers, the Sasol oil-
from-coal processing plant, which was managed by South African Whites alongside the US
firm, Fluor Corporation, paid Blacks $1.80 an hour less than their white colleagues on the
factory floor, for performing the same work. Demanding higher wages, the Blacks, who had
recently developed trade unions as a result of the apartheid state’s first concessions, went on
strike, but the management used state police and their own security agents to attack and set
dogs on the strikers. Some workers were killed and all the black employees fired, according to
a team of lawyers who sued the two corporations on behalf of the exploited and victimized
black workers in 2003.516
African farm workers were paid even less than those working in the industries. Yet,
they could not leave the white farms to seek more highly paid employment. White farmers
controlled the Africans by beating and whipping them, by placing them in debt and by not
providing them with the necessary passes. Withholding passes was the most effective way of
ensuring that Blacks remained on white farms, because it limited their freedom of movement.
African farm laborers were barred from adapting to either traditional or modern life because
they were not allowed to live in the reserves or the cities. This made them socially marginal
and ‘victims of systematic exploitation’.517 The appropriateness of my choice of extending the
concept of apartheid to include the entire period of white domination is perhaps best shown
with the example of 20th century farm workers, whose lot was barely different from that of
their slave predecessors (and ancestors) during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The government demanded a ‘poll tax’ of one pound each from African men aged
eighteen or more and a local ten-shilling tax per dwelling in the reserves (the proto-
Bantustans) from 1925. High taxation and bad harvests due to lack of infrastructure worsened
the already poor life quality of the Africans in the reserves. Therefore, Africans, mainly
males, came looking for employment on white farms and in towns. Although the wages at the

into the early history of apartheid. Clauss 2003: 130 describes how the Egyptian workers in ancient Alexandria’s
profitable incense factories were forced to leave the production facilities naked, officially in order to ensure that
no theft was taking place, but also in order to humiliate the natives. The same pattern is now also being repeated
on a daily basis at Israeli checkpoints, border crossings, etc. Here, the official excuse is ‘security’, but the end
result, humiliation and hatred, i.e. insecurity, is the same. On apartheid humiliation, see also footnotes 292, 558,
761, and 860.
514
Tilley (ed.) 2009: 226f.
515
van der Walt: The Influence of the IWW in Southern Africa, 2005-6: 36; Mandela 2002 (1965): 167
516
Chege: S.Africans to Sue Fluor for Apartheid Wrongs, 2003. On the lawsuits against some of the largest
South African, American and western European companies that profited the most from South African apartheid,
see footnote 889.
517
Thompson 1990: 165f.
 291

farms and in towns were low, they became essential to sustain families living in the reserves.
The black farm workers remained on the farms as a result.
From 1939 onwards Africans who had failed to pay the poll tax were required to work
off their ‘debt’ to the state with forced and unpaid labor on the white-owned farms. After the
National Party took power in 1948, white farmers could be seen queuing outside county jails
to pick up their de facto slave laborers, amounting to several tens of thousands of African
workers each year.518
By limiting African economic development, however, South Africa’s market economy
was harmed as well, because domestic consumption was limited.519 South Africa’s economy
began to rely more heavily on its exports, which were mainly to neighboring African
countries. These countries, suffering from colonialism and the legacies of colonialism,
depended on South Africa’s oil and electricity supply and many other goods and services from
South Africa.520 In the 1960s, South Africa’s economy flourished again. This partly depended
on harsh repression and exploitation of black labor and resultant huge domestic capital
accumulation. Once the economy expanded, however, African wages improved. To a large
extent, this was brought about by nominally illegal, yet well-organized and relatively
successful black trade unions, by pressure from abroad,521 and, perhaps most importantly, by
demographic changes.
In the 1970s, due to modernization and the development of technology (such as that
used in the gold mines), skilled laborers were increasingly needed to handle the more
sophisticated equipment and to make decisions. The industries could no longer rely on
unskilled, cheap African labor. The traditional apartheid job color bar therefore had to be
relaxed, giving some Blacks more education, more skilled work and higher wages.
Agriculture remained traditional for a longer time. The use and abuse of cheap (or
entirely free-of-charge), unskilled African farm labor continued during the 1970s. Therefore,
the ruling National Party was guaranteed support from voters for continued segregation and
suppression of skilled black laborers in the countryside more than in the cities.522
In 1986, under immense international pressure, the government eliminated some of the
apartheid laws, such as the prohibition of interracial marriage and of interracial sexual
relations, and it opened business centers to black traders in the cities. Yet, many government
benefits still remained ‘White Only’, such as those in the welfare services.523
The government continued removing African communities from their homes during
the 1980s, especially from squatter areas around the cities. The Land Act in 1986 still
excluded Africans from owning land outside the Homelands and African townships. Africans
were still considered ‘visitors’ in the cities, requiring passes for entry. The 1986 Act also
prohibited Africans from sharing crops with the Whites, keeping their trade dependent on the
white farmers.524
Another one of the supreme injustices of South African apartheid exploitation is that
the liberated South Africa now has to pay back with regular interest rates the debts incurred
by the racist governments before liberation. The western individuals, corporations and
countries that provided the loans and profited from apartheid are now again profiting due to
the suffering of the very same victims, especially the poorest of the poor in South Africa, and
their descendants. This, and the continued white ownership of stolen land, are perhaps the
most persistent and unjust aspects of epiapartheid, even more so than the effective, continued

518
Ibid: 164; Mandela 2002 (1965): 27
519
Lester 1996: 156
520
Thompson 1990: 230
521
Lester 1996: 157
522
Ibid: 155
523
Ibid: 227
524
Thompson 1990: 228
292

impunity enjoyed by apartheid criminals.525

5.3. One Bad and One Good Thing about Globalization

During the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948-9, some Zionists said ‘Stop! Let’s
keep some!’ For example, Jewish settlers around the Palestinian villages of Furaydis and Jisr
al-Zarqa, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, managed to persuade the infamous Alexandroni
Brigade, responsible for much of the murder and ethnic cleansing already carried out on a
large scale, to desist from expelling these indigenous villagers, so that the Jewish settlers
could use them for unskilled and underpaid labor in their houses and on their farms. This is
one of the main reasons why there are still some Palestinians left today in what then became
Israel.526 And this is why al-Nakba was not fully-fledged ethnic cleansing or genocide, though
much worse in this regard than South Africa or Graeco-Roman Egypt, at least in relative
demographic terms and in terms of relative land dispossession, but the beginning of yet
another apartheid society.
In many industries today, the Palestinians are paid less than Israelis for doing the same
jobs, creating power relationships not only between Israeli Jewish boss and worker, but
between the workers (Jewish, Palestinian with citizenship, foreign, Palestinian with and
without legal papers) as well. Just as in apartheid South Africa, the ‘privilege’ of freely
forming, negotiating for, and belonging to trade unions, which is a basic human right in the
rest of the world, belongs with the invading race only.527 This again, as with the same problem
in South Africa, leaves the indigenous people in poorer living conditions than the chosen race
because their meager salaries cannot keep up with the costs of living.
In his book on Israeli apartheid, Jimmy Carter recalls how then-King Hussein of
Jordan presented him with evidence of how Israel systematically ensured that Palestinians
were forced out of their traditional professions such as family farming and free enterprise into
day labor, mostly unskilled jobs, for Israeli employers. At that time, in the 1980s, up to 12,000
Palestinians were understandably leaving the occupied Palestinian Territories every year for
good. They became economic, as well as political (and racial) refugees.528
The Israeli plan was to pressure Palestinian business elites to emigrate (first), while a
Palestinian working class was used and pressured by uncertain jobs with low salaries. The
following consequences of the implementation of the plan were summed up succinctly by
Didar Fawry:

Dependence of the Palestinian labour force on Israeli business, sub-

contracting reserved for the owning classes, the blocking of technicians from
management positions, a systematic expropriation and repression and, at the
same time, the opening up of employment to part-timers and women. In
other words, a deliberate policy was transforming the population into a
cheap reserve labour force for Israeli business and encouraging the well-off
and the heads of family who rejected working as construction labourers to
525
Klein 2008 (2007): 194-217. The diamond giant, de Beers, which owes so much to the black population of
southern Africa, moved its headquarters to Switzerland a few weeks after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison
in 1990, ibid: 207. Anglo American, the gold giant, moved to London in 1999, and has since made its
contributions from its South African holdings to Anglo American’s headline earnings drop to a quarter of the
overall. See Nevin: Is Anglo Spurning South Africa? 2005. See also Commey: South Africa: Economic
Apartheid Lives On! 2009.
526
Pappe 2006: 132. Apparently, some Zionist leaders had previously already argued in favor of keeping some
Palestinians inside the Jewish state as cheap labor to exploit and abuse. Ibid: 63
527
Said: Intifada and Independence, 1989: 6-7; and Tilley (ed.) 2009: 227-230 outline a harsh and internationally
criminal pattern of Israeli state and business harassment against Palestinians, and Palestinians only, trying to
organize for better working conditions under Jewish bosses in Israel and in the illegal settlements, including
direct military attacks targeting union offices, racist courts of law, unhealthy and dangerous working conditions
sometimes leading to workers dying on the job, unpaid wages, and illegal arrests of striking Palestinian workers.
528
Carter 2006: 86f.
 293

emigrate.529

A comprehensive report on the early history of these problems speaks of two

intertwining, successful campaigns run by the Zionist movement ever since the first half of the
20th century in Palestine: the Conquest of Land and the Conquest of Labour.530
The segregation initiated under the Oslo accords mirrors South Africa’s past,
particularly when one compares the Pass Laws forced upon indigenous people working in
restricted areas. As described earlier, Blacks in South Africa were required to carry passes to
prove that they worked in predominantly or ‘legally’ white areas. From the outset, Blacks
were only given a few days to find work in urban areas. If they failed, they were sent back to
the reserves. Similarly, Palestinians from the West Bank need to obtain passes to enter Israeli
territory, where due to the concentration of capital, commerce and investment, most jobs
available to Palestinians are to be found. In most cases, these passes are issued to allow
Palestinians to work outside the Palestinian self-rule areas. Others are issued to allow the
Palestinians to leave the country (because they must pass over Israeli-held territory in order to
travel abroad). Yet, in many cases these passes are not issued at all, or they are issued for two
to three hours only.
This is a problem especially for Palestinian youths, since they are seen by Israel as the
greatest threat to security. The Pass Laws are implemented with painstaking pedantry at the
Gaza Erez crossing, where people from the ages 18 to 35 have little or no chance of ever
being allowed into Israel. Only medical doctors and a few other professionals who fall within
this age group and are considered essential for Israel are at times allowed in.
According to Edward Said:

There was a proliferation of over a thousand laws and regulations

designed... to rub their noses in the mud, to humiliate and remind them
of how they were doomed to less-than-human status... To hold
meetings required a permit. Entry and exit required permits. To dig a
well required a permit – one that was never given.531

Palestinians also suffer from economic limitations due to the Israeli-imposed closures
of checkpoints, markets, shops and, indeed, whole towns and cities. Palestinian trade
depended entirely on Israeli supervision until 1992. After limited Palestinian self-rule was
established within certain enclaves in 1995, the Palestinians still lacked direct export and
import access. These limitations were due to Israeli security procedures, such as checkpoint
controls and periodic ‘shortages’ of passes for movement, especially to indigenous residents
of the West Bank and Gaza.532 Aside from trade, Palestinian economic development also still
depends almost entirely on what Israel allows: ‘This economic reality in Palestine is shaped
by two factors: the interdependence of the Palestinian and the Israeli communities and the
power imbalance, favoring the Israelis’.533
Israel’s main export market is still Palestine, because it effectively forces Palestinians
to buy Israeli products. In value, however, it dropped from $1 billion in 2000 to $250 million
in 2002, mainly due to the Second Intifada. However, much of Israel’s export is unofficial,
illegal and clandestine. For instance it sells large amounts of goods to the Palestinians and to
Arab countries that nominally boycott Israeli goods. This is done by utilization of Arab

529
Fawry: Palestinian Women in Palestine, 1986 (1984): 72
530
Sawt el-Amel: Separate and Unequal: The History of Arab Labour in pre-1948 Palestine and Israel, 2007
531
Said 1989: 6-7. See also Tilley (ed.) 2009: 267-269, who considers apartheid Israel’s pass laws and practices
central to the exploitation of indigenous labor in ways similar to apartheid South Africa’s.
532
Palestinian Development Plan 1998-2000: Summary Document, Ramallah: Palestinian Authority, December
1997: 8
533
Olmsted: Thwarting Palestinian Development, 1996: 11
294

sanctions-busting businessmen, and other middlemen, hiding ‘Made in Israel’-markings in

parts of products, for example of mobile phones and audio headsets that are not visible to
consumers, and the like. Similarly, many of Israel’s huge military exports, among the four
largest in the world, are illegal and therefore also unofficial.534 Furthermore, the flexibility of
the Israeli economy, unlike colonial and other economies highly diversified in terms of
services and products, makes Israel able to counter sanctions and relatively quickly adapt to
new demands and new situations in the global marketplace.
The exploitation of Palestinian labor takes place in ways most similar to apartheid
South Africa, i.e. through low wages. A minor difference is the Bantu Laws Amendment Act
of 1970, which reserved white-collar work for non-Blacks. There is no corresponding law in
Israel. But there does not have to be. Israel has ensured that management and executive jobs
are firmly in the hands of Jews by other means, sometimes illegal even under Israeli law. In
the illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, especially, Palestinian laborers
are given less by Israeli companies than the Israeli law stipulates as minimum wages, despite
protests from the International Labor Organization, ILO, and other authoritative bodies.
Moreover, medical insurance covering work-related accidents, also required of employers by
Israeli law, is mostly unavailable to Palestinian laborers. Interestingly, as of 2009, the Israeli
state had never enforced any punishment of these flagrant abuses of Israeli law by the
settlers.535 As with violence, the state of Israel is thus also guilty, along with the civilian (in
this instance: business) class, of creating an atmosphere of impunity, which leads to further,
serious human rights abuses.
Since 1992, Israelis employ less Palestinian workers from the West Bank and Gaza.
Instead, like the Greeks in Egypt and the South African Whites before them, the Israeli
apartheid elites import workers from abroad. In Israel they first came mainly from Lebanon
and Thailand. From 1992 to 1996, during the crucial early years of the so-called ‘peace
process’ (better referred to as the ‘apartheid process’), Palestinian labor in Israel was reduced
from 116,000 to 29,500 jobs, causing the unemployment rates to surge at times to 50 percent
in the West Bank and to 74 percent in Gaza. In 2002, almost two years into the Second
Intifada, unemployment had again risen to 50 percent in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 85
percent of the people in the Gaza Strip and 58 percent in the West Bank, according to the
World Bank, were living in poverty on two dollars or less a day. According to the United
Nations, these were direct causes behind the chronic violence in the region, and it (the UN)
referred to Israeli targeting of the Palestinian economy as unnecessary, and, benevolently
assuming that Israel really wants peace, indeed counter-productive ‘collective punishment’.
Israel imposes constant border closures, preventing workers (who do have employment in
Israel) from reaching their job locations. Moreover, security checks hold up workers and
goods deliveries for hours or days at a time. Gradually, Israel is becoming less dependent on
Palestinian workers, but at the same time, it limits Palestinian economic development.
‘Palestinians provide an emergency labor force, to be exploited by Israel, but [they are] not
entitled to rights or employment stability’.536
By October 2002 Israel’s foreign workforce, i.e. excluding Palestinians from the
occupied territories, had grown to almost 300,000. More than half of them, 150,000 people,
were officially classified as illegal. According to unofficial estimates, however, as many as
two-thirds of the foreign workers were in the country illegally. The Israeli economy was now
ailing with the lowest gross domestic product figure since 1953. Many of the foreigners were
unemployed, too, not least due to mistreatment by their former employers, who have, for

534
Immanuel: Israeli Products Slip through Cracks in Arab Boycott, 2002
535
Law Society: Palestinian Workers Exploited & Israeli Economic Oppression: The Case of Settlement
Workers, Palestinian Workers in Israeli Settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 2000, Chapter 2.2.,
Wages; Tilley (ed.) 2009: 267-269
536
Olmsted 1996: 11f; Brough: Hunger Among Palestinians Alarming - UN Official, 2002; Heinrich: Palestinian
Economic Meltdown Prolongs Violence-UN, 2002
 295

example, been known to confiscate passports on arrival in Israel to prevent their new
employees from leaving. Employers have also avoided paying the legal minimum wage or
reneged on agreements made in home countries of the laborers. The migrant workers have on
occasion been fined or beaten for leaving their residential areas without permission or for
refusing to work on the Sabbath. Most immigrants are forced to pay several thousand dollars
to an agency to gain access to the Israeli job market. As with its nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons programs and many other international conventions, Israel is not
necessarily hypocritical about these abuses, but it is brutally cynical. The country refuses to
sign the United Nations convention on migrant worker rights. Human rights groups say
foreign workers today sometimes work under conditions ‘equivalent to slavery’. One may
safely assume that at least some of these ‘skills’ on the part of the employers were first honed
on Palestinian victims.
In 2002 a government clampdown was announced, introducing a freeze on foreign
workers and a deportation program aimed at expelling a thousand ‘illegals’ every month.
Despite an unemployment rate of 10.3 percent in Israel, industries that rely on the work of the
foreigner work force, such as agriculture and construction, protested the government
clampdown. There are obviously many jobs that Israelis refuse to do, preferring
unemployment and leaving them to foreigners and to Palestinians. Xenophobia is spreading
among Israeli Jews, but has yet to reach EU or North American proportions, except when
targeting Palestinians and other Arabs. The reason behind the relative acceptance of other
foreigners is of course the racism targeting Palestinians. ‘Many negative feelings are caught
up in the political situation here and are channeled against the Palestinians, probably to the
benefit of the foreign workers’, according to Zeev Rosenhek, a Jerusalem Hebrew University
sociologist.537
We encountered ‘neo-apartheid’ early on in the first part of this investigation, both on
a global scale and in the relatively quiet invasions of developing countries by ruthless
corporate giants. Here we have a third form of it. The oppressors are indigenous, in relative
terms; the victims are foreign ‘guest’ workers. An interesting feature appears at this point. The
foreign workers are often being paid even less than the Palestinians are, or rather, than the
Palestinians were, since Israelis hardly employ Palestinians any longer. This probably never
happened on such a large scale before in an apartheid society: an imported work force is being
paid less than the indigenous, in relative terms, and they are often being mistreated worse in
other ways, too. Or are they? One could well argue that Palestinians, who are not getting jobs
at all, are treated worse in a more general sense. And then we have the Israeli violence. Being
beaten is bad enough, but being bombed or taken out by army snipers targeting civilians is
worse. A neo-apartheid phenomenon thus exists in Israel, but it is not (yet) as severe or as
important as apartheid, not even close to it, in fact. Moreover, Palestinian labor is probably
still cheaper for Israel than the imported work force is, in general economic terms. Although
the latter are paid less, they first have to be imported, then acclimatized in both natural and
cultural senses, for instance by getting used to the climate, the water and the food, and being
taught the language. Of course, it is impossible to confidently estimate such costs, but it
certainly seems as if the Israeli decisions not to hire Palestinian workers are political and
racist rather than economic.
This is an alarming development, as it appears that Israel since the 1990s is once again
turning its apartheid system into a system of ethnic cleansing, perhaps to a higher degree than
at any time since the large-scale ethnic cleansing of 1948-49. Very much like the Native
Americans who were first needed by white settlers (who made ample use of their generosity)
and new white states and then disposed of, Palestinians are now being disposed of by the state

537
Ridberg: Israel Bans Entry of New Foreign Workers, 2002; Haas, D.: Israel’s Illegal Foreign Workers Feel
the Heat, 2002; N.N.: Israeli Firms Abuse Migrant Workers – Rights Group, August 28, 2003; Robinson, A.:
Israel Fence May Be Final Palestinian Economy Blow, 2002
296

of Israel as well as by its businesses. Israel is telling Palestinians that their service is no longer
required; implying also, of course, that their presence is no longer desired. So, this is not just a
neo-apartheid development, it is also a development that brings Israel deeper into genocidal
behavior and a state of ethnic cleansing.
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are not only isolated from Israel but from each
other as well. Palestinian trade is severely limited between the different autonomous areas
such as between Gaza and the West Bank, mainly due to pass limitations and the lack of direct
routes to the destinations (of Palestinian goods deliveries). A UN report, released in 2003, said
curfews were imposed on towns in the West Bank by the Israeli army 70 percent of the time
in the second half of 2002, halting about 75 percent of domestic production. Defining poverty
as living on less than $2 a day, the World Bank, in a companion report, said 21 percent of
Palestinians were poor when the Intifada broke out in September 2000, and the figure reached
60 percent in December 2002. The Israelis, of course, say that the Palestinians only have
themselves to blame for this situation, namely, by continuing to engage in violent activities.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, say they did not start the violence and blame Israel for
engaging in illegal, collective punishment, and in other, related, systematic crimes against
humanity.538
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are also victims of severe discrimination. In almost
every ministry and state company, the percentage of Palestinians hired is much lower than the
percentage of Palestinians in the work force. Out of the 540 jobs in the Ministry of Trade and
Industry in 2002, for example, only four had been given to Palestinian citizens of Israel, who
made up 20 percent of the work force. And then, out of the state money allocated to the
ministry, only half a percent goes to projects benefitting Palestinian citizens of Israel.539
Another example: Public institutions and many private companies make army service
a condition of employment. Of course, this is not unheard-of in countries with compulsory
military service. But Arabs – except for the Bedouin and the Druze Arabs, both of whom are
tiny minorities – are the only ethnicity barred from military service in Israel. Thus, nearly all
Arabs are unable to fulfil a crucial condition of employment, simply because they are by law
not allowed to do so.
To stop this condition of employment was one of nine concrete steps demanded in
2001 by the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) in order to end
discrimination against Arabs in Israel. The other steps demanded by the FIDH included
instituting a constitutional ban on discrimination, removing any reference to ethnicity on
Israeli identity cards, allowing Arab political parties that do not ‘support the Jewish character
of Israel’ to contest elections, and extending Arab access to public funds and property rights.
The FIDH said that Israel violates its international obligations by continuing systematic
discrimination and repression of its Arab citizens.540
With its apartheid system, Israel has virtually ensured that Palestinians can never
develop economically or become an affluent people in Palestine. Nonetheless, exploitation of
the indigenous people in the work process itself is overall probably not as extreme in Israel
and the Occupied Palestinian Territories as it was in the Graeco-Roman and white South
African apartheid societies. Although, as we have seen, slavery exists in the sex industry, and
‘slavery-like’ conditions in other industries, the most exploited people (in the Marxian sense
of having had most of the exchange value of the products of their labor taken from them) are
almost exclusively nationals of third countries. This is indeed a parallel to early South African
(and to American) conditions, where slaves mostly came from a third continent. In Graeco-
Roman Egypt, Jews and other third-nationals were used by the Greeks as tax collectors. But
these were not extremely exploited people such as forced-labor convicts or slaves. For Egypt,

538
Heinrich: Conflict Throttling Palestinian Economy-World Bank, 2003
539
Bishara, M. 22002 (2001): 52
540
N.N.: Paris-Based Group Slams Israel on Arab Rights, July 4, 2001. See also Peteet 2009.
 297

I believe it is therefore still too soon to tell; maybe we will never know. Slaves were of all
nationalities, even Greek and Roman, and that leads me to doubt that there was truly
systematic use of slaves from faraway third countries, as in the two modern apartheid
societies.
One possible reason why the indigenous are not as targeted for exploitation by Israelis
as the indigenous people in other apartheid societies is the enormous amount of aid and
financial assistance that Israel receives, especially from the USA, but also from EU countries
and elsewhere. Graeco-Roman Egypt and South Africa were more on their own, more isolated
economically. They were compelled to raise most of the enormous funds necessary for
creating and upholding apartheid by exploiting the available, mainly indigenous workforce
(except during the Dutch reign over the Cape Colony, when the Dutch East India Company
provided most of the funding and imported slaves provided most of the labor, and the
indigenous people were largely killed off or died out).
Moreover, Israel has a far more modern economy than any of its predecessors. They
were forced to rely heavily on labor-intensive agriculture and other kinds of labor-intensive
exploitation of rich natural resources, such as gold and diamonds or optimal conditions for
high-yield agriculture, whereas Israel, lacking wealth of natural resources, feels compelled to
rely heavily on cheap transport and communication, and on international lobbying and
propaganda, especially in the USA. This is a double-edged sword for the Israeli apartheid
society, which is therefore, in comparison, economically fragile and dependent on outside
factors for survival. Palestinians are less needed for Israeli comfort and luxury now, but if
Israel’s sources of wealth are dried out, it will not be easy to re-enlist Palestinian labor,
especially if the Palestinians have their own viable state. For these reasons alone, Israel may
well prove to be the most short-lived of the three apartheid societies studied in-depth here, and
perhaps even more short-lived than the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. It is apparently at
least partly dependent on hugely expensive lobbying and propagandistic conditioning of US
decision-makers, and, ultimately, of US voters.
Palestinian dependence on aid from outside is another sign of Israeli weakness in this
regard. As the partial fulfilment of this dependence postpones Palestinian despair over Israeli-
induced injustices as well as desperate reactions to them, it is certainly just that: a
postponement. More Palestinian attacks on Israelis are more than likely to follow, although
mass starvation, such as in southern Africa due to apartheid during the 1970s and ‘80s, has not
taken place within or around modern Israel. This is not thanks to Israel, but to bigger, better
and more disaster relief organizations.
However, the aid not only keeps Palestinians alive, it also weakens Palestinian society.
The millions being pumped into the ‘autonomous’ Palestinian areas to be used to ‘develop’
and ‘democratize’ society, to foster a kind of pluralism, and to make its government more
transparent, among other things, are doing much good. But they are also part of the creation of
a perverse economy in which power – especially over funding – probably corrupts even more
than money does by itself with the traditional types of corruption. The perversity lies in the
fact that Israeli apartheid practices have disabled the Palestinian economy, and aid from third
parties is simply a lid over a pressure boiler, i.e. what I called a ‘short-term illusion’ to the
conflict above.
Another negative aspect of the aid-dependent Palestinian economy among others is the
outside encouragement of elitism in Palestinian society, and the consequent blow to solidarity
between Palestinians. Alongside democratization programs, different kinds of ‘leadership
programs’ have been initiated with western donor money. Palestinians who are already part of
Palestinian elites and who know English and other European languages are preferred, sent to
‘peace camps’ abroad, etc. This financial aid has at least potential divide-and-rule
consequences in favor of Israel, along with other consequences, which may of course be
beneficial to Palestinian society and with more negative consequences for Israeli designs for
ethnic cleansing.
298

As elsewhere in the developing and developed countries, new elites are emerging
within and around the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and today authoritarianism,
corruption, and oppression flourish in NGOs, and of course not only in Palestine. They
flourish as they came to do elsewhere previously in history, namely, in the trade unions and
churches and other kinds of religious institutions, once these had gained a certain momentum
provided by work that was initially mainly fuelled by idealism and genuine charity. Like the
churches and the trade unions (which are strictly speaking also NGOs, except for a few
remaining state churches and state trade unions): once NGOs (in the current, widespread sense
of ‘rights organizations’) become popular and start attracting money, they also become
corrupt, not all of them, not completely, but apparently enough to move the political process
in a direction desired by the paying, especially the highest-bidding, elites and their allies.
Nowadays, some people are getting into and starting their careers in the field of human rights
because of the money and/or the power they can gain there.
One has to understand the roles played by most Palestinians in this process. As
opposed to the Israeli Jews, there are only very few jobs that really serve their community that
Palestinians can ever obtain. The members of the Palestinian masses who are not part of the
tiny elites, but are lucky enough to have jobs, often serve and help create profits for the
Israelis, who often exploit and abuse them. The Palestinian income elites, on the other hand,
are frequently working on American and European aid projects that in some cases may also
serve the Israelis at least as much as the Palestinians. Almost all of the foreign aid is used to
deal with anything but the root causes of Palestinian poverty: the occupation, the theft of their
land, and the racist discrimination and oppression. And this is an economic condition that
adds to the despair.541

541
Cf. Bond, M.: The Backlash against NGOs, in Lechner & Boli (eds.) 32008: 294ff; Abdelrahman: Civil
Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt, 2005. On some of the continuously excellent work done by
trade unions and churches, namely in the transnational movement against apartheid in South Africa, see Thörn
2009 (2006): 8ff. And much of this good work is now being repeated or is continued against apartheid Israel. See
footnote 191 above, however, on how foreign aid is earmarked to nurture and create both elitism and pro-
Western elites in Palestine. See also Bathish, R.: Imported Hypocrisy, 2006; and Karmi: With No Palestinian
State in Sight, Aid Becomes an Adjunct to Occupation, 2005. According to Karmi, Palestinians are the largest
per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world. While it is sorely needed for the shattered and suffocated
Palestinian economy, this aid also helps finance the Israeli occupation by making it cost-free, and even a source
of profits for Israel. Out of every dollar poured into Palestine by the international community except for Israel,
45 cents go to Israel. From my own experience in occupied Palestine it became clear to me that since every
single NGO and IGO representative from abroad has to come in to occupied Palestine through Israel they all
have to spend (quite a lot of) money and time there first, due to a myriad bureaucratic obstacles including an
Israeli blanket ban on any stay longer than three months in Israeli-occupied territory, even for UN employees.
Health care, reconstruction of infrastructure destroyed by the Israeli army and the illegal settlers, and other
humanitarian duties of the ruling authority (Israel) are taken over by the international community instead. And
then the markets of the occupied Palestinian territories are more or less forcibly supplied with Israeli
commodities, including settlement produce, which would face sanctions and boycotts anywhere else. During my
time in Palestine 2004-2005 I usually tried to avoid buying Israeli commodities, but by the time I had brought
my groceries home, I found I still probably ended up with nearly half of my purchased goods being of Israeli
origin, some of which even lacked ‘Made in Israel’-markings, which is a sign of the goods also being intended
for illegal exports to countries that impose restrictions on imports of Israeli settlement produce. See footnote 847
below on the so far unsuccessful and probably half-hearted efforts of the EU to put an end to the illegal imports
from the illegal Israeli settlements to the EU.
 299

6. Access
Accusing everyone of conspiracy
Tightening the curfew, charging people with walking
…Soweto Blues542

This section of the book reminds me – with a fair degree of horror – of adverbs. I
admit it has been put together in an ad hoc manner to account for the kinds of racist
discrimination that could not be subsumed satisfactorily under the other section headings.
Access to water, health care, decision-making in public affairs, work and leisure
opportunities, obviously do share characteristics that set them aside. Yet I am painfully aware
that this is also the least systematic of the sections defining apartheid. The dominant theory of
grammar which throws into a single basket demonstratives with adverbs that modify verbs or
adjectives, ‘sentence adverbs’, temporal and spatial ‘adverbs’, ‘adverb’ particles, interrogative
‘adverbs’, and even interjections, is in my view more troublesome for linguistics and related
disciplines, from a purely scientifically theoretical point of view, than this section is for the
theory of apartheid. And still, elementary school children around the world are required to
memorize adverbs as a single word class, on a par with such well-defined grammatical
categories as nouns, adjectives, prepositions, articles, pronouns, and conjunctions.
Nonetheless, the category of access sometimes, even to myself, seems to serve the
function of a waste paper basket for kinds of oppression that do not fit in under my other
headings. It is certainly a more abstract noun than any of the other eight used in my definition
of apartheid. In the end, though, it is perhaps good to have a miscellaneous category such as
adverbs, which at least attempts to organize leftover data. My understanding of apartheid will
hopefully serve some kind of scientific or analytic purpose for someone else than me, but it
will in any case eventually be abandoned at some time in the future and replaced by a better
theoretical, and no doubt very different, understanding of it. I thus hope to sow the seeds of
destruction of my own theory in this section, namely, in order to facilitate the analytic
understanding of apartheid and perhaps also of other kinds of gross human rights violations or
war and oppression for future and improved attempts at explanation, critique and treatment.
The range of human rights violations within this category is both deep and wide. Aside
from the denials of the basic human rights to food, water, shelter, and health care, it also
encompasses the denials of the basic rights to freedom of movement, to freedom of residence,
to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and the right to leave and return to one’s
country.543 But they also include less codified rights, such as the right to choose an education
or a career, or the right to marry or be with the person one loves, or the right to use specific
public amenities, i.e. collectively owned and financed property, such as post offices, libraries,
beaches, water fountains, toilets, elevators, streets, or park benches. These are nominally
public amenities that countless members of the indigenous majority toil to enable, provide,
and maintain in their own home country; yet they are nevertheless systematically more or less
excluded from using them under apartheid rule.

6.1. ‘All Egyptians Are to Be Expelled, except…’

We know of land confiscations and forced removals of Egyptians during the Graeco-
Roman period, but we have no direct evidence of forced racist segregation, the displacement
of people due to their race alone. However, it certainly seems as if Alexandria was planned
and segregated into different areas for the different ethnic groups. As already noted, up to
fifteen Egyptian villages were initially ‘cleared’ to make space for the new capital. This kind

542
Masekela & Todd: Soweto Blues, recorded by Miriam Makeba for her album ‘Welela’, 1989
543
Tilley (ed.) 2009: 193 also treats these violations together in its in detail and accuracy unparalleled and
comprehensive critique of apartheid under international law as practiced by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories.
300

of phenomenon may of course also occur in non-apartheid societies, e.g. during the clearing of
inhabited Nubian land for building the Aswan dam in modern Egypt, but after the foundation
of Alexandria the ancient Egyptians appear to have been confined to live in Rhakotis in the
southwest quadrant of the city, the Jews lived in the northeast, the royal palace was in the
north, whereas Greeks, Macedonians and others lived in between. There is no parallel to this
in modern or pre-Greek Egypt. Just off the Alexandrian coast, on the island of Pharos – with
its famous lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – was an additional,
walled village or small town with an Egyptian population. There was also a growing area of
increasingly rich Greek suburbs to the east of the city, as far away from Rhakotis as possible
without being too distant from the city center. As slums arose and expanded, crime levels
climbed, and the rich, i.e. European invaders and immigrants and descendants of European
invaders and immigrants, moved out of the city to these suburbs, just like in Johannesburg or
Cape Town, or in the USA, over 2,000 years later.544 Urban segregation along racial lines is
racist, though not in and by itself apartheid in the wide sense.
Likewise, large cities are commonly magnets to the poor and destitute. The influx of
this group of people creates problems in any class society, but especially in apartheid
societies. A portion of them are needed as slaves or as cheap labor, the rest are dealt with
harshly. They are only needed as reservists to the labor force, i.e. they are usually expected by
those in charge to live and die in poverty with as little fuss as possible. In 215 CE, the Roman
Emperor Caracalla – the same one who made practically everyone in the Roman Empire a
Roman citizen (see Chapter II.3.1 above) – issued the following remarkably crude (and rude)
decree:

All Egyptians in Alexandria, especially countryfolk who have fled

from other parts and can easily be detected, are by all manner of
means to be expelled, with the exception, however, of pig-dealers and
riverboatmen and the men who bring down reeds for heating the baths.
But expel all others, as by the numbers of their kind and their
uselessness they are disturbing the city...For genuine Egyptians can
easily be recognised among the linen-weavers by their speech, which
proves them to have assumed the appearance and dress of another
class; moreover in their mode of life, their far from civilised manners
reveal them to be Egyptian countryfolk.545

In essence, the motivation behind this decree is no different from that behind the
creation of Bantustans by South Africa or, for that matter, the strategic creation of areas under
nominal Palestinian Authority rule by Israel and the USA. Keep all the natives away from us
at all times, unless of course through their proximity they can contribute or can be forced to
contribute more directly to our profits, our well-being and our comfort! The luxuries and

544
Hellström 1997: 20; Bowman 1996 (1986): 209; Fraser 1972: 17. As the Jewish proportion of the Alexandrian
populace grew, Jews moved into some of the other districts. In 38 CE, however, under Roman rule, most of the
Jews outside the main Jewish district in Alexandria were murdered indiscriminately by rioting Greek city rabble.
It is unclear if any of the guilty were Egyptians, see Alston 2002: 158f, though it seems clear that the Romans,
the new rulers of Egypt, are squarely to blame for having caused resentment between the Jews and the Greeks,
see Lewis, N. 1983: 29; Clauss 2003: 146. In a second massacre of Jewish Alexandrians by Greeks in 60 CE, the
Romans also joined in against the Jews. Ibid: 160. Finally, during a Jewish uprising in Alexandria from 115-117
CE, all Jews appear to have been killed, murdered or expelled from the city, but perhaps many stayed and
converted to other religions, something that certainly was true for many Jews in neighboring Palestine. In any
event, there is no sign of Jews in the city again until nearly 200 years later. Throughout this time of oppression
and violence against Jews in Egypt under Roman rule, the Romans appear to have favored the Greeks over all
other non-Romans, although Jews had certain unique privileges related to their religion. For instance, they were
exempt from having to worship the Emperors and other deified elite Romans due to their staunch monotheism.
Ibid: 160-164.
545
Quoted in Bowman 1996 (1986): 126
 301

splendors of Alexandria were to be reserved in the first place, or only, to Romans and to
Greeks.
And here we have apartheid: the majority of the people is denied access to important
aspects of life, to things that can make or break them, things that can mean a difference
between life and death, due to their race, their being indigenous, alone. They are not even
allowed to enter the largest city in the country simply because they are indigenous.
As mentioned in the previous section on apartheid work, tens of thousands of people,
many of them under collective punishment, were simultaneously languishing in forced labor
camps in Egypt, especially in the stone quarries in the hot south of the country. Similarly,
South Africa imprisoned nearly 20,000 Black protesters after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.
And Israel keeps many thousands, during the first years of the Second Intifada: over 10,000 at
any time, Palestinians and others opposed to the occupation in Israeli jails today: among them
Arabs, Jews, Christians, foreigners, children, people under collective punishment.546
The free distribution of wheat, the staple food, through local town councils in
Ptolemaic times was made to people of higher standing (most probably only Greeks), whereas
the taxpayer-funded entire maintenance of members of the elite ‘Association of Elders’ was
certainly for Greeks only.547
Already in 242 BCE, less than ninety years after apartheid had begun in Egypt, the
only access to civil political privilege for Egyptians except through priesthood was eliminated,
as the ‘nomarchs’ were stripped of their titles. Until then, most nomarchs, heads of regional
civil administration, had been Egyptians. Since Alexander, however, they had gradually lost
power to the strategoí who were originally heads of the regional armed forces and were either
Greek or Macedonian. From now on, all formal political power, nationally and regionally,
would belong to Europeans, and it was also increasingly militarized. These were probably the
main reasons behind one of the first major Egyptian uprisings (of which we know) three years
later. Another possible factor was famine.548

6.2. Separate Necessities

Because of the comprehensive laws of segregation in South Africa under apartheid,
access to necessities, utilities, leisure facilities, access to the countryside and just about
everything else was differentiated according to race. As in all apartheid societies, access to

546
Gilbert & Reynolds 22008: 376; Addameer: Background on Israeli Detention, no date. Addameer, the main
NGO for Palestinian prisoner rights, states that Israel has detained ‘…over 750,000 Palestinians since 1967,
representing approximately 20% of the Palestinian population and as much as 40% of the male Palestinian
population.’ Ibid. These are not people held innocent until proven guilty. In fact, they are lucky if held guilty
until proven innocent. Many do not even know what they are suspected of having done, or said, or thought.
547
Bowman 1996 (1986): 72
548
Huß 2001: 374ff. After having crushed a later indigenous revolt in Thebes, however, an Egyptian named Paos
was made strategos of that city in 129 BCE. He also received the highest court rank. ‘Egyptians thus finally
succeeded for the first time [after two hundred years of Greek racist minority rule] in becoming members of the
elite’, according to Hölbl 2001: 198. (Bingen 2007: 288 reports on additional Egyptians who were then made
strategoi of southern regions in the first century BCE.) It may also have led to some other advances. In 122 BCE,
an Egyptian high priest married a woman who was probably Greek and who might even have been related to the
royal family. (Hölbl 2001: 198.) It is hard to imagine, however, that these were much more than instances of
token recognition for Egyptians who had served the Greeks exceptionally well, similar to token recognition for
collaborating black kings and chiefs, or to black policemen in South Africa, or for Palestinian businessmen,
officials, and politicians. In any case, this all happened during the long rule of Ptolemy VII, whom many Greeks
and Jews in Egypt had opposed in favor of his sister, Cleopatra II. He has become known as the king who treated
Egyptians better than any other regent of his dynasty. Yet, he did not sever his ties to the other Greeks, and he
never even learned the Egyptian language. His favorable treatment of Egyptians appears to have been restricted
to the Egyptian upper classes, i.e. priests, officers and functionaries. See Huß 2001: 618f. He also harshly
punished those Egyptian rebels who had joined forces with the Sudanese military leader, Harsiesis, who had tried
in vain to conquer Egypt during the civil war between the followers of Ptolemy VII and those of his sister. Ibid:
622.
302

political decision-making was jealously guarded by the racial elite. Restricted access in
everyday life was applied especially harshly in South Africa after the introduction and
implementation of the infamous Reservation of Separate Amenities Act in 1953. The
discrimination goes back, however, to the forced removals of the 17th century, to urban racial
segregation from the beginning of the 19th century, to the establishment of townships, reserves
and homelands, and to segregated amenities, both before and after the introduction of
apartheid in the narrow sense. The physical conditions in the reserves, townships and
homelands were miserable from the start, mainly because of population density and the poor
quality of the soil for purposes of both agriculture and pastoralism/foraging tenure, as well as
the lack of industrial infrastructure and water. At the end of the apartheid era, one-third of all
South Africans, trying to survive and live in a hot and dry country, had no drinking water at
home. People were forcibly herded together onto land that could not possibly support them.
Largely as a result of this, the Human Development Index (HDI) ranking for the ‘liberated’
South Africa in 1996 was still only 100th among the world’s countries – 124th for black
citizens but 24th for Whites.549
The Separate Amenities Act enforced racially segregated beaches, parks, libraries, post
office entrances, staircases, dry cleaners, churches, schools, prisons, sports clubs, swimming
pools, cafés, restaurants, hospitals, ambulances, etc., leaving the inferior options in each
instance as the ones reserved for non-Whites, including the indigenous majority. Amenities
could mean public premises, services and vehicles. Only roads and streets were excluded from
this law, which is very interesting in so far as Israel is presently specializing much of its petty
apartheid regulation and implementation on roads. It seems that Israel is consciously
attempting to implement apartheid that looks maximally different from the South African
version.
As we have noted, segregation intensified more than ever from 1948 onwards, yet
there was nothing essentially new about this. Perhaps some public libraries and post offices
had not been racially segregated to that extent before, but the other amenities had.
The only interracial access that was facilitated under apartheid was due to the careful
location and design of townships by the authorities, which ensured easy white military,
paramilitary and police access. The townships were planned and built so that ‘security forces’
could rapidly and easily enter and crush any seeds of revolt. The roads and streets were built
wide to minimize the risk of ambush and facilitate access and passage of armored vehicles and
other bulky military personnel carriers, as well as bulldozers, etc, for home demolitions. Even
lampposts were built extremely tall and sturdy – not unlike the ones in Nazi concentration
camps – so that a streetlight could not be easily extinguished by a hiding subversive with a
well-aimed rock or bullet. The numbers of entrances and exits to the townships and
homelands were kept at a minimum, again in order to maximize the degree of control,
especially in times of state security emergencies. In all apartheid societies, the authorities are
reluctant to be drawn into urban guerrilla warfare, which is often the only possibility for any
kind of sustained armed resistance. In some townships there was only one point of exit and
entry, and sometimes Blacks had to show passes to get in or out of the township, too. Whites
never had to carry passes.550
‘A secondary effect of the [Separate Amenities] Act was to distance the problems of
the urban poor from white eyes…’ For most white South Africans, the townships, located just
outside their cities or suburbs, might therefore just as well have been on the other side of the
planet.551 This is another instance of negative hallucinations, the psychotic or near-psychotic

549
N.N.: Whites ‘Still Far Better Off Than Blacks in South Africa’: Latest ranking by UN, June 12, 1997; N.N.:
S.African Truth Hearings Inspire Poverty Hearings, March 4, 1998
550
Reilly: Racism in the United States and South Africa, 2003: 229. See also Enwezor & Bester (eds.): Rise and
Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, 2013: 196-205.
551
Lester 1996: 115f, quote 116; Durrsheim & Dixon: The Role of Place and Metaphor in Racial Exclusion:
South Africa’s Beaches as Sites of Shifting Racialization, 2001: 433-450
 303

state of mind of apartheid perpetrators (see Introduction to Part II above). For a white South
African child, it made sense to believe, based on actual experience in kindergartens, schools,
shopping areas, leisure facilities, etc., that Whites were the most numerous.
The racially restricted lack of health care in South Africa was felt and suffered
especially by black women and black children. It highlights the fact that apartheid is
cowardice as well as a crime against humanity. It often targets the weakest. For instance, after
giving birth in hospitals, black women were routinely discharged immediately, on the same
day or in the same night, and forced to take the next bus home, sometimes in the middle of the
night, and sometimes even if there were no buses at all. Only hours after giving birth, young
mothers were routinely thrown out of the hospitals, with their babies. As late as the early
1990s, female public servants were still not entitled to paid maternity leave. Furthermore, as
the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) noted in its report on
health care under apartheid to the South African TRC: ‘Black women were injected with the
controversial contraceptive Depo Provera, often without their consent, counseling, or being
given another birth control option. White women weren’t even told about Depo Provera.
Factories coerced black women to be injected.’ Again, this was not random violence, or due
to personal racism. Women and their children were intentionally targeted by the oppressive
racial minority as obstacles to the repopulation policies of the apartheid society. It was
systematic structural violence, perpetrated by the state, the ‘public’ servants, and ‘civil’
society, all of them partners-in-crime.
The AAAS report adds: ‘Apartheid policy mandated an intentional maldistribution of
resources to the benefit of the white population. The priorities of the Ministry of Health also
encouraged its staff to ignore serious health problems if they did not affect whites.’ Full-scale
epidemics, warnings against cancer-inducing asbestos, etc, were simply ignored by the South
African state, but only if those affected, or likely to be affected, were non-Whites. In some
cases, it even accepted a few Whites falling ill, but only if they were very few compared to the
black victims or would-be black victims.
Hospitals were strictly segregated. There were white hospitals and black hospitals. As
late as 1978, there was only one medical doctor per 44,000 Blacks, but one per 400 Whites.
With this as a measure, health care for Whites was 110 times better than that for Blacks. In
direct correlation with this, the infant mortality rate at the time was 2.7 percent for Whites, 20
percent for urban Blacks and a staggering 40 percent for rural Blacks. Nearly one in two rural
black South African babies thus died at birth or soon thereafter. A quarter of all black infants
who survived birth later suffered malnutrition or stunted growth. In spite of (or alongside)
such appalling health care conditions for the great majority of the population in such a rich
country, the government, as we already noted, cynically ran twice as many family planning
offices as health clinics. That is not just an apartheid policy; it is a genocidal one.
These circumstances were partly known around the world. They raised criticism,
outrage and even voluntary offers from health professionals from abroad to aid the suffering
black population. That too, however, was counteracted by the apartheid state. ‘Doctors from
other countries were willing to work in the rural areas of South Africa, but the South African
Medical and Dental Council had difficult and inconsistent procedures for registering foreign
doctors that limited their ability to provide medical assistance.’552
If the apartheid government, the army, or elements of the army did not spread HIV
among Blacks intentionally (see Chapter II.1.2), then South African apartheid authorities can
still be held responsible for spreading AIDS, though indirectly. There was not enough health
care provided in order to keep the pandemic contained by this very rich state. A comparison
552
Quotes from N.N.: Human Rights and Health: The Legacy of Apartheid: Patterns of Human Rights
Violations, 1998; N.N. March 4, 1998; N.N.: The History of Apartheid in South Africa, no date; see also
footnote 221. More recently, Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world: 257 deaths per 1,000
live births, ‘only’ a little more than half as bad as black rural South Africa in the 1970s. See Nebehay:
Afghanistan Is World’s Worst Place to Be Born: U.N., 2009.
304

with other rich countries, especially in the North Atlantic region, will no doubt prove
instructive in this regard, since the spread of AIDS has (so far) been checked relatively
successfully in this region, although people of color and low income suffer disproportionally
here too.
White women suffered from apartheid much less than black women did, but, still, they
were needed and instrumentalized by the apartheid elites in order to counteract black
population growth, as we saw in the section on repopulation above. This had certain
repercussions on what else they could hope to achieve in life. Moreover, it often bred a lavish
and parasitic way of life as well as a bitterness that was often taken out on their domestic
employees.

White women were excluded from most types of formal employment

except secretarial and clerical work. While this exclusion was not
legislated, many White women were denied access to employment by
conservative ideas within Afrikaans and English communities about
women’s place in society. Thus, White women’s employment patterns
mirrored their role in the family.
Furthermore, White women’s aspirations and opportunities were
limited by the policies of banks that would not let married women
take out loans or open accounts without the permission of their
husbands; employers who fired women when they got pregnant; and
an educational system that encouraged women to take courses in
nursing or teaching rather than dentistry or higher education. This
varied depending on class, and began to shift towards the 1980s as
university enrolment evened out for White women and men, and as
career opportunities began to open up in a number of non-traditional
disciplines. However, broadly speaking, White women are still
economically and politically disadvantaged in relation to White men...
Black women participated in the workforce in significantly higher
numbers than White women did. The most common employment of
Black women was in the domestic sphere. Black female domestic
workers subsidised the life-styles of White women under extremely
exploitative conditions.553

Not only is sexism a divide-and-rule strategy in apartheid societies. Racism is a divide-

and-rule strategy in patriarchal societies, as well.
The liberation of South Africa since 1994 becomes perhaps more obvious in the realm
of access than anywhere else. First and foremost, the black majority now has access to the
political process, although political power has been globalized and subtly shifted from elected
politicians to unelected businesspeople and other appointees at the same time. Nevertheless,
there are many other examples of improved access. The number of households with electricity
has jumped from 50 to 80 percent since the end of apartheid. Millions of South Africans now
get their water for free. But access has also been made easier to debt, including debt amassed
by the apartheid regime for which the victims of apartheid are now paying. The officially
unemployed population of 30 percent (same as in the USA during the ‘Great Depression’ of
the 1930s) is mostly black (and is in reality close to 40 percent) and so are the 5.7 million
HIV-positive South Africans. Hospitals do not segregate patients according to skin color any
more, but they do segregate according to patients’ wealth. And so, access to wealth is still a
very exclusive and rigorously guarded privilege, and South Africa remains the ‘world
champion’ of economic inequality.554

553
Msimang, Sisonke: Affirmative Action in the New South Africa: The Politics of Representation, Law and
Equity, 2000. On the ‘extremely exploitative conditions’, see also Stubbs, in Biko 2004 (1978): 212.
554
Commey: Mandela 20 Years On: Change, But for Whom? 2010
 305

6.3. Pass Laws, Closures, Bypass Roads, Water Theft and the Apartheid Wall
In March 2005 I personally became witness to a blatant, yet undramatic and
underreported, human rights violation. It was, however, a crime under international law and a
part of a crime against humanity carried out with full intention and even as a result of acribic
planning by the state of Israel. Osama’s Pizza in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood in
east Jerusalem, shut down. This act annoyed and upset me and all of my colleagues at Miftah
in Beit Hanina tremendously. It was the closest and the best place for lunch during our routine
working days. Typically one or two of my group of ten or so co-workers would get lunch for
everybody at the office and only walk 50 meters for the diverse culinary pleasures that the
establishment offered. Osama’s Pizza, which produced delicious sandwiches and pizzas at
very affordable prices, closed down because the Israelis built their illegal ‘separation fence’,
in fact a seven-meter tall concrete wall, literally on the pizzeria’s doorstep, between the fast
food outlet and the Palestinian neighborhood of Al-Ram, the source of almost all of Osama’s
business. Al-Ram, however, had by the stroke of a cynical Israeli bureaucrat’s pen been
turned into future West Bank territory, whereas Beit Hanina had been earmarked in the same
process, by the Jewish state, as future Jewish land. This part of Beit Hanina was inhabited
only by Palestinians, but it was not densely inhabited at all. It is now part of Jerusalem,
whereas the very densely populated Al-Ram is henceforth, paradoxically, not part of the
largest city in the country. I believe I was the only one to report the incident, and its inherent
apartheid characteristics and contradictions, at all, in any case in the English language, in an
editorial piece on the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem by Jews against the indigenous people. I
wrote: ‘The neighborhood of Al-Ram starts only twenty meters away, but now its inhabitants
might as well reside on the moon, as far as the business owners and the employees [of
Osama’s Pizza] are concerned.’555 The lack of freedom of movement for Palestinians in their
own home town, enforced as part of Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, is what
killed Osama’s Pizza.
On June 16, 2002, one day short of the 26th anniversary of the beginning of the Soweto
massacre, Israel ‘inaugurated’ work on it originally called its ‘security fence’ along its border
with the occupied West Bank. The ‘fence’, which includes long concrete wall sections,
systems of trenches, razor wire and electronic early warning and surveillance devices, is
officially being erected in order to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from infiltrating Israel.
The ‘fence’ – along vast stretches in fact a wall, three times as long as the Berlin Wall and
twice as high – is largely being built on Palestinian land, at some stages going at least six
kilometers into Palestinian territory. When finished, it will lead to Israel’s annexing
approximately 10% of the West Bank, including 57 Israeli settlements illegally built on seized
Palestinian lands, 303,000 Israeli settlers and almost 290,000 Palestinians. It will cost US$
220 million to build. It already stretched over 110 km in its first phase, which was finished in
a year. A second phase of a 50 km long system of fences and barriers around Jerusalem was
initiated on June 30, 2002. By November 2003, due to the barrier, 70,000 Palestinians had
already become separated from markets, fields, schools, hospitals and other public services in
the West Bank, where they still hoped to be allowed a Palestinian state by Israel and the USA.
65,000 Palestinian-owned olive trees had been uprooted by the Israeli occupiers to make way
for the wall at this point. This fact and the restrictions on access to the fields led to estimates
that the 2003 olive harvest, of immense importance to the crumbling Palestinian economy,
would be halved due to the wall alone. The Israeli Defense Ministry said that 50 claims for
losses had been made by this time, and that compensation had been granted for each one.
Israel built 29 gates, through which Palestinians would sometimes be allowed to pass, along

555
Löwstedt, Jerusalem in my Heart, 2005. I only published this three weeks after the shutdown of the pizzeria. I
was therefore not too involved emotionally, from a professional journalistic perspective, yet of course still rather
annoyed and probably mildly upset.
306

the first 150 km of the wall, but the gates are open only for brief periods at varying times and
are sometimes shut for days, officially due to ‘security reasons’. The entire length of the
‘fence’ was expected to be 680 km. The practical outcome of the wall, frequently referred to
as Israel’s ‘Berlin Wall’ or ‘Apartheid Wall’, was cynically enforced racial segregation and
discrimination, the main reasons behind the suicide attacks. For example, in the Palestinian
village of Rumani, up to 90 percent of male Palestinian workers found work in Israel before
the apartheid wall, around half of them by slipping over the border illegally. On the whole,
unemployment in the West Bank at this time was an estimated 60 percent, and it was expected
to rise sharply again due to the wall, according to the Ramallah-based UNSCO, the United
Nations Special Coordinating Organization. An estimated 300,000 workers from Romania,
Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, China and other countries had replaced Palestinians for
jobs in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories at this stage.556
The Special Rapporteur for the UN Commission on Human Rights referred to the
‘security fence’ as a ‘creeping annexation’ of Palestinian territory and as ‘illegal’. The
International Committee of the Red Cross said it violates international humanitarian law. Even
the USA has criticized Israel for cutting off Palestinian farmers from their land with the wall.
Yet when the international community, represented by the UN General Assembly, voted to
refer the case of the illegality of the wall to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the USA
(along with seven other nations) voted against the motion. The ICJ was already widely seen as
likely to confirm the illegality of the wall. But Israel, the USA and the EU filed briefs with the
ICJ trying to argue that it is not the ‘proper’ forum to decide the issue. (Non-existent peace
negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with US ‘mediation’, were supposed to
provide a better chance of solving the ‘dispute’. Interestingly, an opinion poll had recently
revealed that EU citizens considered Israel and the USA the two biggest threats to world
peace, so there is no doubt at all that the EU officials did not represent the will of the EU
electorate in this case. Europeans have bad memories of walls.) In a reaction to the UN vote,
Israel, as usual, accused the international community of ‘hypocrisy’ (referring not to EU
foreign policy, but to the votes of over 95 percent of the world’s states), but Israel’s justice
minister, Yosef Lapid, in turn accused the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, of seizing too much
Palestinian land, of drawing US criticism and of stirring world opinion against Israel. The
human rights group, Amnesty International, said of the wall that Palestinian communities are
being split up intentionally and that Israeli restrictions on the movement of Palestinian people
and goods have now reached an ‘unprecedented level’. According to Amnesty International,
the ‘security barrier’ along with ‘[c]losures, blockades, checkpoints, roadblocks, curfews and
other restrictions have…a disastrous impact on the lives of Palestinians’, and this amounts to
collective punishment, which is a crime against humanity.557
Along with its awful physical aspects, the barrier also has a disturbing symbolic
character. Like the preponderance of forts and fortified homesteads and ranches and wagon

556
Spetalnick: Israel Inaugurates West Bank Fence Project, 2002; Hauser: Palestinian Town Dreads Israel’s
“Berlin Wall”, 2002; Robinson, A.: Israel’s Fence May Be Final Palestinian Economy Blow, 2002; N.N.: Israeli
Security Cabinet Sets West Bank Fence Line, August 14, 2002; N.N.: LAW Files More Petitions against Israel’s
Apartheid Wall, September 11, 2002; N.N.: 11,000 Palestinians Between Israel’s Apartheid Wall and Green
Line, September 25, 2002; Apartheid Wall Saga Continues, October 15, 2002; Levy: Apartheid Wall, 2003;
Heinrich: Israeli Barrier Cuts into Palestinian Olive Harvest, 2003; Amr, W.: Israeli Barrier Drives Palestinian
Traders to Despair, 2004. A non-governmental organization called ‘Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall
Campaign’ was formed soon after the wall started being erected. The website is www.StoptheWall.org. See
Chapter II.5.3 above on the Israeli disengagement from Palestinian labor since the 1990s.
557
N.N.: Israeli Security Fence Illegal-U.N. Investigator, March 27, 2003; Evans, R.: Israel Barrier Violates
Humanitarian Law-Red Cross, 2004; Heller, C.: Amnesty Condemns Israel’s W. Bank Security Barrier, 2003;
Goldin: Israel Attacks U.N. over West Bank Barrier Vote, 2003; N.N.: Factbox: Israel’s West Bank Barrier on
Trial, February 9, 2004. See footnote 832 below on the EU opinion poll. On the near-impossibility of Palestinian
travel in and to Israeli-occupied areas, see Hass: Impossible Travel: How Israel Implements an Apartheid System
in the Occupied Territories, 2007.
 307

circles (laagers) in the mythology of the Hollywood’s ‘western’ and apartheid South African
movies, the Israeli ‘security barrier’ cleverly inverts the relationship between the invaders and
the invaded: Israel, the real invader, appears to be defending itself against illegitimate,
immoral and evil invasions.
Israel’s Apartheid Wall is similar to the Berlin Wall, but it is designed to keep people
hidden and locked out (the vast majority of indigenous people), as opposed to the Berlin Wall,
which was built to keep people locked in. Due to it already by far dwarfing the Berlin Wall,
Israel’s Apartheid Wall could be compared more usefully with the Great Wall of China, also
designed to lock people out, though foreigners in the Chinese case. It is also very likely that
Israel’s experiment will share the fate of both predecessors, that of utter failure to achieve its
officially stated purpose.
The United Nations human rights envoy, the South African law professor, John
Dugard, has said that the main aim of the Wall is in fact to seize land rather than provide
protection against suicide attacks. Furthermore, by creating ‘anger, anxiety and humiliation’
among Palestinians, the Wall would raise rather than reduce Israel’s physical insecurity.
Dugard’s report for the UN Commission on Human Rights says: ‘The main beneficiaries of
the Wall are [Israeli] settlers...[who] will find themselves...with access to land separated from
its Palestinian owners’.558 In other words, it is to a large extent an apartheid land issue. It is
blatant theft of land.
On July 9, 2004, the ICJ ruled that the wall violates international law and
recommended that it be torn down wherever built on Palestinian land. By this time a third of it
had already been built. It also recommended compensation paid to those who already suffered
from it. The court’s rulings are non-binding, but Israel reportedly feared an ICJ ruling against
it would be so influential as to prompt efforts in the UN General Assembly to lobby for
international action against it, such as sanctions. In fact that is what happened with another
apartheid regime in a similar case. In 1971, the ICJ ruled on the legal consequences of South
Africa’s occupation of Namibia. As Israel would do 33 years later, South Africa tried to argue
that the World Court was not competent to rule on the case, a view rejected by the court in its
1971 ruling. However, in the case of South Africa, the UN Security Council had already
declared the occupation of Namibia illegal, a fact the World Court took as the basis of its
ruling that UN member states should take action against South Africa. That action came to
include comprehensive sanctions that contributed substantially to the eventual downfall of the
South African apartheid regime. In Israel’s case, the Security Council did not condemn the
barrier and any attempt to ask the Council to approve sanctions was expected to be blocked by
the anti-democratic veto power of the USA. Nevertheless, the UN General Assembly declared
the barrier ‘…in contradiction to international law…’ in a resolution approved 144-4 in
October 2003, backed by all the major European states, but opposed by the US and Israel.
Like his South African apartheid role models, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister,
rejected the World Court ruling, calling it ‘one-sided and politically motivated’.559
A second ideological reason for building the barrier is directed at people in Israel. Just
like the hidden black townships in South Africa, which is a country with much more space,
the oppressed indigenous people, the Palestinians in this case, are to be hidden from view, for
Israeli Jews, and for other immigrants, visitors, and tourists. Additionally, the Palestinians
with Israeli citizenship, the token Palestinian 1.2 million people with voting but strongly
restricted other rights in Israel, are to be cut away even more severely from their compatriots
in the Occupied Territories, with whom many of them have familial ties. The Palestinians that
already Golda Meir said do ‘not exist’ are thus turned even more decisively into non-existent

558
Quoted in N.N.: Israeli Security Fence Aims at Annexation-UN Envoy, March 10, 2004.
559
N.N.: Factbox: World Court Ruling on Israel Barrier How It Works, July 9, 2004; Thomasson: World Court
Says Israel’s Barrier Must Go, 2004; N.N.: Sharon Rejects World Court Ruling on W. Bank Barrier, July 11,
2004
308

people, despite their realness and their proximity. Their suffering, resentment, and poverty
will be even more out of sight than it is already.560 And Israeli Jews will feel that they live in a
Jewish democratic state, belying the oxymoron.
Even more similar to apartheid South Africa are the Israeli pass book laws and
inexorable, yet constantly changing, Israeli army rules of permitted and prohibited movement.
In the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, Palestinian residents are required to carry ID passes
according to their region. As in South Africa under apartheid, these are the indigenous people,
forced to carry passes in their own land by foreign invaders. Those in the West Bank carry
orange passes, Gaza is green and those in the rest of Israel/Palestine (including Arab east
Jerusalem) are required to carry blue IDs. These IDs could be seen as ordinary residents’ IDs,
but, due to their differentiation, they are used by Israel as a way to maintain security, and –
more importantly – control, by means of racial segregation. At the numerous checkpoints in
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, more than a hundred in number since the 1980s, citizens
are required to show their ID cards when crossing from one zone to another. If a person
possesses an orange card and does not have a permit to enter the area, s/he will not be
permitted to enter. The same method is used with vehicle plate numbers. They too differ in
color according to zone, thus it is even easier for Israeli security to spot the origin of each car.
Apart from severely hampering freedom of movement, supposedly a basic human right, this
has caused great divisions between the residents of the Israeli-imposed zones.
Furthermore, these divisions have prevented people from access to various institutions
and services. One major problem concerns hospitals and medical treatment, which are limited
in the West Bank and Gaza, especially during riots and attacks, when most hospitals in these
regions are overcrowded. For example, Ramallah is only 15 km from Jerusalem, yet, if an
accident takes place close to Ramallah and it has overcrowded hospitals, and the ambulance
which is transferring the wounded to hospital has a West Bank plate number, then the
ambulance (in most cases) must seek another hospital in the West Bank (much more than 15
km away), since it is not allowed to enter what Israel (alone in the world) considers Israeli
territory (east Jerusalem). Over 277 villages in the West Bank (containing 14 percent of the
population) do not have access to health care facilities.
Another aspect of racially differentiated access to health care and emergency medical
relief is the lack of qualified personnel for Palestinian patients. In the Palestinian territories,
where people are routinely killed and injured, there are only 12 doctors per 10,000 persons. In
Israel, on the other hand, where life is much safer, there are 28 doctors per 10,000 persons.561
There are other, even more repressive, Israeli military practices, which, according to
Al Haq, have been occurring during the past 30 years. For example, in December 1986, the
Israeli army delayed ambulances carrying Bir Zeit university students on the way to the
Ramallah hospital. There are a number of humanitarian agencies (e.g. UNRWA, the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency), which have repeatedly reported interference with their
efforts to collect, transport and treat wounded Palestinians. On January 24, 2001, a 28-year-
old woman who had suffered a heart attack and was being driven to a hospital died during a
45-minute wait at an army checkpoint. The woman had previously been prevented several
times from passing through the same checkpoint and had been forced to walk about 300 yards
along a dirt road carrying her recently born baby, her fifth child.562

560
Kovel 2007: 167
561
Palestinian Development Plan 1997: 11. The numerous so-called ‘by-pass’ roads or ‘safety’ roads, between
the numerous illegal Jewish settlements and enclaves in Palestine, and between these and the state of Israel are
de facto roads for ‘Jews Only’. See N.N.: The Israeli Apartheid Maps, no date; Carter 2006: 141.
562
Al Haq 1988: 70; N.N.: Palestinian Dies at Israeli Checkpoint - Hospital, January 24, 2001; In a first reaction
to Reuters, Peter Lerner, spokesman for the military-run Israeli civil administration of the West Bank denied that
the woman had died at the checkpoint. He contended that ‘from what we know’ there had been a ‘short check’ at
the checkpoint and then she had died in the hospital in an operation for a caesarean child delivery. But Moussa
Abu Hmeid, director of West Bank hospitals, challenged the Israeli version of the story and said the caesarean
 309

In 1987 Israel prevented hospitals from increasing the number of ambulances by

systematically denying license permits to prospective ambulance drivers. 1987 was the year
that marked the beginning of the first uprising, thus medical equipment was essential as
people were being wounded (and killed) on a daily basis.
During both Intifadas, curfews were imposed regularly, but according to international
humanitarian law, in times of war, parties of a conflict must reach agreements concerning the
evacuation of the wounded, sick, children and others. At the same time, Israel as the
occupying power should, according to international law, provide adequate food, water,
medical supplies and health services to those living under occupation.563 Yet, during the
Intifadas, Palestinians under curfew were denied access to medical treatment, food and
water,564 as people were not even permitted to leave their homes during curfews. Other
violations of medical rights include military raids on hospitals, medical treatment being
denied in prisons and detention camps and mistreatment of wounded people.565
This is not only happening because of the fighting. Israel’s health ministry spent 1.6
million Shekels on Arab communities in 2002, out of total 277 million Shekels, the rest of
which was spent on non-Arabs. Following this mathematics, Jewish health is 173 times more
important than Arab health to the state of Israel. There obviously are simply not enough health
care facilities built in or near Arab communities.566
UNRWA has also been targeted with deadly Israeli army fire. In one incident, in Jenin
on November 24, 2002, Israeli soldiers were busy firing indiscriminately as well as targeting
and killing unarmed Palestinian children and other civilians. During lulls in the firing the UN
employees tried to intervene to provide safe passage for women and children. Then they were
also shot by the soldiers. UNRWA Project Manager Iain Hook, a British citizen, bled to death
while Israeli soldiers held up for a whole hour the Palestinian ambulance sent to care for him.
Caoimhe Butterly was shot in the leg but survived. This all happened over two hours after the
Israeli soldiers had been targeted and shot at by Palestinian militants. No Israelis were hit. On
December 6 the same year two more UNRWA employees were killed by the Israeli army, this
time in Gaza. Five UNRWA employees were killed by Israeli soldiers in 2002 alone. Israel
had also destroyed a UN food warehouse, with food for tens of thousands of people, also in
Gaza. These crimes drew only meek responses, an urge for restraint and a demand for an
investigation from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. It is highly improbable that any other
country, UN member or not – except perhaps the USA – could ever get away so easily with

operation had been carried out over a month earlier ‘and we have all the records to show it’. He said: ‘She died at
the checkpoint because they prevented her from crossing’. Ibid. A similar situation occurred when Amira Nassir,
a 50-year-old diabetic died en route to a hospital in Jenin. Israeli troops refused to let her car through a roadblock
and an Israeli patrol jeep stopped the car again as the family member driving her attempted another route. See
N.N.: Palestinian Dies, Kept by Blockade from Hospital, March 14, 2001. Three months later, a Palestinian
woman said she gave birth inside a car at an Israeli checkpoint near Jericho after Israeli soldiers refused her
access to a hospital. Jamla Ihreizat told Reuters from her hospital bed in Jericho that soldiers manning a
roadblock at the edge of the city had not believed she was pregnant until she delivered her baby girl. Mother and
child later arrived at a hospital in critical condition, but were responding well to treatment. See Ass’adi:
Palestinian Gives Birth at Israeli Checkpoint, 2001. By February 2002, however, three Palestinian children had
died after being born at Israeli checkpoints during the first 16 months of the Second Intifada. According to the
human rights organization, The Palestine Monitor, they would all have lived if the cars or ambulances carrying
their mothers to hospitals had been allowed to pass normally. They were among 245 other Palestinian children
who were killed by Israelis during the same period. See N.N.: Israeli Police Murder 14 Year Old Boy, February
12, 2002.
563
Article 55, IV Geneva Convention, 1949
564
Al Haq 1988: 76; Ass’adi: Palestinian Crops Rot under Israeli Closure, 2001
565
Al Haq 1988: 74f, Goff (ed.) 1999: 111ff
566
McGreal February 6, 2006. A similarly disproportionate form of racist state discrimination emanates from the
Israeli housing ministry, which spent more than 100 times as much on each Jewish citizen compared to the
average Arab citizen. Ibid.
310

such behavior.567
Having failed to suppress or control the uprisings, the Israeli authorities took further
steps to halt economic progress in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Already during the first
Intifada, measures were implemented to control the amount of money brought in to these
areas from abroad. Furthermore, supply of fuel was halted for one month, telecommunication
links were cut, water and electricity disconnected. The restriction of money transfers caused
severe problems for many families. Due to the closures, many people were unable to attend
work regularly, thus they depended on money sent from family members abroad. Most of
these measures were taken by Israel to slow the economy down, including the closure of three
Palestinian bus companies, bans on workers traveling from the West Bank and Gaza to Israel,
failure to repair damaged water pumps resulting in shortage of water, prevention of food
entering towns and villages (sometimes for as long as 16 days as in the case of Beni Na’im in
March 1988).568
Most of these restrictions were relaxed during the latter part of the 1990s, especially
after the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (which was now to be
responsible for some utilities in some areas). Yet, such actions still occurred. For instance, the
Israeli water authority has a monopoly over the control and allocation of the entire water
supply, including that in the Palestinian territories. In the year 2000, before the Second
Intifada broke out, Israelis were still using more than three times as much water per capita as
Palestinians. While Israelis on an average enjoyed 377 m³ of water per person per year,
Palestinians had to survive on 112 m³ per person per year, according to the FAO, the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In Hebron, 70 percent of the water went to 8,500
settlers and 30 percent went to 250,000 Palestinians. Two years later, the Palestinian share had
dropped to a fifth of the Israeli one. And in 2010, the average Palestinian was being dried out
to the tune of 98 m3 per person per year.569
Not only the quantity, but also the quality of water differs, as every Gazan knows:

Gaza is often described as one of the world’s most densely populated

places. Many of the more than one million Palestinians live in squalid
refugee camps where safe drinking water is scarce…
The approximately 6,000 Jews in Gaza live a much different life.
Many have comfortable homes with clean running water and other
amenities in heavily-guarded and fenced settlements on or near the
most fertile land.570

Things went from bad to worse during the Israeli army attacks and curfews of 2002. In
567
Butterly: UN Worker Killed in Palestine, 2002; Arieff: U.N. Wants Israeli Restraint After More Deaths, 2002;
Leopold: Annan Tells Israeli Minister to Probe UN Killings, 2002; Leopold: UN Council Asked to Condemn
Israel for UN Deaths, 2002. Iain Hook’s successor, Paul Wolstenholme, was targeted and shot at by Israeli
soldiers who had broken into his office eighteen months after the killing of Hook. Their bullets missed his
successor but the soldiers apprehended him, handcuffed him, blindfolded him for three hours, and theatened him
with ‘physical violence’. Wolstenholme was not physically harmed and the Israeli army later apologized over the
incident. N.N.: UN Agency Protests after Israel Holds Top Official, May 23, 2003.
568
Al Haq 1988: 280
569
Koek: Water For One People Only: Discriminatory Access and ‘Water-Apartheid’ in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory, 2013. McCallin: Making the Blooms Desert, 2002, puts Israeli water consumption two years later at
350 litres of water per person per day, the corresponding Palestinian share being 70 litres. Brough: Israel
Blockade Causing Palestinian Food Crisis-UN, April 15, 2002, quotes the FAO alert as saying: ‘malnutrition was
on the increase, reflected in recent estimates of a 10.4 percent rise in the incidence of low birth weights and a 52
percent jump in the still birth rate in the West Bank. See also Gershberg: Israelis and Palestinians Wake Up to
Water Crisis, 2000; Fagan: Water a Vexed Issue for Israel, Palestinians, 2000. Israel’s B’tselem advocacy group
for Palestinian rights, quoted in Fagan, reports that Palestinian individuals get 30 percent less water than the 100
liters (22 gallons) a day recommended by the World Health Organization, while Israelis use 348 liters (77
gallons) a day.
570
Heritage August 24, 2000
 311

October of that year, there were 281 Palestinian communities that were not connected to water
supply lines. More than 200,000 people in the West Bank – along with their herds and flocks
– depended on water tankers for their daily supply of water, and so, they were getting even
less water. Indeed, the simple though usually arduous task of collecting water from a well
became an adventure during which one could get shot to death, merely for breaking an Israeli
army curfew.571
Access to water could be seen as one of the main Israeli motivations for holding on to
the Occupied Palestinian Territories and expelling their indigenous people. Most of the water
for the state of Israel reportedly comes from these territories. The water amount allowed to
Palestinians by the military regime was capped at the 1967 levels, although the Palestinian
population has grown considerably since then. To make matters worse, Palestinians are
routinely and arbitrarily, or as a measure of collective punishment, prohibited from drilling
wells, as for example from October 2002. Israeli infrastructure minister Effi Eitam has also
put a freeze on the issue of permits for future drillings in the Palestinian areas. The decision
was expected to have a disastrous effect on Palestinian agriculture and on Palestinian public
health. In the region of Salfit, which has the biggest water table in the West Bank, at least 16
artesian wells have been confiscated by Israelis over the years.

[This] water has been diverted miles away to Israel itself as well as to
Jewish settlements in Salfit and the Jordan valley. Israelis and settlers
consume five times as much water as Palestinians, but Palestinians
pay 300 percent more. This racist system of water delivery, perfected
by the South African apartheid regime, is controlled by the Israeli
private water company Merkorot.572

Such cruel measures are of course crimes. They are serious violations of international
law and a host of humanitarian and human rights treaties, most of which are signed by Israel,
as well. But, as usual, such niceties have no impact whatsoever on Israeli apartheid
officialdom or on the Israeli civil apartheid society elites, or on the US supporters of the
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their own land. Israelis and illegal Jewish settlers are of
course not affected by the bans on drilling wells.

In practice this means that Israeli settlers, living in illegal settlements

on the West Bank, get their swimming pools topped up and their
lawns watered while Palestinians living in villages next to them – on
whose land the settlements have usually been built – can go without
enough water for drinking and cooking.573

This kind of problem is not only to be found in the Occupied Territories, but across all
the land Israel occupies. As in South Africa under white rule, the discrimination of access to
amenities according to race is not restricted to times of unrest or war, either. ‘Electricity,
sewerage, and roads are provided free to Israeli households, whereas many Palestinian
communities in Israel, and especially in the Occupied Territories, have existed for decades
without adequate services.’574
A few days prior to the renewed outbreak of widespread violence in September 2000,
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and acting Interior Minister Haim Ramon gave the go-
ahead to the construction of a new road through six Palestinian neighborhoods. Plans for the

571
Hass: Scraping the Bottom of the Cistern, 2002
572
Anna, Karin & Marie-Jo: Occupied Salfit: Living in the Stench of Settlers’ Sewage and in the Shadow of the
Apartheid Wall, 2004. See also Koek 2013.
573
McCallin: Israel Bans New West Bank Wells, 2002
574
Abuhamdeh: 5 Reasons to Stop US Military Aid to Israel, 2002
312

road entailed three tunnels and one bridge, spanning 15.5 km. According to Jerusalem’s
Orient House, the construction of the road was intended to cordon off east Jerusalem from the
West Bank and to connect illegal Israeli settlements.575 We see here how the apartheid
categories of ‘Access’ and ‘Land’ can merge to become one and the same oppressive action
serving multiple purposes.

[C]ontrol is what has enabled Israel to double the number of settlers in

10 years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory
policy of cutting back water quotas for three million Palestinians, to
prevent Palestinian development in most of the area of the West Bank,
and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in a
network of bypass roads meant for Jews only. During these days of
strict internal restriction of movement in the West Bank, one can see
how carefully each road was planned: So that 200,000 Jews have
freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked into
their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands.576

Recreational facilities, such as beaches and parks, are also typically segregated in an
apartheid society like Israel, precisely the way it was in South Africa. The phenomenon,
‘beach apartheid’, is one example of many that is being used to compare and link Israeli
oppression with its South African counterpart. This is not just a crazy law or rule,
transgressors will be punished.577
Similar to casinos in South African Bantustans, including the infamous ‘Sun City’ in
Bophuthatswana, or to the numerous casinos on Indian reservations in the USA, an Austrian
company set up a casino in Jericho, officially under Palestinian Authority rule, in 1998. The
Neo-Bantustan casino was aimed primarily at attracting Israelis and foreign tourists and at
first it succeeded in doing so. Palestinians, on the other hand, were barred from entering
unless they had foreign passports. The militant Hamas group slammed the casino for
‘violating God’s orders’, as Islam prohibits gambling and alcohol consumption, which was
also abundant at the Jericho casino, before it closed due to the Second Intifada.578
During my stay in Palestine in 2005 I witnessed, for the first and so far only time in
my life, racist traffic lights. At the east Jerusalem crossing of the main road from Beit Hanina
(one of the most prominent neighborhoods of Arab east Jerusalem) and the West Bank to the
Old City, i.e. the center of Jerusalem, a large majority of vehicles are forced to wait in
tortuously slow-moving queues, while illegal Jewish settlers (between the illegal settlements
in the French Hills and ‘Israel proper’ on the so-called ‘Begin North Highway’) are given
right of way, not by visible traffic police or soldiers, but by calibrated machines, by racist
traffic lights. My colleagues and I referred to the road for Palestinians leading up to the light,
past the doorstep of the pizzeria I referred to above, which for several hundred meters ran
adjacent to Israel’s so-called security barrier, as ‘Wall Street’ (between Beit Hanina and Al-
Ram). Racism does not even appear to be a human phenomenon any more but in the nature of
things. To stop at red and go at green is one of the first things we learn in life, in cities
probably even before language. The consequences of these unique apartheid measures on the

575
N.N.: Israel Confiscates More Palestinian Land for New Bypass Road, September 19, 2000
576
Hass: Israel Has Failed the Test, 2000; Aloni: This Road is for Jews Only: Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel,
2007.
577
Goldenberg: Palestinians Feel the Heat as Police Enforce Beach Apartheid: With Peace Looming, Israel Is
Keen to Establish Areas for Jews Only, 2000
578
Abusway: Hamas Slams “Devil” Casino, Palestinian Authority, 1998. Three Palestinian lawmakers later filed
a criminal complaint against PA chairman Yassir Arafat, basing their argument on Jordanian law, which was the
last legal system in the West Bank before it was illegally occupied by Israel. See N.N.: Palestinian Lawmakers
Want Casino Shut, 1998. Interestingly, the Greeks in apartheid Egypt, like the Whites in South Africa and the
Jews in Palestine, also had ‘a penchant for gambling’. See Bingen 2007: 237.
 313

economics and the mental health on the Palestinian locals, to some extent including myself at
the time, were all negative. Indeed, much as I miss my colleagues and neighbors and the food,
I feel lucky to have escaped working there for more than six months, there in the entirely
invader-imposed labyrinth of apartheid ghettos for the non-Jews of east Jerusalem.
In general, I doubt there has ever been such a racist system of roads as in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. It is known as ‘road apartheid’, it is in place since the late 1970s, and it
is growing inexorably since then. Since 2007 it has become illegal for Israelis to transport
Palestinians on these roads without a special permit.579 The carefully planned network of
roads for settlers and soldiers only, the ‘Jews Only’ roads, criss-cross the West Bank in order
to connect the illegal settlements and the illegal military bases and both of these with Israel,
but also to push the Palestinians into shrinking ghettos between them. Palestinians are not
allowed to travel or walk on these roads. They are not even allowed to cross them except at
certain places, and then only on foot. This means they will have to leave their vehicles next to
the racist road they wish or need to cross and then find another vehicle and driver willing and
able to take them on the other side of the road. Under international law, these roads are as
illegal as the settlements and the entire occupation, i.e. built entirely on illegally confiscated
Palestinian land, in addition often built so as to destroy Palestinian agriculture and force
Palestinian farmers off their land into the shrinking Palestinian West Bank ghettos. South
Africa never saw such a racist system, although it should be added that black South Africans
seldom owned or drove cars, as opposed to Palestinians; they mostly traveled by foot or by
train or bus. South African Blacks were provided by their apartheid government with awful
trains and buses that were often both overcrowded and dangerous.
In east Jerusalem, illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, unilaterally and illegally
annexed to Israel since 1980, Palestinians are treated as unwelcome visitors by the occupier,
trying to ‘gently’ force them out to make way for Jews only. The western part of the city’s
population are treated to First World amenities by the state, the eastern citizens are treated as
Third World citizens or worse: ‘Jerusalem’s Jewish population, who make up about 70% of
the city’s 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and
26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no
public swimming pools and two libraries.’580 Of the whole city’s 900 sanitation workers, only
fourteen served east Jerusalem during the 1990s, and even there, Jews were treated as the
chosen race. Garbage removal for Jews in the Israeli-occupied Old City in east Jerusalem
takes place 13 times more often than for non-Jews, with Muslims being forced to live with

579
Tilley (ed.) 2009: 196-199 (quote: 197); Dugard: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human
Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, 2008; Shah: On the Road to Apartheid: The Bypass
Road Network in the West Bank, 1997-1998 (cited in Tilley (ed.) 2009: 197); Polakow-Suransky 2010: 236. The
latter also points out that road apartheid is worse in Palestine than in South Africa but hastens (Ibid: 237) to add
that ‘Zionists never banned miscegenation or kept the people they had conquered as servants in their
homes…Nor did they rely on others to build the Jewish state they dreamed of. . . South Africa was a society
premised on white laziness and the exploitation of black labor’, whereas ‘…By contrast, modern Israel was built
by industrious Jewish settlers…’ (Ibid: 239). There is a lot speaking for this difference, but this is still merely a
matter of degree. On the one hand, the kayas of the servants were built outside the masters’ homes, though on the
masters’ private property in South Africa, and on the other there is and has been a lot of exploitation of
Palestinian labor by Jews in Israel and Palestine, more than Polakow-Suransky appears to know. (He only
concedes there was a lot of exploitation during the 1980s (ibid)). The difference between banning racial mixing
by state and parastatal (religious) law is also just a cosmetic difference as pointed out in Chapters II.1.3 and
II.2.3 above. See Chapters II.5.3 above and II.8.3, below, on ongoing exploitation and exploitation pre-planned
before the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and since. Moreover, he is a little unfair to white South Africans, here. To
me they are and have been as industrious and as lazy as Israeli Jews are and have been.
580
McGreal: Worlds Apart (Israel and Apartheid Part 1), 2006. East Jerusalemites also have checkpoints, the
Apartheid Wall, and harassment and humiliations by Israeli police, soldiers, paramilitaries, civilians, and mainly
pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian tourists to look forward to on a continuous, daily basis.
314

their garbage even longer than the Christians.581

The policy of closure of Palestinian towns and cities, implemented by the Sharon
government from March 11, 2001, led to new depths of repression. A Palestinian member of
the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, said it made Israel even worse than South Africa ever was,
‘since the blacks in South Africa at least had a status and pregnant women were not prevented
from reaching hospitals.’582
In the summer of 2002, the Palestinian NGO Medical Relief Committee said 67
Palestinians had died since the beginning of the Second Intifada, less than two years earlier,
simply because they could not reach a hospital, due to Israeli military closures. The cases
included people needing kidney dialysis and women who died in childbirth. The Palestinian
Ministry of Health estimated that the number of women giving birth at home had risen from 3
percent to 30 percent, while those giving birth with the assistance of skilled health workers
had decreased from 97.4 percent to 67 percent, both of which endangered the lives of both
mothers and children. The Israeli army, however, says it must check ambulances out of
concern they could be used to carry weapons or explosives. It said explosives were found in a
Palestinian ambulance in March 2002.
At the same time, malnutrition was higher than 50 percent among Palestinian children
in some rural communities. Nearly one in every two young Palestinian children was now
reportedly suffering from chronic malnourishment. According to a World Bank report, 70
percent of Palestinians were living in poverty – officially set at an income of under US$ 2 a
day.
These horrific effects can and should be seen as direct results of military closure,
military curfews, economic and financial strangulation and, last but not least, Israeli wishes
and intentions along with US and EU blessings.583

581
Armstrong 1997 (1996): 418; Kovel 2007: 223. See Section I.4 above, on the very similar treatment of
Palestinian Muslims and Jews 900 years ago by another lot of invaders from Europe, the crusaders.
582
Gilbert: MK Mahoul: Ramallah like ‘Concentration Camp’, 2001. It should not be forgotten in this context
that Blacks in South Africa, as we have seen, hardly had any hospitals, nor that the few hospitals they did have
were seriously underfunded (as in Palestine and for Palestinians in Israel), nor that pregnant women were
admitted to hospital but sometimes thrown out again on the very day the baby was born. However, see further,
N.N.: Israel Strengthens Apartheid Policies, May 23, 2002; Rothchild 22010: 29f, (a description of the sharp
contrast in quality between First World hospitals in Israel and Third World hospitals in Gaza); and Chomsky: A
Wall as a Weapon, 2004, in which Israel’s Apartheid Wall is seen as a means among many others for Israelis to
intentionally ‘...turn Palestinian communities into dungeons, next to which the Bantustans of South Africa look
like symbols of freedom, sovereignty and self-determination.’ Again, there are South Africans extremes left out
of this comparison, most of them targeting women: aside from the horrendous ‘health care’ offered to Blacks as
referred to in the previous chapter, black women were forcibly injected with possibly harmful contraceptives,
Blacks and Whites were prohibited from becoming ‘intimate’, and finally, millions of Blacks were killed
throughout southern Africa by the apartheid regimes and their allies in Namibia, Angola and Mozambique. See
Löwstedt, July 13, 2005 and footnote 21 above.
583
Hauser: Palestinians Struggle with Weak Health Services, 2002; N.N.: Information Update: Humanitarian
Crisis in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, July 29, 2002; Heinrich: Palestinian Hunger Rises as Israeli Blockades Bite,
2002. According to a counter-survey, funded by the US-based groups, CARE International and the US Agency
for International Development (USAID), however, ‘only’ 22.5 percent of Palestinian children were suffering
from malnutrition. Al-Mughrabi: Survey Finds Palestinian Children Malnourished, 2002. Israel in fact made
reliable, independent investigations more or less impossible by imposing curfews and refusing to allow medical
teams or researchers into certain or any Israeli-occupied areas. For example, it would not let the United Nations’
World Health Organization (WHO) director-general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, into any of these areas despite
several appeals by the United Nations and others. See N.N.: WHO Assembly Condemns Israel, May 21, 2001;
N.N.: Israeli Closures Harm Palestinians’ Health -U.N., September 27, 2002. By January 16, 2009, Israel had
killed 13 paramedics and destroyed 14 ambulances in Gaza since starting an offensive there in the previous
month. See Butterly: Still Breathing in Gaza, 2009.
 315

7. Education
Apartheid education is…a crime against humanity.
(Nelson Mandela)584

7.1. The Museum, the Gymnasia and the Definition of Writing

Ptolemaic Egypt was very rich, most probably the richest country in the world at the
time. Alexandria, the world’s largest city, boasted the largest library and research institute in
the world, the Museum. The most famous scientists of the era, Euclid, Archimedes,
Eratosthenes and others either lived there or came there to study and to do research. Yet,
science and research in the modern sense were only secondary for the Museum. It was mainly
a philological, and thus to a considerable extent an ideological center. Classic Greek literature,
especially Homer and Hesiod, was the supreme subject of inquiry. The researchers were all
appointed (and if unsatisfactory, dismissed) by the king or queen, and most of them studied
Greek literature, Greek poetry, and Greek mythology. A second group studied astrology
(which had been imported to Egypt by the Greeks from Asia), astronomy, and mathematics
(including the famous Euclid), and the third largest group dealt with applied science, mainly
military technology, but also physical anthropology – including dissections of the bodies of
convicts provided to the anatomist, Herophilus, from the prisons by royal decree – as well as
biology and geography. There were no students, and no classes or courses were apparently
offered at the Museum itself.585
All of the researchers that we know of were Greeks, with a single certain exception, an
Egyptian priest called Manetho, from whom we still have a history of independent ancient
Egypt with a list of all the dynasties, kings and queens in Egyptian history since the early third
millennium BCE. It is in fact the most important single tool for our current understanding of
the history of ancient Egypt.
Manetho was active during the reign of the first three Macedonian kings of Egypt,
Ptolemy I, II, and III, and he seems to have been employed for the sole purpose of getting the
Greeks acquainted with a necessary minimum of Egyptian culture. He even wrote his history
of Egypt in Greek, and we only know his Greek name, not his original Egyptian one. Manetho
is the last ancient Egyptian to have written a history of Egypt of which we still have fragments
and reports. We do know of over fifty other ancient historians of Egypt, almost all of whom
had Greek names and were Greek scholars. Their contributions have influenced the
appreciation of Egypt and its independent ancient history deeply. As a historian, Manetho has
had a hard time gaining posthumous acceptance until now. Although present-day Egyptology
gives Manetho right in many of his scholarly disputes with famed Greek historians such as
584
See footnote 611 below.
585
Clauss 2003: 95-110; Järv: Biblioteket i Alexandria, 1997: 86. According to Mojsov 2010: 18, the Museum
also boasted zoological and botanical gardens. During Roman times there were probably classes held in auditoria
near the library, as some recent finds seem to suggest. These auditoria might even have been in use under Greek
rule already. See N.N.: Ancient University Classrooms Found in Alexandria, May 27, 2004. Following Fraser
1972: 348, Clauss (106) writes that Herophilus’ anatomical discoveries would have been the greatest product of
Alexandria had they not been lost until recently. Some of Herophilus’ findings were in fact not paralleled until
the late 19th century CE. Hassan, F. et al: Alexandria Graeco-Roman Museum: A Thematic Guide, 2002: 62 even
refers to Herophilus as ‘the father of anatomy’, mentioning his accurate description of the brain and his
discovery of the difference between arteries and veins. Perhaps it is worth considering whether some of World
War II’s infamous Nazi and Japanese anatomical and physiological experiments on live human subjects were
carried out or foreshadowed by or under Herophilus, as well. The racism-induced lowering of thresholds of
inhibition against extreme physical torture necessary for carrying out such vivisectionist experiments, including
dehumanization of the conquered people, and incitement to violence against them, may indeed have been
sufficiently present in Ptolemaic Alexandria. It is certainly is with Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the illegal Jewish
settlements of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, who has deemed acceptable medical experiments on captured Arab
terrorists. See Gorenberg: The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, 2000: 164.
See also Chapter II.1.1 above, and further, Section II.9 below.
316

Herodotus, the 9th-century monk George Syncellus, for example, ‘…vilified Manetho for
presenting Egyptian history from a native Egyptian stance…’ This is just one example of
many, opposed by Manetho’s reasonable chronology of over 3,000 years of almost
uninterrupted indigenous Egyptian rule prior to Alexander’s conquest. This timeframe,
however, bursts the extremely narrow chronology of the Bible’s Genesis, which dates its
account of a divine creation of the world as a more recent event than the first Egyptian king in
Manetho’s account.586
From Manetho onwards, the Greeks in the Museum seem to have been indifferent
towards or even ignorant of Egyptian culture and Egyptian people. The first head of the
Museum, Demetrios, was known for his anti-democratic and pro-Macedonian chauvinism
before Ptolemy I hired him for the job. In general, the Museum’s scholars, poets, and
scientists seem to have had less contact with the Egyptians than did any other Greeks in the
country, possibly even including the royal family, who were, to put it mildly, out of touch
with Egyptians. The first and only Macedonian regent to learn the Egyptian language, the
indigenous language and the first language of around ninety percent of the population of
Egypt, was Cleopatra VII, who was the last ruling Ptolemy. On the other hand, she seems to
have been quite a talented linguist. She reportedly spoke at least nine languages fluently. By
that time Cleopatra’s family had lived in and ruled the country for three centuries.587
The extravagant and ostentatious588 Ptolemaic kings are famous for trying to acquire

586
Verbrugghe & Wickersham: Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated: Native Traditions in Ancient
Mesopotamia and Egypt, 2000 (1996): 8, 98ff, quote: 102; Bingen 2007: 28. According to Clauss 2003: 176f, the
poet, Pancrates, who was made member of the Museum through personal intervention by Emperor Hadrian in
124 CE, was also an Egyptian. On the practically and/or theoretically eurocentric disregard of pre-Greek, mainly
Egyptian and Mesopotamian, contributions to the development of the sciences, see Pingree: Hellenophilia versus
the History of Science, 1992: 554-563; Bernal: Animadversions on the Origins of Western Science, 1992: 596-
607; Assmann: Hellas, Hellas über alles, 1995.
587
Huß 2001: 318f; Walbank 41994 (1981): 123, 181ff, Weber 1993: 74ff; on Demetrios, see Bingen 2007: 26.
An exception to the negative and ignorant attitude towards Egyptians in the Museum was Eratosthenes; see
footnote 602 below. An instructive socio-linguistic comparison with a vastly different development from a
dynastically similar premise could be drawn here with the Bernadotte family, which occupies the throne of
Sweden since the Napoleonic wars. The first Bernadotte, Karl XIV Gustaf, originally Jean Baptiste Jules
Bernadotte, never learned Swedish and remained very much disliked by the people subjected to his rule. His son,
however, and all further heirs, made Swedish the first language of the royal court, although French was initially
still the language of the Swedish upper classes, and they were no doubt less unpopular among their subjects as a
result of that. In England, foreign kings, such as William the Conqueror or George I, did not learn the indigenous
language either, but, again, their immediate descendants did, as opposed to the Greeks in Egypt. Only if the
present queen of England knew no English and all her predecessors since George I at the beginning of the 18 th
century spoke German, but no English, would the royal family situation in Egypt under Ptolemaic rule have been
reflected by England today. In my opinion, the Bernadottes, the Windsors and the Ptolemies, and many other
royal families and aristocracies, manifest some interesting recurring similarities, including dynastic longevity,
cruelty, and perhaps the inheritance of inbred deficiencies, though that is by far mostly the case with the ruling
Ptolemies, several of whom were the offspring of brother-sister unions. My own estimate of around 90 percent
Egyptians in Ptolemaic Egypt stems from the inverse of Parsons’ estimate of a four percent Greek minority in
Egypt, with Jews and other non-Greek non-Egyptians, among them many other foreign mercenaries, subtracted. I
could be exaggerating a little, however, as J.G. Manning claims there were as many as ten percent Greeks in
Ptolemaic Egypt. See footnote 371 above.
588
The many festivals and parades in Alexandria were basically tributes to the alleged heroism and the conquests
of the Greeks, i.e. self-celebratory affairs. An article on the subject ends with the words: ‘...the generosity and
thus expense involved redeems a certain nouveau riche attitude which the Ptolemies had inherited from
Alexander, but outside of this stood the indigenous population.’ Goukowsky: The Pomp of the Ptolemies, 2000
(1992): 140, quote, 147. One might add that the indigenous were not only excluded from, but also to some extent
humiliated by these celebrations of Greek (European) excellence and Egyptian (African) defeat, as they typically
included bombastic victory parades through the city, to be attended and watched by one and all. See also Lewis,
N. 1983: 39; Clauss 2003: 76ff. The same was true in South Africa and apartheid Liberia. See Biko 2004 (1978):
32, and Dennis & Dennis 2008: 34f, respectively. Israeli ‘Independence Day’ celebrations are yet another
example of the same thing. In 2011 it even became a punishable offense in Israel to mourn its officially and
 317

every existing book in the world for their Museum, but that was not really the case:

The library was essentially a collection of Greek literature. . . [and

despite some doubtful ancient testimony to the contrary] we may
suspect that the works in the library translated from other languages
were in fact comparatively few. The whole surviving body of Greek
and Latin literature includes only a handful of translations from one of
these languages into the other, and translations from other languages
may have been rarer still.589

The only ones that really mattered to the Ptolemaic rulers and scholars were apparently
Greek books. And they mattered immensely to Greek elite society. With a dose of Anglo-
Saxon understatement Lewis remarks that a payment of 448 drachmas to a reciter of Homer,
the ancient Greek Shakespeare, recorded on a papyrus in Egypt is ‘impressive’, especially
when compared to the wages of skilled laborers at the time, which amounted to four drachmas
a day.590 Poets and singers (with only a handful of exceptions worldwide) may only dream of
receiving such fees for audiences of such limited magnitude today.
The translations of foreign (i.e. non-Latin) language texts that did take place were
mainly restricted to technical texts, i.e. texts that were seen exclusively as means, and never as
‘high’ literature, as worth reading for their own sake. This goes for the entire Greek-speaking
world during the Hellenistic Age:

[O]f genuine literary interpenetration between Greek and other

cultures there is virtually no trace. For one thing, literary translations
– as opposed to those of medical, mathematical, astronomical, or
similar practical treatises... – seem to have been nonexistent, a sure
sign of esthetic indifference.591

This was no ordinary kind of ethnocentrism, especially at the Museum, which included
“…the first [library] to underwrite a programme of cultural imperialism to become a ‘centre
of calculation’…” and ‘an epicentre of Hellenism more Hellenic than Greece’, in the words of
Roy MacLeod, the editor of a recent collection of articles on the library. 592 With a

socially heavily celebrated day of ‘independence’, which for the 10 million Palestinians in Israel and around it is
considered a nakba, a catastrophe. Sofer: Knesset Passes ‘Nakba Bill’, 2011. See also footnote 861 below.
589
Barnes: Cloistered Bookworms in the Chicken-coop of the Muses: The Ancient Library of Alexandria, 2002:
67
590
Lewis, N. 1983: 61. However, one could compare this 112-1 wage difference with current class societies such
as Austria, where CEOs on average take 48 times more than their employees receive, or the USA under George
W. Bush, where on average CEOs took a whopping 411 times more money than their employees received. N.N.:
Trotz Krise mehr Geld für Aktionäre und steigende Managergagen, April 29, 2009; Gepp: So viel verdienen
Manager… und so viel wir: Während Durchschnittsgehälter sinken, haben sich Managergagen in zwei
Jahrzehnten mehr als verdoppelt, 2013; Klein 2008 (2007): 444. In terms of capitalist exploitation, Egypt under
European rule in antiquity, though perverse, was only midfield. As we saw in Chapter II.5.1 above, it was in the
state and other taxes that Egyptians faced exploitation on a par with the exploitation of workers with their
meager wages by the capitalists in present-day USA.
591
Green 1990: 316. An important exception was the translation of the Jewish Septuagint, for which Ptolemy I
was said to have hired and housed 72 rabbis at the chief librarian’s suggestion: see Barnes 2002: 63f; Brundige:
The Library of Alexandria, no date. Yet, the translation was most probably not intended to be for the direct
benefit of Greeks, but for the many Jewish (mercenary) soldiers and (civilian) settlers in Egypt who did not
understand Hebrew. See Werner, Jürgen: Zur Fremdsprachenproblematik in der griechish-römischen Antike,
1992: 14. It should also be noted in this context that religious art was syncretized to a great extent in Egypt under
Greek and Roman rule, but chiefly for (manipulative) political rather than aesthetic or any other reasons. See
Chapter II.9.1 below on this issue.
592
MacLeod, Roy: Introduction: Alexandria in History and Myth, 2002: 3. Bingen 2007: 25f. interprets the
Museum as mainly an ideological tool for the king to legitimize himself and his alleged divinity to his Greek
subjects, i.e. to the privileged racial minority. I believe our two perspectives complement each other, since the
318

predominantly cultural brand of racism, the Greeks in Egypt attempted a kind of ethnic purity
that manifested itself chiefly in language, custom, culture, and thought, but secondly also in
biological terms. At first, the Greeks in Egypt were very successful in centralizing
intellectualism and scholarly pursuits in this way. Within just a few decades of the founding
of the city, Alexandria took over the central role of Athens for intellectuals in the Greek-
speaking world. But already towards the end of Ptolemaic rule the glorious reputation and the
scholarly achievements of the Museum had faded considerably.

Eventually, the word Alexandrian became a metonym for the craft of

‘editing’, for the practice of consolidating and correcting scholarship
rather than creating it – critical, custodial, preoccupied with the purity
of old forms…593

There is perhaps nothing more conservative than elite apartheid culture. This also
becomes obvious with a look at Ptolemaic secondary education. The Hellenistic gymnasia,
schools that taught literature, rhetoric, mathematics and physical education exclusively to
Greeks, were the main breeding grounds for Greek racial chauvinism, under Ptolemaic rule
and later. The only language of education was Greek. Almost all of the school texts were
hundreds of years old, originating in the 3rd century BCE or earlier. Homer, who was
apparently read four times more than any other author, was the ‘centrepiece’ of an education,
which was necessary for most careers in Egypt. Aside from the Homeric epics themselves,
authored in the 8th century BCE or earlier, there were Homeric vocabularies and Homeric
dictionaries (from ancient to the contemporary koine Greek and back), Homeric commentaries
and Homeric summaries. Homer has been referred to as the ‘bible of the Greeks’. Under
Roman rule, a few Egyptians and other ‘foreigners’ were also allowed to study at the
gymnasia, but even if they graduated, this did not mean that they would automatically gain
citizen status, as was the case for racial Greeks.594 The gymnasia therefore intensified and
widened the gap between the Greeks and the Egyptians considerably. 595 Other schools during
the Ptolemaic era were Greek philosophical schools, which were essentially private
enterprises.596
Three centuries into Roman rule the nationalist and imperialist Roman poet, Virgil,
was added to Homer as the most required reading in Egyptian schools.597 In both cases, the
school texts largely glorify war and celebrate dogged survival, patriotism, loyalty, and self-
sacrifice.
After the advent of Christianity, however, things changed to some extent. Church
teachers during the last few centuries under Roman rule taught in Coptic as well as in Greek,
so we may safely assume that at least some Egyptians were also attending schools by that

most effective way for the king to justify himself to the rest of the racial elite was to develop an ideological and
racist propaganda factory to their (perceived) benefit under the guise of science, culture, and civilization, though
Bingen does not explicitly say so. He does say, however, about the Museum: ‘…the king [Ptolemy I] found in
this creation and its exceptional dimensions the convergence at a high level of two legitimacies: Macedonian
royal legitimacy and Greek cultural legitimacy’ (26). I believe the latter ‘legitimacy’ in this quote is actually an
unintended euphemism for ‘superiority’ (cf. the Green quote in footnote 493 above, and the Swain quote in
footnote 645 below). Bingen also points out that Ptolemaic legitimizing ideology did not target the majority of
the population, the Egyptians. (29). See Chapter II.9.1 below, on aspects of Ptolemaic ideology that made
Greeks, whether royal or not, feel divine, or even super-divine, during Ptolemaic times.
593
Ibid: 9
594
Parsons 2007: 146-152; Fraser 1972: 77; Green 2007: 69 (quote). Similarly, one may find some Arab students
at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and also at other Israeli universities today, or a few black students at South
Africa’s universities during some periods of the era of white supremacy there.
595
Walbank 41994 (1981): 120. In a kind of ‘Yellow Pages’ for Ptolemaic Alexandria, a list of people with
specialized knowledge, including practical skills, not even a single non-Greek is listed. See Clauss 2003: 109f.
596
Bowman 1996 (1986): 224f.
597
Parsons 2007: 173
 319

time. Nonetheless, Christians were working with a corpus of theological and doctrinal texts,
which were originally written in Greek. Thus it appears to have remained the dominant
language in all walks of life.598 Furthermore, the kind of ‘education’ being offered by the
Church was hardly likely to be useful in a liberation struggle, except perhaps the ability to
read and write itself. There were, however, some additional exceptions to Greek hegemony in
the period immediately preceding the spread of Coptic, when the impending death of the
ancient Egyptian language must have been rather obvious.

From the second and third centuries AD there are examples of Greek
translations or adaptations of Egyptian literary works which is an
important clue to the existence of a Greek-speaking readership,
perhaps one of which a part had some demotic ancestral memory. This
in itself does not quite constitute a merging of Egyptian and Greek
literary traditions, but it points the way forward to the role of Coptic
literature, much of which uses the themes and substance of Christian
material written in Greek.599

Still, there were cases of people manifestly able to write Egyptian, people who were
nevertheless officially declared illiterate by the Greek-speaking state bureaucracy. It is
obvious that Greek writing was considered by those in power to be not only superior but in
another league than Egyptian writing or whatever it was that Greeks regarded Egyptian
writing to be.600 We will return to this theme in the following two sections.

7.2. Bantu Education and Baasskap

The apartheid system of segregation and oppression in South Africa secured its power
through its educational systems, which were created differently for the four racial groups,
White, Black, Coloured and Asian. Educational systems depended primarily on race, with the
white schools being the most privileged ones. The average ratio of state expenditure between
a white and a black student during the apartheid years in the narrow sense was ten to one. In
the mid-1970s it was nearly twenty to one. More than half of all black children left school
after less than four years, mainly because the state did not care about them and because both
big and small white business was mainly or only interested in Blacks as cheap, unskilled,
expendable, and replaceable workers, i.e. only as means to the short-term ends of white
prosperity, white comfort, and white security.601
Especially from 1948 onwards, the National Party felt that it was necessary to limit
black people’s education, perhaps mainly so that they would not become too ‘enlightened’
and demand more or even equal rights, which might lead them to revolt against white
minority rule. School attendance for Blacks was not mandatory and Whites did what they
could to keep as many Blacks as possible in school as briefly as possible or even altogether
out of school. Afrikaans-language universities were already closed to Blacks, and from 1958,
English-language universities were also closed to Blacks. As in other apartheid societies,
education in South Africa in general had the effect of radicalizing the oppressed indigenous
majority, the Blacks, and of making apartheid defenders and apologists less radical.602

598
Ibid: 160f.
599
Ibid: 164. It is of course undeniable that Greek culture is as much part of Egyptian history as Jewish culture is
of Palestinian history, or western European culture of South African history.
600
Ibid: 159. See also below, Chapter II.9.1.
601
Fedderke, de Kadt. & Luiz: Uneducating South Africa: The Failure to Address the Need for Human Capital –
a 1910-1993 Legacy, 1998: Fig. 9; Ross 1999: 161
602
Iliffe: 1995: 283; Mandela 2002 (1965): 32. This is almost certainly also the case in Israel. The settlers in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories are mostly recruited from the latest waves of immigrants and from other
relatively poor and uneducated Jews. Palestinians with higher education, in sharp contrast, tend to become
radicalized. In a way, this fact in itself ‘proves’ the moral inferiority of apartheid to less oppressive societies. The
320

Even though apartheid officially professed to aim at separate yet equal developments
for all races, the government was spending much more attention and money on the
improvement of white schools and on the education of white pupils. In the 1950s and the
1960s, the number of black students doubled, without additional governmental spending in
comparison with the increase. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 led directly to the number of
technical colleges for Blacks falling from 54 in 1953 to 21 in the following year. 603 Less
qualified teachers, inadequate facilities and a curriculum, which was to ‘complement the
apartheid model of society’604, were forced onto the overcrowded black schools. The ratio of
pupils per teacher in black schools rose from 46 to 1 in 1955 to 58 to 1 in 1967. Some classes
had over 100 children. Meanwhile, white pupils in state schools, designed for them only,
enjoyed superior education with small classes, better-educated and better-paid teachers,
science laboratories and swimming pools, things that black children never knew. Furthermore,
black pupils had to pay for their schoolbooks while Whites got theirs free of charge. In 1976,
257,505 black children enrolled to start secondary school, but black schools were only able to
take 38,000. Not one of the additional 219,505 students was taken in by the white schools,
both because they did not want those students, and also because they were not allowed to take
them in.605 These were some of the reasons behind the Soweto uprising of that year. Another
reason will be treated in the next section.
The assault on the basic human right to education (to which South Africa was bound
by international law as a signatory of the relevant declarations and conventions) was carried
out mainly through and within the framework of the 1953 Bantu Education Act (No. 47),
which divided the black population into different tribal units, resulting in each unit being
isolated from the other – yet another strategy to prevent black national consciousness and
racially-nationally organized resistance from developing. The only exception to this pattern
could be found in the few private black schools, many of them church and mission schools,

more you know the more you want to overthrow. There even seems to be a parallel in Ptolemaic Egypt, where
education was, after all, probably more ideological than in any other apartheid society. (See Chapter II.9.1
below, and also footnote 41 above.) The famous mathematician and geographer, Eratosthenes, who actually led
the Museum in Alexandria for a while, argued for an end to the separation between Greeks and Barbarians, i.e.
‘foreigners’. He is more famous however for other things, such as his ingenious calculation of the circumference
of the earth, which he achieved with amazing accuracy. See Leuteritz: Hellenistische Paideia und Randgruppen
der Gesellschaft: Herrscher und Frauen, “Bildungspolitik“ und Eukosmia, 1997: 151. During the second century
BCE, when most of the indigenous uprisings against Greek minority privilege and rule took place, several
members of the Museum were ‘…forced to flee the country. There must have been many who fled, since
Menecles of Barca, the historian, later stated that in their diaspora, Alexandrian scholars educated Hellenes and
barbarians alike in every branch of knowledge.’ (Hassan, F. et al 2002: 63). Just like in South Africa and modern
Israel, an increasingly repressive state ends up being anti-intellectual, stifling academic freedom, i.e. preventing
the unfettered pursuit of truth and the teaching of that pursuit, in a wide variety of ways. After only six decades
of apartheid in Israel and Palestine, there is in fact already an intellectual Israeli-Jewish Diaspora, like the
Ptolemaic Greek one, exemplified currently by Ilan Pappe, who resides and works in Britain since threats were
made to him and his family, or Neve Gordon in the USA, or Gilad Atzmon (http://www.gilad.co.uk), or Uri
Davis, who at first also left Israel for Britain, but is now back in Palestine, since marrying a Palestinian and being
elected into the revolutionary council of Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian political party in the West Bank. See
Beaumont: Why Israeli Jew Uri Davis Joined Fatah to Save Palestine, 2009. See Rothchild 22010: 57, on
additional anti-intellectual tendencies in Israeli society. The Israeli-Jewish Diaspora is also starting to look like
the intellectual European-Jewish Diaspora prompted by Nazi persecution, which led to immeasureable losses for
European science and culture, among many other, even worse, losses. Amid the numerous things that the
members of the intellectual Israeli-Jewish Diaspora appear to have in common are the ideas that modern Israel so
far is a state of apartheid, and that it should be boycotted and sanctioned. One might add that today, too, this
diaspora commonly teaches to all people things that are practically reserved for a single racial group in the home
country. See Section II.9 below. On the exceptional civil courage of these people and others like them, see
Mandela 1995 (1994): 561f, referring to Bram Fischer, an ANC lawyer who was seen as a traitor by his own
people, the Afrikaners, who sent him to jail for life for conspiracy to commit sabotage.
603
Lester 1996: 113f, 159
604
Ibid: 114
605
Bonner & Segal 1998: 78f
 321

which increased in numbers between 1935 and 1956. Yet, private school pupils’ enrolment
dropped again from 1956, mainly due to increasing poverty among Blacks, but also because
several private schools for Blacks were now forcibly being closed down by the government.606
Largely similar to Homer for the Greeks in Egypt, the plays of William Shakespeare
came to South Africa to instill a sense of racial superiority among Whites, primarily, of
course, for the British, but also, in time, for the Afrikaners. At first, in the early 19th century,
Shakespeare’s plays were staged and acted by British military officers only. Later on,
professional actors from London were brought in for guest performances. Cultures of
bardolatry (uncritical worship of Shakespeare) and Shakespeare criticism started developing
alongside each other. By the mid-19th century, professional theater companies started up in
South Africa, and soon Shakespeare was read and experienced off theater stages by millions,
if only as required school texts or plays. Shakespeare initially served mainly as colonialist
culture, to remind British soldiers and settlers of their heritage, to construct identity as well as
a sense of racial superiority, and to teach and remind people that the world is a hierarchically
ordered, violent, cruel, and unfair place. From the 1940s, Shakespeare was also staged in
Afrikaans, and by now, the independent South African elites in charge of the theater
productions, increasingly in schools, employed Shakespeare as justification for Afrikaner
nationalism, state racism and apartheid. Simultaneously, however, Shakespeare was also
being staged by Coloured and black theater groups (in Zulu as well as English), and from the
late 1980s by multiracial casts, and here his plays could serve as a mirror of injustice in
society, or even as a kind of subversive commentary or prophecy. I have seen no evidence of
Homer being used in the latter two ways by anyone under Greek or Roman rule and
occupation in Egypt. But the defining and most important parallels between Homer and
Shakespeare under apartheid were their uses as ancient authorities, employing ancient
versions of the dominant culture’s language, to simultaneously justify and cloud awareness of
relations of production, domination and oppression within the societies in which they were
performed.607 The Torah, as well as secular Zionist historiography, serve these same supreme
apartheid education purposes in Israel today, as we shall explore below.
The educational system in apartheid South Africa was more abstractly based on the
concept of baasskap or bosshood, which also means white supremacy over all other races,
implying non-white inferiority.608 Hendrik Verwoerd, the Minister of Native Affairs (and later
Prime Minister), stated with regard to his Bantu Education Bill of 1953 that racial relations
could only be improved once each race knew what education they deserved. Certain areas of
education, such as mathematics and natural science, were not open to non-white students.
Black Africans ‘should be educated for their opportunities in life’, because there was no place
for them ‘above the level of certain forms of labour’. In other words, Blacks deserved inferior
education because they were ‘culturally inferior’, and Whites conversely deserved more
advanced education since they were allegedly ‘more advanced culturally’. 609
This, and the authorities’ demands for more Afrikaans in the schools, sparked mass
resistance in 1976 in township schools, in which two organizations launched boycotts, which
by the 1980s had spread throughout the country with the slogan, ‘Liberation before
Education’. By 1985, 650,000 students were not receiving any education. Leaders in charge of
the boycotts were arrested, harassed, tortured, and some killed. Others committed suicide after
having betrayed their comrades under torture, threats and intimidation. Tens of thousands of
children and youth were in jail. The leaders of the large black resistance movements, on the
other hand, were unhappy with the outbreak and outcome of the student revolt. They were
mainly concerned with the future development of negotiations. In response to their concern,
606
Fedderke J.W., et al. 1998: 3f; Lester 1996: 113f.
607
Quince: Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions during the Apartheid Era, 2000: 151-157; Johnson:
Shakespeare and South Africa, 1996: 5-12. See also footnote 687 below.
608
Mandela 31990 (1978): 65
609
Commey: South Africa: The Triumph of the African Spirit, 2003
322

parents and leaders of black resistance movements established a National Education Crisis
Committee (NECC), with the slogan ‘Education for Liberation’.610 Teachers were paid by the
committee and new curricula were made in response to student needs (such as English and
history). However, the government did not implement any measures to change the educational
system, resulting in many students staying out of school altogether. This was further reflected
upon by Mandela, when he told the people of Soweto:

The crisis in education that exists in South Africa demands special

attention. The education crisis in Black schools is a political crisis. It
arises out of the fact that our people have no vote and therefore cannot
make the government of the day responsive to their needs. Apartheid
education is inferior and a crime against humanity.611

Fedderke et al. also conclude that widely divergent features and opportunities provided
by white and black schools were mainly due to race rather than class. 612 To improve the
situation in epiapartheid South Africa, the government in 2002 set a five-year deadline for
traditionally white universities to make progress towards accelerating racial integration.
Afrikaans universities were always closed to non-Europeans during white rule, whereas
English universities had accepted a few black students prior to 1958, when mixed-race classes
were made illegal there, too.
Overall improvement in student performance only became visible in late 2001, when
nearly 62 percent of South Africa’s pupils passed matriculation exams, and 15 percent
qualified for university studies. In the first three years after apartheid, pass levels had
remained at only around 40 percent, obviously a hangover from a school system designed to
throw a majority of young people out of school as soon as possible.
In summary, schools and universities in South Africa today remain among the most
divided sectors of post-apartheid, or better: epiapartheid society, and the country is plagued by
continued resentment and anger over this, highlighted by recurrent protests by black students
demanding better facilities and lower fees. After over 300 years of racist segregation in
education, sandwiched between powerful political and economic constraints, huge disparities
between Whites and Blacks still remain: ‘After the demise of political apartheid, it is
economic apartheid, it seems, that threatens most the huge potential of the African child.’ In
education, as elsewhere, the gap between South African Whites and Blacks today appears to
be finally narrowing, but only very slowly, and a radical improvement in this regard cannot be
expected to take place unless there are radical changes in the economic situation.613

7.3. Denial of the Right to Education versus State-sponsored Religious

Instructions for Genocide
Repressed education in the West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem include destruction
of Palestinian schools, long-term closures of schools, and prohibition of make-up classes and
even of home studies. On several occasions, the Israeli army raided schools, destroying
property and even turning the schools into military posts. Perhaps the Israeli government had
intentions similar to the South African National Party’s in mind, giving students ‘only what
they deserve’, as Palestinian schools were shut down by military orders at different times and
locations, for being ‘centers for violent protest’, or as an Israeli military spokesman described
them: ‘hot-beds of anti-Israeli protest.’ In any case, the Israeli authorities apparently felt that,
by allowing Palestinian students to attend schools and universities, civil unrest was more

610
Lester 1996: 199
611
Mandela 31990 (1978): 219
612
Fedderke et al. 1998: 10
613
Commey 2003 (quote); Boyle: S.Africa’s Once Segregated Schools Seen Improving, 2001; N.N.: S.Africa to
Revamp Apartheid-Era Education, December 9, 2002; Mandela 2002 (1965): 32
 323

likely to occur. The justification or excuse for these spontaneous closures was therefore
‘security reasons’.
However, the closures of schools are really intended to penalize the entire Palestinian
population under military occupation, as was the case in 1988, when primary and secondary
schools were closed for nine months, and universities closed for eleven months.614 Bir Zeit
University was even declared a ‘closed military area’ by the occupation authorities and
remained closed for four and a half years.615 Due to all this, more than 300,000 students
received no primary or secondary education, and another 18,000 were barred from higher
education. In South Africa, 650,000 students did not receive any education in 1985, a higher
number in absolute terms, but lower in terms relative to the sizes of the Palestinian and South
African populations.
More than fifty percent of the Palestinian population eligible for school were not
receiving education. Thus, teachers and parents, similarly to the South African NECC,
decided to offer students classes outside the schools. These classes were aimed at purely
academic activities, in response to the long closure of academic institutions, yet the Israeli
army felt threatened by such activities, as well, and declared them illegal, too. There were
several cases of Israeli raids, which resulted in greater unrest, and many students and teachers
were arrested. In October 1988, the Israeli authorities announced that they would not even
tolerate any attempt to encourage individual learning in private homes, such as giving students
textbooks, which would allow them to study alone.616
Due to civil unrest and closures of schools, students who could not keep up with their
peers were forced to repeat their academic year. This led to overcrowded class rooms, where
some ‘students had to stand during classes because there was simply no space in the room for
extra chairs.’617 As with black South African schools, Palestinian public schools became
overcrowded, and the state of Israel did not give the problem the attention it deserved for
improvements. At the end of the 1990s, the average number of students per classroom for all
educational levels was still 36.7.618 The prolonged closure of schools also led to personal
economic crises, since the teachers of public schools could not be paid during the periods of
closure (sometimes lasting for nine months). Private schools also suffered a serious economic
crisis, as they were obliged to pay their staff during closure to guarantee their return once the
schools reopened; yet income from tuition fees had ceased.
Some of the schools in the West Bank reopened for two months (from May 23 until
July 21, 1988), amid reports of Israeli military harassment of Palestinian students and Israeli
raids on primary and secondary schools, with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition.
The Israeli military stated that this took place in response to students holding demonstrations
(such as chanting slogans against the occupation) on school grounds. The army felt threatened
by such demonstrations – they might lead to violent civil unrest – and it attacked unarmed
students in schools, such as the Al Hussein Secondary School in Hebron in 1988, when ‘more
than 30 students fainted from tear gas, and at least 15 [were] wounded by rubber or aluminum
bullets’.619
Other closed schools turned into Israeli military posts. These schools were later found
in poor condition, as they had been attacked by the Israeli soldiers, who in many cases left
windows, desks, chairs and laboratory equipment destroyed, similar to the army-requisitioned
living quarters left behind by apartheid soldiers after use in both the Occupied Palestinian
Territories and Graeco-Roman Egypt.
Education in South Africa and the Occupied Territories was itself the target, ensuring

614
Al Haq 1988: 296
615
Ashrawi 1995: 42
616
Al Haq 1988: 296
617
Ibid: 298
618
Palestinian Development Plan 1998-2000, 1997: 10
619
Al Haq: 300f
324

that military action would lead to penalizing the civilians for whom the education was
designed. It appears that by oppressive action against education, the intention of the ruling
powers is to make the oppressed abandon some of their political goals, in order to ensure
better education for themselves. Some of these goals which the authorities may fear are
enhanced consciousness, independent and critical thinking, and human rights recognition. By
limiting education, the oppressor can guarantee that these goals will not be achieved easily.
Limiting education will have a long-term effect, since it does not only punish the present
generation, but future ones equally.620
The pattern persisted. In 2001, about half of the Palestinian students in Jerusalem
attended private schools, whereas virtually all Jewish children attended state schools. As we
saw in the previous chapter, this was also the state of affairs in South Africa during much of
the 20th century, including the first eight years of apartheid in the narrow sense. In South
Africa, however, the money soon ran out, and the black private schools closed. In Palestine,
on the other hand, aid from the EU and from Arab charities is still keeping several private
schools for Palestinians above water. A petition to the Israeli High Court of Justice on July 2,
2001, however, demanded that Palestinian children be given equal access to state schools.621
The structural racism in Israeli schools can be found spread out over the country as
well. Almost every school for Palestinian children in Israel ‘proper’ is underfunded,
underresourced, overcrowded and understaffed. Children with Arabic as a mother language
make up a quarter of Israel’s schoolchildren. Their schools have 20 percent more pupils per
class as well as fewer teachers, with fewer qualifications and lower salaries. Their schools
have less or no computers, smaller or no libraries, science labs and recreation space. Not
surprisingly, dropout rates at Palestinian schools in Israel are much higher than in schools for
Jewish children. Especially Palestinian children with special needs are ignored, whereas
Jewish children with the same special needs receive ample support from the state of Israel.
Several subsequent hypocritical Israeli governments have acknowledged the gaps, promised to
do something to improve the situation but failed dismally to deliver on those promises.622
The raids and massacres perpetrated by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank in the spring
of 2002 were accompanied by successful efforts to destroy Palestinian education
infrastructure, higher education, science, and culture in a wider sense within the ‘autonomous
Palestinian areas’, as Edward Said pointed out:

It is significant of how Sharon’s intention went far beyond ‘rooting

out terror’ that his soldiers destroyed every computer and then carried
off the files and hard drives from the Central Bureau of Statistics, the
Ministry of Education, of Finance, of Health, cultural centres,
vandalising offices and libraries, all as a way of reducing Palestinian
collective life to a pre-modern level.623

The violence and damage wrought by Israeli armed forces had now indeed reached
new heights, as the Palestinian minister for higher education stated in 2002. During the first
23 months of the Second Intifada, moreover, 239 Palestinian school pupils were killed by the
Israelis and more than 2,500 were injured. 166 students and 75 teachers had thus far also been
arrested during the revolt. Additionally, many schools had been taken over by Israeli troops,
many were shelled and many vandalized by them.624 During the numerous curfews, many of

620
Sané: The Need to Know, 2001: 4-5
621
Carney: Arabs in East Jerusalem Demand Access to Education, 2001. According to McGreal, February 6,
2006, the Israeli education ministry does not release figures on how much it spends on Jewish students and how
little on Arab students, but a 1992 Israeli government report revealed that the average Jewish student received
nearly twice as much as the average Arab student at that time.
622
Gordon, N.: Apartheid in Israel’s Schools, 2002: 32
623
Said, October 10, 2002 (see footnote 188)
624
Ass’adi: Back-to-School Means Hard Lessons for Palestinians, 2002
 325

the one million school-age children in the West Bank and Gaza did not receive any education,
and those who did were often dependent on untrained volunteer teachers, such as unemployed
parents and pensioners. They also widely lacked proper facilities, classrooms, pencils, paper,
schoolbooks, etc.625
In October 2002, Pierre Popard, the United Nations International Children’s
Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Special Representative in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, stated:
‘A generation of Palestinian children is being denied their right to an education.’ He said that
more than 226,000 children and over 9,300 teachers were unable to reach their formal
classrooms and at least 580 schools had been closed due to Israeli army curfews and closures.
Israeli officials had no immediate comment when asked by journalists about their
responsibility for a basic human right being denied to a whole nation’s children whose lack of
education falls entirely under their responsibility.626
On top of all that, more than a quarter of all Palestinian children now lived in poverty
and growing numbers were being forced out of school to work, according to Palestinian
Central Bureau of Statistics director Hassan Abu Libdeh: ‘Among the most important reasons
for this rise is the overall drop in the standard of living of Palestinians,’ He said a survey
conducted in 2000 showed more than 25 percent of children in the Palestinian-ruled parts of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip lived in poverty and almost six percent of those aged between
ten and seventeen were in the labor market. As the Intifada broke out later that year, things
went from bad to worse. In June 2001, the International Labor Organization, ILO, reported
that a quarter of the Palestinian adult work force was out of work and this forced even more
children out to work, although there was hardly any to be had. They missed school all the
same. Later in the same month, the Palestinian Labor Minister estimated an overall
unemployment rate of 50 percent. By March 2003, that figure had risen to a staggering 53
percent, as estimated by the traditionally and formally pro-US, and indeed US-created, World
Bank.627
Meanwhile, the relatively ‘over-funded’ schools for Jews were also becoming
increasingly ideologized. A column criticizing the changes in education content under prime
minister Ariel Sharon, published in the Swiss newspaper, Berner Zeitung, made further
headlines when a complaint filed against it was taken up by the Swiss Press Council, the
ethical body that supervises and sanctions unethical media practices in Switzerland, in 2002.
The organization, ‘David (Center against Anti-Semitism and Denunciation)’, had filed the
complaint, accusing the column of being ‘unambiguously anti-Semitic’. But the complaint
was not upheld by the esteemed, independent council, which considered acceptable the Berner
Zeitung column’s criticism of Sharon’s insistence on more teaching in Israeli Jewish schools
from the Bible’s Book of Joshua. The column had described the book on the legends of
Moses’ successor as the ‘most bloodthirsty’ and most ‘martialist’ book in the Bible and as
approving in its description of the genocidal slaughter of the indigenous Cana’anites by the

625
Ass’adi: Under Curfew, Palestinians Go to Makeshift Schools, 2002; Giacaman & Abdullah: Schooling At
Gunpoint: Palestinian Children’s Learning, 2002
626
N.N: Thousands of Palestinian Children Denied Access to Schools, October 2, 2002; N.N.: Israel Curfews
Hurt Palestinians’ Schooling-UNICEF, October 2, 2002
627
Heinrich March 5, 2003; N.N.: Poverty Forcing Palestinian Children to Work, April 10, 2000; Nebehay:
Closures Mean Crisis for Palestinian Workers - ILO, 2001; Drees: Rising Palestinian Unemployment Is Burning
Fuse, 2001; Ass’adi: Palestinian Boy Struggles to Make Ends Meet, 2001. The latter is a description of a day in
the life of eight-year-old Ahmed Shqeir, who sold coffee by the cup at the illegal Israeli army checkpoint at
Qalandiya in the West Bank. Ahmed was the sole provider for his family of ten. His ten-year-old brother used to
do the job but was hit by a car and lost his spleen. Their father was banned from working in Israel for ‘security
reasons’. He was even jailed for four months for having worked inside the Jewish state without a permit. (The
article did not say what happened to those who employed him.) Ahmed wanted to be a mathematics teacher
when he grew up, and was quoted in the article as saying: ‘I dream of having at least one day off.’
326

invading Israelites.628
Carefully selected passages of the Torah are thus being used by the racial Israeli elites
in the same ways that Homer was used by the Greeks in Egypt, or Shakespeare by the Whites
in South Africa. The language of the central ideological text I have chosen is, in relative
terms, by far the most ancient in the Israeli case (beating both Greeks, Romans and white
South Africans by at least over a thousand years) – the propaganda also by far the most
pronounced. It crudely attempts to justify ethnic cleansing and genocide as ‘God’s Will’, and
racism on behalf of ‘God’s Chosen People’. Of course this is a text that played a paramount
role in South Africa, especially among Afrikaners, as well as in Israel. We shall return to the
lasting and onerous impact of the Book of Joshua and other apparently pro-genocidal holy
texts, on both Jews and non-Jews, in Chapters II.9.2 and II.9.3.
Of course, there are other ideological sources and elements than the central ones I have
chosen here. Especially in the Israeli case, there are also some very influential secular
ideologies, in particular the notions that masses of Jews were driven from their land in late
antiquity by the Romans and/or by Muslims in the 7th century. Both of these claims are
seriously mistaken, as Shlomo Sand has demonstrated. Most of the Jews, both in Roman and
Muslim Palestine, actually stayed. They were forced by the Romans, who never expelled
people wholesale from conquered territories, to become Christians. And then, starting a few
centuries later, the Christian descendants of Israelite and Judean Jews largely, yet slowly,
became Muslims. Their descendants today are – to a considerable extent – Palestinians. Many
of today’s Palestinians are without a doubt direct biological descendants of Jews of ancient
times. The early Zionist idea of Romans and Christians being to blame for the imagined
expulsion of Jews from Palestine was mainly circulated while Palestine was under Ottoman
rule. The even more preposterous, Islamophobic idea has become popular in Zionist
historiography since then, i.e. since Palestine came under British rule and since the
independence of Israel. The opportunist, ideologized essence of Zionist ‘science’ is
unmistakable. Instead of embracing their actual relatives or the descendants of their cultural
ancestors, modern Israelis, under the false pretences supplied by the Zionists, opted to negate
them.

Very soon, the modern Palestinian fellahin [peasants] became, in the eyes of
the authorized agents of memory [i.e. Zionist historians and their leaders as
well as their followers], Arabian immigrants who came in the nineteenth
century to an almost empty country and continued to arrive in the twentieth
century as the developing Zionist economy, according to the new myth,
attracted many thousands of non-Jewish laborers.629

There is in Zionism not much respect for facts, crucial facts that can serve truthful and
healthy self-identification of and for both Israelis and Palestinians, truths that can contribute

628
N.N.: Kritik an Israels Erziehungspolitik in der Schweiz Nicht Unzulässig: Presserat Weist Antisemitismus-
Beschwerde Zurück, January 22, 2002. In the 1993 documentary film about his life and work, ‘Manufacturing
Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media’, directed by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, Chomsky (himself a
Jew, ex-Zionist, and son of a Zionist) goes further and calls the Bible ‘one of the most genocidal books ever
written’, also most likely with the Book of Joshua in mind, without any legal or paralegal repercussions known
to me. The genocide carried out by Joshua and his followers, by the way, is described in the Bible as
premeditated, since Moses, before he dies, instructs the Israelites, who have never been to Cana’an, to kill all the
people who reside in the Promised Land, in Deuteronomy 5:1-7:16. See also Chapter II.9.3. below. Regarding
Israeli school textbooks and children’s literature in general, there was some improvement during the 1990s, when
in-depth monitoring for racism and critical research started. Palestinian textbooks and children’s literature was
also found racist at times. See Rothchild 22010: 58-61. However, see also the magisterial Peled-Elhanan:
Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, 2012, which underlines the heavy
propaganda to which Israeli schoolchildren are still subject. See, further, Chapter II.9.3 below.
629
Sand 2009 (2008): 178-189 (quote: 187f.), see also Löwstedt & Anon.: A Ray of Hope from Israel: Shlomo
Sand Visits the Birthplace of Zionism, and His Own, 2010
 327

substantially to a real peace process, truths that can serve reconciliation. To a considerable
extent, apartheid is perpetuated by blatant lies. Here we have already distanced ourselves from
a formal look at conditions for education in apartheid societies, which has been the subject of
this section, and we are looking at the concrete contents of such miseducation. This is more
properly the theme of Section II.9 below. Nevertheless, content often shapes form, and with
regard to this we can discern certain commonalities of the miseducation contents in apartheid
across space and time, whether in the uses of Homer, Shakespeare, the Torah or the inventions
of the secular ideologies of Zionism: Racism, or at least notions, hypotheses, or stories that
can easily be used in racist ways, as well as justifications of unprovoked violence, belong to
the chief themes. These are not themes that are unique to apartheid education. Nationalist
narratives often center on successful killers and thieves, on territorial expansion and conquest.
Many modern Greeks identify with or feel proud of Alexander the Great like many Israeli
Jews identify with the Israelites in the Book of Joshua. And I can also add to this list Swedes,
from my own childhood experience in the 1960s and ‘70s. Swedish children, such as myself,
identified themselves and felt proud and akin, even through school history textbooks, with
Viking conquerors, and even more with the warrior kings, Gustav II Adolf, a killer of
Catholics and many others, and Karl XII, a killer of Russians and many others. These men are
among the favorite ‘ancestors’ of Swedish Neonazis today.
But at the beginning of the 21st century, Israel certainly stands out. The horrific effects
of nationalism in the 20th century have now moved most societies to replace nationalist
narratives with more truthful and critical approaches to history, at the very least on the
academic level and in tertiary education. Shlomo Sand has shown that this is deplorably not
the case in present-day Israel, which continues to be a hotbed of nationalism, if not the hotbed
of nationalism in the world today. Aside from trying to justify racism and unprovoked
violence academically, Israel also deprives the racialized indigenous people of their right to
reside in their own country or even their right to exist, and it attempts to rationalize the theft
of their land by racialized newcomers, just like apartheid South Africa did, and in many
regards more systematically than any previous apartheid societies did. Before going into the
heart of apartheid ideology, however, we will first take a look at another formal condition of
apartheid thought, an often overlooked condition.
328

8. Language
Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?
(Ray Gwyn Smith)630

In the realm of language, apartheid oppressors display remarkable arrogance. From the
time of the first invasion onwards, they overwhelmingly refuse to learn the language of the
indigenous majority. Instead, they try to and often succeed in more or less forcing the latter to
learn theirs. Moreover, the political and physical geography of the invaded country is slowly
but surely renamed into the language and symbolism of the invaders. A very often and very
much desired long-term effect of these two apartheid strategies by its perpetrators is the death
of the indigenous language and of the indigenous culture in general. From the point of view of
apartheid conquerors and oppressors, the majority indigenous people are at best turned into
dehumanized servant robots or beasts of burden. This belief, or apartheid faith, will be easiest
on the conscience of apartheid perpetrators, as the next section will show. Here my point is
that linguistic apartheid easily and actually turns into linguistic genocide, and into yet another
crime against humanity.
Because we think so much in words, the loss of a language limits the possibilities of
thought. And this is exactly what the apartheid elites also want to prevent in the long term:
critical thought, the formulation of justice and demands for justice, the thought of liberation
and resistance, the recollection of true history. By making it harder for the indigenous to
comprehend elite thought as well as to express themselves and make themselves understood,
the elites may also be able to uphold and further entrench the racist stereotypes: that the
indigenous are culturally, and even biologically, inferior to the invaders and their descendants;
that they sound, and therefore must be, stupid. Linguistic apartheid is an expression of racial
contempt.
The concept of ‘linguistic genocide’ was separately defined and roundly condemned
by all but 16 members of the United Nations (in the 1948 Draft Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) among other reasons in order to emphasize that it
is a far more common occurrence than physical genocide.631 Linguistic genocide, thus
‘almost’ a crime against humanity in international law, takes place in apartheid societies as
well as elsewhere, for instance against the imported slaves in racist slave societies such as the
ones in the Americas or in the Dutch Cape Colony. It was also achieved in South Africa with
most Khoisan languages and in Egypt with the language of the entire indigenous majority,
though it was reborn heavily influenced by Greek in the form of Coptic. In this way, aside
from the indigenous disadvantages to which I just referred, much of the resistance practiced
by the indigenous becomes defense of their culture, which on the one hand helps to solidify
resistance, indigenous culture becomes a flag to rally around, but on the other hand this
defense takes away indigenous time and energy from the resistance against the more physical
630
Quoted in Anzaldúa: How to Tame a Wild Tongue, 42001 (1987): 572
631
At the time of writing, more than half of the world’s languages are threatened by extinction. On average one
language vanishes every two weeks. This is almost certainly unprecedented in human history. Analysts mainly
blame the globalized spread of commercialism and consumerism, and, secondly, the spread of English – the
devastating effects of anglocentrism and anglomaximism are wrought upon billions of people – as the main
factors behind this, perhaps the greatest, threat to cultural diversity ever. But there are many additional factors,
such as US- and UK-driven cultural imperialism in general, mono- and oligopolistic or centralist developments
in communications business and technology, the size of the most ‘successful’ nation-states in military and
economic terms, sharp population increases of already large populations, the spread of French, Arabic, and
Chinese, to name but a few. N.N.: Terralingua: UNHCHR Submission on Linguistic Rights in Education, 1998,
UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/AC.4/1998/2; Capotorti: Study of the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic,
Religious and Linguistic Minorities, 1979: 37; Hamelink: Confronting Cultural Rights, 2001; Skutnabb-Kangas:
Linguistic Genocide in Education – Worldwide Diversity or Human Rights? Outline of the Book, 1999; Dunham
2007; Löwstedt: Rights versus Diversity? The Accelerated Extinction of Languages and Cultures as an Aspect of
Current Globalization Trends, 2007; Philippson: Linguistic Imperialism Continued, 2009.
 329

or concrete aspects of human rights violations that we have dealt with in earlier sections.
Apartheid in general destroys communication, perhaps not as much as genocide has
done historically, but communication is to a large extent an interruption of violence.
Negotiations and peace talks ideally follow a ceasefire. And thus communication is one of the
few hopes we have for peace and justice in this world. From my perspective, this is yet
another reason why linguistic apartheid must be seen as a crime against humanity. Linguistic
apartheid hinders communication, sometimes making it impossible. Even if the victims of
apartheid are not directly punished for using their mother language, they are so indirectly. The
effects of that indirect punishment may accumulate, and thus the end results of linguistic
apartheid are sometimes the same as the consequences of linguistic genocide.
Another hallmark of the three apartheid societies under investigation is the
introduction by the elite minority of an official, elite language that is practically useless
outside the apartheid country, even in the countries of the invaders’ origins, yet useful to the
invaders themselves and their descendants in order to exclude the indigenous as well as newer
immigrants (including imported ones) from elite culture in the widest sense. This was
achieved with ancient varieties of the languages spoken by the apartheid invaders in Egypt
and Israel, and with the settlers’ new variety of Dutch, influenced by both African and Asian
languages of the oppressed masses, called ‘Afrikaans’, in South Africa. Hebrew, the language
spoken by some of the Jewish invaders and immigrants to Palestine, had been reconstructed
and reinvented during the decades prior to the establishment of the modern Jewish state, and it
thus represents a middle instance between Graeco-Roman Egypt’s and South Africa’s elite
apartheid languages. Hebrew is both new and old.
From another perspective, Israel is the least oppressive of the three apartheid
authorities with regard to language. It is the only one to (still) formally grant the language of
the conquered indigenous majority the status of official language of the apartheid state. As we
shall see, however, the Arabic language is still vigorously suppressed in and by Israel. At
present, its official status is hanging by a thread. Moreover, one quarter of the modern Hebrew
vocabulary comes from Arabic, which is a very closely related Semitic language, and so it is
nowhere near as difficult for Hebrew-speakers to learn Arabic as it was for Greeks or Romans
to learn Egyptian or for Dutch-, English- or Afrikaans-speakers to learn indigenous South
African languages. Arabic is therefore seen as less of a threat to the elite apartheid culture.
Whereas some Egyptians were able to defend themselves in court using their native language
under Greek and Roman rule (making Egyptian a semi-official language under European
rule), this was not at all possible for Blacks in white-ruled South Africa, which was, at least
formally, the most oppressive apartheid society with regard to language. Although these
differences may make a difference between life and death for indigenous individuals and even
for relatively small groups of indigenous individuals, the larger context of linguistic apartheid
is basically the same in each apartheid society.

8.1. Atticism and the ‘Obsession with Language’

Ptolemaic Egypt...remained throughout its history a land of two
cultures which did coexist but, for the most part, did not coalesce or
blend. . . . We discern the manifestations of the two discrete cultures in
every aspect of their coexistence. . . . It would be difficult...to
exaggerate the significance of the fact that, except for some local
designations of places, measures, and so on, no native Egyptian word
made its way into Greek usage in the thousand years that Greek
endured as the language of Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt.632

632
Lewis, N. 1986: 154f
330

In fact, none of the words that we commonly use today to describe ancient Egypt are
Egyptian themselves, e.g. pyramid, sphinx, pharaoh, Egypt, hieroglyph. Some of these Greek
words, however, have Egyptian or other Afro-asiatic etymologies which by far predate
Alexander’s conquest. It is, however, unlikely that Greeks in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
were ever aware of this.
Even the Gods and all of the cities were given Greek names, most of which
accompany them to this day. The Egyptian kings of antiquity are also still known, ever since
the sway of the Greek apartheid system, by their Greek names, e.g. Cheops, Mykerinos, etc.
This kind of cultural dispossession is common with colonialism – the fact that the
largest lake in the continent of Africa is still named after a long dead white person who never
even went there speaks volumes to that effect – but it is even more intensive in apartheid.
Although Kenya’s and Uganda’s largest lake is still called Victoria, their main cities all have
indigenous names, e.g. Nairobi, Kampala, or Mombasa. Almost all of South Africa’s main
cities, on the other hand, still have white names. Just the fact that we in European languages
still call the country by its apartheid name, rather than Misr (Arabic), Kemet (ancient
Egyptian), or something else truly ‘Egyptian’, is testimony that Graeco-Roman apartheid has
still not been totally defeated either, and that linguistic apartheid and even linguistic genocide
are somehow still applauded.
Cultural dispossession was later repeated to roughly the same large extent in South
Africa and Israel as in Egypt, one difference being that Egyptian, the language of the entire
indigenous majority, was eventually wiped out under Greek (and to a lesser extent, Latin633)
domination. The Persian occupiers of Egypt, prior to the Greeks, did not use their own
language, but Aramaic, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean region at that time, as
the language of administration in Egypt. They did this although Persian, an Indo-Iranian
language, is very different from Aramaic, which is a Semitic language. And being a Semitic
language, Aramaic is automatically also an Afro-Asiatic language, which means it is much
more closely related to ancient Egyptian than to Persian, the mother language of the
invaders.634 Apparently, an invading power needs at least a sizeable civilian element if it is to
impose its language on an indigenous majority, and especially if it is to achieve the demise of
an indigenous majority’s language, unless of course the difference in military resources is
large enough and a physically genocidal policy is desired and implemented successfully, as
was frequently the case, especially in the Americas and in Australia but also in Africa, during
the last half-millennium. In other words: a colonialist power – though not neocolonialism –
apparently needs to develop into apartheid (or further into physical genocide) if it is to achieve
linguistic genocide.
The ancient Egyptian language only lived on during the end of and after the Graeco-
Roman period with another name and in a vastly different form: as Coptic, which is massively
influenced by Greek and by the new Greek-inspired system of writing. At least one quarter of

633
The Romans were apparently not quite as ethnocentric as the Greeks. For instance, many Greek works of
literature were translated into Latin, and many Romans learned Greek. This was not reciprocated to any
comparable degree by the Greeks. See Werner 1992: 11. Similarly, the British in South Africa were in general
not quite as ethnocentric as were the descendants of the Dutch, the Afrikaners. Due to over a hundred years of
British colonial rule, as well as the British pioneering efforts in industrialization, which left the overwhelmingly
agricultural Afrikaners behind them in terms of economic development, the British in South Africa were also
generally richer than the Afrikaners were, leaving the Afrikaners to compete economically with the Africans
rather than with the British. But there were significant exceptions to this general pattern. For instance, from the
1820s onwards, British settlers and soldiers were in the process of subjugating the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape,
and some Afrikaners, who were conscripted by the British colonial administration from the 1830s onwards to do
some of the new conquerors’ dirty work, apparently ‘…showed some fellow feeling towards the African
chiefdoms.’ Keegan 1996: 35. It might well have been the same in Egypt, namely, that some Greeks under
Roman rule showed some fellow feeling towards the indigenous Africans there. On Afroasiatic etymologies of
Greek words for Egypt and things Egyptian, see Bernal 1987-2006.
634
Thompson, D. J.: Literacy and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt, 1994: 74
 331

the Coptic vocabulary is Greek in origin. Almost all the phonographic signs in Coptic script
are also originally Greek.635 The Coptic language is no longer being used in the vernacular
today, and the lingual blame for that should not only be given to Arabic, which has largely
replaced Coptic during the last millennium, but to Greek and Latin, as well.
As we have seen, only a negligible amount of Egyptian words ever made it in the
opposite direction, into the Greek and Latin languages of the dominant racial minority. In
comparison, Khoisan languages, with some very limited exceptions, were annihilated in South
Africa, whereas the Bantu languages of the majority persevered and survived, though not
without also being heavily influenced by the white languages.636
The Whites in South Africa presently seem to have progressed further than the
Europeans in Egypt (as far as we know) in acculturation by starting to use certain African
words such as ubuntu, sangoma or impimpi.637 Yet, it should not be forgotten that apartheid is
now formally absent from South African politics. Therefore, this linguistic comparison with
Greek-speaking Egypt is, strictly speaking, already an anachronism. (In the final analysis,
however, one should not underestimate ‘epiapartheid’, i.e. economic, social and cultural
apartheid, which is still a considerable factor in today’s South African society.638)
The slowly increasing use of cryptography in hieroglyphic texts during the Persian
occupation – which, unlike the Greek one, was colonial in style and not accompanied by
massive immigration of settlers – accelerated rapidly from the beginning of Greek rule to the
point where all hieroglyphic texts started containing cryptographic elements. Only priests, and
no lay people, are likely to have mastered hieroglyphs by the time of the Roman invasion
three centuries later.
The total number of symbols in the Egyptian hieroglyphic system increased tenfold
after the conquest by Alexander. That is equivalent to increasing our Latin system from 26 to
260 different letters. Soon, the Egyptian script was only used and understood by a small
number of Egyptian experts (priests). The normal Egyptians then started using the cursive
Demotic system and, increasingly, Greek writing. In the meantime, many more Egyptians
learned Greek than vice versa. They were even giving their children Greek names. Amongst
the indigenous population, the priests had probably realized first that the entire Egyptian
culture was under an implicit, but appalling threat of extermination. They may also have
wanted to keep the foreigners ignorant about this possible tool of resistance. Finally, they
were able to distance themselves from the other Egyptians, in relation to whom they possessed
considerable privileges thanks to their being sought out by the Greeks as indigenous
collaborators, i.e. as instruments in the apartheid elites’ divide-and-rule scheme. Of course the
priests were also able to justify their own privileged standing by showing normal Egyptians
how patriotically resistant they really were by ‘openly’ criticizing the Greeks. The dimension
of resistance seems to have been the dominant motivation for the increasing use of
cryptography, although the two other factors may also have been influential. Some of the
temples of the Graeco-Roman period are in fact covered with cryptic anti-Greek and anti-
Roman propaganda in hieroglyphs, which the Greeks and Romans at the time seem to have
either completely misunderstood or not understood at all.639

635
Manning: Review of Hoffmann, Friedhelm: Ägypten - Kultur und Lebenswelt in griechisch-römischer Zeit:
Eine Darstellung nach den demotischen Quellen, 2001
636
Lester 1996: 10, 20ff.
637
Zulu for humanism or ‘humanness’, healer/diviner, and traitor, respectively, see Glossary in Krog: Country of
My Skull, 1998: 282-286. This book is a personal and honest, post-modernist attempt at laying ghosts to rest by
an Afrikaner journalist who covered events surrounding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for an
extended period of time. The word, ubuntu, is even left untranslated in the English version of South Africa’s
post-apartheid Constitution.
638
See, for instance, Thomasson: Racial Tension Still Divides Small Town South Africa, 1998; Lovell: South
Africa Reverts to Racially-Divided Politics, 2000; Lovell: South African Local Poll Reveals Widening Racial
Divide, 2000. See also, Chapter III.5 below.
639
See Assmann 1996: 456ff; Assmann 2000: 76; Parsons 2007: 43
332

The responsibility for the demise of Egyptian writing must therefore be partly
shouldered by some of the Egyptians themselves, namely, by the priests who played a part in
effecting the inflation of symbols and cryptography. It made the writing, and the reading,
more and more esoteric. Yet, I firmly believe this would not have happened if it had not been
for the Greek (and Roman) apartheid system, which first put the language and the priests
under such immense pressure. In the late Roman period this included the use of the Christian
holy texts for the new mandatory religion, texts which were considered better in Greek, in
which some of them had been written originally, though Aramaic had been the language of
the founders of this religion, and Aramaic is, as already mentioned, more closely related to
Egyptian than to Greek.
It has been argued in the recent past that the Egyptians took over the Greek language
and script because their own writing system was so complicated, whereas the Greek
alphabetic system was much simpler and easier to use. However, the scholar, Dorothy
Thompson, accuses this line of thought of perpetuating a kind of eurocentrism. Her modern
counter-example is Japanese, for which knowledge of no less than 8,800 characters is needed
in order to read and understand a newspaper. Literacy in Japan today is 99 percent, which she
compares with literacy in the USA, which is only 96 percent, despite its use of a script with
only 26 different characters. Thompson plausibly thus concludes that Egyptian scripts were
replaced by the Greek alphabet (and the Egyptian by the Greek language) mainly because of
political pressures from the Greek elites.640
Due to Egypt having been continuously phonographically literate since nearly 3,000
years before the coming of the Greeks, and for well over 2,000 years before the Greeks
themselves first became phonographically literate, we seem to have a more important
difference between Graeco-Roman Egypt and White-ruled South Africa, (which only ever had
European languages as official languages). Although most surviving documents from the
entire Graeco-Roman period are in Greek, there were also some official documents written in
Egyptian (in the so-called Demotic script) throughout the Ptolemaic period. But Greek only
gradually replaced Egyptian as the language of administration, from the top down. Coptic was
also used later, though almost exclusively in Church matters. 641 As we saw in the previous
section, however, the Greeks in Egypt, at least sometimes, did not consider Egyptian writing
as writing, but apparently as some kind of illiterate activity. I will return to the definition and
role of literacy at the end of this section.
Similarly, the Greeks were astoundingly ignorant, not only of ‘foreign’ languages, but
also of multi-lingualism. The well-traveled Galen, a very important figure in the history of
medicine, wrote: ‘In ancient times there was a man who spoke two languages, that was a
miracle: a man who understood and fluently spoke two languages.’ And he apparently meant
what he was writing!642
Despite this strange lack of knowledge of linguistic matters, the Greek elites – in the
words of scholar Simon Swain – displayed an ‘obsession with language’.643 The resolution to
this apparent paradox lies in the power of language as a tool for racism, i.e. its use as an
instrument of power and as a symbol of status. That is what the obsession was all about.
The Greek scholars of Alexandria made sure that school grammars were generally to
be learned and used by a literate and Greek elite. For any of the very few outsiders let into the
educated elites, it was necessary to be steeped in Greek culture, language and ideals. But even
that was not sufficient. One also had to know an already ancient Greek culture and an ancient
Greek language, which up until this point in time had not been spoken for centuries.

640
Thompson 1994: 78
641
Bowman 1996 (1986): 158; Manning 2010: 7; Bingen 2007: 106 maintains that all of the top levels of
administration in Ptolemaic Egypt used Greek only.
642
Quoted in Werner 1992: 12
643
Swain: Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World AD 50-250, 1996: 7
 333

The grammars which they analyse and present in running lists is not
that of any spoken form of Greek, but the normative grammar of
classic literary Attic, including forms such as the dual [beside singular
and plural], which were long obsolete in the koine [the standard or
common Greek, used around the eastern Mediterranean at the time] . .
. all Greek tabular grammars are of classical literary Attic. Grammar
therefore throws into high profile one particular, idealized, literary
form of a language of which many forms, spoken and written, were
familiar to all literates. This is the practice taken up by scholarly Latin
grammarians. . . As a result, a particular type of language, a normative
version of classic literary Attic or classic literary Latin, became the
standard not only of literary language but of educated spoken
language, too.644

It becomes obvious that grammar school was an exercise in cultural and social
exclusion as much as anything else. It is important to point out that this is not mere snobbery;
it is not just upper-class pomp and pride. It is an instance of racism, designed to reserve
privilege and augment power for an invading racial elite. Like Afrikaans in (twentieth and late
nineteenth century) South Africa, and like Hebrew in modern Israel, the Greek elites
introduced to Egypt a language, which was spoken or understood by few, and mastered by
even fewer, as the a priori elite means of communication. Attic Greek was a language or
dialect known from written texts from Attica, the region of Athens, texts which were at least
two centuries old. Atticism continued throughout Roman rule. In the end, the elite Greeks in
Egypt spoke a language that was actually over one thousand years old.

The aim of attikismos [atticism], stylistic and linguistic, was to

differentiate the leaders of Greek letters and speech from the broad
mass of Greek speakers in order to signal clearly that they had
command of the best sort of Greek. It was the expression of a certain
sort of consciousness, a distinction to do with the maintenance of
cultural superiority.645

Another central subject at the elite schools of Graeco-Roman Egypt was rhetoric.
Although, throughout ancient times, it was not exclusively seen the way it is usually perceived
today, as a means to the end of augmenting power, but sometimes also as an ‘ideal
encompassing truth, beauty, persuasion and power’, it was nevertheless another important
weapon used by the apartheid elites in order to defend, consolidate and extend power. The
idea was of course to keep possession of power within a rigidly limited number of groups and
individuals.

[S]omething which all educated Greeks and Romans would have

recognized…[was] the unique glamour of the art of persuasion. . .
[R]hetoric constitutes the moment of the pupil’s transition from
passive recipient of education to active user of it, a transition
which…was a vital marker of social status and power.646

Egypt under Greek or Roman rule was never anything remotely akin to a democracy.
Unlike today’s leaders, the politicians and other state employees in Ptolemaic Egypt and in
Imperial Rome and its provinces were not primarily populists. They were not in politics for

644
Morgan 1998: 160-162
645
Swain 1996: 21
646
Morgan 1998: 197f. A single situation, according to Morgan, where being untruthful was accepted, according
to the rhetoric curriculum at the time, was if a lie was ‘required for reasons of state’, ibid: 227. Moreover: ‘The
orator will always have the interests of state at heart.’ Ibid: 231
334

votes, but merely for control, wealth, and manipulation. One of the main surviving sources of
educational texts from the Roman period is Quintilian’s Institutio Oratorio.

The vocation of Quintilian’s orator is above all to rule, and his rule is
described in absolutist terms. This is no negotiation among equals, no
wooing of the crowd. The orator controls his people, both physically
and mentally. Describing the relationship of the orator with the crowd
Quintilian tellingly invokes Virgil’s description of a statesman
quelling a riot.647

One of the reasons that we can identify the Arabian-led conquest of Egypt as liberation
from apartheid – aside from the flight of the apartheid elites out of Egypt, the lack or relative
lack of confiscation of land, and the (Christian) Egyptians’ support for the non-Christian
invaders against their (Christian) Greek oppressors – is the fact that Greek place-names were
discarded by the conquerors in favor of Arabic names ‘…which often point back to the
Egyptian name via the Coptic’.648 Thus, there seems to have been a conscious attempt to
connect the time after apartheid with the time and culture before Egypt’s apartheid
millennium, even though the Egyptian language was already dead by then. (Later on,
however, Arabic appears to have served as an imperial instrument, and it slowly but surely
replaced Coptic over the next millennium, and until today.) This connection from post-
apartheid to pre-apartheid culture is a central aspect of liberation from apartheid to which I
will return at the very end of this book.
Language commonly becomes one of the main battlefields of the liberation struggle
against apartheid. If skin color is not as useful a criterion, i.e. excuse, for discrimination as it
was for the South African apartheid elites, then language will do. Both the Graeco-Roman
rulers of Egypt and the Jewish rulers of Israel/Palestine were and are aware of this. But even
in South Africa, especially after the introduction of communication technologies such as the
telephone or the radio, language became a matter of crucial importance for the apartheid
society. The Soweto uprising (‘riot’) of 1976 was sparked by the apartheid government decree
to increase the use of Afrikaans in schools, making it the mandatory language of instruction in
at least half of all classes. In Egypt, similarly, we know that many Egyptians did not learn
Greek. And we know that the Greeks mostly suppressed the Egyptian language, although it
was to some extent, for practical reasons more than anything else, also a tolerated kind of
resistance, in which the oppressed were occasionally allowed to let off steam. Linguistic,
religious and cultural strength of the oppressed masses are obviously less disturbing to an
oppressive racial minority than military, political, or economic strength would be, but they are
still disturbing649, especially when the oppressed people refuse to admit or accept the
apartheid elites’ notion of possessing a superior culture.

8.2. What Sparked the Soweto Uprising

The official languages were Dutch, later replaced by its equally Germanic derivative,
Afrikaans, and English, all white languages, until the liberation in 1994. South Africa today
has eleven official languages, of which Afrikaans and English are only the third and fourth

647
Ibid: 231. Teachers of rhetoric and public presentation in Graeco-Roman Egypt, the ancient counterparts to
today’s public relations professionals (in the USA today more numerous than journalists, see Patterson &
Wilkins: Media Ethics: Issues and Cases, 52005: Chapter 4), received around four times more in wages than
normal teachers did, according to Parsons 2007: 138ff.
648
Sijpesteijn 2007: 447. Arabic is of course also an Afro-Asiatic language and thus distantly related to ancient
Egyptian and Coptic, which Greek, an Indo-European language, is not, although it also contains large amounts of
borrowings from Afro-Asiatic languages. Perhaps as much as half the ancient Greek vocabulary has Afro-Asiatic
roots, mainly Northwest Semitic and Egyptian roots, although the grammar is more squarely Indo-European. See
Bernal 2006.
649
Bowman 1996 (1986): 126
 335

most spoken languages at home, respectively. (English is obviously the most widely spoken
language overall, i.e. as a first, second, third or fourth language.)
In retrospect, it is a small wonder that the indigenous South African languages were
not all wiped out, like the ancient Egyptian tongue was, or at least made into marginalized and
quickly disappearing minority languages, similar to the surviving Native American tongues in
North America or the surviving Aboriginal languages in Australia today. On the other hand,
African languages have picked up a great deal of European, especially English, vocabulary.
And the entire Khoisan language phylum, one out of six indigenous phyla in all of Africa, as a
whole was in fact also on the verge of being wiped out under white domination. The linguistic
diversity of South Africa has no doubt suffered severely due to the coming and the staying of
the Whites. They added two or three new languages (all Indo-European, Germanic ones that
continued to exist and expand elsewhere, as opposed to the indigenous African languages) to
the pre-existing mix, but they wiped out many more. Perhaps, then, a millennium of apartheid
in South Africa would have achieved what it did in Egypt.
The early white pioneers in South Africa and elsewhere in the world during this period
– a period still referred to by many conscious or unconscious eurocentrics as the ‘Age of
Discovery’ – embarked on the important task of renaming all aspects of the conquered or
‘discovered’ landscape in their own tongue. They ‘…effectively prised non-European people
away from the land which they inhabited, and once they had been textually removed from the
landscape, it was easier to do so physically [and morally] as well.’650
Perhaps language cannot be ranked alongside physical violence or repopulation as an
equally important factor of apartheid. But due to the complexity of human behavior and
human social structures, oppressive behavior with regard to language can produce
contributing causes of apartheid and other kinds of racist violence. Not only the names of
landscape features play important roles in such a process, but nearly every aspect of
symbolism, as the following comment, on the British oppression during the 19th century of the
Tswana people in today’s South Africa and Botswana, bears testimony:

Coloni[ali]zers in most places and at most times try to gain control

over both the material and semantic practices through which their
would-be subjects produce and reproduce the very bases of their
existence, no habit being too humble, no sign too insignificant to be
implicated in the battle.651

Today, there are still many towns, main streets, squares, etc. that commemorate white
supremacists and oppressors, for instance the ‘architect’ of apartheid in the narrow sense,
former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd. These offensive namings (which, naturally,
contradict official condemnations of apartheid and its new legal status as crime against
humanity,) survive largely because of a lack of government funds, bureaucratic obstacles and
other pressing concerns for the government such as the AIDS pandemic, mass unemployment
and rampant crime levels. Nonetheless, a few geographic entities have now been given
African names, and many more are planned. This has caused some truly needless controversy,
especially in rural areas, since many Whites are still opposed to renaming, not only for
rational reasons, such as some of those just mentioned, but also out of a lingering racist
motivation. In marked contrast, almost all official Eastern European vestiges of Communism
and Marxism in public art as well as the names of geographical landmarks and roads were
changed in a great hurry after the end of the Cold War.652
Let us now return to language, the most important symbolic system, as a whole. By

650
Gregory, D.: Geographical Imaginations, 1994: 30, quoted in Lester 1996: 10, words added by Lester.
651
Comaroff & Comaroff: Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 1992: 236
652
N.N.: Afrikaner Backlash to South African Name Changes, January 31, 2002; Cosmeanu: The Balkans’
Street-Renaming Obsession, 2009
336

1976, most black students in South Africa were learning all or most subjects in English, which
was often perceived as a neutral middle between African languages and Afrikaans, and, of
course, as the most useful language in the world. As tension brewed in the deteriorating and
severely overcrowded township schools, among many other parallel critical developments,
including rising unemployment among Blacks, increasing international pressure against
apartheid, the spread of the Black Consciousness Movement, and the panicky granting of
independence to hastily created Bantustans, the government provocatively and suddenly
decided to force all black schools to introduce Afrikaans as a mandatory language of
instruction for half of all subjects, with the rest of the subjects in English and only music,
religion and physical education in the African mother tongue in primary schools and the lower
forms of secondary schools. The highest classes for most black students, forms 3, 4 and 5 in
secondary schools, were not to include any instruction in African languages at all. By
prohibiting teachers from teaching students complex matters in their mother languages,
African culture was supposed by the elites to weaken and eventually to evaporate in favor of
European cultures.
Chaos erupted in the black schools. The students, who had until that time often made a
point out of not learning Afrikaans, the main language of the oppressors, were now often
unable to understand the teachers at all. Many teachers also had severe problems with having
to teach in an entirely new language for them. The teachers and students together launched a
campaign against the decree, but the government would not budge an inch. The Deputy
Minister of Bantu Education, Punt Janson, said: ‘No, I have not consulted the African people
on the language issue and I’m not going to...An African might find that the ‘big boss’ only
spoke Afrikaans or only spoke English. It would be to his advantage to know both languages.’
Another apartheid bureaucrat reacted similarly: ‘If students are not happy, they should stay
away from school since attendance is not compulsory for Africans.’653
The school language issue became a wake-up call and a catalyst for many oppositional
Blacks, who then started a South African Intifada that lasted, with short intermittent breaks,
until political liberation 18 years later. As with the Palestinians, another 11 and 24 years,
respectively, after the outbreak of the Soweto uprising, it was mainly children and youths,
armed with little more than rocks and sticks, who challenged a military machinery that would
probably have used all of its vast resources to suppress the uprising, including ABC weapons,
had it not been for persistent media coverage, international law, and world public opinion. In
the next section, we will take a look at some of the information and propaganda machinery
employed by the apartheid elites and their allies, but increasingly also by the resistance and its
allies in order to sway that opinion. It is obvious that South African liberation served as an
inspiration to Palestinian liberation, both in general and in more specific regards. For
example, children and youths were to become martyrs and heroes of resistance. Stone Age
arsenals were used against nuclear age mass killing devices. The importance of photography,
film, and symbolism in general rose significantly as the media, itself under revolutionary
transformation as the electronic media, digitization and globalization took off and accelerated,
became part of a new kind of desperate struggle in an altogether new way.
The importance of song to the South African resistance also needs to be mentioned in
this context. There were songs for every occasion and aspect of the struggle: protest, rage,
sadness, elation, pride, battle, loss, defeat, victory, hope, despair, funerals, executions (sung
by the victims), arrests, detention, pauses in the struggle, self-criticism, etc. The songs were
sung in indigenous languages, sometimes in a mixture of these languages in order not to
exclude anyone or at least to exclude as few as possible, and sometimes with phrases in
English. The songs were not as much composed by individuals as by collective efforts. Music,
indeed, was a weapon of the resistance, which the apartheid government underestimated and
was unable to disarm. Radio, television, and recording studios were completely in the hands

653
Quoted in Bonner & Segal 1998: 82. See also Lester 1996: 166-171
 337

of the white elites, and so the songs only spread orally, but they did spread, carrying
information, sometimes coded, often confounding, provoking and even intimidating the
Whites, as well as enhancing the morale of the resistance. In this way, South Africa was lucky
it still had enough linguistic diversity to be able to confuse the ‘system’, the name by which
the white authorities were known among Blacks. But in another way it was unlucky, i.e. with
regard to the unity of resistance. More than that, the songs of South African freedom fighters
and apartheid victims were a way of coping and even a survival mechanism as well as a non-
violent, moral, and effective kind of resistance against the White-led cultural and linguistic
apartheid and genocide.654

8.3. Hebrew and Yiddish, English, Arabic, and Russian

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Zionism to a large extent still
consisted of the revival of the Hebrew language. Hebrew had never died, but it had become a
chiefly liturgical language long before the Romans had ended relative Israelite political
independence in ancient times. By then, Palestinian Jews typically spoke Aramaic, yet another
Semitic language, which had spread as a lingua franca in the region six centuries earlier. As a
result of the Greek defeat of the Persians, who had used Aramaic as an administrative
language in their empire, Egyptian and other Jews normally spoke Greek when the Romans
first invaded the eastern Mediterranean. And then came the Arabs. Between the 10th and the
early 20th century CE, most Jews in the southern Mediterranean area (a very large proportion
of all Jews), including Palestine, and also Syria, Iraq, etc. (and during the first half of that
millennium also Spain) spoke Arabic as a first language. Then French and English started
replacing Arabic.
Modern cultural Zionists had a whole range of motivating factors behind their move to
revamp Hebrew for secular use for the first time in over 2,000 years. Afraid of an impending
death of the language, and hence of a distinct Jewish culture – due to anti-Jewish pogroms in
Eastern Europe as well as to secularizing tendencies in most societies around the world in
general during the 19th century – they soon joined forces with political Zionists to claim the
land of Palestine, or, rather, parts of it. For Zionists, there was also a perceived need to
displace and dismiss and forcefully forget the Yiddish language – a basically Germanic
mixture of Middle High German, Hebrew, Aramaic, English, Hungarian, Slavic and Romance
languages – as a ‘ghetto language’. Yiddish was spoken by more than 11 million Jews prior to
World War II. Today it is a language struggling to survive. Many Jewish people, especially
Israelis, do not seem to care about this loss of cultural diversity in general, and of Jewish
cultural diversity in particular. Yet, there are ongoing Yiddish revival projects, especially
perhaps as this becomes a way to claim Jewish identity outside of overtly religious and/or
Zionist and/or Israeli circles.
The modern Israelis, the ones that Zionism wanted and wants to nurture, were to be
physical and practical types, sun-tanned workers on the land, sportsmen and sportswomen and
soldiers, rather than citified, pale intellectuals and small business owners. These were the
kinds of people who were typically (and stereotypically) associated with Yiddish. In 1893,

654
See Hirsch (director): Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony, 2002, in general, and Elman: Nelson
Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, no date, on one particularly important event, an eleven-hour concert broadcast
live from London’s Wembley stadium to 67 countries and 600 million people worldwide, one of the largest
single entertainment events ever, on June 11, 1988, to commemorate Mandela’s birthday while he was still in
prison. On rare occasions, anti-apartheid songs did contain de-humanization of Whites or of the enemy, or even
incitement to violence (see next section), one of the chorus lines in one of the songs in Hirsch’s film being sub-
titled as ‘The dogs must die’; and there is little doubt as to who is being referred to. As far as I know, songs did
not kill a single white person, even indirectly, so they were not very efficient offensive weapons. But in general
they were a remarkably non-violent ‘weapon’ that served information requirements (‘intelligence’) for the
resistance, as well as unification and mutual encouragement among its members, as well as frightening and
intimidating the enemy, especially riot police and soldiers.
338

before Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat and the first Zionist Congress, the first secular school
using Hebrew as the language of instruction was opened in Yaffa in western Palestine.
Zionism in Palestine was at first cultural, it was taken over by political activists later. Hebrew
then came to play roughly the role in Palestine and Israel that Attic Greek had played in
Ptolemaic Egypt, and Afrikaans in South Africa.655
Today, Arabic is the second official language of Israel, yet it is not taught as much in
schools as English is, and it is only rarely learned sufficiently – despite a few compulsory
years of Arabic classes in Israeli state schools – nor used much by the Jews. It should not be
forgotten in this context that Spanish is taught in the schools of Texas, too, or that Chinese
was taught in the English schools of colonial Hong Kong. (In some cases it might be in the
interest of the ‘big bosses’ (see previous chapter) or their assistants to learn the language of
the employees, as well.)
Learning Hebrew, on the other hand, has become a necessity for Palestinians, not only
for those with Israeli citizenship, who make up a de facto minority amongst their ‘fellow’
Israelis, but also for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories – who are still a corresponding
majority – for reasons of business as well as for short-term survival under the Israeli armed
forces’ orders and guns. Israeli occupation soldiers still arrogantly shout their demands at
Palestinians in Hebrew – routinely. Palestinians, on the other hand, routinely, and defiantly,
reply in Arabic or English. Nevertheless, Palestinian Arabic has started incorporating Hebrew
words, mostly related to the conflict, especially to the Israeli army’s elaborate checkpoint
rituals for non-Jews.656
Arabic is still an official language of Israel, taken over as such from the law of the
British Mandate in Palestine, but its status as such is facing increasing hostility among Israeli
lawmakers and the Israeli public. In 2011, a law was proposed to change the relationship
between the concepts of ‘Jewish state’ and ‘democratic state’ in Israel’s Basic Law so that
when the two are in conflict, the ‘Jewish state’ will have priority. The bill also includes a
disqualification of Arabic as an official language of Israel, although this would fly in the face
of Israel’s duties to the international community and would jeopardize Israel’s membership in
several intergovernmental organizations, including the United Nations.657
Meanwhile, Hebrew is used to kill Arab history in Israel. Since 2001, the Israeli
Transportation Ministry is in the process of transliterating Hebrew place names into the other
two languages, (with the exception of towns with ‘New Testament resonance’, such as
Nazareth or Acre). This appears especially perverse with regard to the many towns, villages
and other geographic entities, whose Arabic names were hebraized after 1948. It is a
conscious and offensive strategy to make those Palestinians who were not yet expelled or did
not yet flee feel even less at home in their own homes. An additional, also much-desired effect
is that foreign visitors, tourists, geographers, etc., will forget about or remain unaware of the
Arabic origins of the place names and about indigenous Arab and other kinds of non-Jewish
physical, spiritual, cultural, social and economic presence in the country during the last couple
of millennia. The Palestinians’ own and original names for their own towns and villages will
now be exchanged for slightly different-sounding and differently written names, only in order
to sound less Arabic and more Hebrew. And through its taxpayers, including many who are
themselves underprivileged and exploited Palestinians, the apartheid state is now financing
this scheme.
If Arab lawmakers choose to address the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, in Arabic,
translation for Hebrew-speakers is not provided. Road signs are supposed to be trilingual, in

655
Avishai 1985: 45ff; See also Weinreich: College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to
Jewish Life and Culture, 61999 (1949); N.N.: Dreaming of Altneuland, December 23, 2000.
656
Gershberg: In Peace or War, Few Israelis Learn Arabic, 2001; Johnston: Checkpoint Hebrew Finds Way Into
Palestinian Lexicon, 2004
657
Guarnieri: Language Becomes a Political Weapon in Israel, 2011; Lis: Lawmakers Seek to Drop Arabic as
One of Israel’s Official Languages, 2011
 339

Hebrew, English and Arabic, but Jewish vandalism has eliminated many signs in Arabic, with
little or nothing being done by authorities to replace them.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship also often complain about time allotted for
programming in Arabic on state broadcasters being insufficient and about songs in Arabic that
‘Israeli Arabs’ want to hear but do not get to hear on Israeli radio, whether publicly or
privately owned. If music is unable to play an important role in Palestinian as compared to
South African resistance, it is perhaps mainly because of a more successful Israeli
fragmentation of the Palestinian community.
An earlier law proposal in 2001 already tried to strip Arabic of its status of still being
an official language of Israel. Its author, ultra-nationalist Michael Kleiner, argued that, due to
massive immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, there are now more Russian-
speakers than Arabic-speakers in Israel, and the state cannot afford to have three official
languages. He thereby implied that recent immigrants, who are being given privileges and
rights superior to those of the indigenous inhabitants, also have a more compelling right to
their language becoming official than do the original inhabitants, upon whom the Jewish state,
the Jewish language, and Jewish culture were thrust by force.658
This kind of discrimination also takes on more concrete forms. Palestinians with
Israeli citizenship and others with Arabic as mother language who are employed in
McDonald’s restaurants in Israel are, according to company policy, not to speak to customers
or each other in Arabic. Abeer Zinaty, an ‘Israeli Arab’ employee who had received the
McDonald’s employee award, ‘Excellent Worker 2003’, was fired in early 2004 for speaking
Arabic, (still) an official language in Israel, and the indigenous language during the last more
than 1,300 years, on the job. After being bombarded by protest letters from around the world,
and even by criticism from an Israeli parliamentary committee, McDonald’s Israel announced
it would reverse its discriminatory language policy, but it would not rehire or compensate
Zinaty, while the restaurant chain’s headquarters in the USA simultaneously denied that there
was any change of policy, unwittingly testifying that Zionism is often stronger in the USA
than in Israel.659
In another Tel Aviv restaurant, Arab employees were reportedly instructed to only
speak Hebrew near customers and even to use Hebrew names when addressing each other. In
this case, however, as opposed to most other cases of discrimination, there was at least the
possibility of redress. The employees took the chain of restaurants to court in a civil law
suit.660
‘Ibrahim Becomes Avraham’, a report by the Israeli YNET internet news service in
2005, stated that as many as 800 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship had changed their
original Arabic names to Hebrew names in order to get jobs in their home country. This is a
658
Williams, D.: Israeli Arabs Decry Signs of the Times, 2001; Ben-Zeev: The Deluge and the Ring, 1998: 121-
123. The origin of the name for the capital, Jerusalem, appears to be a pre-Hebrew, Semitic name. An Egyptian
source calls it ‘Rushalimum’ at the beginning of the 19 th century BCE. See Armstrong K. 1997 (1996): 6f.
659
Abunimah & Parry: McConfusion: Mounting Evidence Supports Claim McDonald’s Israel Fired Worker for
Speaking Arabic, 2004; Abunimah & Parry: McConfusion: McDonald’s Israel Reportedly Backs Down, While
McDonald’s HQ Stonewalls, 2004
660
Bana: Restaurant Chain Orders Arab Workers to Stop Speaking Arabic Near Customers, 2001. I have not
been able to find out how the court case turned out. Guarnieri 2011 also mentions Aroma Tel Aviv, a major
coffee chain, which in a manual instructs employees to ‘speak Hebrew only’ around customers. She also
mentions a host of other critical ways in which discrimination against Arabic takes place: in some Israeli schools
Palestinian pupils are forbidden from speaking their mother language; application forms for Social Security,
National Insurance, and other necessities are only available in Hebrew; some Palestinians struggle to defend
themselves in court in Hebrew because of discriminatory policies making it difficult to get a translator. And there
are still many more ways in which Israel qualifies for imposing and upholding apartheid in language: ‘In Lod, for
example, 25 percent of the population is Arab. But out of the city’s 50 social workers, only two speak Arabic and
both are part time employees. . . . [Arabic] textbooks used by Palestinian citizens of Israel have over 16,000
grammar and spelling errors. Mistakes appeared in math, history, geography books and those used to teach the
Arabic language itself.’ (ibid.)
340

direct parallel to the first name of the first democratically elected president of South Africa.
His family named him ‘Rolihlahla’, not ‘Nelson’; a teacher did, once Rolihlahla Mandela had
started attending school.
My own first name is also English, but that is not the result of any kind of apartheid or
colonialism or any kind of cultural imperialism. My mother is English. For hundreds of
millions of people around the world today, however, their first names are English, like
Mandela’s, because of cultural imperialism alone. Though in a very much smaller scale,
Israeli society is structurally and systematically carrying out cultural imperialism within its
borders in the same destructive way as do the anglo-americocentrics and the Anglo-American
maximists and their supporters around the world. It is also something which in the long run
drives wedges between the Palestinians in Israel and those outside, as well as between
Palestinians within Israel. It is an ongoing imperialist infiltration of indigenous cultures, of
which many people are only dimly aware.
Parents all over the world are giving their children English first names, and English is
today’s de facto world language. Hebrew, however, is no such thing. The situation in Israel is
more like Tibetans taking Chinese names or Samiti (the indigenous Scandinavians) taking
north Germanic (Swedish or Norwegian) names in order to be accepted and in order to be able
to make a living. Linguistic genocide is something that happens frequently all around the
world. As will become clear below, I am nevertheless hopeful with regard to Arabic in Israel.
The first democratically elected president of Palestine/Israel is of course likely to be
Palestinian (due to demographics as well as apartheid racialization of the populations), but she
might well go by a name such as Shlomit Abu Sneineh, a Holy Land equivalent of Nelson
Mandela.
The nearer future, however, appears less rosy. Tensions between the Israeli Arab
pragmatists or assimilationists and those Palestinians who wish to strengthen their Arab
identities in the Jewish state are on the increase, according to the YNET report about
Palestinians changing their first names to Hebrew names. The 20 percent Palestinian minority
in Israel is therefore easier to control for the apartheid elites, it is both seriously divided and
oppressed.661
To view the very same phenomenon as assimilation, on the one hand, and cultural
genocide, on the other, obviously creates a profound schism in this fragmented part of the
already fragmented Palestinian nation: the fragmented families, the refugees outside Historic
Palestine who make up most of the Palestinians, and who are literally scattered around the
world; the ones under Israeli military occupation, who are, among many other things, split up
into discontiguous cantons by means of settlements, military installations, the Apartheid Wall,
and ‘Jews Only’-roads; and then, finally, the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who are split
up culturally and socially, and even linguistically, under intense pressure from the Israeli
presence.662 This is all brought about intentionally, at least approvingly, by the Israeli elites
and by Jewish-Israeli civil society. And the world is apparently too confused to notice.
Underscoring the intimate relationship between domination and nomination, Marwan
Barghouti once said:

And now I pass from my exile to their….homeland? My homeland?

The West Bank and Gaza? The Occupied Territories? The Areas?
Judea and Samaria? The autonomous government? Israel? Palestine?

661
Palter: Ibrahim Becomes Avraham: Hundreds of Israeli Arabs Adopt Hebrew Names in Bid to Find Work,
2005
662
Barghouti, O.: Israeli Apartheid: Time for the South African Treatment, 2006. And then there is the problem
that some of the Palestinian leaders in the Occupied Territories seem to not even be able to speak plain Arabic,
but apparently only some dialect of Bantustani.
 341

Is there any other country in the world that so perplexes you with its
name?663

Yet, on the whole, despite active linguistic oppression by Israeli society and the state
of Israel, the initial language situation in the country, before Zionism, has been detrimental to
apartheid in all areas under their control. Palestine and all its geographical neighbors used
Arabic as a first language. Even the Jews used Arabic, both in Palestine and throughout the
Middle East and North Africa, for many centuries before Zionism. In South Africa, on the
other hand, black resistance was split due to the existence of tens of different indigenous
languages and no obvious contender for being the leading language (Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho,
English, and even Afrikaans (especially in the Cape region) were used at different times and
places as the main languages for multiracial resistance). Palestinian resistance, in contrast, is
galvanized by the fact that practically all Palestinians understand and speak Arabic. The same
was the case with the Egyptian resistance to apartheid, although Egyptian gradually gave way
to Coptic, mainly due to the oppressive elite promotion of Greek, and also due to contempt
and ignorance towards Egyptian. There must have been for centuries a split between
Egyptians who wanted to hang on to Egyptian and assimilationists who needed jobs more, or
who were just greedy collaborators. Egypt’s neighbors did not speak Egyptian, in any case not
as a first language (some of them did, however, use the Egyptian script). All of Israel’s
immediate neighbors, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, on the other hand, are (still) Arabic-
speaking countries, and so are many of the neighbors of those neighbors (Libya, Sudan, Saudi
Arabia, and Iraq). Under these conditions, Israel is obviously not very lucky with its
apartheid, especially not with linguistic genocide, and, as we saw in Chapter II.1.3, Israel’s
successfully genocidal tendencies and programs are indeed more physical than cultural. They
manifest themselves today as bombs, bullets and bulldozers, rather than as more subtly racist
language policies or laws.
Like Egyptian, independently of Greek, Arabic also has its own system of
phonographic writing, independently of Hebrew, which may help to crucially unify cultural
and social identity in resistance and even be a tool useful for practical resistance whenever the
oppressor does not understand it. This relatively advantageous situation should not, however,
be overemphasized. The South Africans lacked a system of phonographic writing when the
Whites first arrived, but they did have pictographic and other graphic (and, of course, the
whole range of spoken, sung, and otherwise symbolic) texts with which to communicate with
each other so that Whites would not necessarily understand what was being communicated. 664

663
Quoted in del Vecchio 2011: 19.
664
See Oluoch: Africa’s Rock Art Revealed, 2001; Campbell & Coulson: Windows on the Past, 2001: 40-45 on
the overvalorization of phonographic systems of writing by scholars and others. Löwstedt 1995: 91ff argues that
there are no illiterate cultures at all, not only in the sense of the existence of oral literature, but also in the sense
of graphic literature. Pictographic and ‘ethographic’ writing are both often abstract in character, they sometimes
include signs for numbers and, equally crucial, ever since paleolithic times, i.e. the Early Stone Age, they are
sometimes conventionally sequenced, i.e. read from left or right, down or across. The Greek word, graphein,
from which all these words for types of signs have been derived, significantly means ‘to write’. Furthermore, the
words ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’ refer to literature, the concept of which has long been extended by anthropologists
to include oral literature. Thus, ‘illiterate culture’ is an oxymoron. After spectacular recent finds of abstract as
well as realist art, much of it serialized and complex, dating back 70,000 years, had been made on South Africa’s
Cape coast, anthropologist Christopher Henshilwood made a comparison between that and the oldest European
art and the thought and language that it presumably expressed. The European finds are only a maximum 35,000
years old but, in typical eurocentric scientific lore, they have been considered paradigmatic by anthropologists
(even physical anthropologists), art historians, and others until now, although they are in fact also predated by
huge numbers of other Paleolithic symbols found in Africa, Asia and Australia. Henshilwoods says: ‘We are
changing the origins of [highly sophisticated human] behavior from Europe into Africa…I think that is really
important for Africa and for the African people. It puts pride back into Africa and pride back into the African
people.’ Fox: Cave Art Shows Human Behavior Arose Early - Study, 2002. See also Wong, K.: The Morning of
the Modern Mind, Becoming Human: Evolution and the Rise of Intelligence, 2006; Gugliotta: The Great Human
342

Moreover, they were commonly skilled at mastering or at least using several languages, which
the oppressors generally were not.

Migration: Why Humans Left Their African Homeland 80,000 Years Ago to Colonize the World, 2008;
Löwstedt & Daigle: Media Development, Convergence, and Long-term Progress: A Stage-sequence Theory,
2014.
 343

9. Thought
[T]he most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
(Steve Biko)665

Plural abstract phenomena or concepts – such as ‘cultures’, ‘races’, ‘nationalities’,

‘ethnicities’ and ‘religions’ – are habitually represented and invoked by apartheid oppressors
and their sympathizers as bastions separated by unbridgeable divides. Nothing could of course
be further from the truth, but the strategic and political function of such reasoning is almost
invariably to avoid or to marginalize the more concrete and material facts of discrimination,
i.e. of apartheid violence, repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education and
language. Especially when a violent conflict flares, the underlying apartheid is disguised by
the elites responsible for them as somehow inevitable, and even more importantly as a clash
of civilizations, cultures, or even as a clash of different and opposed human natures. The
background information of perpetual change and oppression is conveniently forgotten and, in
many cases, itself repressed.
A clever trick is achieved by sympathy thus being generated for the ‘beleaguered
minority’, the most common reaction to typical western media reports about and from both
apartheid South Africa (at least until the 1970s) and apartheid Israel (until the present). As we
have seen, this minority does allow for occasional democratic processes, but these are only or
nearly only for use by members of that same racial minority. This card, ‘beleaguered’ on the
one hand, and ‘democratic’ on the other, is played cunningly by the apartheid governments
and by their closest allies, e.g. by the US Secretary of State in October 2000 (see below), and
relayed by the mass media. And the mass media do, to a large extent, govern and control
political opinion. Especially when it comes to world affairs, of which there is even less direct
knowledge among the public than of local, national or regional affairs, public opinion is
published opinion, whether in the electronic or the print media.
Apartheid thought is therefore neither unimportant nor unessential unto apartheid
itself. It is an exceptionally extremist, elitist kind of thinking, which attempts to justify gross
human rights violations, and even to make them appear as moral duties. And in order for the
entire system of oppression to function, this variety of extremist thought has to become
internalized by each generation of an entire people, i.e. the oppressive racial minority. 666 That
is sufficient, though very expensive and energy- as well as time-consuming, both for
producers and consumers of the ideology. But it usually goes further than that.
Apartheid thought also targets the oppressed majority as well as any other minorities
aside from the most privileged one in an apartheid state. Especially the small, indigenous class
that has been selected as the favored allies of the oppressors are sought out and worked upon.
Although apartheid ideologues never even approached success in convincing an indigenous
majority of its inherent inferiority, they have often proved successful with these favored
groups, and also in severely limiting the self-respect, self-confidence, dignity and dynamism
of the whole majority, by means of constantly reiterated dehumanization and humiliation, by
ignorance and outright negation of their culture, and by means of making the indigenous
people ask themselves what is wrong with them. Personally, I have heard Palestinians refer to
each other as animals or as unworthy of statehood countless times. That is also why, for
instance, it became so important for the South African white elites to silence and eventually
murder Steve Biko, the perhaps most important leader of the Black Consciousness Movement

665
Biko 2004 (1978): 74, 101; This quote has become a celebrated legacy of Biko’s. See, for examples, Boyle:
27 Years On, S.Africa’s Slain Biko Sets a Standard, 2002; Barsamian in: Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies,
An Interview with Noam Chomsky, 2001. (The interviewer quotes Biko and Chomsky agrees with Biko.) Just
like so many assassinated Palestinians who were subsequently spuriously accused of inciting other indigenous
people to violence (see below, Ch. II.9.3) by the apartheid elites and their allies, Biko never did so either.
666
See MacCann & Maddy: Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature, 1985-1995, 2001.
344

(see Chapter II.1.2.) and of black South Africans in general, until his death in 1977 as well as
posthumously.
Finally, apartheid ideology is directed at vital military, political and business partners
abroad. With the indiscriminate way the mass media work, the not so vital partners and the
numerous neutral or powerless parties are of course also subject to the propaganda. But if they
were not so brainwashed, they probably would not be so neutral or powerless, either. I could
have called this section ‘Propaganda’, ‘Hegemony’, or ‘Ideology’, but I believe the
pervasiveness of apartheid manifests itself even more in this section than in the previous ones.
Once it starts covering several successive generations, apartheid thought seems to be
something that can only be fully understood by those who suffer or perpetrate it continuously.
I will attempt to decipher at least some of its essential characteristics in the chapters that
follow.
It might seem vastly exaggerated and extremely dangerous to refer to thought as a
gross human right violation. Yet I do not mean that individuals should be held responsible
alone for thinking in favor of apartheid or racism. As with the case of the rabid racist and Nazi
publicist, Julius Streicher, who was sentenced to death by the US-led allies in the Nuremberg
trial and executed in 1946, incitement and instigation to violence can be abetting murder. 667 If
thoughts are conceived and consciously devised, expressed and publicized to cause murder
and other kinds of violence to take place, and especially if they succeed in doing so, then
criminal liability must apply. That is not even controversial. There are probably laws against
incitement to violence in every single country in the world. And conversely, if thoughts of
racial equality and human rights for all people are punished with death, such as in the cases of
Steve Biko and countless other victims of apartheid, then criminal liability must also apply,
although in these cases for the punishing agent, not for the publicist or speaker.
As we have seen, the distinction between apartheid and genocide is often blurry, and
that grey area is where thought, accompanied by such seemingly innocent actions as talking
about it or publishing it, can become a crime, a human rights violation and even a gross
human rights violation. Both apartheid and genocide are states of war. Apartheid thought may
indeed be able to exist without apartheid violence, and then it is not a gross human rights
violation. But apartheid violence will not happen without at least some measure of apartheid
thought: conscious, subconscious, or unconscious. It is in this last realm, in the unconscious
mind, in the suppressed memories and thoughts, that apartheid manifests itself as
schizophrenia, as a mental as well as a thought disease.
Like apartheid violence, apartheid thought differs from all the other kinds of apartheid
phenomena in being a human rights violation that can be perpetrated by members of all racial
groups involved in the conflict. As with violence, however, the vast majority of offenses are
committed by members of the oppressive majority. Four steps of increasing severity that I
have identified in apartheid thought, on both sides of the apartheid divide, are bias,
dehumanization, demonization, and incitement to violence. Apartheid thought, if effective, is
a racist hate crime.
Lastly, apartheid thought, like apartheid as a whole, is as much a process as it is a
structure. It is basically a strategy of attacking rather than a system to defend – whatever
biased journalists and politicians may say to the opposite effect (mainly in favor of the
‘besieged minority’). Thus, South African Whites would switch to ‘culturalism’ after
‘biological’ racism had become increasingly discredited on a global scale in the 1940s and
‘50s. In a desperate attempt to postpone the inevitable end of South African apartheid, the
crumbling edifice was broadened in 1983 to include Indians and Coloreds into the electorate.
In Egypt, the Romans would switch, even more dramatically, from persecuting Christians to
persecuting non-Christians within a very short space of time, during which their apartheid
system was also somewhat relaxed, at least legally.

667
N.N.: Julius Streicher (1885-1946), 2012
 345

There are huge problems related to the anticipations and feelings of inferiority that
develop in a conquered indigenous majority. But it must never be forgotten that each
individual inferiority complex that results from this is lastly caused by an even larger
psychological problem, the superiority complexes of the apartheid oppressors. As argued
above, in the Introduction to Part II, these phenomena are correlated with the development of
the most serious mental diseases, schizophrenic diseases, or at least with their main
symptoms: hallucinations, psychosis, paranoia, violent behavior and suicide, all prevalent in
apartheid populations, both among perpetrators and victims. However, if this cause, the
superiority complex, is removed, then true healing can set in, both within the conqueror and
the conquered.

9.1. Zero-sum Competition and the Climax of De-secularization

The starkest contrast between the conquerors’ attitudes towards the conquered before
and after conquest is in Egypt. The Greeks were inspired by, admired and even copied
elements of all main aspects of Egyptian culture, at least during the eighth, seventh, sixth, and
parts of the fifth, centuries BCE, and possibly even for many more centuries prior to that.
During this period, the archaic or ‘pre-classical’ period, Greece was on the periphery of the
civilized world, and it was influenced mainly by the comparatively rapidly developing
Egyptian and West Semitic cultures, i.e. by African and Asian cultures.
Among the numerous Greek mercenaries who served in Egyptian armies during the
(Greek) classical period were many officers who belonged to the social elites back home in
Greece. They started marrying Egyptian women once the first Greek colony in Egypt,
Naucratis in the Nile Delta, a trading colony (emporion) had been given to the Greeks around
650 BCE by King Psammetich in gratitude for their mercenary services against the Persians.
Many Greek mercenary officers then married into the elite families of Egypt.668
In the Ptolemaic kingdom, only three centuries later, the opposite was the case: only
Greeks of low social standing, and only very few at that, ever married Egyptians. As far as we
know, apartheid marriage restrictions were still not there in (national) law, but they were in
practice.669

[W]hatever way one interprets the existing sources, it is undeniable

that the relations between the Greeks and the native population were
filled with problems from the very beginning [of the Ptolemaic state].
There were several causes behind this, first of all, of course, the
intrinsic tension that always accompanies the encounter of a
conquering people with the oppressed original inhabitants.670

In this society, in Egypt under Greek rule, ‘many Greeks were fundamentally racist’
towards the Egyptians, according to the Swedish classicist, Karin Blomqvist. To Greeks in
general, it had by this time become obvious that they were superior to all Barbarians. The
Egyptians, especially, had for a while already been considered thugs by the Greeks, and, in
particular, as devious thugs.671
The reasons behind the 180-degree switch of Greek attitudes towards foreigners in
general and Egyptians in particular are complex. But the beginnings of this process are fairly
clear. Once the Greeks had beaten off the Persians attempting to invade Greece in the fifth

668
Haider: Griechen im Vorderen Orient und in Ägypten bis ca. 590 v.Chr., 1996: 111ff; Assmann: Weisheit und
Mysterium: Das Bild der Griechen von Ägypten, 2000: 10ff; Bernal 2001
669
Walbank 41994 (1981): 119. For one probable exception, see footnote 548.
670
Blomqvist 1997: 63 (‘oavsett hur man tolkar det bevarade källmaterialet är det ovedersägligt att relationerna
mellan grekerna och den infödda befolkningen var problemfyllda från första början. Orsakerna var flera, först
och främst naturligtvis den inneboende spänning som alltid följer på mötet mellan erövrarfolket och de
underkuvade ursprungliga innevånarna.’)
671
Ibid. (‘många greker var utpräglade rasister.’)
346

century, arrogance and hubris spread quickly within their society.

In the eyes of the Greeks the barbarians were not only foreigners, but
inferior beings: between Greek and barbarian, says Isocrates, there is
no less difference than between man and beast...The superiority of the
Greeks gave them rights: it was natural and just that Barbarians should
obey them as slaves obeyed freemen...Between them no friendship
was possible, but there must be eternal war.672

This perception – by Simon Davis, a South African classicist writing at the time of
implementation of apartheid in the narrow sense in his own home country and, apparently,
opposed to it – was of course an over-generalization. There are a few known exceptions to the
extreme xenophobia and racism developing among Greeks during the Classical period, for
instance Diogenes, the famous ‘cynic’ who lived in a barrel, or the sophist, Antiphon, but
these exceptions were very likely marginal beings or freaks. Another philosophical freak, who
had a great deal more success in putting his stamp on history, was Socrates. But he was as
elitist, anti-democratic, xenophobic, and racist as any ancient Greek could be.673 Thus, Davis
was really not far off the mark.
Another classicist explains how the 180-degree switch did not cover all aspects of life:
‘[From the classical period onwards, the Greeks] defeated and despised the Orient in public
and political contexts, while continuing to admire and imitate it in private taste and
intellectual activity.’674 This is not unlike the way white racists around the world have
admired and imitated black music and black musicians (and often gained more profit and
prominence than the original black artists and composers in the process), especially since the
early 20th century CE. Thus, people who were perhaps essentially non-racists have also been
drawn in by profiting from the racism; Al Jolson, Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, and the Rolling
Stones are prominent examples. At least for a while, during the late 1970s, ‘80s and early
‘90s, Johnny Clegg, a white South African singer and performer, was the prime ambassador
(and not a bad one) in the world for Zulu music and dance. It is likely that similar mechanisms
work in favor of Israeli Jews as well as they did for Greeks regarding the Orient, for instance
in Jewish-Israeli music, which contains many Arab elements, or, in yet another apartheid
society, in the Oriental clothes fashions among the elite crusaders. The relationship between
the two cultures is thus one of violence, expropriation, oppression, but sometimes also one of
mutual enrichment, of a new cultural identity, and of love, if only self-love, i.e. apartheid
culture is a volatile, explosive, and destructive mixture of love and hate.
With regard to their relationship with the Egyptians, then, racial hatred started with the
Greeks, and it continued throughout their apartheid era in Egypt, for a thousand years.
Naturally, the Egyptians themselves eventually reciprocated the hatred. There is a genre of
late Egyptian literature called ‘hate rituals’ by a present-day commentator. It consisted of
texts, and sometimes of ritual acts, which were supposed to cause harm to enemies. The genre
had its beginnings already under Assyrian and Persian occupation, and occasionally, due
almost certainly to fear of persecution, the ‘hate rituals’ against the Persians written during
Ptolemaic times seem to be thinly veiled symbolic attacks on the Greeks.675 Many of these

672
Davis, S. 1951: 2; see also Blomqvist 1997: 63 and Fèvre 1997: 48.
673
Tzermias 1998: 185f
674
Morris, S. P.: Daidalos and Kadmos: Classicism and ‘Orientalism’, 1989: 41
675
Assmann 1996: 446ff. There are also hateful written exchanges between Egyptians and Jews during the
Ptolemaic era. See Clauss 2003: 64-67. It should be added in this context that Egyptian culture, prior to the first
millennium BCE, i.e. prior to the invasions by the first Iron Age superpowers (Assyria, Persia and Greece),
appears to have been remarkably tolerant towards foreigners and their cultures. In a recent investigation into this
matter, the author ranks race or ethnicity well under the following four categories of discrimination in
independent ancient Egypt: status, wealth, age, and class. Meskell: Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class
et cetera in Ancient Egypt, 1999: 148ff. Without ever fully excusing the hate crimes, they should be seen in the
 347

texts would be called ‘hate speech’ today, and they should be condemned as ethnocentric or
racist, and so should some texts by some black South Africans and some Palestinians, but
none of them should be taken out of context. As with acts of violence against apartheid
perpetrators carried out by apartheid victims, this racism was (is) deeply provoked racism,
provoked by racist crimes against humanity. Again, that does not make it forgivable, but it
makes it understandable. In my opinion, the racism manifested by the racial elites in apartheid
societies, on the other hand, is both unforgivable and unworthy of any kind of sympathetic
understanding. To ignore either kind of literature, however, might be dangerous, because, as
this section will show, it seems that we are doomed to repeat what we forget in the field of
racist ideology. As long as racist texts are free of incitement to violence, they will receive
some support from international law, under the human and civil rights articles allowing
freedom of expression, and therefore, it is imperative to deal with these texts with
circumspection, to monitor racist texts as a way of monitoring racism, in order to prevent it
from becoming violent, especially by means of pre-emptive investment in the removal of
factors contributing to the marginalization of racists and would-be racists (they should be
confronted and supported in a path towards constructive contributions to society), a policy
that is completely absent in apartheid government measures.
Throughout human history, it seems that whenever a time- and energy-consuming
military conquest is completed, (further) contempt towards the conquered people sets in. The
same phenomenon can be observed in South Africa. Of course, racism was there from the
very start. But as long as there were still some unsubjugated Khoisan in the Cape, there was
still some sort of dignity afforded to the Khoisan as a whole by the white invaders. Only when
the land had become all white did wholesale racial contempt on a systematic basis set in;676
the same appears to have been the case with Greek contempt for Egyptians.
Once Egypt had been conquered, or re-conquered, the Greeks in Egypt – generally a
brutal and lazy racial elite – typically described the Egyptians as ‘cruel’, suffering from
‘profligacy and indolence’, ‘excitable and uncivilized’, lacking ‘good sense and capacity’.677
The Greeks steeled themselves using this method; their own most negative qualities were
simply reflected or deflected, and dumped on the native population, a racist strategy that is by
no means unique to the Ptolemaic Greeks.
As we already noted, ancient Greek racism was mainly culturalist, rather than
biologically imagined. Still, there are increasing signs, from the 6th century BCE onwards, that
black Africans were associated by Greeks with ‘apes’, an expression used in an insulting and
racist manner. And many Egyptians must have appeared to be black Africans to both Greeks
and Romans. Furthermore, it is evident that people of Greek origin (and others) who lived
outside of Greece during antiquity considered their Greekness (whether real or imagined) to
be of utmost importance.678 And this was apparently a view supported and even instigated by
the intellectual elite.

Ptolemy II not only nursed expansionist dreams, but liked to think of

himself qua Alexander’s successor, as a protector of Greeks and Greek
interests – but the underlying belief rested on that fundamental

context of apartheid and colonialist crimes against the Egyptians, by Greeks and Persians, as well as by Jewish
and other mercenaries and collaborators with the Persian and Greek occupiers of Egypt.
676
Lester 1996: 14. On the few ancient Greeks who are known to have dared to contradict the alleged inferiority
of barbarians, see Müller: Geschichte der antiken Ethnologie, 1997 (1972, 1980): 143; Cartledge 1993: 42.
677
Walbank: Polybius, Rome and the Hellenistic World: Essays and Reflections, 2002: 59f.
678
Bernal 2001: 74f. It should perhaps be added that ancient Greek racist biologism probably never reached the
levels of Northern and Western European racism since the invention and spread of racist slavery in the sixteenth
through the nineteenth centuries CE. See also Bernal 1991: 444; Swain 1996: 10f; McCoskey 2004 and Chapter
II.2.1 above. McCoskey cites Montequieu’s inspiration, Hippocrates (the one whose oath physicians swear
today), who argued from a climatic-culturalistic, deterministic theory that non-Europeans are characterized by
‘mental flabbiness’ and ‘cowardice’. Ibid: 317
348

Hellenocentrism, or Panhellenism, which had been a constant factor in

Greek affairs at least since the Persian Wars. The geographical
boundaries might have expanded…but this had merely sharpened the
Hellenic appetite for empire. The new world that emerged had
also…produced a deep sense of deracination among emigrant Greeks,
in particular the intellectuals of Alexandria.679

Biological racism against Egyptians was still around within the racial elites during the
late Imperial Roman times. An anonymous, late fourth-century treatise ‘…claims that people
with curly hair resemble the Egyptians and are therefore very deceitful, greedy, fearful, and
grasping.’680
An otherwise commonly overlooked feature of ancient Greek culture is its
competitive-eliminative aspect, or form. Greek people, at least the elite males among them,
were generally out to eliminate their rivals on the battlefield, in court, in love, sports, and
business.681 Public affairs were permeated by this ideology: ‘Greek politics... were...an
agonistic and zero-sum competition’682, as were the arts: ‘Classical Greek literature...like the
culture as a whole was quintessentially agonal or competitive’683 This attitude, combined with
several recent instances of overwhelming military success, led to a Greek self-image during
Hellenistic times that Peter Green has described as more than super-human, namely as super-
divine:

Philosophical precedent for this might-is-right attitude could be found

in the pronouncements of fifth-century sophists [philosophers who
sold wisdom by the lesson, the most famous of whom was the
relativist Protagoras who is accredited with ‘man is the measure of all
things’] such as Critias; the Athenians had given a notable, and
notorious, demonstration of the thesis in their savage treatment of
Melos during the Peloponnesian War: ‘You know as well as we do,’
they told the Melians…’that justice in human debate results from a
balance of power, and that the strong exploit their advantage, while
the weak must perforce yield.’ Arguments of this type had not lost
their force, or their popularity, with time. It is, however, worth noting
that whereas in the fifth century such conduct had aroused a storm of
disapproval, little more than a hundred years later it was virtually
taken for granted: Alexander – after, characteristically, cutting the
Gordian Knot rather than untying it – had driven the point home with
ineluctable force. Gods…had been men, and now men were going the
gods one better, had indeed become the measure of all things in ways
Protagoras had never foreseen. . . . The full force of this militaristic
ethic, and its ramifying implications for every facet of Hellenistic
society, have not always been clearly recognised.684
679
Green: “These Fragments Have I Shored Against My Ruins”: Apollonios Rhodios and the Social Revalidation
of Myth for a New Age, 1997: 62f
680
Isaac 2004: 365
681
Trampedach: Wer andern eine Tafel ritzt, Einschreiben aus dem Jenseits: Fritz Graf über den Schadenzauber
in der Antike (review of the book „Gottesnähe und Schadenzauber. Die Magie in der griechisch-römischen
Antike” by Fritz Graf), 1996
682
Cartledge 1993: 111
683
Ibid: 65
684
Green 1998 (1989): 183. Green goes on to dispel the ‘Victorian myth’ of Hellenism as a ‘missionary cult
spread for the enlightenment of the heathen’ (Ibid: 184). Apparently, this myth still exists in some conservative
quarters. Of course, a few indigenous individuals did benefit: ‘[H]istory has found some unpleasant names for
such people.’ He concludes: ‘The Macedonian dynasties in Egypt and the Near East were exploitative imperial
regimes, ruling by military force for their own benefit, in the last resort massively indifferent to the indigenous
civilisations with which they came into contact (Cleopatra VII was the first Ptolemy who ever bothered to learn
Egyptian, there is virtually no trace of interpenetration between Hellenistic Greek and Pharaonic or Babylonian
 349

This must be a historic height of self-aggrandizement: We, Greek men, are better than
the gods! A prime example of the classical Greek competitive-eliminative ethos, in at least
one way unsuperseded by any racism since, is the way that Plato argued in favor of infanticide
in his ‘Republic’. The finest stock was to be selected, and the not so perfect babies should be
‘exposed’, i.e. left to die, in Plato’s ideal state.685 The practice itself was in fact widespread
throughout the Greek and Roman culture spheres during antiquity. Especially unwanted
female infants were commonly left on garbage heaps to die slowly, sometimes perhaps to be
picked up and saved by someone who would want such a child, or who would take pity on it,
or feel morally obligated to take care of it.686
The Greeks brought this practice along to Egypt, and apparently it horrified the
indigenous: ‘Egyptians, whose religion forbade infanticide, often rescued babies left thus to
die. The law allowed them to adopt foundlings or raise them as slaves.’687
An interesting fact about the Egyptians who saved the lives of these Greek and later
also Roman infants is that Roman lawmakers encouraged Egyptians to enslave ‘exposed’
babies, but indirectly punished them for adopting the same. According to Paragraph 41 of the
Roman law for Egypt, a quarter of the property of Egyptians who adopted children ‘found on
the garbage heap’ was to be confiscated by the state. 688 It is not immediately easy to see why
anyone should be punished for saving innocent lives at all, and secondly, why there was no
corresponding punishment for Egyptians who enslaved babies – Greek and Roman babies! –
found in the trash. On the one hand, Roman sexism (most of these babies were girls) seems
stronger than racist classism. (Egyptian slave-owners, presumably mostly men, were more

literature).’ Ibid. Clauss 2003: 167f. describes how the Roman Emperor, Vespasian, who ruled 69-79 CE, in a
way made himself equal or superior to Sarapis, the main god in Alexandria at the time.
685
Plato: The Republic 460c, This is the first known substantial anticipation of Social Darwinism and the first
known justification of politically programmatic eugenics, see Mürner: Philosophische Bedrohungen:
Kommentare zur Bewertung der Behinderung, 1996: 28. The German Nazi propaganda gratefully made
extensive use of its Platonic inspiration. See Tzermias 1998: 130ff. (Of course this does not make Plato himself a
Nazi. Some post-World War II commentators have probably gone too far in dismissing him as such, though
others went at least as far in the opposite direction by preposterously trying to reinstate Plato as an egalitarian or
humanist social thinker. Ibid: 132ff.) A further indirect legacy of Plato’s can, for instance, be found in Israel’s
policy towards Palestinians, but also against its own disabled individuals, who are clearly underprivileged, unless
they have wounds sustained in wars, in which case the state spends ‘lavishly’ on them. Ilan Ghilon, a left-wing
Israeli lawmaker crippled by childhood polio, says: “It’s time we stop making this distinction between the ‘hero’
and the ‘weak’.” See Williams, D.: Israel’s Disabled Fight for Respect, Recognition, 2002.
686
Tyldesley 1995 (1994): 69. Women in ancient Greece were in fact treated no better than women under
Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Ibid: 38-44. See also above, Section I.4.
687
Lewis, N. 1983: 54. In fact, it was probably more an Egyptian moral philosophy than Egyptian religion that
forbade infanticide. The life-centeredness and the humanism of ancient Egyptian philosophy was an integral part
of the culture from the very beginnings of the civilization, since long before de-secularization started to set in
(with the New Kingdom: around 1550 BCE). And although the religion contained rules of conduct that appear to
carry a notion of the sanctity of life, these rules vary considerably between the texts and in space and time. In
spite of the Greek term and concept for the disastrously mislabeled Egyptian phonographic signs, hieroglyphs,
i.e. ‘holy signs’, there were in fact never any holy, unalterable texts in Ancient Egypt prior to the biblical
religions. On the whole, though, the ancient Egyptian concepts of life appear to differ from ancient Greek and
subsequent ‘western’ concepts, in particular by not equating life with survival. At times, life even appears to
have been conceived by the Egyptians as the sublime opposite to both death and survival. Thus, the ethical drift
of Egyptian ontology was no doubt in the wide sense anti-Darwinist, i.e. anti-selectionist and anti-eliminationist.
That is something that can hardly be said about European or ‘western’ ontology, or even about much of western
arts, for example, Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ being, or rather, begging, the question. It would be an
exaggeration to say that life has therefore been devalued (to the benefit of survival) by European culture as a
whole, but it has certainly been so by strong currents within elite European culture since ancient Greece. See
Zandee: Death as an Enemy According to Ancient Egyptian Conceptions, 1960; Bilolo: Les Cosmo-Theologies
Philosophiques d’Heliopolis et d’Hermopolis, 1986; Assmann 1995 (1990): 214f; Assmann 1996: 165, 231-238;
Assmann 1997: 193; Karenga 1995: 322-343; Löwstedt 1995: 151ff, and footnotes 117 and 607 above.
688
Lewis, N. 1983: 58
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important (especially for collaborative purposes) than were the unwanted elite babies, some of
whom could have been the products of liaisons between Greek women and slaves or even
Egyptians.) There was probably a strong wish among those in power to counteract biological
racial mixing with this law. Slaves are of course much less likely to intermarry with the racial
group to which their owners belong than adopted children are. The motivations behind this
strange law are apparently either very complex or they represent conflicting interests among
the elites and legislators. In either case, racism appears to have been strongly linked with
sexism. The disregard for human life and basic human rights is the one certain common
denominator for any interpretation of Roman intentions here.
There obviously is a possibility of a link from ancient Greek and Roman culture to
Capitalism, Darwinism, Machiavellism, classism, sexism, and racism in modern (and
postmodern) societies and cultures with a ‘western’ character. But it is equally obvious that
much of the kind of hypocrisy offered to us today by those preaching equality but acting
otherwise – e.g. the Christian churches, the human rights ideologies of the USA and the EU
(the largest weapons sellers and exporters in the world, respectively), and the mythology of
Hollywood (the ‘bad guys’ always losing in the end) – was not widespread among the Greeks.
On the other hand, they were also prone to religious hypocrisy, though of a very
different kind. For those who did not believe in the traditional Greek religion, and there were
many of them, it manifested itself in the dishonest, yet dutiful execution of rituals, especially
with sacrifices, wherein the culture’s fundamental brutality and lack of respect for life reveals
itself further: “[I]f there was one religious ritual that made a Greek conventionally and
normatively ‘Greek’, it was the eligibility to participate in a bloody animal sacrifice” 689 If one
did not carry out the ritual, one faced the possibility of a death sentence, as some philosophers
with a secular or critical bent experienced. It might seem overly harsh to call people who are
just trying to survive ‘hypocritical’ or ‘dishonest’, and most of us still do use killed animals to
survive, but there were many who were not directly threatened by the death sentence, and all
Greek men appear to have been schooled in the art of animal sacrifice.
In Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, all people, but especially Egyptians, were obligated to
participate in the religious cult of the deified rulers, their families, dynasties and sometimes
even of their lovers, though without any kind of sacrifice of living beings. These allegedly
divine personalities had both intricate and bombastic propaganda machinery at their disposal.
With the Hellenistic Age as a whole, the relative importance and ‘density’ of ideology reached
a climax for all of Greek and Macedonian history. We already dealt with the ideological
importance of Greek education, language, history and art (especially Homer) to Greeks in
Egypt in Chapter II.7.1. Ideology also reached further into metaphysics, in a wide sense, than
before or after, especially in Egypt.690 Religion in general was used consciously and cunningly
by the ruling class as an opium for the people, i.e. as a ‘…political instrument...purporting to
symbolize the unity and equality of the two cultures – an ideal to be given lip-service in the
present and realized in some utopian future. . . in the full knowledge that government policy
was directed at perpetuating the rigidly stratified status quo.’691
This insight is crucial though not recognized by all contemporary commentators. For

689
Ibid: 159ff, quote: 162. Another instance of ancient Greek religious hypocrisy would be the way that someone
like Socrates could be found guilty of misleading the youth with false gods and then sentenced to death. The
piety of his accusers was quite obviously merely a thin veneer for a political agenda, maybe a laudable agenda
(‘democracy’), but still one that murdered people. See Stone, I. F.: The Trial of Socrates, 1989.
690
Weber 1993: 56ff, 243ff, Lewis, N. 1983: 87f; Koch 1993: 592; Huß 2001: 320ff
691
Lewis, N. 1983: 86. This is the kind of hypocrisy that then became an essential element of western culture,
perhaps most importantly with Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire and of equivalent status
within subsequent European and American powers, to this day, i.e. that ‘there will be pie in the sky when we
die’, as Joe Hill, the Swedish-American protest songster wryly remarked, before he was framed and found guilty
of the murder of a former policeman, and then executed in Utah in 1915. Today, however, the mythology of
Hollywood (‘crime never, or almost never, pays’) is perhaps even more important than religion for upholding the
lie, or the pious faith. See, however, footnotes 903-905 below on emancipatory aspects of this kind of belief.
 351

example, the renowned and brilliant Heidelberg egyptologist, Jan Assmann, remarks that:
‘The generally positive, admiring view that the Greeks had of Egypt, the country and the
culture, strangely contrasts with their dislike of the Egyptians, whom they considered as
greedy, cunning, unreliable and slavish. The verb aigyptiazein denotes sly, crafty, malicious
behavior.’692 Assmann then goes on to characterize and label the Ptolemaic and early Roman
period (320 BCE-50 CE) as one of ‘scientific’ Greek texts about Egypt. 693 Of course, there is
a good reason for this: After having conquered the country and initiated massive immigration
into it, i.e. repopulating it, the Greeks learned more about Egypt than ever before. But here,
Assmann ignores the strong ideological aspects of these texts, which will explain the Greek
aversion towards Egyptians, which appears ‘strange’ to him, and also why religion became the
focus and the only important locus of intercultural mixing. The first explanation will
inevitably involve what Peter Green called the ‘rampant’, ‘imperial racism’ of Greeks and
Macedonians during this era.694 The second will involve a short digression.
The one thousand years that Egypt remained under Greek and Roman rule was perhaps
the most de-secularized time in human history. It led up to and saw the birth of Christianity
and Islam, the two most intolerant and indeed brutal missionary religions the world has ever
seen. But the scene was being set from long before the birth of Jesus:

From the beginning of the Ptolemaic period innumerable temples,

shrines and priesthoods developed, celebrating some of the traditional
gods of old Greece, Zeus, Dionysus, Aphrodite, the Egyptian or
Graeco-Egyptian deities, Isis, Sarapis and Anubis, as well as the
deified members of the ruling house and Alexander in particular,
whose priesthoods carried great prestige.695

Sarapis, the Graeco-Egyptian god, was created by Ptolemy I in order to combine the
religions of the two racial groups, to secure control over the favored Egyptians (the priests –
who were still often the ones who started armed uprisings and resistance movements), and
further to divert and distract the working population during its minimized free time.696 With
the exceptions of the cults of the deified kings and queens and their families, the sanctioned
practice and content of religion (and of philosophy) had also become more de-politicized than
ever. The new god’s main temple, the great Serapeum, was erected in the crowded Egyptian
township of Alexandria, Ra-Kedet (Rhakotis). The huge temple, the largest in the city, was
built on top of a largely artificial hill and ‘…dominated the southern part of the city like an
Acropolis.’ Since the Egyptian living quarters were confined to the southwest of the city, the
Serapeum thus became a Greek and royal presence among the indigenous and at the same
time a perpetually broken promise of proximity. The closest a normal Egyptian could come to

692
Assmann 2000: 10: („Das im Ganzen positive, von Bewunderung geprägte Bild der Griechen von Ägypten,
dem Land und der Kultur, kontrastiert eigentümlich mit ihrer Abneigung gegen die Ägypter, die ihnen als
geldgierig, verschlagen, unzuverlässig und sklavisch galten. Das Verb aigyptiazein bezeichnet schlaues,
durchtriebenes, hinterhältiges Verhalten.“) Similarly, Benjamin Isaac states that among the most common insults
levelled at Egyptians by ancient Greeks and Romans are: ‘greed and dishonesty, wantonness, presumption, and
rebelliousness’, Isaac 2004: 356, along with ‘promiscuity, greed, arrogance, fickleness, cowardice, and constant
resistance to the legitimate authorities’, ibid: 495.
693
Ibid: 24. The Roman literary depiction of Egyptians was similarly ambivalent. ‘There are essentially two
traditional portrayals of Egypt and Egyptians. One emphasizes the irrational, ferocious, uncontrollably passionate
peasants, devoted to their incomprehensible deities, rejecting civil authority and prone to extreme violence and
banditry. The other is of an old culture of learning, religion and philosophy which goes back beyond even Greek
civilization.’ Alston 2002: 248
694
See footnote 138 above.
695
Bowman 1996 (1986): 216. See also Koch 1993: 497ff.
696
See, however, Huß 2001: 246ff, where the author argues that the cult of Sarapis was introduced to ‘unify’ the
Greek ruling class and that the new era needed a new god. Huß does concede that his is a minority opinion. Ibid:
245
352

Greekness was through the contrived religion imposed on him or her by the Greek elites. The
Museum, on the other hand, was in the royal palace district, where the monarchs closely
followed and deeply influenced how the ideology and the technologies progressed. The
Egyptians were to be controlled with a crude, state-concocted opium for the people, whereas
the Greeks needed to be reinforced and reminded of their own cultural superiority (through
Homer and the other greatest poets, along with the reintroduction and use of Attic Greek), as
well as of the perceived material needs for military and technological superiority over the
Egyptians and the neighboring states.697
These needs stemmed from a very basic fear. Just like the South African Whites with
regard to Blacks, and Israeli Jews with regard to Palestinians and Arabs in general, the Greeks
were afraid of Egyptians due to the latter’s larger numbers, and to the fact that the Greeks
oppressed and exploited them, thus giving rise to resentment. Moreover, the Greeks were very
superstitious; they were afraid of the power of Egyptian magic and religion. The great age of
Egyptian civilization also awed them and contributed to the fear. At least some of them
adopted mummification. To some extent, this is still a European sentiment about Egypt today.
The hellenomanic and eurocentric interpretations of world history, Napoleon’s invasion, the
British and American periods of domination, and now, also, the mass tourism from the rich,
western countries as well as the indirect domination by Israel – all these factors contribute to
rational and irrational fearful anticipations of Egyptian reactions to nearly two millennia of
nearly unbroken European or white domination and oppression of Egypt. ‘With Alexander’s
conquest, as again with Napoleon’s, Egypt was simultaneously the imaginative territory in
which the European mind revisited its most basic anxieties of otherness and a geographical
space that was subjected to European imperialism.’698
During the Greek period, throughout the country, ‘…to judge by the evidence of
surviving inscriptions, the Ptolemies did not demand from the Greeks the full ruler-cult which
they…received from the Egyptians…’699 It is hard to imagine how the Egyptians could have
given the rulers that cult freely.
It seems, however, that the Egyptians, at least in Alexandria, did not care much for the
state-imposed cult of Sarapis, at least not until the beginning of Roman rule, but then it was no
longer state-imposed.700 Under Greek rule, though, it appears to have been perceived as a
chore more than anything else. The Greeks had been very clever at imposing ideology and de-
secularization, but, although already hundreds of years old, the craft of getting people hooked
on this opium was still in its infancy, and many Egyptians are sure to have seen through much
of what the Greeks were attempting to accomplish and why.
At the end of the 800-year period of the ancient Egyptian religion under European
rule, it was hardly recognizable as Egyptian religion any more. The Greek and Roman
oppressors had worked hard to make Egyptians feel that their gods had abandoned them. It is
no wonder that the Egyptians, and neither the Greeks nor the Romans nor the Jews, were the
first people in Egypt to turn for transcendent salvation to Christianity in great numbers.701

697
Quote from Fraser 1972: 27. See also Hellström 1997: 23; Clauss 2003: 13, 28, 94f; Mojsov 2010: 16. In the
city of Oxyrhynchus, a provincial capital south of modern Cairo, another ‘great’ Sarapis temple was erected in
the city’s central square, and it also housed the city’s main marketplace as well as a public space with a speaker’s
platform, according to Parsons 2007: 103, 175.
698
Vasunia 2001: 288. As we shall see (Section III.6 below), however, there was a big exception to the
domination of Egypt by Europe, the beginning of which coincided with the defeat of Greek and Roman apartheid
in Egypt and the introduction of Islam, and the end of which was marked by the Ottoman Empire and the
beginning of European world domination, i.e. from the 7 th until the 15th century CE. On mummification among
Greeks, see Parsons 2007: 216.
699
Fraser 1972: 115f.
700
Ibid: 273. It was thus possibly a thorn in the side of the new – Roman – authorities.
701
Koch 1993: 623ff. Moreover, Naphtali Lewis 1983: 101 makes the ‘[traditionally,] generally accomodating
attitude of the [Egyptian] population in matters of religion’ responsible for allowing Christianity a strong, early
foothold in Egypt, without which it might not even have survived outside Palestine and Syria.
 353

A fairly certain indication that the Pagan Egyptian priests were the indigenous class
most favored by Greeks and Romans, or more accurately, the least oppressed class, is the fact
that they were the last ancient Egyptians to hold any titles to their names. During independent
ancient times, the priests had been a mere professional group of officials and workers among
others. Only under European rule, when all officials had become Greek and later also Roman,
did Egyptian priests become a class of their own, with rigorously circumscribed privileges,
rights, and duties.702
Religion as superstition and escapism (there are of course many other aspects of
religion) and other, similar phenomena, such as divination, alchemy, dream interpretation,
magic, demonolatry, exorcism, and astrology, were thus encouraged, even created, and they
experienced an enduring surge of popularity in Graeco-Roman Egypt. This was when Egypt
became the center of the occult, a reputation it has found difficult to shake off ever since.
Astrology, which has been called ‘the most comprehensive scientific theory of
antiquity’ by David Pingree, a leading contemporary historian of ancient science, consisted of
three parts: ‘advanced Babylonian celestial divination’ (a Greek import to Egypt from western
Asia), ‘Aristotelian physics’, and ‘Hellenistic astronomy’, and it was created in Egypt in the
second century BCE, that is, at the height of Ptolemaic rule.703 Due to hellenophilia in the
popular modern consciousness, we are not used to consider the ancient Greeks as anything
else than rational contributors to the history of science. Of course, they did make invaluable
contributions, but the largest ancient Greek scientific effort was no doubt astrology, which is
in my view a scientifically worthless effort, or nearly so. And the reason it was such a
tremendous effort is the same as the reason behind sub-nuclear physics being such a great
scientific effort, possibly the greatest, during the 20th century CE: the reason is and was
political, more specifically, the production of weapons, whether physical or ideological.
Similarly, the Museum was ultimately under royal, i.e. political, authority, but second
in line was a (Greek) religious authority: ‘It remained a cult centre, directed by a priest. If the
principal shrine of Apollo was Delphi, and that of Zeus, Olympus, then surely the shrine of
the Muses would be Alexandria.’704
Egypt under Roman rule also happens to be the place from which cenobitic (as
opposed to eremitic) monasticism spread. The bishop of Oxyrhynchos ‘…boasted of 10,000
monks and 20,000 nuns’.705 This could be speculatively connected with a mass escape from
femicide (see Chapter II.1.1 above). But if Christianity ever provided a way to escape
femicide in general and female genital mutilation (FGM) in particular, then it later lost that
way, as FGM takes place in Christian as much as it does in Muslim families in Egypt today.

702
Quirke: Altägyptische Religion, 1996 (1992): 143; Koch 1993: 497
703
Pingree 1992: 560. Pingree’s concept of science is obviously not the current official concept, but a historic
one, relating to what was seen as science by the society and population under investigation. See also Koch 1993:
519ff and the references in footnote 46 above. A further aspect of continuous de-secularization was the
transformation of medicine, which had been virtually free of magic during the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but
from the time of the New Kingdom, from 1550 BCE onwards, it increasingly developed magical techniques for
healing until magical medicine finally became dominant. See Westendorf: Erwachen der Heilkunst, Die Medizin
im Alten Ägypten, 1992: 19; Theurl: Staat und Gesundheitswesen: Analyse historischer Fallbeispiele aus der
Sicht der neuen institutionellen Ökonomik, 1996: 164f. More recently, Assmann described the de-secularization
of Egypt as the ‘process of increased religious determination’, observable in ‘the areas of wisdom literature
[which includes both secular and religious philosophy, human sciences, and art], the concept of history, and the
interpretation of everyday experience.’ He also goes on to describe the de-secularization of medicine as an
example from the last-mentioned realm. Assmann: The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, 2001 (1984): 2f. To me
these were all decisive areas, i.e. it makes sense to me to describe the trend of de-secularization as applicable to
the whole society, though there would of course be exceptions and even counter-currents taking place during this
long time.
704
MacLeod 2002: 4
705
Parsons 2007: 12, 196. The brand of Christianity that first became popular in Egypt was of a fundamentalist,
apocalypticist character. The oldest known copy of the Book of Revelations was found in Oxyrhynchos. Ibid:
206.
354

For the purposes of understanding apartheid I believe the rise of monasticism within
apartheid, a kind of living martyrdom (for the religion but also for the conquered indigenous
nation), is perhaps most of all a symptom of extreme de-secularization, but also similar to the
violent acts of self-sacrifice by extremists on both the Palestinian and the Zionist sides, with
the one difference that its violent aspect was only turned inwards, whereas the present-day
Palestinian and Israeli suicide attackers turn their violence inwards as well as outwards.
The de-secularization of society went on almost unabated during the entire period
under consideration, although the number of gods was curtailed and other religious aspects
altered dramatically with the rise of Christianity. The weapons of mass distraction remained
the same: ‘The Alexandrian mob of the Byzantine period found its opiate not only in chariot
races but in popular Christianity and it would pack the great churches...’706
The Greeks even had an old ideology for imposing ideology in this manner. Isocrates,
mentioned above, who was a contemporary of Plato’s, wrote that religion was good in order to
keep the masses in fear, to make them respect the law and the stability of the state.707 With
this kind of meta-ideology, the Greek elites did not even need to feel cynical or hypocritical
about their use of religion. It simply fulfilled a practical purpose.
As we have now seen, the continuous de-secularization of Egypt took place in the
(perceived) interest of the occupiers, and important secular aspects of ancient Egyptian
culture, such as its own phonographic script, philosophy, science, medicine, and several forms
of art, appear to have been downplayed and even repressed by the ruling and the intellectual
classes in order to ‘prove’ the inferiority of Egyptians as compared to Greeks, and later also to
Romans. The open and tolerant character of ancient Egyptian culture, e.g. the fact that it did
not have any holy texts, made it all the more vulnerable to surreptitious meddling by elites.
(This could have been a factor involved in the resounding successes of the considerably
younger, and ultimately victorious religions of this region – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam –
making sure that their ‘Word of God’ was to remain absolutely immutable.) Over the decades
and centuries, the Greek and Roman elites had been able to make ancient Egyptian culture,
especially the religion, stand for almost whatever they wanted, for whatever their own
perceived needs were at that moment.
If the Egyptian form of writing, the so-called hieroglyphic writing, was not
disqualified out of hand, it was downgraded, among others by the famous 3rd century Neo-
Platonic Alexandrian philosopher, Plotinus, to mere pictographic or conventional signs (as
opposed to phonographic, which most of them really are). In a typically de-secularizing twist,
he contended that the Gods understood the signs, but the latter lacked logical and causal
stringency.708
Today, it is often reiterated that ‘western’ science and civilization rediscovered and
deciphered Egyptian writing, but it is seldom remembered or mentioned in this context that
the most celebrated roots of that very same civilization were ultimately responsible for
destroying the ancient Egyptian culture in the first place.

During the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine rule of Egypt, the religious,
philosophical and historical material of Egypt from the Old Kingdom
through to the Third Intermediate Period, written in hieroglyphics or

706
Bowman 1996 (1986): 217
707
Assmann 2000: 47f. Interestingly, Isocrates attributes (‘transfers’ in Assmann’s rendition) this meta-ideology
to the Egyptian elite using it on its own people. (Isocrates lived decades before Alexander’s conquest of Egypt.)
In the same manner, the Greeks took over different kinds of magic techniques – designed to ward off harm
defensively – from Asia, but they would turn them into offensive techniques and incorrectly as well as unjustly
attribute the offensive uses to the Asians. See Trampedach 1996. On an optimistically gauged, emancipatory use
of ‘meta-ideologizing’ in totally different contexts, see Sandoval 2000: 107ff.
708
Plotinus: The Enneades, V,8,5,19 and V,8,6,11, quoted in Assmann 2000: 68, and further Löwstedt 1995:
143ff. See also Chapters II.7.1 and 8.1 above for the Greek bureaucratic denial of the status of Egyptian writing
as writing.
 355

hieratic, was no longer being copied and was not even, so to speak,
brought up to date. . . Thus, the literary output of over two thousand
years was not preserved…under the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines,
pagan or Christian.709

Despite the many momentous changes that took place during the apartheid millennium
in Egypt: Greek invasion and establishment of apartheid, Roman rule superseding Greek rule,
Constantinople superseding Rome, state-imposed syncretistic religion superseding the
Egyptian religion and Christianity superseding all Paganisms, there was remarkable continuity
in the gradual deterioration and destruction of the indigenous culture and civilization, and also
in the identity of the dominant ethnicity. Religion was extremely important during this time,
but on the whole, across the centuries, it still does not seem to have been as important as
racism was.
Among Egyptian cultural traits only the Egyptian religion, minus the religious texts,
was not downplayed, repressed or destroyed by the Greeks or the early Romans. Several
Ptolemaic rulers emphasized in official texts that they had ‘brought the stolen images of the
Gods back to Egypt’. This referred to the earlier occupations of Egypt by Assyrians and
Persians, who were spuriously accused, centuries later, by the Greeks of stealing or destroying
Egyptian sacred objects. It also echoed indigenous Egyptian legends of a Messianic nature.
The only difference was that the Messianic king that the Egyptians were waiting for was
Egyptian, not Greek, nor anything else. Put in a more modern way: the Ptolemies invested
heavily in religious practice and theory, which became one of the main battlefields in its
apartheid war on Egypt. According to Frank Walbank, one of the main contemporary
authorities on the Ptolemaic era, it was a ‘…system of cultural and religious apartheid by
which the Macedonian conquerors…sought to solve the problem of governing two races,
radically different but living perforce side by side.’710
The much-celebrated ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the Hellenistic Age, i.e. the time of
widespread Greek dominance after Alexander, and of its cultural capital, Alexandria, has gone
a very long way towards misrepresenting the period. Although scholars broke away from this
mistaken thought around the time of the Second World War already, it has shown remarkable
tenacity.

[D]uring the past generation a fundamental working hypothesis, that

of the mixing of cultures in the Greek Hellenistic East [including
Egypt] has been dismantled by Claire Préaux and other scholars. Thus
the notion of interpenetration of two societies and two cultures has
been largely replaced by the idea of the coexistence of two largely
autonomous socio-cultural entities, even if there are noticeable areas
of osmosis, such as religion, and even transitional zones from one
group to the other.711

In fact, the one thousand years preceding the Macedonian invasion: the Egyptian New
Kingdom, Late and Persian Periods, were almost certainly more cosmopolitan – in the sense
of cultural diversity as well as intercultural tolerance within Egypt – than the Ptolemaic and

709
Verbrugghe & Wickersham 2000 (1996): 7. See also Bagnall 2007: 8.
710
Walbank in Bulloch et al. (eds.) 1994: 121; Assmann 1996: 424
711
Bingen 2007: 216. This chapter in Bingen’s book was first published in French under the title ‘Économie
grecque et société égyptienne au IIIe siècle’, in Maehler, H. & Strocka, V.M. (eds.): Das ptolemäische Ägypten,
Mainz am Rhein, 1978: 211-219. There are also areas of osmosis, such as the ‘peace camps’ referred to in
Chapter II.5.3 above, and transitional zones (see Chapter II.8.3) in present-day Israel and Palestine. Of course
they also existed in apartheid South Africa, e.g. in the ‘coloured’ community. Even more important than the fact
of separation, however, is the act of separation, and in apartheid societies that is the act of the privileged invader
racial minority.
356

Roman millennium of oppressive racist rule was, despite the long periods of Egyptian
imperialism, on the one hand, as well as Assyrians’, Persians’, and other colonial invaders’
rule during that millennium, on the other.712 The ideological image of Egypt under Greek rule
as a ‘melting pot’ truthfully refers to religion, for instance to the depictions of the Ptolemies in
temples, who are deified and carry Greek as well as Egyptians symbols and traits, but not to
material or social reality. Greeks and Egyptians did not marry or even live together in this
apartheid society (see Chapter II.2.1 above). They and their cultures did not and could not mix
on equal terms under these conditions.
The Stoic philosophers, especially the Greek-speaking Cypriot-Phoenician-Egyptian
founder of the movement, Zenon of Kition, were indeed cosmopolitan, arguing for laws that
should apply to everyone in the whole world without national or any other distinctions, that
slavery should be abolished, and even that everyone should wear the same clothes. But these
ideas had no influence on any powerful decision-makers. The Stoic cosmopolitan philosophy,
important though it is for the history of ideas, remained a utopian vision, far removed from the
political realities of the time. And, as we already remarked, the philosophical ideas of the time
were otherwise remarkably unworldly and apolitical.713 The Epicureans, who were a great
deal more successful than the Stoics in influencing people, were convinced that only Greek-
speakers were capable of wisdom, and that the gods only spoke Greek. This is not readily
deducible from an anthropologically primary ethnocentrism, in which many commentators
today believe, since Xenophanes, the great Eleatic philosopher, of whom the Epicureans were
almost certainly aware, had critically argued, already in the sixth century BCE, that different
people tend to make their different gods similar to themselves. That was before the Greek
city-states united and became a world military power, and before their society would descend
into systematic racism and de-secularization. Therefore, the Epicureans were either
anthropologically retarded, or, much more likely, they were involved in a propaganda
campaign, possibly against the Stoics, and in any case against the cultures of the many
peoples subdued by the Greeks, including the Egyptians.714
It should not come as a surprise now that members of the ancient Greek elites, through
their emulators (including the overwhelming majority of elite Imperial Romans and countless
latter-day adherents, such as Adolf Hitler715), are identified here as partly responsible for
apartheid throughout history. They provided us not only with the first known examples of
slave-labor-based societies, an institution that was taken to extremes in the Dutch Cape
Colony, and of social Darwinist-elitist-racist ideology, but also with a fully-fledged and
successful system of oppressive segregation against an indigenous majority over centuries,
including some quite sophisticated ideological techniques. As we have seen, the latter
included the mix of eschatological elements of Egyptian, Greek and western Asian origins
that created an appearance or at least a promise of de-segregation but in actual fact veiled the

712
Ray: Literacy and Language in the Late and Persian Periods, 1994: 51. Haas, C. 1997: 335 also takes issue
with the resilient and superficial myth of the capital, Alexandria, as a tolerant, cosmopolitan melting pot.
713
Tzermias 1998: 187ff. According to one ancient source, cited by Diogenes Laertius, one of the most
authoritative ancient historians of philosophy, the founder of the Stoic school, Zenon, was dark-skinned and of
Egyptian descent, although he was raised in Kition, a Cypriot Greek city with many Phoenician settlers. Laertios:
Leben und Lehre der Philosophen, Book 7, § 1, 296. See also Löwstedt: World Citizenship, 2003
714
Werner 1992: 11
715
At the height of his influence and power, Hitler reportedly told his inner circle of confidantes: ‘When asked
about our ancestors or predecessors, we must always refer to the Greeks.’ (‚Wenn man uns nach unseren
Vorfahren fragt, müssen wir immer auf die Griechen hinweisen.’) Picker: Hitlers Tischgespräche im
Führerhauptquartier 1941-1942, 1963: 159. Hitler appears to have been influenced by, among many others,
Friedrich Nietzsche, who (in 1884-5) held the ancient Greeks to be ‘the hitherto highest type of man’. See
Goldhill: Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, 2002: 295. This politically extreme
right-wing tradition of Philhellenism or Hellenomania still exists in several western countries, including France,
with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigration party, Front National, and the GRECE group. See
Tzermias 1998: 109.
 357

oppressive and violent essence of the society. Coupled with de-secularization and the
unofficial discouragement of a book culture among the indigenous people, uneducating them
like the South African Whites uneducated Blacks, and the Israelis uneducate Palestinians, it
became a remarkably useful and successful instrument in the hands of the ruthless Greek and
Roman elites, and it had a devastating effect on the late ancient Egyptians, who were perhaps
the first victims of such systematic European racism.
Obviously, information and opinions did not flow freely in the oppressive society that
was Graeco-Roman Egypt: ‘…Hellenism was an elite culture, sponsored by the wealth of the
gymnasial and bouleutic [local government] classes and…[it] required a Greek literary
education of those who would participate. Those who either did not wish to or could not share
in the new culture were effectively silenced in the public sphere…’ 716 That means that the
indigenous majority, the Egyptians, more than any other group, were quite simply excluded
from the world of information, ideas and opinions. In this realm, their existence was indeed
like that of the shadows in Plato’s famous simile of the cave. They were not only oppressed.
They were also considered less civilized, less human, and even less real than the Greeks and
Romans were. Under South African apartheid, which started thousands of miles away and
nearly two thousand years after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, things were not all that
different.

9.2. The Power of Racism and the Superiority Complex

Racist ideas of western European origin since at least the 17th century became an
important part of the origin of the racist social order in South Africa.

Africans served Europeans as a convenient mirror, or as a screen onto

which they projected their own fears about themselves and their world.
The encounter with Africa in the seventeenth century occurred in an
era that emphasized [especially for the Dutch colonists, however lax
they were] order, self-discipline, self-abnegation, sexual restraint and
Christianity. These were difficult ideals. The Europeans’ failure to
realize these lofty goals, or even their temptations to deny them,
created serious inner tension to which the contact with Africa gave
emotional release.717

Africans were also seen as generally inferior by the Europeans from the 17th century,
at the latest, due to their inferiority in military technology, their relative political
powerlessness and slavery, i.e. due to the very fact that they had been victimized in this way.
This is important. If or where there is or was an African inferiority complex, then it is or was
because of a European or white superiority complex. Africans were commonly relegated by
European thinkers and non-thinkers alike to the bottom end of the racist ladder of spirituality
and morality, of human worth and value. The slightly paler Asians and Native Americans
were usually placed above them, the Europeans fixed at the top. (During the early 19 th
century, during the heyday of both racism and Hellenomania, the famous Swiss biologist,
Georges Cuvier, placed ancient Greeks along with deities above his contemporary Europeans.
Hellenomania remained very influential during the 19th and 20th centuries with Friedrich
Nietzsche among many others.) Blacks, on the other hand, were continuously seen as the
‘link’ between men and animals, not only by the white elites in their colonies and ex-colonies
involved in the Atlantic system of slavery, but all over Europe itself, too. Skin color became

716
Alston 2002: 272. One author, Sotades of Maronea, was executed (by drowning) after having been recaptured
following an escape from prison to which he had been sentenced after making fun of Ptolemy II’s marriage in a
verse. See MacLeod 2002: 5.
717
Cohen, 1988: 33, quoted in Lester 1996: 33f, text added by Lester. Egyptian women were similarly attributed
with vast sexual appetite in Graeco-Roman propaganda. See Knight 2001: 319f.
358

the prime criterion for racism during the 18th and 19th centuries. But other, equally
unintelligent excuses kept being used as well. The Khoikhoi (‘Hottentots’, i.e. stutterers), for
instance, were commonly considered by Europeans to lack the power of human speech due to
their use of ‘clicks’ for some consonantal sounds in their languages.718
The Africans were also regarded by the Europeans as lazy (for sometimes refusing to
work for the invaders, the settlers, the plantation owners and the other entrepreneurs supported
by European governments), and as immoral from an ethical as well as a religious point of
view. Thus, the rape of African women by European men, for example, though forbidden by
religion as well as common human decency, could be blamed on the victims. The factor of
Africans being considered lazy, in apartheid South Africa as in apartheid Egypt, contributed to
the Whites’ decision to ship over 200,000 Indian indentured workers to perform work in the
sugar plantations in the KwaZulu-Natal region, although Zulu pride and initially blank
refusals to perform such work were additional factors.
Furthermore, when the Africans opposed the dispossession of their land by the Whites
and tried to fight back, they were seen as thieves and violent criminals in the eyes of the
Europeans, which further intensified the Whites’ negative perception of the ‘soulless
Africans’. Similar to the devious thuggery, laziness, etc., ascribed to Egyptians by the Greek
invaders of Egypt, Whites in Africa, two millennia later, were probably only able to steal
people’s countries and take their freedom, their cultures and sometimes even their lives, if the
latter were regarded as subhuman beasts. The following passage, written by the nationalist
Afrikaner author, Johan Frederik van Oordt, in 1898, illustrates this ideology.

According to the Boer idea, the Kaffer [Bantu-speaker], the Hottentot

[Khoikhoi], the Bushman [San] belong to a lower race than the
Whites. They carry as people once rightly called it, the mark of Cain,
God, the Lord, destined them to be ‘drawers of water and hewers of
wood,’ as presses [servants] subject to the white race . . . People can
only control a Kaffer or a Hottentot through fear, he must always be
kept in his place, he was not to be trusted, give him only a finger and
he will take the whole hand. The Boer does not believe in educating
him; yes, I do not believe that I go too far when I express my feeling
that the Boers as a whole doubt the existence of a Kaffer- or a
Hottentot-soul.719

Religion is a near-constant factor that has to be involved by apartheid oppressors.

Apartheid is not able to work without religion. We shall return to the biblical reference in the
quote above in the course of the next chapter. Also at the end of the 19th century, a Dutch
Reformed Church minister, S.J. du Toit, became the first South African intellectual to endorse
and build upon the myth of ‘the chosen people’, namely that: ‘Afrikaners...were...endowed by
God with the destiny to rule South Africa and civilize its heathen inhabitants.’720 Not only was
it permissible to kill, rape, dispossess, and hurt Africans in additional ways; it was often seen
as beneficial to the victims, as well.
As we observed in apartheid Egypt, there was in South Africa, too, a process of de-
718
Comaroff & Comaroff 1992: 218f; Biko 2004 (1978): 69f; Fredrickson 1981: 11; Bernal 1987: 281-336. See
also footnote 715. There is in fact in sum total more phonetic diversity in Khoisan languages than in other
languages. See Lewis-Williams 2004 (1990): 43. (So who is closer to the animals with regard to this aspect of
language?) The notion of the superiority complex in Alfred Adler’s theory of psychoanalysis is founded in
feelings of inferiority, which all of us have. There are three ways of dealing with feelings of inferiority:
compensation (healthy), overcompensation (unhealthy), and the formation of a superiority complex (very
unhealthy). See Balles 2006 on how Israel’s ‘apartheid’ against Palestinians can be seen as a manifestation of a
superiority complex. See also Balles: A Bigot’s Conceit, 2002, on similar manifestations against Arab culture in
general in the reporting of the New York Times.
719
Quoted in Reader 1998 (1997): 481
720
Thompson 1990: 135
 359

secularization, which resulted in it becoming the most Christian country in Africa in modern
times, mainly through missionary activities. The underclass was obviously easier to control,
exploit, and abuse if it embraced a religion that emphasized non-violence, mea culpa, and
rewards in the afterlife. After all, the same religion had served the late imperial Romans in
much the same way, and many others since then. In latter years, however, a kind of liberation
theology also developed in South Africa, through personalities like Luthuli and Tutu, but also
due to many grassroots linking religion with liberation.721
During the 20th century, the role of religion also diminished slightly, due among other
things to the success of natural sciences, including the theory of evolution. This was a global
development, against which South Africans could do little, whether black or white. Since the
end of the 20th century also brought about the end of (political) apartheid, it is in my view well
worth considering secularization as one of the factors that helped bring about this end.722
Yet on the whole, racism prevailed during the 20th century, even intensifying in some
ways. This was the era of the culmination of scientific racism, and the decline in religiously
justified racism was offset by the rise of scientific racism, at least until the 1980s in South
Africa. Segregation and discrimination (before and in the post-1948 apartheid system) were in
this context often based on a totally unfounded, yet commonly seen as scientific, assumption
that Africans were an inferior branch of the evolutionary tree. In the late nineteenth century,
Whites thought that any of the Africans who were undeniably intelligent must have acquired
their intelligence from ancestors who possessed ‘white blood’.723 This was at a time that
brought transformation for all racial groups in South Africa, but discrimination became more
and more unquestioned among Whites. ‘Racial order’ became paramount for establishing new
economic, social and spatial relations as industrialization and a related demographic explosion
swept over and transformed the country.
The following quote is from ‘Holism and Evolution’, a theoretical biological text by
Jan Christian Smuts, who was also a general, field marshal, a keen supporter of Zionism, and
twice prime minister of the Union of South Africa. If we exchange ‘organism’ in this quote
with ‘state’, then we have an elite apartheid attitude towards the state: it should nurse and care
for those who ‘…are in the main direction of development…’, but leave the others to perish, or at
least not back them, even if they are stronger and more ‘virile’, something that rings of apartheid
victim fertility rates.

With the prodigality of life itself, organic changes are scattered

broadcast like seeds, and most of them, with nothing particular in the
urge of the organism behind them to give them continuous
momentum, perish as soon as they are born. But some are in a
different position; they are in the main direction of development, they
are on the road, so to say, on which the organism is travelling; they
have the whole weight of the organism behind them; they are nursed
and cared for, figuratively speaking; and in the end they survive. Once
more a case of Holistic Selection as distinct from Natural Selection. . .
The Holistic Selection which acts within each organism in respect of
its parts inter se is essentially different from the Natural Selection

721
Biko 2004 (1978): 60ff. Biko preached (constructive) criticism of the Christian religion, not only to the
converted (anti-Christian leftists and black nationalists), but also to the black priests and ministers themselves. I
personally believe that Palestinian Christians, on the other hand, have largely avoided falling into the trap of
letting their religion serve as opium for their flock or lessen their resolve for liberation.
722
Ross 1999: 183. It is in my view also worth considering how lucky black South Africans were in this regard.
Starting in the 1980s, de-secularization set in with vehemence in the USA (e.g. the ‘Moral Majority’ that helped
Ronald Reagan, or the evangelical and often Zionist Christians who helped George W. Bush, into power), in
Israel (the new wave of religious Zionist settlers), Iran (the establishment of the Islamic state), Palestine
(Hamas), and elsewhere. By this time, elite South African Whites were apparently too busy with their own
problems and too late to properly notice this new, global macro-trend and to profit from it.
723
Lester 1996: 58
360

which operates between different organisms, which is more

appropriately called the struggle for existence. Holistic Selection is
much more subtle in its operation, and is much more social and
friendly in its activity; it puts the inner resources of the organism
behind the promising variation, however weak and feeble it may be in
comparison with other characters, and makes it win through powerful
backing rather than through the ruthless scrapping of the less desirable
variations. In the organism, the battle is not always to the strong, nor
is the struggle an unregulated scrimmage in which the most virile
survive. The whole is all the time on the scene as an active friendly
arbiter and regulator, and its favours go to those variations which are
along the road of its own development, efficiency and perfection.724

In distinguishing between Natural and Holistic Selection, furthermore, Smuts seems to

be distinguishing between genocide and apartheid (in the wide sense that I have proposed).
The latter is friendlier. But it is still partly selection, and therefore also elimination and ‘…in
the end…’ the favored, the developed, the efficient, and the perfect parts will survive.
By the 1920s, some Whites had begun to realize that differences between Africans and
Europeans were due more to culture than to nature. Yet, by seeing racial differences through
culture, or only metaphorically through nature, the Europeans almost invariably still thought
of the Africans as inferior. Now, however, they sometimes believed that there was a chance
for this ‘inferior culture’ to ‘develop’, to advance through industrialization and urbanization in
order to achieve the cultural ‘level’ of Whites.725
At the same time, though, race had become a crucial criterion for social segregation,
mainly in order for the white elites to secure white dominance over Blacks in the region.
Because of this, Whites in general did not feel that segregation should be eliminated in order
to help the Africans develop culturally. This was in the heyday of colonialism, when only
Ethiopia was not (yet) ruled by Europeans in Africa. Segregation was seen as a solution to the
South African problem of industrial developments, since it gave the white population the
opportunity to use cheap, unskilled black laborers at low cost, and at the same time, Whites
thought they did not have to live amongst them. This was seen as a natural and rational thing
to do for the Whites, since it was in their own economic and (perceived) social interest. This,
according to Lester, ‘...provided the structures which the apartheid ideologues would seek to
consolidate.’726
The ideologues, however, had some very useful, already existing thought at their
disposal. The Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), the ‘Afrikaner Brotherhood’, a secret organization
that had been formed in 1918, came to dominate every NP government from 1948 onwards.
Its basic tenet was remarkably similar to the ideology of Jewish supremacy in Palestine (see
next chapter). The Afrikaners felt threatened, by the (even richer) British population as well as
by the poor, oppressed Black majority, and the AB’s role was first and foremost to ‘protect
Afrikaner culture and language’. (Similarly, the early Zionists felt threatened both by

724
Smuts: Holism and Evolution, 21927 (1926): 221f.
725
An elderly white South African once told the author: ‘Yes, the black man is my brother, but he is 200 years
younger than I am.’ It should be added that the philosophical problem with this kind of racist thought is not the
adoption of the concept of progress itself, but rather the adoption of a single dimension and a single direction of
progress. This narrow concept of progress appears to be a peculiarly European invention, with dire
consequences, such as the many strands of Hegelianism, Marxism, Comte’s positivism, Freud’s, Piaget’s and
Kohlberg’s developmental psychologies, among the ‘scientific’ (in the wide sense) examples. The unequivocally
unscientific theories and concepts of unidimensional and unidirectional progress were even more influential and
even more fatal, especially within racist paradigms, theories and propaganda. See further Löwstedt 1995: 65ff.
Similarly, some of the pre-1948 Zionists earnestly but mistakenly believed that the ‘primitive’ Arabs would
welcome the ‘modernizing’ invading or immigrating Jews, with their ‘superior’ culture, and would want to
emulate them. Sand 2009 (2008): 184f.
726
Lester 1996: 83
 361

Europeans and indigenous people.) AB members included the first three apartheid prime
ministers, and sometimes every single cabinet minister, as well as senior army and church
leaders. As they extended their power, the ideology became less and less defensive and
increasingly offensive. The AB could indeed be held responsible for millions of untimely
deaths. The knowledge of and about the AB is only slowly being unraveled. The TRC, in fact,
did not deal with it at all.727
During the early years of the apartheid system in the narrow sense, culture became the
ideological basis for the differences between races, thus the official white perception of
Africans started to acknowledge their difference as ‘other’ rather than ‘inferior’. It was up to
each racial group to ensure that its own people, language, religion, tradition, etc. would
survive.728 This was the official position of white South Africa, the one that was presented to
the outside world.
Simultaneously, however, a much more racist and dehumanizing mythology was again
being spread within South Africa, this time disseminated by politicians, domestic mass media,
school teachers and school textbooks.729 The government was determined to protect the white
minority and to further develop its interests, occasionally aiming at separate developments
even between the Afrikaners and the English-speaking white South Africans. More than ever
before, the Whites became concerned with maintaining and securing their own individual and
collective economic advantages, rather than their collective national (or African) or human
identities. The following assessment by Biko in 1970 could also easily be transposed to the
Israeli Jewish ‘civil’ society today:

Basically the South African white community is a homogeneous

community. It is a community of people who sit to enjoy a privileged
position that they do not deserve, are aware of this, and therefore
spend their time trying to justify why they are doing so. . . . Everyone
is quite content to point out that these people – meaning the blacks –
will be free when they are ready to run their own affairs in their own
areas. What more could they possibly hope for?730

Closely connected with the ideological justification of apartheid were two basic issues:
the first being economics. It was important for the Whites in South Africa to develop
economically in order to survive as a nation. Therefore separate economic developments were
necessary, as the Whites felt they needed to secure their (economic) supremacy over the black
majority. The second issue emerges from the former one and manifests itself as fear of black
supremacy (or even black urbanization). Throughout South Africa’s white history, racial fear
has been evident. This can be traced back to the seventeenth century, when the Dutch East
India Company obstructed and soured relations between the Blacks and the white settlers.
Therefore, apartheid (in the narrow sense) came to be seen as the final solution to the
problem. Segregation depended on race, rather than class or culture. According to Wade:

For the apartheid system to continue to exist and provide the surplus
needs of the white minority, that minority has to exercise political
power in a manner based on wide-ranging denial of reality. In practice,
this means a mechanism that enables the Whites to deny the existence
of Blacks as autonomous individuals...731

727
Bell, with Ntsebeza: ‘Our Strength Lies in Secrecy’, 2004: 16-21
728
Lester 1996: 111
729
Ibid: 112
730
Biko 2004 (1978): 20
731
Wade: White on Black in South Africa: A Study of English-Language Inscriptions of Skin Colour, 1993: 48,
quoted in Lester 1996: 245
362

This denial went far, and it had and still has profound effects not only on white
thought but on black thought as well. The social future of South Africa will very much depend
on whether this ideology can be overcome soon enough – maybe as much as on whether
perpetrators of violence and those responsible for it can be made accountable and can be
punished, land and other kinds of stolen wealth can be returned to its rightful owners, and
income and capital can be re-distributed in a more just and equitable way.

Blacks were portrayed as innately inferior, accustomed to

dehumanised living, sexually promiscuous, intellectually limited, and
prone to violence; blackness symbolized evil, demise, chaos,
corruption, and uncleanliness, in contrast to whiteness, which equaled
order, wealth, purity, goodness, cleanliness, and the epitome of beauty.
Inevitably, these racist stereotypes were at least partially internalized
by South African blacks, although their self-doubt never matched that
prevalent among blacks in the United States, where the official
proclamations of equality misled many blacks into blaming
themselves, rather than discrimination, for any miseries they
experienced. But undoubtedly, apartheid society also produced self-
hatred. The limited range of opportunities open to blacks gave rise to
rationalizations in favor of the status quo, and self-doubts and self-
accusations led some blacks to accept their oppression as legitimate. In
short, blacks blamed themselves. In addition, the fragmentation of the
three black groups through differential privileges and incorporation
led to a reinforcement of an intrablack hierarchy.732

In order to produce and to perpetuate such portrayals, the flow of information in

apartheid South Africa was severely hampered, controlled, and distorted, mainly by
government intervention733, but also by the overwhelmingly dominant, White-owned media
businesses themselves, which almost unanimously shared government interests and concerns.
For example, the 1976 Soweto uprising took place before the onset of the globalized
information society, in any case well before any signs of it could be detected in a South
African township. Government spin on violent developments was therefore ubiquitous.
Around 200 children and youths were killed on the first day after the police had opened fire to
disperse a crowd of unarmed demonstrators who had not even started throwing stones yet, but
the official death toll repeated throughout the uncritical national news media was only 23. By
the third day, over 500 were in fact dead, but only 95 according to the South African media,
which, with very few exceptions, uncritically echoed the lies of the apartheid government
spokesmen.734

732
Adam & Moodley 1993: Chapter 5: Psychological Liberation; Internalized Colonialism and the Psychology of
Liberation. In my opinion, the combined effects of five hundred years of intense and globalized anti-African
degradation, humiliation and propaganda, preceded by one millennium of Graeco-Roman apartheid and
colonialism in North Africa and accompanied by more than one millennium of Muslim and Arab missionary and
colonializing activities, including racist slave raiding, have done more damage to people’s understanding of
themselves than perhaps any other single ideological effect in world history other than men’s continuous
oppression of women and of others opposed to patriarchy. This process is still ongoing. See, for instance,
Allimadi: Inventing Africa: New York Times Archives Reveal a History of Racist Fabrication, 2003: 26-28. As
Joe Strummer, the late poet and singer, suggested, the most disadvantaged Blacks in South Africa hardly even
dare to have a vision. Strummer, Norris & Cook: Yalla Yalla, 1999
733
From 1975 to 1982 alone, nearly 9,000 publications, i.e. books, films, songs, and other materials, were banned
by the apartheid government censors. South African civil society was permeated by a ‘climate of fear and
anxiety’ as a result. Tilley (ed.) 2009: 238
734
Bonner & Segal 1998: 88f; Kotch: Soweto Museum Opens as South Africans Rewrite History, 2002. See also
Mandela 2002 (1965): 76-79 on the ‘shameful’ role of the South African press and broadcasting during the early
1960s, when they also toed the government line and ignored or misreported exactly what and how the apartheid
government wanted them to leave out and distort, respectively. On exactly the same media patterns during the
 363

Until the end of political and judicial apartheid in the 1990s, the western media outside
South Africa, not only the tabloid media, willingly or not, took over much of the ideology
from the South African media and governments, especially their preference for the white
perspective, and their racism against black and other non-white people. Rich, white, and
conservative publishers and other media executives around the world, especially, even those
who swore they were liberal and not racist, felt much more affinity and sympathy with South
Africa’s Whites, an apparently besieged minority, than with the oppressed Blacks. At least
some of this attitude, and its resultant institutional and structural racism, are no doubt still
present in the western mass media, the world’s mainstream media. Blacks were (and are)
habitually misrepresented as more prone to violence than others, as unable to govern or think
abstractly, as being tied or held back from progress by ‘tribal’ thought and behavior.735
Corresponding lies and spin were activated in the coverage of the Second Intifada of
2000 in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, though this time the media were on
location in force from the very beginning, and were able to prevent the South African scope of
misrepresentation of quantitative relationships (such as death tolls), despite the often
successful counter-efforts by Israeli military censors, by Israeli soldiers targeting and shooting
journalists – especially Palestinian journalists – and by Israeli and its allied and/or hired US
public relations professionals.736 However, the qualitative bias of pro-Israeli spin in world
media, especially since the 1960s, is remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented, and it amounts
to something that is well beyond the sympathy afforded South African Whites by the world.
This is dependent on investment, manpower, and effort, but also on a deep historical
dimension to the ideology, in some respects even deeper than both the Graeco-Roman one in
Egypt and the white one in South Africa.

9.3. The Bible, Hasbara, the Money, and the Media

For centuries, both Arabs and Jews have developed historical roots in the country now
known as Israel. Both groups have a strong emotional attachment to the country. This has
created two nationalisms, an Arab nationalism, which claims Palestine as its homeland, and a
Jewish nationalism, which through ‘Zionism’ established a homeland in the ‘Holy Land’ and
contributed considerably to the development of the modern state of Israel.
Since Abraham, according to the Bible around 2000 BCE, or since around 1000 BCE
as most scientific scholars believe737, Jews had thought of Palestine, and sometimes also its
more than immediate surroundings, as their ‘Promised Land’. Two Old Testament passages

late ‘60s and early ‘70s, see Biko 2004 (1978): 16. See also Meredith: The State of Africa: A History of Fifty
Years of Independence, 2005: 413.
735
Dechant: Stereotype in den Massenmedien am Beispiel der Apartheidpolitik Südafrikas, 1993; ter Wal (ed.)
2002: 421ff; Kamalipour & Carilli (eds.) 1998: xixff.
736
Bathish, N., et al. 2004. Norman Finkelstein, in C. Brown 2006, argues cogently that the shrill accusations of
‘anti-semitism’ against critics of Israel have increased sharply since the early 1980s, since facts (of Israeli-
induced injustices) are no longer so easily buried. See also Chapter II.9.3 below.
737
Whitelam 1996; and, for instance, the egyptologists Rolf Krauss, Edgar Pusch and Old Testament scholars
Bernd Jörg Diebner and Niels Peter Lemche, originally quoted in N.N.: Archaeology: Was Moses Really
Pharaoh? 1997. Palestinians today sometimes refer to themselves as ‘Cana’anites’, underscoring the far from
unrealistic possibility that some may have Palestinian ancestors from before the very first conquest of the land or
the very first case of immigration or colonialization by Jews or by their ancestors (i.e. by some of those people
whose descendants were to become Jews) or the formation of an indigenous group into Jews. Whitelam treats
ancient Israel as a rather minor part of Palestinian history, for sound reasons, in my opinion. The entire country,
which has been referred to as ‘Palestine’ for far longer than as ‘Israel’, has always been multi-ethnic and there
have always been several religions co-existing there. See Löwstedt & Anon. 2010. The PLO continues this
Palestinian legacy with its consistent call for a secular and democratic state. The modern Jewish state, however,
does not. Its closest spiritual precedent is the story of the mayhem of the Book of Joshua. Its closest material,
structural, and political precedent is probably the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (see Section I.4 above), though
Ptolemaic Egypt is also very similar. Its closest temporal precedent and erstwhile closest ally, of course, was
apartheid South Africa.
364

are the main sources of the justification by alleged revelation:

[T]he Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, Unto thy seed
have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the
river of Euphrates... (Genesis 15:18)

[T]he Lord spake unto Joshua…the land which I do give…to the

children of Israel…From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto
the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto
the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.
(Book of Joshua 1:1-4)

Due to this very useful and allegedly divine sanction, any means used to appropriate
the land were apparently allowed for the Jews, and for them alone, in order for them to get rid
of the indigenous peoples:

And Joshua said to the children of Israel…the living God is among

you, and…he will without fail drive out from before you the
Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and
the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites. (Ibid: 3:9-10)

Joshua and his ‘men of valor’ first conquered Jericho, with some supernatural help
(back when Jews were knocking down security fences with the sounds of trumpets), and then
‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old…with the
edge of the sword’ (ibid: 6:21). They continued with the city of Ai, of which we learn that the
people of Israel ‘smote them, so that they let none of them remain or escape’ (ibid: 8:22). The
slaughter went on, as the Israelites won ‘battle’ after ‘battle’. Only the inhabitants of one
town, Gibeon, survived. By pretending to be visiting foreigners, the Gibeonites cunningly
tricked the Israelites into swearing an oath not to kill them. In return, Joshua, good enough to
keep a promise, made sure that the Gibeonites would be ‘bondmen, and hewers of wood and
drawers of water for the house of…God’ (ibid: 9:21ff). This is the passage that became the
ridiculously far-fetched justification for Afrikaners to impose slavery, exploitation, and
oppression on the indigenous population in South Africa, and not just for the ‘House of God’,
as we saw in the previous chapter.
In the following passages of the Book of Joshua, other indigenous inhabitants of
Palestine, or ‘Cana’an’ as it is called here, were slain without mercy, even as they fled (ibid:
10:10). A few, however, were spared in the fringes of what was now to become Jewish land,
according to the Torah, in Gaza and east of the river Jordan (ibid: 11ff), and the Jebusites, in
Jerusalem, whom the Israelites, for unknown reasons, were unable to drive out of the city
(ibid: 15:63; God, by the way, is not quite clear on why the indigenous people had to be killed
or driven out). This, then, is the book, referred to by Noam Chomsky as one of the most
genocidal books ever written, which the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, ordained for
more meticulous study by Israeli schoolchildren (see Chapter II.7.3; on other kinds of ethics in
the Torah, see next section).
Archaeologists have dismissed the biblical story of Joshua’s invasion of Cana’an as a
vastly exaggerated account of a largely peaceful migration that really took place (or an inner
expansion by an indigenous Cana’anite tribe that was to become the Israelites) to a much
smaller territory, namely, the central Palestinian highlands, which today, ironically, contain
some of the last strongholds of Palestinians facing the Israeli onslaught. But this chapter is not
about whether Joshua invaded Cana’an and committed genocide or not. It does not even care
about whether he existed or not. It is about the role that the biblical story has played and is
 365

playing in the world today.738 The biblical story has been turned into reality at least once,
however. And this we know. The war of 1948-49 amounted to a carefully planned and brutal
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The ethnic cleansing since then has not taken place at the
same pace, but for over 60 years, it has been a centerpiece of Zionist and Israeli policy and
practice.
It is a chilling but sobering thought that the implementation of megalomaniac ideas of
a Greater Israel739 might eventually lay claim to large chunks of Egypt, Jordan, Turkey,
Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, basing the Jewish right to that land on the quoted biblical passages.
Indeed, Israeli occupations and forays into Jordan and Egypt (1967), and especially Syria
(since 1973), Lebanon (1982 until the present) and the UN-granted Palestinian Territories
(since 1949 and 1967, respectively) appear to be attempts along that line of action. In his
youth, the former prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is said to have wanted a Jewish state that
reaches west all the way to Algeria.740 Israel, we must remember, is the only country in the
world today without declared borders. As the fifth (or so) strongest military power in the
world at present (see Chapter II.1.3) and with the almost automatic backing (or prodding) by
the USA for each of its expansionist moves, Israel would certainly be able to enforce such
aggressive claims militarily, although the costs for both Israel and the USA would certainly
also be very high. Another biblical passage, though, is more specific and limited in its claim.

I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God

Almighty... I also established my covenant with them to give them the
land of Canaan where they lived as aliens. (Exodus 6:18)

The ancient territory of Cana’an, mostly controlled by the ancient Egyptians, roughly
corresponds to what Romans would later call ‘Palestine’, i.e. the land of the Philistines. Many,
if not most, of today’s Jews cannot even begin to justify their historical – as opposed to the
allegedly revelatory – claim to Palestine as Jewish land. And the revelatory claim must by its
own very nature remain ethnocentric in kind. Many non-Jews have in fact converted to
Judaism through history, often through intermarriage, but also collectives, for example, the
inhabitants of the Khazar Empire, which consisted of an almost entirely non-Semitic
population in a large area around the Caspian Sea. The Khazars converted to Judaism in the
seventh and eighth centuries AD for political reasons (mainly in order to buttress the pressures
from the neighboring Muslim and Christian powers). The Khazar Empire was eventually
destroyed by Russian, Tatar, Turkic, and Mongol invaders, and a great portion of its
inhabitants fled, many into what is today Eastern Europe. Earlier, during pre-Islamic times,
there were also many conversions to Judaism in what is today Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and
Libya. During the first century BCE through the third century CE, Judaism gained many
converts throughout the Roman Empire, the high point being a time when between seven and
eight percent of the Empire’s inhabitants were Jewish, according to historian Shlomo Sand,
the author of ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’. Judaism mainly spread in conjunction with
Christianity at a time when people were less frequently born into a life belonging to a single

738
Armstrong, K. 1997 (1996): 22ff; Leeman: Queen of Sheba and Biblical Scholarship, 2004. The latter also
argues that many ancient Jews originated in Western Arabia. See also Whitelam 1996, and Karon: Toasting
God’s Terrorism and Other Passover Themes, 2006, in which the author, a South African Jew, recalls his own
Passovers in apartheid South Africa, with black servants, and celebrations of the end of slavery for Jews in
Egypt, but not the end of slavery in general, where divine terrorism against non-Jews in Egypt was feted, and
Jewish racism against Palestinians finds some of its many roots. Shlomo Sand recalls how, in his childhood in
Israel, there was nothing between him and his nursery school friends and Joshua’s warriors, not even the ‘exile’
or the holocaust. Sand 2009 (2008): 14.
739
Saleh 2002 (see footnote 357). Ronnie Kasrils, in his speech to the British parliament about Israeli apartheid,
said both Israeli Jews and white South Africans had a strange God who acted as a sort of ‘real estate agent’,
giving away land that belonged to indigenous people to invaders. See Chehata 2010.
740
Kovel 2007: 39
366

religion than they are today. People changed religion then like we change favorite pop stars or
soccer teams. And when Christianity finally became state religion for Romans, Judaism
became non-missionary, since any mission other than Christianity was punished with the
death penalty under Roman law. It seems that from that moment on, the Romans, who had
earlier come closer than any other power (including Nazi Germany) to actually annihilating
the Jewish religion, and other, later, mainstream Christians wanted to keep Judaism alive, yet
only barely alive, as a reminder in the margins that God’s last words to mankind had come
through Jesus, and that the religion into which he was born was now overhauled and a symbol
of the past. The lot of the Jews under the rule of Christians and European Atheists (Nazis and
others), was not unlike that of apartheid victims. They were allowed to exist, but only barely.
However, the Jews were generally not in a majority, nor were they generally seen or did they
generally want to be seen as indigenous.
Of course, the fact that so many Jews through history were converts to the religion
renders the racist, apartheid Basic ‘Law of Return’ to Israel for all Jews (and for Jews only)
arbitrary and even senseless if Jewishness is to be defined biologically, as well as being plain
discriminatory. Many of the Jews favored by Israel’s law of ‘return’ had or have no ancestors
from Palestine or Israel, none whatsoever.
Around one million Jews – and 300,000 others who have become or are in the process
of becoming Jews – have emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel. Judaism is again a
missionary religion, like in ancient Roman times, although this time around, only certain
people are allowed by a state and by religious leaders to become Jews. There are still another
million Jews in Russia today, and many Zionists are doing their best to entice them and many
others to immigrate to Israel.741 Asymptotically speaking, it is certainly much truer to say that
the modern state of Israel exists due to the hatred of Palestinians than that it exists for the love
of Jews.
The first break-up of the proto-Afroasiatic language – the hypothesized ancestor of the
Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Arabic) as well as of ancient Egyptian, of Hausa
and Iraqw (spoken in Nigeria and Tanzania today) and of many other languages – is
commonly assumed to have taken place no more than 10,000 years ago. The people who
spoke this language most likely resided near or in the northern part of the East African Rift
valley. All six or more branches of the Afroasiatic language family except the Semitic branch
are geographically and historically confined to Africa. Moreover, the Semitic sub-family is
also confined to Africa except for a minority of languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. 12
of the 19 Semitic languages still spoken today are only spoken in Ethiopia.742 It would
therefore make sense to assume that the ancestors of many if not most Jews and Palestinians
were all Africans as recently as 10,000 years ago.743 At the very same time, however, there
was already a fortified village at Jericho in Palestine, undoubtedly populated by non-Semitic-
speakers. Thus, the Israeli constitutional claims to Palestine, Cana’an or the area ‘from the
river of Egypt unto…Euphrates’ as primordially Jewish land are rendered even more
senseless. The Palestinians, however, are tied to the land in an unbroken chain at least since

741
See Koestler: The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, 1976, Wexler: The Khazars, The
Writings of Israel Shamir, no date, N.N.: Scholar Claims to Find Medieval Jewish Capital, September 21, 2008.
On conversions to Judaism in North Africa, see Hourani: Die Geschichte der arabischen Völker, 52006 (1992):
134. On the Roman Empire, see Sand 2009 (2008): 166-177. See also N.N.: Russia’s Putin Meets Jewish
Leaders, March 19, 2002 and footnotes 399-404 above. For the wider problem of biased justification attempts
through history and especially through archaeology, see Fagan: Israel – Archaeology (General Feature): Digging
for History or Politics in Israel? 2000; and Said 2003: 45-50. Against the grain of recent, mainly biblically and
nationalistically inspired, Israeli archaeology, Leeman 2004 argues that the origin of the Jewish religion may lie
in Western Arabia. On the intellectual appropriation (and obfuscation) of Historical Palestine, which has
retroactively obliterated Palestinian history or attempted to turn it into footnotes of Israeli history, see Whitelam
1996.
742
Diamond 1998 (1997): 383
743
Bernal 1991 (1987): 11f.
 367

long before the British mandate, not unlike the dispossessed Blacks in Rhodesia or South
Africa or Australia. Not only the landowners and the former landowners among the
Palestinians should be counted here, but also all those who belong to the land, and to whom
the land belongs in a cultural sense.
Nonetheless, some Jews – and it is practically impossible to say who – do have a kind
of relationship with historical Palestine which is historically deeper than the Whites’ to South
Africa: a difference of degree, however, rather than of kind. A culture of exile (not necessarily
a history of exile), which has for a long time reiterated the phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem’,
should not be expelled from it, nor be denied access to the city. However, there is, crucially,
nothing in this phrase that implies statehood for the Jewish people, nor is there anything that
prescribes exclusion of others from Jerusalem. Primarily, the phrase expresses and symbolizes
hope for the future as well as commemorating pain over expulsion. It is also a reference to the
Kingdom of Heaven, which is by definition not a place on earth. If Jews come in peace or live
in peace, why should they be denied access to or be expelled from the city? Moreover,
approximately seven percent of Historic Palestine is owned legitimately by Jews, and some of
that property is in Jerusalem. A truly liberated Jerusalem should therefore be accessible to all,
regardless of religion or race, and without exception.744 Similarly, white families who have
inhabited South Africa for three centuries or more could not possibly be expected to feel that
any other place is home.
The Jews have an older recorded relationship with Palestine than the Whites with
South Africa, but it is cultural, not racial or biological, and it cannot be respected as an
exclusive claim by any reading of international law or secular or non-secular ethics informed
by the concept of equal human rights. In fact, as Joel Kovel says: ‘A two-thousand-year-old
claim would be laughed out of any secular court – all the more so for the Ashkenazi Jews who
comprise the main body of Zionism and have little discernible link to the ancient inhabitants
of Palestine.’745 Furthermore, even if it were a biological or kinship relationship, it is not an
unbroken relationship. In political and judicial regards, it is claimed to be both ancient and
very recent, but with large gaps and discontinuities. Muslims, Christians, and others, need to
be respected equally for their special relationship to the land, to the ancient institutions, and to
the symbols of their faiths.
The descendants of the first white settlers in the Cape may, on the other hand, have
more ancestors born in South Africa than modern Israeli Jews who descend from ancient ones
have in Israel, modern and ancient, in relative as well as absolute numbers. Furthermore,
archaeoanthropologically speaking, all human beings have African heritage. In this sense, and
in this very limited sense only, all Whites who came to South Africa came home, whereas all
Jews who came to Israel certainly did not come home in any biological sense whatsoever.
This is a home-coming attribute to white presence in Africa which is not matched by Jews in
Palestine.
The Whites in South Africa are not necessarily less indigenous to their country than
Jews to Israel for yet another reason. There have also been many White families and projects
in South Africa since 1652, whereas only a very small number of Jews lived in Jerusalem and
other places in Palestine after the Arab Muslim liberators-conquerors of Palestine let the Jews
back in after their banishment by Byzantines and crusaders, right up until the 1880s.
Most importantly, however, the Zionists responsible for systematic and gross human
rights violations in Palestine since 1948 cannot be exonerated on any form of historical or
religious grounds, since the Jews’ alleged exclusive right to the land is practically nullified by
the historical distance. The final loss of relative sovereignty by Jews over (some of) the land
that other Jews now occupy to the Romans over 2,000 years ago simply cannot be rectified,

744
Cunin: This Year in Jerusalem, no date; Starhawk: Next Year in Mas’Ha, 2003. Jerusalem has of course also
been interpreted as a spiritual place. See Löwstedt: Jerusalem in My Heart, 2005.
745
Kovel 2007: 36
368

since the Roman Empire no longer exists. For Jews to claim the land ‘back’ on historical
grounds would be akin to Mayans – assuming they had an independent homeland – today
claiming land back that they had lost to the Toltecs, long before any Spaniards, French or
Austrians, the next great waves of invaders, even knew about what is today Mexico, Honduras
and Guatemala. In the USA it would mean that 87 percent of the population (all but Native
and black Americans) would have to leave, and with much better (actually much less bad)
justification, since it was only invaded a quarter of the years ago compared with the Jews, and
since the same white ethnicity has held power and wealth in the USA ever since; in Britain,
many more, relatively speaking, would have to hand over all their land to the Celts and the
Welsh. The historical claim to Israel by Jews and for Jews alone, therefore, is a preposterous
and extremely arrogant claim, not matched by any other people’s existing claims to land,
anywhere or at any other time, as far as I am aware.
Attempts at Zionist justification usually pursue the same logic but in a different, more
secular way. It starts with the alleged need for a Jewish state, and then asks: where should we
put it? Since the Jewish claim to any other territory large enough for a state is even more
tenuous, that leaves only Palestine. But Zionism, whether in its secular or its de-secularized
form, is morally corrupt, as this investigation attempts to show.
The Greeks’ relationship with Egypt prior to their de facto invasion was of yet another
kind: at times intense cultural interaction, trade and Greek mercenary services. Whether the
depth of that relationship can be compared at all with the depth of Jewish ties to historical
Palestine is hard, if not impossible, to determine. Obviously, the Greeks had had a more
intense relationship with Egypt during the centuries preceding invasion. But the Jews had had
a more intense relationship in the few decades preceding invasion of Palestine, most
conspicuously Zionist plans and activities (including terrorist activities against both
Palestinians and British colonialists) to bring about that invasion.
The current Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has described this secular
view of the nature of the relationship between Jews and the lands of Israel and Palestine as a
kind of eurocentric illusion, and, ultimately, an ‘Arab lie’:

Almost all European nations have had the experience of colonialism,

so it was easy for them to swallow the Arab lie that we came to a
foreign country almost like crusaders, conquered it and took it away
from the native population. It seems to the Europeans that we are not
in our own country but in the Belgian Congo.746

As we have seen throughout this investigation, however, Netanyahu and his fellow
Israeli Jews are in a place and position indeed comparable to the Belgians in Congo, although
even more people were actually killed there. Around ten million Congolese were killed
between 1891 and 1911 alone, mainly as a compounded result of different kinds of aggressive
European presence in the region, namely, as a result of forced labor, genocide, colonialism,
apartheid (perpetrated by and on behalf of Belgian settlers) and, mainly, as an indirect
consequence of the European racist slave trade and slave industries, which had already ended
by then. The Israeli Jewish situation is a great deal more like the Whites in South Africa, at
least until 1994. But it is not entirely incommensurable with the Belgian Congo. The basic
ingredients, except for the system of slavery, were all there.747 Jews in Israel today are

746
Pumpyansky Interview, July 2002. Netanyahu confuses colonialism and genocide with apartheid, a fallacy to
which many of his harshest critics are also prone. Moreover, two-thirds of the group of people to which he refers
by the first person plural are today at home in other countries than Israel and Palestine.
747
Lindqvist 1998 (1992); Reader 1998 (1997): 517ff; Iliffe 1995: 198, 203f.; Hochschild: King Leopold’s
Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, 1998; Akram: Norman G. Finkelstein, The
Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 2002. See footnote 410 above on sex
slavery in Israel today. It is not practiced to the same extent, of course, as racist slavery against Africans was by
 369

therefore no better than the Whites in South Africa, or anywhere else in Africa, except
perhaps for some rather localized atrocities. They are essentially invaders or descendants of
recent invaders, who have decided to base their perceived right to be there on military might.
Their justifications – for giving and allowing Jews more access than indigenous Palestinians
to the land and the wealth – by the alleged word of God, or by ‘history’, are simply not
enough from the standpoint of basic respect for basic human rights, nor at all from any
reading of valid international law, and international law is becoming increasingly clear on this
point.
After a rocky period of conquests and re-conquests by the different powers of the day,
the last independent Jewish state in antiquity (in which Jews spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew) was
crushed by the Roman Empire, which gave the province the name, Palestina, after the
Philistines, who had lived there for over a thousand years already. ‘Palestine’ is a name that
remained unchallenged, among Jews as well, for nearly two thousand years. The Jews were
converted (not really ‘scattered’) around the world after this final Roman conquest, though
many remained in Palestine, some converting to Christianity and then Islam, and others
remaining Jews. During much of the Middle Ages and the Modern Era, some Jews were to
play roles similar to the ones they had played in Egypt, under Persian as well as under Greek
and Graeco-Roman rule. They would often belong to a second-tier or third-tier racial and
social class, helping the oppressors police and exploit the indigenous majority. Individual
Jews would also sometimes be on the bottom of the hierarchy, and sometimes very close to or
at the top. Collectively, they were also often made scapegoats and sometimes massacred for
invented reasons, such as the medieval European plague. Most of the time, they were
discriminated against in various ways, especially by European Christians and by European
atheists.748
Until the nineteenth century, many Jews wanted to return to their ‘Promised Land’,
whether a concrete place or a spiritual one, for religious reasons. With the increasing
secularization of Europe during the last few centuries, however, this wish waned. In the
1890s, the Zionists, European Jews with a political program of ‘re-taking’ and ‘restoring’
Israel and the Hebrew language and culture, burst upon the scene. No longer was the religious
motivation the main motivation.
In western Europe, Jews had often improved their socio-economic and political status,
but in Eastern Europe they repeatedly became an oppressed and persecuted racial minority.
Zionists decided that in order to further improve their social and political status, Jews must
establish a national homeland, in which they would all be united. Like the Germans and
Italians had created or ‘unified’ their countries during the 19th century, it was now perceived
to be the Jews’ turn. The projected homeland chosen by the Zionists was inhabited, but that
was not seen as a major obstacle in 19th-century Europe – one of the most racist and genocidal
societies that ever existed – simply because that land was not in Europe, nor was it to any
considerable extent already inhabited by Europeans or European descendants.
The Zionist Jewish immigration into Palestine could be seen as the initial force leading
to the creation of modern Israel. Arabs feared that such immigration could result in a Jewish
government in Jerusalem, and thus they opposed the Zionist movement, and they

the Whites.
748
Shahak: Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, 1994; Fredrickson 2002:
18ff. See also the reviews of Shahak’s book by Hunt, E. H. 1994, Pages 69, 79-80, and Halle 1995. See Spickard
2005: 14-16 on how France favored Jews over Muslims (and Berbers over Arabs) in French colonial North
Africa. See Cook: Book Refuting Jewish Taboo on Israel’s Bestseller List, 2008 on the Israeli historian, Shlomo
Sand’s challenge (Sand 2009 (2008)) of the ideas that Jews ever saw themselves as a people or a nation (rather
than as a religious community) in pre-Zionist history, and that there were ever an exile of the Jews from the
promised land. Sand maintains that Jewish missionary activity during the centuries around the beginning of the
Christian era and strategic mass conversions such as that by the Khazars led to a Jewish community increasingly
alien to Palestine.
370

overwhelmingly still do so today.

Yet, there is more than just Arab self-interest that opposes Zionism. The great
revolutions in history, e.g. the French revolution of 1789, the defeat of national socialism, the
end of colonialism after World War II, the Filipina revolution of 1986, the ‘Velvet
Revolutions’ ending Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe, and the end of apartheid in
South Africa, have been described as the antitheses of Zionism, since they are based on
inclusion, on democratic ideals, on the equality of citizens and on the universality of human
rights and social progress. Zionism, on the other hand, is an ideology of exclusion, of special
rights for special people, of special rights and privileges for special citizens, due to their race
alone, and it is anti-democratic. Some of its intellectual roots lie in the most pro-genocidal
holy text ever produced, as far as I am aware, but more importantly in 18th-20th-century
secular western European thought, which includes the most racist theories and prejudice ever
produced.749 This is a crucial fact from the points of view of morality and legitimacy. Zionism
is motivated by a narrow (perceived) collective as well as narrow individual self-interest. But
its enemies are not (only) motivated by self-interest.
In a violent climate exacerbated both by British colonial rule and British favors to
Jews (as a way to divide and rule, similar to Belgian and German favors to minority Tutsis
during colonial rule in Rwanda), British bias, ineptitude, unwillingness, and inability to solve
the brewing conflict, violent acts between Arabs and Jews started being perpetrated over
anticipated future territorial control. By 1921, David Eder, a member of the Zionist
Commission, told the British Court of Inquiry that: ‘There should not be equality between the
Palestinians and the Jews...only Jews should be allowed to bear arms in Palestine.’750 This
was to be implemented rigorously in 1948 and has remained so to this day, except for the light
firearms with which the Palestinians were supposed to police themselves in the tiny ‘self-rule’
areas, the Neo-Bantustans, after 1995.751
The violence between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine intensified, to the advantage
of the Jews, as they accumulated sympathy for the Jewish case abroad. In a speech to Jews in
London after World War I, the future first president of Israel, Haim Weizmann, had insisted:

The Jewish state will come, but it will not come through pledges or
political statements, it will come through the tears and blood of the
Jewish people. . . .A society in Palestine which will be Jewish as much

749
Bathish, R.: Zionism, Settlements, and the End of Israel, 2001. On the European and eurocentric
Enlightenment roots of Zionism, see Said 1992 (1979): 73-79. The Torah was not as important a justification to
the relatively secularized atmosphere of post-World War II Europe as European imperialist and racist thought
still were.
750
Hadawi: Bitter Harvest – A Modern History of Palestine, 1990: 13; See also Davis, U.: Israel - An Apartheid
State, 1987: 2: ‘For the anti-Jewish racist...Jewish society must be segregated outside the body of Gentile
society; hence evacuation and, if necessary, annihilation. For the political Zionist, Jewish society must also be
segregated outside the body of Gentile society, in this case to Palestine, redefined and reified in Zionist ideology
as the Land of Israel...’
751
Ornan: Apartheid Laws in Israel: the Art of Obfuscatory Formulation, 1991. In the areas that have been
brought under nominal Palestinian control since 1995, there are now armed Palestinian security forces, expected
to rein in Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militants, but certainly no ‘Defense’ Force like the IDF, i.e. no tanks,
no attack helicopters, no combat aircraft, no heavy armored vehicles, no heavy artillery and no missiles, not to
mention ABC weapons (see Chapter II.1.3). Under the present Israeli negotiation demands, Palestine would be
the only country in the world condemned to such military weakness. Israel still assumes the right to deploy
armed forces almost anywhere on Palestinian territory ‘if a military threat arises’ and it is able to take military
control of all Palestinian areas within a few hours. See Taylor, P.: Mideast Summit - Issues, 2000. After the
outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, West Bank Palestinian police was again disarmed by the
Israelis, whereas Gaza police were allowed to keep their handguns. In 2004, the Israeli cabinet started debating
whether to rearm the West Bank police, and to what extent Israeli security agency checks of each individual
Palestinian policeman was to go ahead. Spetalnick: Israel Puts Brakes on Guns for Palestinian Police, 2004. I am
personally not in favor of a Palestinian army, for the same reason that I am not in favor of any army. Here, I am
just pointing out the absurdity of Israeli ‘security’ demands.
 371

as England is English and America is American.752

Unlike England and America, however, where citizenship and nationality are not
formally defined by genes or religion, where it was, and still is, illegal to discriminate on these
grounds, the Jewish state would become a state for one religion and one racial group only, a
state that excludes, ignores, oppresses or barely tolerates indigenous people, who generally do
not share the genes or the religion of the chosen people, chosen not by God, but by the State.
First, however, came the Third Reich and the Second World War, in which six million
Jews, around two-thirds of all Jews at the time, were murdered along with six million others
by the Nazis in a singularly horrific, industrialized manner. The large number of displaced and
homeless Jews after this war was one of the most important factors behind the international
(but non-Arab and non-Third World) decision to set up a homeland for the Jews.
From an ideological point of view, the Nazi genocide of Jews further increased the
Jews’ interest in Palestine as a national homeland as well as international sympathy for their
cause and plight, especially through what historian Norman Finkelstein has called ‘The
Holocaust Industry’, the shameless instrumentalization of Jewish suffering prior to and during
the war which resulted in a lucrative money-making machine as well as an efficient weapon to
discredit critics of modern Israel, especially since 1967 in and from the USA.753
As a result:

[T]he concentrated…affect of unfathomability…rousing all the

monsters set down over three thousand years [judaeophobic monsters,
real and imagined]…still persists and turned into guilt, shadows the
debate on Israel, making even committed anti-imperialists and
champions of justice into crypto-Zionists, who despite themselves,
end up following the Israeli line. The complex has crippled a good
deal of politics in Europe and the United States.754

Zionism was not only the driving ideological force behind the establishment of the
modern state of Israel. Along with the Torah, it is still the foundation of Israeli law. Unlike
South African racism during the last 100 years, Zionism has become increasingly de-
secularized. Three of the main areas in which Israeli law discriminates against non-Jews are
residency rights, the right to work and equality before the law. This brings us back to land
confiscation, exploitation in the production process and the lack of equality before the law and
the lack of an Israeli-Palestinian TRC, respectively. But the influence of Zionism also goes
well beyond the law.

The similarities between Israel and pre-1994 South Africa lie…in the
ideological underpinnings of Jewish and Afrikaner nationalism, and in
the consequent apartheid systems each has deployed in order to assure
purity of and power through their respective nationalisms. Afrikaner
Calvinist belief that Afrikaners were predestined to settle and develop
the land of South Africa, along with a strong exclusive national culture
fostered through the Afrikaner language, gave justification and
legitimacy to their expropriation of the land. There was simply no
moral space in Afrikaner thinking for indigenous Africans. Apartheid
was embraced as a way to ensure white survival, and was rationalised
as providing an opportunity for Black development in tribal
Bantustans. The South African National Party believed political power
to be an essential safeguard for Afrikaner survival as a nation, just as

752
Heikal 1996: 42
753
Finkelstein, N. 22003. See also Akram 2002.
754
Kovel 2007: 67
372

the major Israeli political parties believe Jewish power is necessary to

Israeli survival and security. Zionist exclusivism, based as it has come
to be on Abraham’s covenant with God and the notion of redemption,
has its own agents of intellectual legitimisation.755

There are differences between Afrikaner nationalism and Zionism, but the compelling
reason that the author uses the word ‘apartheid’ to describe the two systems of human rights
violations is a reason strong enough to also consider the similarities as not only more
essential, but as overwhelmingly essential. Israeli Jews are not so special after all, despite
what the scriptures say. They are in fact just like the white South Africans 1652-1994, the
Greeks in late ancient Egypt, the Americo-Liberians 1847-1980, the Rhodesian Whites 1965-
1979, Guatemala’s ethnic Spanish elite until 1996, the western European (crusader) elites in
the kingdom of Jerusalem 1099-1291, and several others.
An increasing de-secularization of society in the interest of the political elites of Israel
can be observed as in the cases of Graeco-Roman Egypt and most of white-ruled South
African history. As opposed to Ptolemaic Egypt we are dealing here with religion that is based
on holy writs, in all of the three religious identities within the two main racial groups:
Judaism, Islam and Christianity. (But we must not forget that there are secular (atheist and
agnostic) people as well as members of other religions among both Jews and Arabs.) South
Africa represents a middle instance – between Egypt and Israel – with its chiefly Protestant
Christian and traditional African faiths.
Israeli Jewish elites, including many Orthodox Jews as well as the military authorities,
support de-secularization of the Arab population in spite of the fact that they do not share its
faiths. Unlike Christianity and Islam, Judaism was never chiefly a missionary religion during
the last millennium or so. And it still is not, although it has now become more missionary
(again). But it is not interested in converting any of the natives, very much unlike Christianity
in South Africa. According to Chomsky, the reason behind elite Jewish support for Arab de-
secularization is that, despite locally devastating Palestinian suicide attacks, in many cases
carried out with religious (Muslim) motivation, secularized (i.e. leftist and nationalist)
resistance is perceived (by these Israelis) as being even more dangerous to the ‘important’
Israeli interests than Muslim fundamentalism is.756 The suicide attacks on Jews do not target
the Israeli elites. They mainly target people who travel by bus or by foot, not by motorcade
with police or military escort. These victims (mainly Jews but also ‘Israeli Arabs’ and
foreigners) are not just victims of Palestinian warfare, but also pawns in the Zionist elites’
game, which is one of aggressive territorial and demographic warfare. Moreover, the calls for
an Islamic Palestinian state, supported by the Muslim fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad
movements, the most important militant Palestinian groups today, are rejected by the
Palestinian mainstream, but they provide welcome ammunition for Israel’s propagandistic
attempts to depict Palestinians in general as cruel, anti-democratic and anti-modern. At the
755
Hagopian: Soweto on the Jordan, 1998
756
Chomsky 21999: 152ff. This appears to rhyme well with the facts of the matter as well. See Hassan: Suicide
Bombers Driven More by Politics than Religious Fundamentalism, 2004. It is only since the 1990s that
fundamentalist Islamic groups have become a main security concern for the Israelis. The leftist organizations, the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP), are now headquartered outside of the Palestinian territories, whereas the Hamas and Islamic Jihad
movements are both still based and headquartered in Palestine, at least until 2004. See also Harel: Focus/Why
Doesn’t Israel Confront Hamas? 2002; N.N.: Factbox: Three Militant Palestinian Groups Unite for Attack, June
9, 2003. According to some Israeli sources, Israel even encouraged the formation of Hamas as a countervailing
force to the secular PLO. See Plitnick: Assassination, 2004. It remains to be seen whether the seemingly
secularizing twist of the spring of 2004, the Israeli military assassinations of two successive Hamas leaders,
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, will lead to or be an aspect of a secularizing macro-trend such
as white people in South Africa becoming less religious during the last 80 years. I doubt it. The global macro-
trend that I am able to perceive since a decade and a half is one of increasing de-secularization. In Israel itself,
there are increasing signs as well, as I will attempt to argue below.
 373

same time, of course, Israel denies millions of Palestinians the vote in Israeli elections, and
even tries to sabotage Palestinian municipal and national elections.757 By supporting de-
secularization, Jews also hope to create wedges between the Muslim and Christian Palestinian
communities, as we have seen.
Furthermore, de-secularization through the evangelical Christian right wing in the
USA has proven very beneficial for Jewish apartheid in Palestine. There are not only Jewish
lobbying groups in the USA that support Israeli apartheid; there is in fact a much broader
Zionist lobby. (It is worth repeating: not every Jew is a Zionist, and not every Zionist is a
Jew.) On July 9, 2002, for example, nearly 400 orthodox North American Jews arrived as
immigrants to Israel in a $2 million drive by American conservative fundamentalist Christians
to return Jews to ‘their’ alleged biblical homeland, thereby supposedly hastening the New
Testament’s prophecy of an Apocalypse and Second Coming of Christ. Much of this money
was raised by the Chicago-based International Federation of Christians and Jews. Another
example of such an organization is the Jerusalem-based ‘International Christian Embassy’,
which says ‘the Bible commands gentiles to bless the natural seed of the patriarch Abraham –
the Jews’. The state of Israel has actively courted such circles for decades, although average
Israelis show scant understanding for the allegedly Christian motivation behind the support
for what in reality amounts to an exacerbation of the Jewish invasion of Palestine and a
concomitant expulsion of Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and others. After all, Christian
Zionists (who are by no means active only in the USA) expect Jews to either die or convert to
Christianity during or around the time of the Second Coming. Some of the neo-conservatives
involved in pro-Israeli, anti-Islamic and anti-Arab US government efforts are Christian
Zionists. It should be emphasized that Christian Zionists are not by definition involved in
illegal activities, unlike the Jewish state (which blatantly practices apartheid and other
international crimes and has remained an ethnocracy despite UN demands that it be turned
into a democracy), but their morals are also highly questionable: How can the Christian notion
of neighborly love ever be reconciled with the expulsion and killings of Palestinians, some of
whom are even Christian?758
According to a recent opinion poll, no less than 44 percent of US Americans believe
that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews. So, for these people, there can be no question of
invasion or theft in the present version of Israel, which is somehow supposed to correspond to
the ancient state, and whose nationals (not necessarily citizens) are supposed to correspond to
the ancient figures, presumably by some manner of incestuous means of keeping the race

757
Johnston: Palestinians Say Israel Trying to Block Vote Drive, 2004; N.N.: Israel Shuts Palestinian Poll
Offices in Jerusalem, September 13, 2004; Ass’adi: Qurie Condemns Closure of Jerusalem Voter Centres, 2004.
The first article refers to attempts by armed Israeli plainclothes state agents to intimidate both Palestinian voters
and voter registration officials in east Jerusalem alone. In plain contradiction to international law, Israel claims
that east Jerusalem is part of Israel, and therefore, apparently, it sees attempts to democratic reform from within
as a threat. The second article refers to a shutdown of polling offices and the police detention of nine Palestinian
election officials, including four women, for ‘carrying out illegal polling activities’. Two and a half months later,
Israel had promised the international community and the Palestinians that it would help to facilitate presidential
elections following the death of President Arafat. But reality was different. Five days into a week-long voter
registration period, the Israelis had still not allowed Palestinians to open voter registration centers in east
Jerusalem. Eventually, only 5,300 (out of a couple of hundred thousand) Palestinians were allowed to vote in
Jerusalem by Israel. Tens of thousands of Jerusalemites were forced to vote outside the city. Many of them
feared Israeli interventions that could lead to loss of Jerusalem residence permits, and some decided not to vote
for that reason. Johnston: Palestinians Face Obstacles over Jerusalem Vote, 2004; MacAskill & Urquhart:
Divided People Enjoys a Taste of Freedom, 2005. Palestinians living in Jerusalem were permitted to take part in
the first Palestinian presidential and legislative elections in 1996 held under interim peace deals with Israel, but
then, already, Israel had sabotaged Palestinian democracy in favor of Jewish ethnocracy in Jerusalem. See Carter
2006: 144f.
758
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 132-139. In their end note 115 (page 401), these authors point out that the Roman
Catholic Church as well as the Episcopal, Lutheran, and Syrian Orthodox churches have all condemned this
central aspect of Christian Zionism. See also footnote 69 above.
374

pure. And 36 percent of US Americans believe that the state of Israel is a fulfillment of the
biblical prophecy of the second coming of Jesus. How can such an educated nation as the
USA believe such nonsense?
The vast majority of Americans who believe both of these ideas are white and have
their own traditions and suppressed consciousnesses of ethnic cleansing, but yet another
example of (officially) non-Jewish Zionists are the Black Hebrews, a group of around 2,500
black Americans, who were recently accorded permanent residency rights in Israel after 34
years’ wait. This group of people lives in the Israeli desert according to Old Testament
traditions, including polygamy, and claim that they are descendants from one of the Bible’s
ten ‘lost tribes’ of Israel, by way of Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. They are still not
recognized as Jews by Israel’s rabbinate, but they became eligible for citizenship from 2008,
and they are able to serve in Israel’s army since July 2003. During the 1970s, some Black
Hebrews were deported, but authorities avoided a wholesale expulsion, citing concerns that
the Jewish state could be accused of racism. Postmodern or ‘cultural’ racism has been a strong
feature of Israeli policy from the very beginning of the modern Jewish state, but of course
biological or traditional racism lingers, as well, for instance in the basic tenets of classical
Zionism, a typical 19th-century European construct. Finally, although no US president since
1948 has publicly identified himself as a Christian Zionist, there are plenty of indications that
Christian Zionism has been a constant factor in US government policy since the formation of
the modern state of Israel.759
The overwhelmingly pro-Israeli producers and screenwriters of Hollywood, another
pillar of current US global power (next to militarization, state-imposed capitalism on other
states on US terms, de-secularization and other features described in the last section of Part I
above), also oblige Israel with their cliché images of Muslims and Arabs in general and
Palestinians in particular: evil and dangerous, fanatics and terrorists, blood-thirsty, cruel,
cowardly and devious. Since the advent of Gorbachev, they have become the unambiguously
‘bad guys’ par excellence of the world’s ‘dream factory’, which is sometimes provided unpaid
assistance – especially in these ultimately profit-driven, but also deeply ideological and racist
endeavors – by the US Defense Department. Thus, US taxpayers are paying, beyond their
movie tickets and cable television, video, and DVD purchase and rental fees, to be exposed to
simplistic pro-Israeli (as well as pro-US) propaganda. To a significant extent, Hollywood
produces not just Washington State TV, but also Tel Aviv State TV.
Indeed, Hollywood is now plausibly being accused of providing the world with images
of Arabs that are essentially the same as the racist images of Jews promoted by the Nazi
German film industry. The similarities do in fact seem to outnumber the differences by far.
The most important difference, it should be mentioned, is that there are in fact a few
exceptions to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda (still) coming out of Hollywood, but at
the time of writing there are hardly any. In Nazi Germany, however, there were of course no
exceptions to anti-Jewish propaganda in the rigidly state-controlled national and local mass
media.760 Jews, on the other hand, have due to Hollywood become the film victims of racism
par excellence. I am not saying that the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere did not
contain some of the worst manifestations of racism in history. They did. But the American
759
Heller, C.: U.S. Christians Fund Jewish Newcomers to Israel, 2002. See also Berkowitz: Conservative Watch:
Strangers in a Strained Land, 2002; Steinberg: One Man and His God, 2004 (which cites the US opinion poll);
Williams, D.: Israel Grants “Black Hebrews” Permanent Residency, 2003; Alush: First Black Hebrew Gets
Israeli Citizenship, 2009. In Israel, an even more de-secularized country than the USA, some 68 percent of the
Jewish population believe that Jews are the Chosen People and 39 percent believe in the coming of the Messiah.
See Cook 2006: 175. On US governmental Christian Zionism see Merkley: American Presidents, Religion, and
Israel: The Heirs of Cyrus, 2004 (Jimmy Carter was the first living US president to break this tradition, but by
then he had been out of office for decades). On Christian Zionism in general, especially in its adopted homeland,
see also Hubers: “Christian Zionism” and the Myth of America, 2003; Wagner: Bible and Sword: US Christian
Zionists Discover Israel, 2003.
760
Sardar: Orientalism, 1999: 95ff.
 375

filmmakers have since almost made genocide, in the popular mind, synonymous with
Auschwitz, thus also sweeping under the carpet the white-led genocides in the Western
Hemisphere and others, as well as the ideologically very inconvenient fact that wealth and
power of the western Europeans and North Americans today depend on gains made from
those conquests, genocides, and the unparalleled theft and exploitation that came with them.
And the wayward idea of an incompatibility between Judaism and Islam, or between Jews and
Arabs, is further fueled by European repression of European anti-Semitism through history.
‘They’ are the extremes, whereas ‘we’ – the Europeans, the Whites, the Christians – are in-
between, calm, and peace-loving. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crusades as
well as the Christian Roman Empire, for instance, reveal this attitude to be an upside-down
account of intercultural relations historically.
Out of hundreds of movies since 1980, Jack Shaheen, the Arab-American film critic
and author of ‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People’, and ‘The TV Arab’, found
only 12 that contained positive portrayals of Arab people. Dating back to 1914, but especially
since the end of the Cold War, Hollywood has presented Arabs as ‘quintessential evil’. For
instance, the 2000 Paramount release, ‘Rules of Engagement’, shows Arab children and
women firing at and killing heroic US elite soldiers by deviously using firearms hidden under
their clothes during a stone-throwing demonstration outside the US Embassy in Sana’a,
Yemen. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only work of fiction that effectively manages to
accuse women and children – facing armed, foreign, elite soldiers employed by the world’s
sole military superpower – of cowardice! That film and 13 others that had shown Americans
killing Arabs (including women and children) credited the US Defense Department, i.e. US
taxpayers, for providing equipment, personnel and technical assistance.
The prevalent anti-Arab racism in the US, however, must also partly be blamed on the
strong effects of an older, eurocentric tradition of Orientalism, as Edward Said has shown.
The American literary critic, Greta D. Little, has identified five stereotypes that have persisted
during the last two-and-a-half centuries of western, i.e. US and western European, literature
on Arabs for adults and children: 1.) Arabs are dirty and lazy. 2.) Arabs are ignorant,
superstitious and silly. 3.) Arabs are irrational, cruel, and violent. 4.) Arabs mistreat women.
5.) Arabs hate Christians and engage in the slave trade (nowadays: in hostage-taking). Of
course, there are exceptions, but, again, not many, and not prominent. Moreover, Arabs are
typically portrayed in centuries of western literature as needing western guidance and western
values. One of the worst examples of this kind of racism is the book, ‘The Arab Mind’, by
Raphael Patai, which was published in 1976. The book was being used as late as 2003 by the
US military to brainwash its own soldiers in preparation for invading Iraq and for the ensuing
US military occupation of that country. Its long chapter on the purported Arab sexual taboo
ridden with shame and repression is supposed to have shaped US military torture techniques
during that occupation, as exemplified in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison torture-murders and
extreme humiliation of indigenous suspects by illegal US occupation personnel.761

761
Shalal-Esa: Writer Documents Hollywood’s Vilification of Arabs, 2001. See also Shaheen: “Rules of
Engagement”: A Highwater Mark in Hollywood Hate Mongering with U.S. Military “Cooperation”, 2000: 15f,
and Shaheen: Unkindest Cuts, 2003: 76-81, which is where the author compares anti-Arab depictions in
contemporary US motion pictures with anti-Jewish depictions in German Nazi films. Aside from the couple of
percent of good Arabs in Hollywood portrayals, there is also the question of what ‘good’ actually means. Usually
it means that they help westerners, for whatever reasons. On the closely interconnected power of the military, the
government and the (privately owned) mass media, including the motion picture industry, in the USA, see
Herman & Chomsky 1988. On Orientalism in this context, see Said 1979 (1978): 284ff and Shaheen 2003: 77.
On literature see also Little: Representing Arabs: Reliance on the Past, 1998: 261-272. On Patai, see Whitaker:
‘Its Best Use Is as a Doorstop’ (review of ‘The Arab Mind’ by Raphael Patai), 2004. In general, see also
Löwstedt: Stereotypical Images of Arabs in the Western Mainstream Media, 2004. As horrible as the cases of
torture at Abu Ghraib are, they should not be equated with Israeli torture of Arabs. The latter is more as if Abu
Ghraib takes place in America itself, with victims who are denied citizenship as well as the right to life and most
other human rights.
376

De-secularization among the Jews themselves is also pursued vigorously by the Israeli
elites, especially in the case of east Jerusalem. Tanya Reinhart, the dissident Israeli professor
at Tel Aviv University, analyzed the situation in an unusual way (for an Israeli) a few months
into the Second Intifada:

In today’s setting, it is hard to recall that just a few years ago, only
some fringe lunatics demanded Israeli control of ‘Temple Mount’ [Al
Haram al Sharif]. Every time they tried to enter the place and pray,
Israeli police would be there to block their entrance or drag them out.
Even the word ‘Temple Mount’ was perceived as belonging to the
bizarre vocabulary of religious fanatics. Today it is the Israeli
government that launches the holy war. Israel’s foreign affairs minister
- the ex-liberal Shlomo Ben-Ami - declares day and night that ‘no
nation can give up its sacred sites’ and the world nods and accepts. . . .
Israel’s claim on ‘Temple Mount’ is completely new - brought up only
since the recent Camp David negotiations [held in the summer of
2000]. . . . Barak and Sharon [respectively the head of government and
of the parliamentary opposition at the time]…see only one solution to
the ‘Palestinian problem’ – subjugation and control! It is not at all
impossible that in their sick general’s minds they believe that if one
applies sufficient force for sufficient time it may be possible to drive
more and more Palestinians out of Jerusalem and the central West
Bank so this area becomes more Arab-free. And this approach isn’t
confined to just the occupied Palestinians. For several weeks now,
Israeli Palestinians have been subject to vicious attacks, and more and
more voices in the media (orchestrated, as always, from above)
complain about how they have too many rights and are not ‘loyal’ to
Israel. . . Israel has become the land of apartheid.762

Racist Israelis have also at times even gone as far as their previous tormentors, the
Nazis, as well as the Afrikaners, in trying to prove the genetic inferiority of Arabs and ‘other
Blacks’ (!) compared to Jews. The racist apartheid mindset is vividly illustrated by a young
rabbi, quoted by Chomsky, who speaks of the ‘filth’ of mixed marriages between Jews and
Arabs and the ‘hybrid children’ that result. (Hybrid is a biological term for crossed species,
and most certainly not for ‘crosses’ between two genetically close, in fact genetically
indistinguishable, human populations who also speak closely related languages.)763
The dehumanization of the enemy is of course observable on both sides in the conflict.
For instance, a Palestinian suicide bomber who blew up himself and five Israelis at a shopping
mall in the Israeli city of Netanya on May 18, 2001, had previously left behind a videotape, in
which he said: ‘I will make my body a bomb that will blast the bodies of Zionists, the sons of
monkeys and pigs, to avenge every drop of blood spilt on the soil of Jerusalem.’764 As
shocking and unacceptable as these insults are (not to mention the racist act of murder itself),
they are still not quite as dehumanizing as the references to Palestinians by Israelis as ‘snakes,
cockroaches and grasshoppers’, quoted above.765 The reason for this is that the evolutionary

762
Reinhart: Israel – Land of Apartheid, 2000. The only obvious criticism that could be launched against this
analysis is that Israel in fact has been a land of apartheid (in a wide sense) continuously since 1948. In another
context, however, Reinhart does acknowledge that Israel and the Palestinians have been in a state of war since
1948. See N.N. November 8, 2002.
763
Chomsky 21999: 151ff. See footnote 380 for the equivalent Greek labeling of the children of mixed Greek and
non-Greek parentage as ‘hybrid’.
764
N.N.: Palestinian Bomber Talks on Video of Vengeance, May 19, 2001
765
See footnote 434 above. In a very similar fashion, Galen, the famous physician and philosopher who studied
in Alexandria, and whose authority in medicine in the western world would remain ‘virtually undisputed’ until
the 16th century, compared non-Greek languages to the sounds of pigs, frogs, ravens and jackdaws. Werner 1992:
 377

distance of humans to other mammals is not as great as that to reptiles or insects. In order to
emphasize this point, in September 2002, none other than the Israeli Health Minister, Nissim
Dahan, referred to Palestinians as ‘foxes who evolved gradually to become snakes and
scorpions’. Palestinians allegedly invert evolution and turn from mammals, first into
dangerous reptiles, and then into dangerous invertebrates. The leader of Dahan’s orthodox
Jewish Shas party, a junior partner in the ruling coalition under Sharon’s Likud party, had
previously called Arabs ‘damned evil-doers’, and Palestinians ‘snakes’.766 It should not be
forgotten in this comparison that the quoted Palestinian suicide bomber was an oppressed and
humiliated, young, desperate, and unemployed man, whereas the Israelis quoted are mature
men with enormous powers, state security protection and other privileges, considerable
wealth, and last but not least, responsibilities in their roles as public servants, including great
responsibilities for millions of disenfranchised Palestinians living, suffering, and dying under
their rule.
The dehumanization of Palestinians went even further in the same year with the
implied yet obvious insults voiced by Moshe Ya’alon, Sharon’s Chief of Staff, i.e. the highest
ranking military commander in Israel, who described the ‘Palestinian threat’ as ‘like a cancer’.
He went on to explain that ‘there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the
time being, I am applying chemotherapy.’767 At least healthy foxes, snakes, scorpions,
cockroaches and grasshoppers all consist of organic cells, which work together for the
harmony and well-being of the whole organism, but cancerous cells are deadly anomalies,
which, if left alone, and often regardless of intervention attempts, will kill their host. (Notice
that Israelis are here implicitly and contrafactually identified as hosts, Palestinians – the
indigenous people – as ungrateful guests who have long outstayed their welcome.) To call
cancerous cells ‘forms of life’ is somewhat perverse, and that is apparently what the top
Israeli soldier wishes to express publicly with regard to Palestinians. He also seems to imply
that his temporary solution is to kill controlled numbers of Palestinians indiscriminately but
gently, and that with the means at his disposal he could apply an even more radical treatment,
namely, that of a total excision.
Another track well-worn by racists is the alleged irredeemability of the Other. Israel’s
deputy defense minister, Ze’ev Boim, for example, said Arabs carry a ‘genetic defect’ that
makes them ‘murderous’ by nature.768 Irredeemability is not necessarily biological by nature.
The former prime minister, Ehud Barak, uttered the following opinion in 2002: ‘They [the
Palestinians] are products of a culture in which to tell a lie… creates no dissonance. They
don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is
seen as an irrelevant category.’769
Finally, we have the demonization of Palestinians, shamelessly expressed by Israel’s
National Security Council director, Giora Eiland, yet another one of the country’s top
securocrats, who in 2006 referred to the future majority of Palestinians between the Jordan

18; N.N.: Article ‘Galen (130-200)’, no date. See Werner 1992: 9, for further ancient Greek sources describing
the languages of ‘barbarians’ as animal sounds, and Isaac 2004: 366, for the jackdaw comparison applied
specifically to Egyptians. The Greek word, ‘barbarian’, of course, originally referred to people, all foreigners,
who can’t speak properly, whose words sound like ‘bar-bar-bar’. The Philosopher, as he was known throughout
the European Middle Ages, i.e. Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander the Great, advised Greeks ‘to deal with the
barbarians as with beasts and plants’ (fr. 658, Rose), quoted in Green 2007: 61.
766
N.N.: Row Erupts over Israeli Minister “Snake” Remark, September 26, 2002. Twelve years later, the ‘snake’
epithet is used again by an Israeli politician, Ayelet Shaked of the Jewish Home party, who refers to Palestinian
children as ‘little snakes’. See Cook: Calls for Genocide Enter Israeli Mainstream, 2014.
767
Fisk: How to Shut up your Critics with a Single Word, 2002. See Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 89f. for many
more instances of elite and other Israeli Jews’ dehumanizing remarks about Palestinians and Arabs in general.
768
Quoted in Cook 2006: 130.
769
Interview with Benny Morris, New York Review of Books, June 13, 2002, quoted in Isaac 2004: 513, note 2.
See also footnote 776 below.
378

and the Mediterranean as the ‘demographic demon’770, i.e. as something even worse than
animals, cancer, or genetic defects, namely as Evil itself. It is also arguably worse than the
labels, ‘demographic bomb’ and ‘demographic threat’ (see Chapter II.1.3), as bombs could be
bad or good from the Judeocentric position, especially since the establishment of the state of
Israel, and threats could turn out small or insignificant or be easily overcome. Demons, on the
other hand, are intrinsically evil, superhuman, and much harder to fight. From here, the step to
incitement to violence is microscopically small. Under international law, Eiland could and
should, in my opinion, be charged with a serious crime, the kind of crime that the USA
punished with a death sentence (i.e. in the case of Julius Streicher and Nazi incitement to
violence). Not believing in the death sentence at all, I would be happiest if he could be
charged, tried and, if found guilty, jailed by the International Criminal Court.
These racist statements by Israeli leaders all stem from the last few years, and although
the climate has worsened during the second Intifada, this is nothing new. Said has referred to
several earlier attempts by Israeli Jews and their American allies, including many academics
and high-ranking politicians, to depict and characterize Palestinian or Arab people as a fatal
disease, as something that must be fought.771
The differences in acts of dehumanization between Palestinians and Jews appear to be
correlated with the relative effectiveness of propaganda on each side of the conflict, and with
the relative confidence with which it is being perpetrated. Given their military, political,
diplomatic and financial resources and their allies, given their own hi-tech information and
communication technologies and deals (which have recently contributed substantially to make
them the 4th largest arms dealer in the world),772 it is not surprising that the Zionists are
winning the propaganda war in the short term. Palestinians are being dehumanized on a daily
basis by Israelis in Israeli acts of killing and murder, and even in Palestinian murders of
Palestinians. They are also dehumanized on a daily basis in many other ways, for instance by
being treated as cattle at Israeli checkpoints, or at Israeli offices sometimes granting but
mostly (illegally) denying Palestinians different kinds of permits, or in the global mass media
depicting Palestinians as blood-thirsty beasts. Although the Israelis are much more blood-
thirsty and murderous, although the Palestinian casualties are huge compared to the Israeli
casualties, the Palestinian narrative is not often reaching large audiences, and neither is their
propaganda (except as ‘proof’, from Zionist or Zionist-financed media monitors, of pro-
Palestinian, anti-Israeli, or even anti-Jewish bias in the mass media, see below).
At every step of the way, from bias over delegitimization, dehumanization,
demonization, to incitement to violence, the Israelis are producing, publishing, printing,
broadcasting, distributing, prompting, influencing etc. more material, i.e. they are scoring
higher and winning the propaganda war (although the media saturation, the internet and
occasional objectivity are also currently giving the Palestinian narrative and the truth more
media presence, though not yet mass media presence, see below). In every main media arena,
in news, entertainment, and advertising, the Israelis are also still winning globally.773 But in
the long haul, if their war and the hate are perpetuated like this, Israeli Jews are likely to face
a rude awakening, and it may prove fatal for the Israeli Jews to underestimate Palestinian
ingenuity as well as Palestinian humanity, just as it did for Whites with regard to Blacks in
770
Cook 2006: 120. See also N.N.: Wanted: Giora Eiland, for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, no
date, on what is arguably even more serious criminal charges, filed in Spain in 2008, against Eiland, who is held
responsible on multiple counts of murder of innocent Palestinians. For Eiland’s continued racist militancy, see
Blumenthal: How Israel Used Its Own Civilians as Human Shields While Assaulting Gaza, 2014. For further
racist statements by Israeli Jews, see footnotes 836-840.
771
Said 1979 (1978): 306ff.
772
Moreover, Israel has a ‘…developed hi-tech saturated industry, advanced research centers, extensive
technological infrastructure, computer-intensive industries and services, and a [media] literate society with a high
average salary’. Limor: Israel and the New Media, in Seib (ed.) 2007: 166. See also footnote 315 above.
773
Löwstedt & Madhoun: Wenn Fakten auf der Strecke bleiben: Die Rollen der Medien im Nahostkonflikt
(‚When Facts Don’t Make It: The Roles of the Media in the Middle East Conflict’), 2010
 379

South Africa.
Palestinians are the only main victims out of my three main examples of apartheid
societies who are not African. But I do not believe that this sets them apart in any systematic
or theoretical way from the main victims of apartheid in Egypt or South Africa. The
Palestinians are closer to the Egyptians in space and closer to the South African Blacks in
time. They speak an Afroasiatic language like the ancient Egyptians did (and unlike the South
Africans), but they are being oppressed by a society which was closely allied to the apartheid
oppressors of South Africa. Both of the latter were mostly close allies of and aided by the
USA and western Europe. The differences between the main victims are thus fairly equal in
kind.
The main perpetrators, however, are all European or of European descent. This has
some theoretical significance, because Palestinians are among the many latter-day victims to
the same racist, hegemonic idea of ‘European’ excellence and dominance that Africans (and
others) were and are. This idea is described succinctly in Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’:

[A] collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’

non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major
component in European culture is precisely what made that culture
hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity
as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples
and cultures.774

The US Empire, which during the 20th century took over the reins as the world’s
leading military, political and economic power from the last hegemonic European one, the
British Empire, is as connected to it as ancient Rome was to ancient Greece, if not even closer.
The North American elites today generally speak English, a European language, whereas the
Romans mainly spoke Latin, not Greek. In any case, western Europe has made sure it will not
upset the new master, again like the late ancient Greeks did not anger Rome, with a few
exceptions in both instances. In each case, the earlier hegemonic power found it relatively
easy to switch its opportunist strategy from that of a supreme oppressor to that of the most
privileged collaborator, as for instance observable in the UK’s behavior in the US-led wars on
Iraq, Afghanistan and others during the last decades. The racist, hegemonic culture was also
transplanted westwards with surprising smoothness and continuity in both cases. Today, the
Palestinians, and Arabs in general, are culturally mainly victims of American, white, and
western European racism. They are commonly seen as something less than people, as
subhuman creatures who like to kill Jews and are glad to sacrifice their children for this
purpose.

The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism,

dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very
strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to
feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.775

Since many Jews have worked hard and earnestly at assimilating – for instance, they
have intermarried with Europeans (but also, marginally, with others) for centuries – they
themselves have, lately, been able to ‘pass’ as Whites, and their Jewish religion as an integral
part of the ‘western’ cultural heritage. The other Semitic-speaking peoples, however, are
neither considered white, nor western, nor European. Their chief religion, Islam, comparably
similar to Christianity, and similarly intertwined historically, has not been considered part of

774
Said 1979 (1978): 7. Said refers to Hay: Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 21968.
775
Said 1979 (1978): 27. On anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias in the western mass media, see also Löwstedt 2004;
Abu-Fadil: Is Coverage of Arabs, Islam Good? Western Media under Scrutiny, 2008.
380

‘western’ or European culture. One often speaks of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ today

without even considering the exclusivist aspects of this expression. If labels for civilizations
must be religious, then the ‘Christian-Muslim’, ‘Islamo-Christian’, and ‘Judeo-Muslim’ or
‘Islamo-Jewish’ civilizations are in fact at least as important realities as the ‘Judeo-Christian’
one is. Ibrahim is as close to Abraham as Avraham or Avram. Yet, the term, ‘Judeo-Christian’
is usually invoked to exclude ‘Islamic’ (see the Ehud Barak quote above). In fact, the
expression ‘Judeo-Christian’ was hardly ever used prior to the Second World War. Its current
popularity is due to genuine sympathy towards Jews after the Nazi genocide, exploited guilt
over that genocide (largely promoted and spread by the Israel lobby), as well as a thus far
rather successful, concerted attempt to create and uphold emotional and spiritual distance
from, prejudice towards, and fear of, Islam.776
This prevalent hypocrisy inherent in treating Jews as ‘westerners’ and Muslims as
‘non-westerners’ is all the more annoying to Palestinians, since Zionism usually lays claim to
Palestine without invoking the fact that Jewish people and cultures have always mixed with
European (and other) people and cultures, but rather by claiming the opposite of that idea,
namely, the idea of Jewish racial and cultural purity and Jewish uniqueness. Like all other
racisms, Zionism contains many self-contradictions and lies.
The fate of Sephardic or Oriental Jews in Israel further illustrates the European lop-
sidedness of Israeli elite culture. Sephardic Jews today make up around one third of all Jews
in Israel. They are very poorly represented in the elites, who proudly nurture their European
roots, while tacitly or loudly accusing Sephardic Jews of having avoided the Nazi genocide.
Thus, the descendants of genocide survivors somehow manage to consider themselves
superior, by invoking their origins in the historically worst judeophobic area in the world, as if
the European experience were better for Jews than the much less devastating experience
among Muslims and Arabs, among whom the Israeli Jews now live. There is also a color-
coded racism involved here since the European Jews generally have lighter skin.777
In 1896, the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his ‘Judenstaat’ that the
Jewish state would constitute a ‘fortification’, or a ‘wall’ of ‘civilization against barbarity’,
meaning Muslim or Arab culture. This idea has been plausibly linked to one of Ariel Sharon’s
many illegal legacies: the infamous apartheid wall (see Chapter II.6.3 above). It could also be
considered a legacy in the so-called ‘Iron Wall’, the militaristic, hard-line Israeli, yet
mainstream Zionist policy of never negotiating with Arabs except from a position of military
strength.778
There is nothing at all idealistic, in a humanist sense, about Zionism. The brave and
eminent Israeli historian who brought the central importance of the Iron Wall doctrine for
Zionist and Israeli politics to the attention of the world, Avi Shlaim, has also identified
Zionism’s fundamental if not fundamentalist opportunism. Zionists never chiefly negotiated
with Palestinians, the indigenous majority who owned over 90 percent of the land when Israel
came into being, about anything in Palestine. Their main negotiating partners about
everything in Palestine have been, in chronological order, the Ottomans, the British, and the

776
Nettnin: Islamo-Christian Civilization, 2005; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 108f.
777
Plathe: Viele Israeli mögen nicht zum Nahen Osten gehören: Die arabische Welt ist ganz nah und wird
geschmäht, 2004; Warschawski: Half-Price Citizens: Sephardic Jews in Israel, 2007. The German-Jewish
intellectual, Rafael Seligmann, has expanded on this, saying that for Jews to define themselves in terms of the
holocaust is a disaster for Jewish culture and Jewish identity. The holocaust was not an achievement of the Jews.
They should, according to Seligmann, rather define themselves in terms of culture, art, language and science, and
not in terms of what was done to them. See Mendelsohn: Interview with Rafael Seligmann, Alles Kosher –
Jüdisches Leben in vier Städten Europas, 2010.
778
Bunzl: Der Wall, der Zaun, die Mauer, 2004. The German original quote from Herzl in Bunzl’s rendition is:
‘Wall der Zivilisation gegen die Barbarei’. See also Schoenman: The Hidden History of Zionism, 1988; and
Shlaim 2001 (2000): 4: Herzl ‘viewed the natives [of Palestine] as primitive and backward, and his attitude
towards them was rather patronizing’. See, further, the thoughtful review of Shlaim’s book: Halper: Eight
Decades of the ‘Iron Wall’ Concept, 2001: 97-102.
 381

Americans, i.e. whoever was most powerful in the region (and, lately, in the world) at the
time.779
In this regard, Jewish nationalism has also been compared to Darwinian nationalism
and racism: ‘the fittest (nation or people) survives’.780 And to ensure that, apparently, all and
any tricks are basically allowed. Zionism and Social Darwinism both belong to the ‘web of
ideas’ that Said described. They are both products of late 19th-century European elitist
thought. The following quote from the then Israeli foreign minister, later president, Shimon
Peres, brings home the eminent applicability of the term ‘racism’ for Zionism: ‘There were
Palestinians who lived on that land but were never a people, and there were Jews who were a
people but who never had a land.’781 Groups of human beings (or super-human beings) who
are ‘people’ apparently deserve land and statehood, whereas groups of humans (or sub-human
beings) who are not ‘people’ do not even deserve the most basic of human rights. This
acrobatic use of the term, ’people’, is indeed very similar to the dominant use of the German
concept of ‘Volk’ prior to 1945.
This is not a marginal view in Israeli-Jewish society. It is ubiquitous. Another
representative of the Jewish-Israeli so-called ‘Left’, writer Amos Oz, has described the
conflict and his ‘solution’ to it in precisely these racist terms, although he avoids the historical
lie of Peres. (The so-called Israeli ‘Right’ is the Iron Wall racism.) The disastrous, 19th-
century European idea that peoples – Völker – are the agents of history, the movers and
shakers of the long run, is more alive in 21st century Israel than anywhere else in the world
today. Oz describes the Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Arab peoples as two patients in need of
therapy, and as spouses in need of divorce. (The idea of Völker is apparently unable to make
itself understood without using individuals as metaphors.) The truth of the matter is that
millions of individual human beings are in sore need of human rights, and duties. But there
are twice as many Palestinians as Israeli Jews. To use Oz’s metaphor of patients: there are
actually three patients, not two, if we wish to reflect demographic reality. Two Palestinians
and one Jew. The simple fact that ten million Palestinians are being bullied by Israel, the
USA, the EU, and even the UN, to be content with less than 22 percent of Historic Palestine is
also left unmentioned, yet taken for granted, and apparently considered necessary by Oz.782
The divorce metaphor for Oz’s ‘peace’ process has an additional weakness: Israel has literally
and forcibly divorced at least three Palestinian population groups from one another, directly
resulting in spouses being unable to see each other, people unable to see their parents,
children, siblings, and other relatives and loved ones. Palestinians have done nothing of the
kind to Israelis. Therefore, there are, much less inaccurately, two Palestinian patients and,
most of the time, the third person is doing all he can to kill, or persecute, or make life hell for
them.
The variety of social Darwinism implied in the Peres lie is also reflected in the
physical violence and the nigh daily justifications offered by the Israeli state securocrats.

779
Shlaim 2001 (2000): 17f. One could add two more powers to the list of Israel’s least unacceptable negotiation
partners: the socialist powers, both dictatorial (Warsaw Pact) and democratic (Western and Central European),
who played important roles in the region and the world, for the birth of the Jewish state and during the Cold War.
In case of Capitalist power defeat, they were to be mollified by Israeli pseudo-socialism, which provided
governments to Israel until the 1970s. The Zionist pseudo-socialists did care about the exploited, the oppressed,
and the poor, but only if they were Jewish. Nationalism and racism were in fact always prioritized over socialism
by the Zionists, some of whom thought of themselves as socialists; but in fact they betrayed the universalist
priorities of socialism. See Kovel 2007: 48ff.
780
Ezrah: Rubber Bullets, 1998: 89; Chomsky 21999: 153ff
781
Quoted in Pumpyansky July 2002; see footnote 24; Kovel 2007: 73; and Ashrawi: Peace in the Middle East:
A Global Challenge and a Human Imperative, 2003, where Ashrawi speaks of the “myth of a ‘land without a
people for a people without a land’ that has long framed the rationalization for the most extreme forms of
Zionism that sought to deny the very existence and humanity of the Palestinians.” On the genocidal/pro-ethnic
cleansing aspects of Zionist ideology, see further Said 1992 (1979): 83ff, and Chapters II.1.3 and II.2.3 above.
782
Oz: How to Cure a Fanatic, 2006
382

These justifications, ‘we must attack the Palestinians in their towns and homes, because
otherwise they will attack us in ours’, are contained in the cynical attitudes manifested in the
quotes by Peres and Netanyahu above. ‘We believe that might is right, but we will never
admit that, so we will publicly just keep reiterating our historical and/or divinely revealed
“rights” to the land and/or our mystic qualification as a people and/or our enemies’ mystic
lack of such a quality.’ This is not essentially different from the meta-ideology of the
Ptolemies in Egypt or of the ultimately self-appointed ‘civilizing’ or missionary duties of the
South African Whites. It is insidious ideology.
As in South Africa and in Graeco-Roman Egypt, violence and ideology are the two
utmost pillars of an analyzable system of racist subjugation that is built upon all nine
principles of apartheid’s gross human rights violations, as detailed above. These nine
principles lend each other the sufficient and necessary support to enable a privileged racial
minority to hold sway for centuries. Sooner or later, however, it seems the final bell will start
to toll. In Egypt, the Romans and Greeks were finally overthrown by a new invading force,
the Muslim Arabs. In South Africa, the demographic growth of the black underclass as well as
foreign and domestic pressures relentlessly forced the Whites to retreat, and in Israel a similar
scenario seems to be underway. I will return to this issue in the Conclusions.
At present, the approaching nominal independence of Palestinian ‘Bantustans’ mirrors
the stage of development of apartheid that the South Africans had reached in the 1970s. US
and European governments and businesses are still supporting Israel qualitatively like they did
South Africa until the 1970s and even 1980s783, although Israel is receiving much more aid, as
we have seen. On the other hand, the first Intifada, which got underway already in 1987,
corresponds in many ways to the Soweto uprising in 1976 and thus, by comparison, has
pointed towards an immediate end to the Israeli apartheid system since 2005. The second
Intifada of the fall of 2000 resembles the township uprisings of the 1980s in South Africa,
thus heralding possible liberation within a decade.784 It may seem futile to bring the parallels
of Israel and South Africa too close with such simplistic attempts at comparison and
prediction, but the signs of an impending revolutionary end (at most within the next few
decades) to apartheid in Israel, whether violent or not, are as we have seen many indeed.
Nevertheless, optimism in this regard may be illusory and very counter-productive, as the
following assessment from 1998 shows.

Interestingly enough, when the PLO adopted the notion of a

democratic secular state in all of Palestine for Palestinian Arabs and
Jews, it found no real international support. Separation by partition or
agreement was what the international community supported. And this
is because they were committed to a Jewish state, whereas the African
National Congress could refuse separation, and the world accepted
that. Now, because of the failure of Oslo to produce a viable two-state
solution, the international community may come to support a
democratic secular state for Arabs and Jews in all of pre-state
Palestine. This can only happen if the Palestinians can offer a credible
inclusive, democratic and secular vision of that state. With this
message and the exposing of Israeli apartheid, the Palestinians have a
real alternative to present to the international community, and the

783
N.N.: US, European Banks Propped Up Apartheid Government, March 3, 1999. See further Egli, Madörin,
Tsele, & Wellmer: Apartheid-Caused Debt: The Role of German and Swiss Finance, 1999, and Section III.6
below.
784
The following quote by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher brings the advent of Palestinian liberation
even closer: ‘Israeli colonialism in the land of Palestine which it has occupied since 1967 is living, in my
opinion, its last moments…We have seen throughout history that colonialism gets more brutal in its final hours’.
The same of course goes for South Africa, which may very well have been on Maher’s mind as he made that
comment. See N.N.: Israeli “Colonialism” in Final Throes - Egypt, August 14, 2001.
 383

conditions are such that the world will listen.785

The world did listen and look in September and October 2000, as the Second Intifada,
or rather, the first contained civil war, broke out in the Occupied Territories, and to some
extent in pre-1967 Israel itself. Yet, the voices that practically drowned out all others in
massive spin campaigns were those of the pro-Israeli, US-owned media and US and Israeli
government officials, spokesmen and hired teams of public relations professionals. 786 The
propaganda since then has remained astounding in both scope and depth, as Said acutely
observes:

Never have the media been so influential in determining the course of

war as during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which, as far as the Western
media are concerned, has essentially become a battle over images and
ideas. Israel has already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into
what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or information for the outside world
(hence, propaganda). This has included an entire range of efforts:
lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish
university students who over a week in a secluded country estate can
be primed to ‘defend’ Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen
and -women with invitations and visits; pamphlets and, most
important, money for election campaigns; directing (or, as the case
requires, harassing) photographers and writers of the current Intifada
into producing certain images and not others; lecture and concert tours
by prominent Israelis; training commentators to make frequent
references to the Holocaust and Israel’s predicament today; many
advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel;
and on and on. Because so many powerful people in the media and
publishing business are strong supporters of Israel, the task is made
vastly easier.787

Even the public broadcasters – who are by law supposed to be neutral and objective –
are hopelessly biased, perhaps especially those in the USA. The American media monitoring
organization, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a rare voice of sanity in a national
media landscape that could benevolently be described as an extension of the publicity
departments of the Israeli government and army, has repeatedly expressed concern about this.
For example, a FAIR study of six months of the National Public Radio (NPR) network’s
coverage found that ‘…81 percent of Israeli conflict-related deaths were reported, but only 34
percent of Palestinian deaths. Strikingly, NPR was even less likely to report the deaths of
Palestinian minors killed; only 20 percent of these deaths were reported, as compared to 89
percent of Israeli minors’ deaths. While NPR was more likely to cover Israeli civilian deaths
than those of Israeli security personnel (84 percent vs. 69 percent), the reverse was true with
Palestinians (20 percent vs. 72 percent).’788

785
Hagopian 1998
786
See Plushnick-Masti: Israelis, Palestinians Wage Media War, Reuters, July 16, 2001. Although this article
tones down the enormous extent of the actual dominance of pro-Israeli media content, it does acknowledge the
lopsidedness of reporting in favor of Israel. On the intimate, almost incestuous relationship between the mass
media and the (other) economic, political and military elites in the USA, see Herman & Chomsky 1994 (1988).
Some of the following passages can be found shortened in Löwstedt & Madhoun: The Intifada, Hasbara and the
Media, 2003: 47-56
787
Said August 31, 2001. Cf. Dabashi 2012: 76; Pilger: Why My Film is Under Fire: The Pro-Israel Lobby
Intimidates Journalists to Ensure that Most Coverage Remains Biased in Its Favour, 2002; Eltantawi: US Media
Turn a Blind Eye to the Israeli Occupation, 2002; Dunsky: What Constitutes Full and Fair Media Coverage of
Israeli-Palestinian Issues? 2002.
788
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Action Alert: For NPR, Violence Is Calm if It’s Violence against
Palestinians, 2002. The title of the article refers to allegations by NPR that Israel and the occupied Palestinian
384

The privately owned American media are even more biased in favor of Israel. In a
separate report by FAIR, the use of the terms, ‘retaliation’, ‘retaliate’, ‘retaliatory’, etc. in
nightly news broadcasts from September 28, 2000 through March 17, 2002 by the three main
broadcasting networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, with regard to Israeli and Palestinian violent
acts was analyzed. The findings indicated that 79 percent of the time the words were used to
describe Israeli acts of violence. Palestinian violent acts, however, were only described with
these words in 9 percent of the cases. (12 percent were ambiguous or used to describe violent
acts by both sides in the conflict). The impression was thus fostered that Israelis acts in self-
defense, in response to violence initiated by their foes, almost nine times more than the
Palestinians do. It should by no means be forgotten in this context that in reality both the first
use of firearms, the first five deaths and the first hundreds of gunshot wounds in the Second
Intifada were all perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and policemen, nor that around three quarters
of the killings in the Intifada thus far were in fact of Palestinians by Israelis. Retaliation?789
The same kind of behavior, amounting to inexcusable, downright lies spread by the US
media, could be observed during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. In a fit of
willful manipulation, retaliatory Hezbollah attacks on Israel on June 24, 1999, killing two
civilians, were simply and falsely predated by the US media to give the impression that they
occurred before Israel killed at least nine Lebanese civilians in massive bombing raids earlier
on the same day. Those US media outlets included CNN, Time, Newsweek, NPR, and the
Chicago Tribune, media that all have access to all the major news agencies, including the
American Associated Press, the British Reuters and the Agence France-Presse, which in
contrast to the outlets all recorded the chronology of events accurately.790
But even the news agencies are not immune. The US Associated Press (AP), the
largest news organization in the world, apparently erases video material that records Israeli
soldiers committing war crimes. In the words of one critic its coverage of the conflict suffers
from the following kinds of systematic pro-Israeli bias and manipulation: ‘newsworthy stories
not being covered, reports sent to international newspapers but not to American ones, stories
omitting or misreporting significant facts, critical sentences being removed from updated
reports.’ A major study established that in 2004, AP reported 131% of Israeli deaths (some
deaths were reported repeatedly) and 66% of Palestinian deaths in headlines or first
paragraphs. It covered Israeli children’s deaths at a rate 7.5 times greater than that of
Palestinian children’s deaths.791
The misrepresentation and the lies by mainstream US media go on, sometimes with
heavy diplomatic consequences, as well. Canada officially listed Hezbollah, one of the major

territories are ‘calm’ unless there is violence perpetrated against Jews. According to FAIR, its action alert
prompted ‘at least several hundred people’ to protest the biased use of ‘calm’ by contacting NPR and
complaining against its flagrant misuse of public US funds for pro-Israeli propaganda. Yet in spite of the FAIR
campaign no improvement with regard to this bias in the NPR coverage of the conflict could be detected a month
later. See FAIR: Activism Update: NPR Continues Distortion on Mideast ‘Calm’, 2002. Thus, the pro-Israeli
bias on NPR is not only habitual, it is conscious and arrogant, as well. The same manner of underreporting
Palestinian deaths while making Israeli deaths major news items is also obvious in the privately-owned US
media. See FAIR: Media Advisory: Journalists Find ‘Calm’ when Only Palestinians Die, 2003.
789
FAIR, Action Alert: In U.S. Media, Palestinians Attack, Israel Retaliates, 2002. ABC was the least biased
network with ‘only’ three times as many uses of the words for Israeli acts, whereas NBC was the worst, never
once referring to Palestinian violent acts as retaliation, but 41 times to Israeli violent acts as such. See also FAIR,
Action Alert: CBS’s Mideast ‘Cycle of Violence’; Analysis Omits Palestinian Deaths, 2006. On the nearly
ubiquitous lack of balance and objectivity in the US media, especially in foreign news reporting, and their
systemic roots in an elitist system of economic and political dominance, see Herman & Chomsky 1994 (1988);
Patterson & Wilkins: Media Ethics: Issues and Cases, 52005: 196.
790
Ibish: Retaliating in Advance: U.S. Reports Reverse Chronology of Israeli Airstrikes on Lebanon, 1999. A
similar story of false reports can be found in Fisk: US Media Mirror Distorts Middle East, 1998.
791
Quote from Weir: AP Erases Video of Israeli Soldier Shooting Palestinian Boy, 2006; If Americans Knew:
Deadly Distortion: Associated Press Coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Deaths, 2006. See this website also for
other analyses of systematic US media bias in reporting the Palestine/Israel conflict.
 385

parliamentary political parties and militant resistance groups against the Israeli invasion in
Lebanon, as a ‘terrorist organization’ on December 11, 2002, referring to alleged statements
by the Hezbollah secretary-general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, to the effect that Hezbollah was
urging Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Israel to continue and,
moreover, for the attacks to spread around the world. Nasrallah, in fact, said nothing of the
kind. The quotes had been invented by the pro-Israeli Paul Martin, a reporter from the far-
right US newspaper, the Washington Times, and by Walid Phares, a far-right, ‘contributing
expert’ for the Israeli-based Ariel Center for Policy Research. (One of that center’s directors is
Yitzhak Shamir, the former Likud prime minister of Israel.)792 After the fraud had been
exposed, Canada, amazingly, did not repeal its action, apparently due to fear of its mighty
southern neighbor. Australia later became the third nation outside of Israel to ban Hezbollah,
although the country’s laws only allow bans on groups that are listed by the UN Security
Council. In the words of domestic analysts, the Australian ban of Hezbollah was (also) more
because of US pressure than due to ‘terrorism’.793 Such is the effectiveness of the propaganda
when combined with intimidation (or cowardice). We shall return to anti-Palestinian racism in
Canada below.
The New York Times, widely considered the most important newspaper in the world,
refers to killings of Israelis but blatantly ignores killed Palestinians in its headlines. For
example, on April 10, 2002, the late edition New York Times front-page screamed:

‘13 Israeli Troops Killed in Ambush; Bus Bomb Kills 10’ in the 36-
point headline size that the paper reserves for what it considers major
events. Six paragraphs into the story, the paper provided this
additional information: ‘More than 100 Palestinians have been killed
in Jenin, the Palestinian town that has brought the stiffest resistance to
the broad Israeli sweep through the West Bank. Many of the
Palestinian dead still lie where they fell.’ By its headline choice, the
Times suggested that the deaths of 23 Israelis…are more important
than the deaths of 100 Palestinians. But even those ratios may
understate the greater weight that the editors place on Israeli
casualties. Beneath the main headline in the late edition were two
subheads: ‘Worst Army Toll’ and ‘A 14th Soldier Is Killed in
Separate Attack at a Refugee Camp.’ The Times might have used one
of the subheads to acknowledge the deaths of more than a hundred
Palestinians, but evidently noting the death of a single additional
Israeli soldier was considered more newsworthy. One might suggest,
in the New York Times’ defense, that large numbers of Palestinian
deaths have been a constant since Israel’s military invasion of the
West Bank began on April 1, whereas the deaths on April 9 were the
first time since the offensive began that Israelis – civilians or
combatants – had seen casualties on that scale. But when were the
hundreds of Palestinians killed considered to be major, front-page
news by the New York Times? A review of the page A1 headlines
used by the Times since the March 29 start of the invasion reveals a
striking lack of references to the Palestinians killed in the Israeli
operations.794

792
Nasser: Hizbullah – Media Misquoted Our Leader, 2002; Regan: Hezbollah Remarks Likely ‘Invented’, 2002;
Parry: Media Caught in a Lie about a Quote that Was Never Made, 2002
793
Goldsmith: Australia Joins U.S., Canada in Ban on Hezbollah, 2003
794
FAIR Action Alert: Palestinian Deaths Aren’t Headline Material at New York Times, 2002. Although the
United Nations Security Council and the overwhelming majority of the world community demanded an
immediate and independent inquiry into the Palestinian deaths in Jenin, Israel stalled and delayed the inquiry
until it was no longer possible to count or inspect the scores of Palestinian bodies, due to their decomposition.
The UN then gave up and the apparent massacre in Jenin remains uninvestigated by an authoritative neutral
386

When Israelis are killed by Palestinians, the acts are often referred to by both the
private and the public US media (and by extension, many media around the world) as the end
of a ‘calm’ period, as a ‘flare-up in violence’, even if many more Palestinians were killed by
Israelis in the preceding days or weeks. Israel and the Occupied Territories are thus ‘calm’
unless, and only unless, violence is perpetrated against Jews.
For example, on September 18 and 19, 2002, six Israelis were killed in the first two
Palestinian suicide bomb attacks in six weeks. All major US news outlets referred to the
preceding six weeks as ‘calm’. However, during those six weeks, 54 Palestinians were killed
by Israelis, most of them unarmed civilians, totally uninvolved in resistance activities, some
of them in their homes. At least seven of the Palestinians killed during this time were children,
at least 15 were teenagers, and two were women.795 Calm?
During peace negotiations between Israelis, Palestinians and Americans in Jordan in
June 2003, Israeli soldiers embarked on a large number of unprovoked attacks, some fatal,
against Palestinian civilians in Palestinian cities and towns. The US mass media, with the sole
exception of the newspaper, Newsday, did not report these attacks, in some cases even
explicitly and falsely stating that there was no violence at all.796
Although media monitoring organizations and concerned individuals have pointed out
and protested these practices they seem to have become even more widespread as time passes.
In the December 2003 reporting of the first suicide bombing in 12 weeks targeting Israelis –
and killing three along with the bomber – not only US media, but also foreign media,
including the otherwise relatively objective British-owned Reuters news agency referred to
the preceding two-and-a-half months as ‘relative calm’ or ‘quiet’, although 117 Palestinians
had in fact been killed by Israelis during this time.797 The occupied indigenous population is
thus always, implicitly or explicitly, accused of breaking the peace, of launching provocative,
rather than provoked, attacks.
A related kind of bias, i.e. selectively incomplete information, became manifest to
impartial outside observers when the US and other western mass media commemorated the
thirtieth anniversary of the murders in Munich of eleven Israeli Olympic athletes by
Palestinian militants on September 5-6, 1972. The anniversary story received blanket
coverage by American media, whereas the twentieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila

body. On the basis of a compilation from public information, mostly from the observer missions of individual
countries and a variety of NGO reports, the UN did however finally publish a report on August 1, 2002, in which
the word ‘massacre’ was not used, although the UN faulted Israel for keeping out aid and medical services from
the city after the raids as well as blaming Palestinian militants for using civilian residential areas as bases. It said
at least 52 Palestinians died in Jenin, as many as half of them civilians, while Israel lost 23 soldiers there. But
497 Palestinians were killed between March 1 and May 7 in the course of the Israeli incursion into Palestinian
cities and towns including Jenin, the report said, citing UN figures. Another 1,447 Palestinians were wounded,
including 538 live ammunition injuries, the report said, criticizing Israel for using heavy weaponry in densely
populated areas. However, much criticism was immediately levelled at the UN ‘report’ for exonerating the
Israelis. Wael Qadan, general director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, questioned the UN figures. He
said his organization had recorded 65 Palestinians killed in Jenin, including those in the camp who were not from
Jenin itself. He also said there was no breakdown for civilians and gunmen in the UN report. Human rights
groups said that Israeli soldiers used Palestinians as human shields in house-to-house searches, that they tore
down buildings in full knowledge that civilians inside would be killed, and that they executed unarmed civilians
who had already surrendered to the soldiers. See Arieff: UN Says Israel, Arabs, Put Civilians in Harm’s Way,
2002; N.N.: Israel Says UN Jenin Report Ends “Misconceptions”, August 1, 2002; Hauser: Months after
Incursion, Jenin’s Scars Not Healing, 2002; Leopold & Arieff: No Israeli Massacre in Jenin but Grave Abuses,
2002. The important thing in this context, it should be reiterated, is not that the New York Times was wrong in
its estimate of Palestinian deaths, but that it downplayed, even ignored, a huge Palestinian death toll in favor of a
much smaller Israeli death toll.
795
Brown and Abunimah: Killings of Dozens Once Again Called Period of Calm by US Media, 2002. See also
footnotes 786-789 above.
796
Abunimah: US Media Ignores Israeli Violence After Aqaba Summit, 2003
797
Abuminah: 117 Palestinians Killed, Hundreds Injured During Media’s “Relative Calm”, 2003
 387

massacres, in which at least many hundreds, and probably thousands of Palestinians were
murdered due to intervention by the then Defense Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, was quietly
passed over. That anniversary fell ten days after the Munich one, but it was almost completely
ignored by the US media, although the number of victims was more than a hundred times
more, although it was closer in time to the present, and although one of the main perpetrators
still, or again, held considerable power in world politics. He was now the commander-in-chief
of the fifth (or so) largest military power in the world. The few short mentions that the
twentieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres received in the US mass media all
left out the inconvenient facts that the top responsible Israeli official, then defense minister
Sharon, was now prime minister of Israel and thus, apparently, that the closest US ally, the
head of government who receives the most military aid and the most overall aid from the
USA, was a war criminal.798
Nevertheless, snippets of objective reporting do occasionally manage to slip through
the net of pro-Israeli bias that characterizes US mass media. During the 2006 Lebanon war,
the pictures that showed the most devastation were obviously pictures of the results of Israel’s
totally unproportional bombardment. They tended to make the front pages, and the news
shows, although the commentaries, editorials and opinion columns were staunchly pro-Israeli.
And there was ‘next to no debate’ in the US media about who were to blame for the many
deaths that occurred in this war and that are still occurring, due to Israel’s use of cluster
bombs.799 For reasons such as these, where the public has to think for itself, it is still possible
to be informed about facts on Israel and its enemies by the US mass media. But it certainly is
not easy.
Possibly due to Britain’s by now traditionally uncritical stance towards US foreign
policy and also because of its own history of pro-Jewish bias in matters relating to Palestine
since World War I, including its crucial role in the formation of the Jewish state, the public
broadcasting of Britain also appears very biased in favor of Israel, as the following analysis by
Paul de Rooij on the BBC’s reporting of the Second Intifada claims:

Unquestionably, Israeli deaths are deemed more important than

Palestinian deaths; much more extended coverage is devoted to the
suicide bombing casualties than to incidents where greater numbers of
Palestinians are killed. Also, BBC TeleText and Online news refer to
Israelis as having been ‘killed’, thus denoting intent, whereas
Palestinians invariably ‘die’; these media always enclose massacres
and assassinations with quotation marks. Israeli killings and violent
acts are always labeled ‘retaliation’, thus justified. Increasingly,
Palestinian violence has been labeled ‘terrorism’ – it has never been
labeled ‘resistance’. Although the term ‘terrorism’ is often applied to
Palestinian violence, the term ‘state terrorism’ is never applied to
Israeli acts of aggression. . . . The more mundane aspects of the
violence engendered by occupation are never reported. The BBC has
never reported that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are subject to
arbitrary ID paper confiscation, thereby losing the right to residence in
Jerusalem and losing their homes. Similarly, house demolitions,
torture, or arbitrary imprisonment without charge, trial, appeal or
representation are not the BBC’s going fare.800

798
Abunimah: How the US Media Forget and Remember an Anniversary, 2002
799
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 312-313
800
De Rooij: Worse than CNN? BBC News and the Mideast, 2002. The author also points out, however, that
some reporting critical of Israel that would never have been shown by US broadcasters has nevertheless appeared
on BBC. See also Deans: Flood of Complaints as BBC Postpones Israel Investigation, 2003; Fisk October 22,
2002. On direct British military aid to Israel, government-sponsored yet illegal, since it is being used for state
terrorist purposes to kill civilians, see Pilger 2003 (2002): 144-147.
388

The privately owned British mass media are, in effect, no better, although some rather
marginalized exceptions do exist (as is the case in the USA). Research undertaken by the
Glasgow University Media Group even indicates that Britons belong to the most misinformed
and brainwashed people in the world with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and
perhaps also on other subjects. Britain, of course, is today a key ally to, or key instrument for,
the USA and among other things a potential instrument for Zionists to manipulate and
neutralize the European Union with regard to the conflict:

Of all the statistics accompanying the violence in occupied Palestine

and Israel - 1600 Palestinians killed and 20,000 injured, up to $10
billion worth of damage to the Palestinian economy, 190 attacks in
three months on Palestinian ambulances - perhaps the most sobering
are that eighty percent of British people do not know where the four
million Palestinian refugees come from, and only nine percent knows
that it is the Israelis who are the occupiers. . . . Palestinian violence is
magnified through stronger language than that used for the
overwhelmingly larger Israeli violence, from Israelis speaking twice
as much on television news as Palestinians, and, contrary to Israeli
violence, Palestinian attacks never being ‘in retaliation’. Less than 0.5
percent of media text on this second intifada explained the crucial
history to the conflict.801

In a second Glasgow study, the main British public and private television news
programs and the audiences’ staggering misperceptions of the conflict, based upon these
programs, were analyzed. As in the USA, words describing Palestinian attacks as attacks, but
Israeli attacks as ‘retaliations’, or as other kinds of responses, were used at a ratio of six to
one. The Palestinian perspectives and narratives were marginalized to the benefit of the
militarily stronger players involved in the conflict:

There is a preponderance of official ‘Israeli perspectives’, particularly

on BBC 1, where Israelis were interviewed or reported over twice as
much as Palestinians. On top of this, US politicians who support Israel
were very strongly featured. They appeared more than politicians from
any other country and twice as much as those from Britain.802

So much for the media in the USA and the UK, until recently the two greatest weapons
sellers, and still the greatest media content exporters in the world. (As mentioned in Chapter
I.1.3, the UK had slipped to fifth position in weapons exports since 2000, but the USA has
consolidated and extended its worldwide lead.) Words, indeed, are also weapons. And so are
images. The USA and the UK remain very closely allied with regard to foreign policy, and for

801
Sammonds: The Ending of History: Israel/Palestine, 2002. See also one of the authors of the Glasgow study:
Philo: Missing In Action: New Research Suggests that Television News Fails to Inform Young People About
What’s Going On in the Occupied Territories, Or Why, 2002: ‘Only 9% knew…that the settlers were Israeli.
There were actually more people (11%) who believed that the Palestinians were occupying the territories and
that the settlers were Palestinian.’ On pro-Israeli media bias in the USA and the UK, see also Edwards, David:
Hide The Looking Glass: The Observer, ITV, Channel 4, The New York Times, The Washington Post, 2002, and
Solomon: Palestinians Are Blurry In The Editorial Frame, 2002.
802
N.N.: Glasgow University Media Group: Bad News from Israel, Greg Philo and Mike Berry, 2004. By the
time of the 2008-9 Gaza War, things at the BBC had not gotten better, as the second edition of the book, ‘More
Bad News from Israel’, reveals. See Llewellyn: BBC Is ‘Confusing Cause and Effect’ in Its Israeli Coverage,
2011. See also Miller, D. Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control? 2003, on the
US/UK military and political strategy of ‘information dominance’, a new kind of propaganda that, among other
things, tolerates (or better: ignores) dissent as long as it does not present obstacles, i.e. effective resistance, to US
and British military and political goals. Thus, illusions of healthy media pluralism and of democracy are also
generated.
 389

these and several related reasons they are possibly more dependent on misinformation and
clever manipulation of their own electorates, and of the decision-makers of other countries,
than any other two countries in the world, except, perhaps, Israel.
Public broadcasters, especially, cannot be forgiven for this. Whereas privately owned
media may always be excused for reasons of profitability (they have to give their audiences
what their owners, advertisers and audiences want), and are thus to be taken less seriously,
although they may profess and even believe in their own objectivity, public broadcasters are
bound by law to inform accurately and objectively. But in the USA and Britain, they
spectacularly fail to do so. Unfortunately, this fact usually raises few eyebrows in the two
countries that habitually pride themselves as the ‘leaders of the free world’. There, the
freedom of the press has to a great extent become the freedom for the elites to mislead, to lie,
to incite, and to get away with it.
One might counter that most of the Arabic-language media, Palestinian and otherwise,
are correspondingly biased in their anti-Israeli coverage of the conflict, and that may even be
true, but these media are crucially powerless on the global stage, where the US and UK media
reign almost supreme, among other things through the Associated Press and Reuters, the two
largest news agencies in the world, also by heavily influencing Arabic-speakers.803 The
Palestinian media and journalists, moreover, are subject to almost routine attacks by the Israeli
army, as we shall see presently.
Nevertheless, it is imperative to reiterate the importance of the moral high ground
here, as with the phenomenon of apartheid violence. Just because the Zionists and their allies
fabricate and distort, does not mean that a liberation movement should. The truth, not an
exaggeration or invention of it, shall set you free.
Countries that are closely allied to the US and the UK manifest similar bias. For
example, in Canada, the largest and arguably most influential newspaper publisher, the
CanWest Global Communications Corporation, is owned by a staunchly pro-Israeli family,
the Aspers. Their interventions in editorial decisions, ‘gag orders’ and acts of ‘censorship’ (in
the words of their numerous domestic critics, including reporters, journalist unions and media
commentators), are focused on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2002, CanWest
owned around 60 percent of Canada’s mass media, including: ‘126 community newspapers,
one of three national television networks, and a major Internet portal, as well as 14 major
metropolitan daily newspapers, including the nationally distributed National Post. In most
large Canadian cities, CanWest runs the only daily newspaper.’
Stephen Kimber, director of the school of journalism at the University of King’s
College and a columnist who resigned from the Halifax Daily News, an Asper paper, told
Reuters: ‘Almost anything that you wrote that might be construed as not supportive of the
Israeli government position was a nonstarter, and I found that frightening’.
A native Canadian columnist, Doug Cuthand, found that the first ever of 500 columns
of his that was killed by the editor of another Asper newspaper was one in which he, for the
first time, compared the plight of native Canadians (see Section I.4, on genocidal societies,
above) to Palestinians. These cases, and others like them, have at least managed to spark a
debate about the lack of freedom of the media in Canada.804
803
Zayani: Witnessing the Intifada: Al Jazeera’s Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, 2005: 171-182;
Miles, H.: Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World, 2006 (2005). The title of the latter book says
it all. The Qatar-based Arab TV news station challenged the enforced pro-Western near-consensus in the mass
media industry, and was punished for it. Al-Jazeera, the only Arab television news channel available in English,
can hardly be obtained through western cable services, and political and military pressure from the USA, in
particular, has unfairly given Al-Jazeera the reputation of being controversial with regard to Israel. It is in fact a
great deal more objective than most, if not all, western mainstream media. This is not to deny that there is
occasionally anti-Israeli bias in the Arab media, but that is next to nothing compared to the pro-Israeli, anti-
Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab bias in western media.
804
Hodgson: Press Freedom Debate Flares at Canada Newspapers, 2002; Badih: Journalists Launch Own
Intifada against Pro-Israel Owners, 2002. See Burrows: Israel’s Allegations about Peace Activists Are Deliberate
390

France, the third greatest power, is special in many ways. It has the largest Jewish and
the largest Muslim populations in Europe. Although it was one of Israel’s main backers until
1967, when the USA started an unprecedented run of state support for another state, France
has since taken a more balanced approach. Debates on Israel and Palestine in the French mass
media are often very passionate. In 2004, a racism report commissioned by the French interior
ministry appeared to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish racism. Its author even called
for the criminalization of ‘unfounded’ comparisons between apartheid South Africa and
Israel! Luckily, the recommendation was not implemented.805
In Israel itself, the media are in fact less unfree and not quite as biased as in the US,
the UK or Canada. First and foremost, media commentators who are not Jewish and who are
outside Israel have a harder time criticizing Israel for fear of being accused of ‘anti-
semitism’.806 Moreover, in Israel, it is impossible to avoid some of the basic facts about Israel
and its occupied territories to the same extent that this is being done abroad, especially when it
comes to apartheid geography and apartheid demography. (Remember the British, only nine
percent of whom realized at the beginning of this century that Israelis are occupying the
occupied territories!) This does not mean, however, that the Israeli media or the elites’
treatment of the domestic media – or of foreign-owned media – are superior to their
counterparts in the US and the UK in any moral sense whatsoever.
The Israeli state restrictions on reporting in areas under its rule have eased with
increasing military power and self-confidence, but they are still severe. The same goes for the
lack of freedom of expression in general. After more than twenty years of Israeli military
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli bans on the usage of the word ‘Palestine’,
on the display of the Palestinian flag, and on the display of the colors of the Palestinian flag,
were finally rescinded in the late 1980s, i.e. after Israel had decided to opt for a Bantustan
policy. Palestinians under Israeli occupation were, furthermore, unable to phone or mail
anywhere in the Arab world before 1990. Political information and communication through
books, newspapers and magazines from the Arab world was also unavailable to them. Israel
controlled almost all of the communication coming out of and into the occupied Palestinian
Territories. The changes since the late 1980s are more due to global forces (globalization)
against which Israel is almost as powerless as the South African apartheid government was
from around the same time.807 But Israel has persevered and exhibits one of the bloodiest and
most comprehensive systems of censorship and information control in the world since its very
inception in 1948, despite paradoxical legal guarantees for freedom of expression, which are,
however, really only for the benefit of Jews and other non-Arabs, and not for all Jews or all

Falsifications, 2003, on pro-Israeli bias in The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s otherwise most respected
newspapers.
805
N.N.: French Racism Report Causes Controversy, October 21, 2004. This book could thus have been a
criminal offense in France. If I had said that God knows that this book is not criminal, it would not have helped
me in a court of law in a country that has a proud tradition of liberty of opinion and expression, of even putting
freedom before equality and brotherhood, and of the first known declaration of universal human rights, but is
also known for exceptional brutality and destructiveness from the time of the crusades over colonialism until
today’s neo-colonialism, secret weapons tests, and state-sanctioned and -instigated murders of environmentalists.
806
Fisk October 22, 2002. On mainstream leftist Israeli media’s relative lack of bias compared to that of the
mainstream US ‘liberal’ or ‘leftist’ media, in this case the New York Times and CNN, see Kanazi: Covering
Israel/Palestine: US Media Bias, 2006. After returning home to England in 2004 from his first visit to Beirut
since he was held (and tortured) there as a hostage by Hizbollah-linked militants between 1987 and 1991, Church
of England envoy Terry Waite compared Hizbollah with the ANC and directed angry criticism at Israeli policies
against Palestinians: “My God, when you look at the Palestinian situation, before you say anything on this,
unfortunately because of the atmosphere, you have to preface everything by saying ‘I am not anti-Semitic, no,
no, no, I am not’…But I have never seen anything that equates more closely to apartheid…” Quoted in
Cawthorne: Beirut Better outside a Car Boot, Says Terry Waite, 2004.
807
Said 1992 (1979): xxvi; Najjar: New Palestinian Media and Democratization from Below, 2007: 195. On
Israeli dependence on British emergency censorship law, discarded for Palestine before the British withdrew
from it, see Tilley (ed.) 2009: 238f, and footnote 194 above.
 391

non-Arabs, either.
Journalists are now allowed to get closer to the action during some small-scale military
operations, but not during large-scale operations. By the fall of 2004, the Israeli harnessing of
the media, foreign and domestic, was highlighted by at least 497 incidents of journalists being
shot, attacked, harassed or obstructed in other ways by Israelis (overwhelmingly by soldiers,
but also by some settlers and some civilians) during the first four years of the Second Intifada.
In this context, it should not be forgotten that the Palestinian Authorities (PA) also violate the
basic human right to freedom of expression, especially, however, in order to silence ‘radical’,
anti-Israeli journalists, columnists and publications. This is mainly due to political pressure on
the PA from the Israelis and the Americans, who, of course, wish to silence radical Palestinian
voices and sometimes just the critics of the Bantustan scheme. Still, at least 88.4 percent of
the press freedom violations in the Second Intifada were perpetrated by the Israelis
themselves. Aside from the targeting of journalists, including several shooting deaths, this
also comprises several targeted air force bombings, missile attacks and other kinds of assaults
on Palestinian media outlets, which are routinely accused by the Israelis of spreading
propaganda and inciting violence. After several bombings of the Palestinian Authority-run
broadcaster, the Voice of Palestine, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
started to monitor the station’s broadcasts. It found no incitement to violence, no military uses
of the broadcaster, which of course defines it as a civilian institution. The Israeli military,
however, persisted with its attacks – in blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions and other
pillars of international law.808 These pillars are the perhaps most celebrated elements of
international law by US elites. But the Americans remained silent about its main client’s
trespasses. There are no corresponding attacks on Israeli (or US, Canadian, or British!) media
outlets or on other pro-Israeli propagandistic institutions perpetrated by Palestinians or any of
their allies, none at all.809 Moreover, many foreign journalists in the region have reportedly
stated that: ‘they have never encountered such rough treatment as they are receiving from the
Israeli army’.810
This is not a new development. Nine years prior to the Second Intifada, the following
assessment on the lack of press freedom in Israel and Israeli-controlled territories was made
by CPJ:

Wide-ranging restrictions on the media remain in place in Israel:

Palestinian journalists are detained, without charge or trial;
publications are closed down; newspapers are censored, and access to
the occupied territories is frequently restricted. Extremely severe
restrictions on the occupied territories after the outbreak in January of
war in the Persian Gulf offer little hope for improvement. Authorities
continue to administratively detain Palestinian journalists on the
assumption they are using their profession as a cover for the
involvement in the intifada, Censors often remove from Arabic-
language newspapers translations of stories that have appeared in the
Hebrew-language press on security grounds. The Hebrew-language
press is also subject to censorship, but in practice it is applied with
greater leniency. In March the authorities began to restrict reporting

808
N.N.: Israel: IDF Troops Destroy Palestinian Broadcast Facilities in Gaza, February 21, 2002. See also
footnote 831.
809
Bathish, N. et al. 2004. Palestinians do not kill foreign journalists, only a few of their own.
810
Perlmutter: Spin Doctors in the Middle East, 2002. As we have seen in previous chapters, observers who are
not journalists, e.g. representatives of the United Nations and other intergovernmental, as well as non-
governmental organizations, human rights activists, etc., are also hindered and in some cases even killed by the
Israelis. See N.N.: Amnesty Says Israel Shutting Out Foreign Scrutiny, May 9, 2003; Gershberg: Israel Steps Up
Crackdown on Foreign Activists, 2003.
392

on Soviet Jewish immigration. . . .811

‘Newspapers under the Influence’, a book on Israeli daily newspaper coverage of the
initial weeks of the Second Intifada, written by the former journalist, now linguist and media
researcher, Daniel Dor, an Israeli, concludes that objectivity actually existed in that coverage,
but mainly in the back pages. Especially editorial decisions on headlines and front-page
photos, the real movers in public opinion, were ‘incomplete, committed, biased’ and
sometimes plainly false. The simple professional demand for objectivity in the mass media
reporting was frequently seen by the Israeli newspaper-reading public, as well as by many
media workers themselves, as close to treason. Instead of fairness, honesty, objectivity or
truth, patriotism is the main journalistic virtue in the Israeli media. Dor’s conclusions are truly
alarming: “We can say that anyone who relied on the coverage of the events in the Israeli
newspapers…simply don’t know anything about what happened here during that [first]
month, about the infinitely complicated causal chain that led from Ariel Sharon’s visit to the
Temple Mount on Thursday, September 28, 2000 to…the next ‘war of no choice’…”812
In an interesting piece on similarities and differences between South African and
Israeli apartheid with regard to newspapers, Raymond Louw – who was the editor-in-chief of
the main anti-apartheid newspaper during the 1970s and ‘80s in South Africa, the Rand Daily
Mail – recalls the similar financial pressures that Ha’aretz, the main liberal daily in Israel,
now faces. Due to financial withdrawals, readers cancelling subscriptions and companies
cancelling advertisements, the Rand Daily Mail had to close down in 1985.813

811
Committee to Protect Journalists: Attacks on the Press 1990: A Worldwide Survey, 1991: 9f; See also
Committee to Protect Journalists/Article 19: Journalism under Occupation: Israel’s Regulation of the Palestinian
Press, 1988; Israeli military censorship goes on today, to the point of misleading the public, according to the
Israeli media, which accused the army of lying about types of weapons it uses against Palestinian civilians,
apparently in order to preclude criticism over unnecessary killings. See N.N.: Israel’s Military Admits Error in
Report on Raid, November 19, 2003. See Salam: Daniel Seaman: Enemy of the Journalists in Israel, 2007, on a
particularly oppressive head of the Israeli Government Press Office, an important tool to control the news media,
especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where it has a near-blanket refusal policy for Palestinian
journalists requesting and needing press cards and for many foreign journalists as well. See also Tilley (ed.)
2009: 239-241.
812
Dor: Newspapers under the Influence (in Hebrew), 2001: 19. Reviewed in Lavie: All the News that Fits,
2001. See also Harrer: Konflikt findet auch in den Medien statt, 2002; Mendel: Diary, 2008; Jamal & Masalha:
Arab Reporters Needed for the Hebrew Press: Patterns of Representing Arab-Palestinian Citizens in Israeli Print
Media, 2011. On yet another possible main virtue in journalism, namely, the demand for reporting human rights
violations, i.e. injustices, and on the concept of ‘democratic journalism’, see Kunczik: Closing Remarks: Is There
an International Ethics of Journalism? 1999; 245-268. On the conspicuous lack of reporting gross human rights
violations carried out by Israelis against Palestinians by the BBC, and thus, the worst possible journalistic and
media vice from this perspective, the media being accessory to a cover-up of systematic human rights violations,
see de Rooij: The BBC and Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, 2004: ‘...the BBC’s bias is evident primarily in
terms of omission.’
813
Louw: Dealing with Hostile Readers, 2001: 29. The main differences related by Louw are, again, differences
of degree rather than of kind: the intensity of censorship in South Africa and the whole-hearted rejection of
apartheid in the wide sense by all members of his staff, as opposed to members of the staff at Ha’aretz in Israel.
Nevertheless, Louw’s visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories was sponsored by the then editor-in-chief of
Ha’aretz, Hanoch Marmari, and some of the newspaper’s Jewish reporters did criticize Israel for implementing
‘apartheid’ during a visit to the West Bank that Louw undertook with them during his visit to the region. More
recently, Ha’aretz’ Managing Editor, Yoel Esteron, said that Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, two reporters whole-
heartedly opposed to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have cost Ha’aretz ‘a few dozen’
subscriptions. See also the article on Hass by Miller, M.: Voice for Israel’s Enemy, 2002. For criticism of the
differences between Ha’aretz’ Hebrew (‘nationalistically correct’) and English editions, see HaCohen: Looking
Behind Ha’aretz’s Liberal Image, 2002. For criticism of the one-sidedness of Israeli media reporting of violence
and security issues, see Reinhart: “According to Security Sources”: What Remains of the Israeli Media, 2005 and
Keshev. Since 2004, the Israeli media monitoring group, Keshev, is working with the Palestinian human rights
group, Miftah, on mapping bias, dehumanization, and incitement to violence in the Israeli and Palestinian media,
in a project financed by the European Commission. I am proud to have been part of this effort in its early stages.
See Miftah: Media Monitoring, 2007.
 393

Although censorship, harassment and brute force against the domestic (and the
foreign) media, perpetrated by the elites of the privileged racial minority, was (is) present in
both apartheid societies, these extreme measures were found by the elites to be less efficient
(and less objectionable to the international community) in the cases of the Rand Daily Mail
and Ha’aretz than financial pressures combined with propaganda. This conclusion again
highlights the otherwise so often underestimated responsibilities of civil society. The word
‘apartheid’ cannot usefully or even meaningfully be restricted to refer to policies and actions
formulated and carried out by a government or state alone.
With the Israeli elites so unanimously intent on warfare, and the warfare so
remarkably spearheaded by an opposition politician rather than the government, it calls for the
earnest question whether Israel is even a democracy for its Jewish citizens. It does not appear
so. How can non-elite Israelis carry any burden of responsibility for apartheid when they are
being systematically deceived by their politicians, their generals and their news media? But
they can. They do have access to foreign media, and although most of these were also
deceptive in an anti-Palestinian way, many were not. Moreover, ‘Israeli Arabs’ did not
swallow the lies. Israel’s Jews could have talked to them. Finally, Israeli Jews in general have
enough free time, financial and technological resources and means to inform themselves,
whether through the media or directly. That is their civic duty, one that they have generally
failed. Yet, most of the responsibility must lie with the Israeli elites, including also the
business elites in general, i.e. not just the media, but also, in this context especially, the
advertisers.
Less than 25 percent of all those killed in the Second Intifada, so far, have been Jews.
Almost all killings and clashes at first took place on occupied territory, on which the Israeli
forces had moved in, surrounding and bombarding Palestinian cities, towns and settlements
with tanks, artillery and (US-made and -delivered) helicopter gunships as well as (US-made
and -delivered) F-16 bomber jet planes. The killings that did take place on Israeli soil in the
initial fighting were the killings of 13 Israeli Arabs, some at demonstrations, some in their
own homes. These killings and other attacks on Palestinians with Israeli citizenship were
carried out by Jewish mobs, police and soldiers. But the US Secretary of State, Madeleine
Albright, insisted that Palestinians were ‘laying siege to Israel’.814 Youths armed with rocks
besieged one of the world’s most formidable military powers! The Cable News Network
(CNN), part of the largest media corporation in the world, Time Warner Turner, reported
falsely on its website on the first day of hostilities that Palestinian protesters had pelted Israeli

814
Interview with Madeleine Albright, NBC ‘Meet the Press’, Sunday, October 8, 2000, quoted in Ashrawi: A
Tragic Reversal: Madeleine Albright’s View of Reality, 2000 (emphasis, H.A.). According to Ashrawi, Albright
even repeated herself and exclaimed: ‘Those Palestinian rock throwers have placed Israel under siege,’ adding,
again, that the Israeli army is defending itself. She is also quoted thus in Said: Double Standards, 2000. Albright
went on to bless the sale and delivery of more attack helicopters for the Israelis to use in assaults on Palestinian
civilians, in spite of a campaign by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch, and others, to stop the deal. See their Suspend Helicopter Sale to Israel (A Joint Letter to Madeleine K.
Albright), 2000. On the continued unsuccessful efforts to stop western powers from supplying Israel with the
means to commit grave human rights violations, see N.N.: Amnesty Seeks to Halt UK Arms Exports to Israel,
August 16, 2001; Evans, D.: Britain Under Fire Over Israel Arms Report, 2002. After Amnesty International had
published an investigative report accusing Israelis of being behind the great majority of human rights violations
in the first year of the Second Intifada, Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the non-governmental human rights
organization ‘biased and not objective’ and said Israel considered Amnesty International’s reports on the conflict
‘a product of its political agenda’. N.N.: Amnesty International Calls for Mideast Observers, November 13,
2001. On the most pro-Israeli media in the world (even more so than the Israeli media themselves), see Said:
American Zionism: For US Media, Israel is the Victim, 2000. The USA is the only country in the world that has
more Jewish citizens than Israel does, although Jews only make up 2 percent of the entire US population.
American Jews’ view of Israel is often a more romanticized and extremist one than that of most Israeli Jews. In
both views, Arabs generally play an unambiguously evil role and simply do not belong. See Giacomo: Powerful
U.S. Jewish Lobby Flexes Political Muscle, 2002.
394

worshippers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with stones815, whereas in reality they had
thrown stones at some 1,000 Israeli policemen and soldiers who had accompanied the
rightwing Likud party leader and subsequent prime minister and fugitive from Belgian Justice,
Ariel Sharon, to the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif, Temple Mount) in Israeli-occupied
east Jerusalem, the perhaps most contested 30 acres of land in the world. The armed Israeli
forces had provocatively taken up sniper positions on street corners, squares and the roofs of
buildings, etc., of all days on a Friday, the Muslim religious day of rest and prayer. Five
Palestinians were shot dead and hundreds were wounded, at least 32 of them seriously, by the
visiting, but uninvited soldiers, who thus, along with Sharon, sparked the outbreak of the
Second Intifada, and the ensuing intense hostilities. Not a single shot was fired by Palestinians
on that first day of hostilities. Nor was any Israeli killed, although a few soldiers were injured
by stones.816 Over the next months, hundreds of Palestinians, many of them children, were
killed by Israelis. In the following year, Hamas and Islamic Jihad then resumed and
intensified a retaliatory suicide attack campaign, dormant since 1996, targeting Jewish
soldiers, settlers and civilians in the occupied territories as well as in ‘Israel proper’.817
The ideological weapon of blaming the victim for the very same wrong that was
perpetrated by the own side, used by the US-Israeli elites against the Palestinians, is in
essence nothing but the same as Isocrates’ and the Greeks’ meta-ideology, or the ‘mirror’ that
Africans represented for Europeans having problems with their own ideals of self-negation
and sexual restraint during the modern era (see Chapters II.9.1-2 above). Israeli society, which
is in actual fact deeply militarized, is presented and represented as civil society. Palestinian
society, on the other hand, which is almost completely civil, is presented and represented as
militarized, as combatants. Deception is an integral part of warfare, and the Israelis as well as
the US elites are waging war on the Palestinians. Israel’s Apartheid Wall, as we have seen,
creates the impression that Palestinians wish to invade and Israelis to defend. This weapon
was also used by many other oppressive elites through history, including the US cultural
elites’ invention of the ‘Westerns’: literature, film, and folklore that portrayed Native
Americans as invaders, unprovoked attackers, thieves, and cowards, and glorified genocide as
something else than genocide, namely as the spread of Civilization, Christianity, and moral
decency.818 The real invaders, the original invaders, the actual thieves, the ultimate cowards,
are treated or referred to as ‘the victims’, and their acts of violence are preposterously labeled
as ‘self-defense’.
Meanwhile, the propaganda machines continue to churn out their half-truths and lies:
An even more pro-Israeli TV news channel has taken over as the most watched and listened to
source of news for U.S. Americans since 2003: the pro-plutocracy, pro-Republican, and pro-
tea party Fox News. And it is even more pro-Israeli and pro-war than CNN. Israeli armed
forces on occupied foreign soil are mostly referred to in US as well as European media as
‘security forces’, Palestinian demonstrators on the other hand as ‘rioters’ or ‘militants’. The
Israeli occupation army, which has created the largest mass of refugees in the world and is

815
CNN, September 29, 2000. It should be mentioned that CNN did report the facts, as well as the lie. It is
symptomatic for the general thesis espoused here that CNN chose white South Africans for their two senior
correspondents from Israel and Palestine, Jerold Kessel and Mike Hanna, during the the beginning of the low-
intensity Israeli-Palestinian war from September 2000. A few months after it broke out, Time Warner Turner
became part of AOL Time Warner, i.e. even larger and even more powerful. CNN’s first-level parent
corporation, the Turner Broadcasting Empire, was now not even present in the name of the ultimate owner any
longer. The bias in its reporting did not diminish in any way, rather the opposite.
816
Miftah: Statement: Israeli Massacre of Palestinian Civilians Continues, 2000; see also Shalal-Esa: Israel’s
Sharon Again Rejects Blame, Regrets Deaths, 2000 and Ackerman, S. 2002. The human rights group, Amnesty
International, and many others criticized Israel for using military rather than policing methods in the fighting,
though the international news media and world leaders on the whole paid scant attention to this side of the story.
For a rare exception see N.N.: Amnesty Slams Israel’s “Excessive Force”, October 22, 2000.
817
N.N.: Israel and the Palestinians: Yes to a Ceasefire, No to a Halt on Settlements, 2001: 47f
818
See footnote 707 above; Reilly, Kaufman & Bodino (eds.) 2003: 327
 395

responsible for one of the longest periods of military occupation in recent history, is habitually
referred to with its self-styled naming, the ‘Israeli Defense Force.’ For the Palestinians, the
indigenous majority, however, it is not a security force, but enforced insecurity.
In a June 2002 special on Jewish victims of Palestinian attacks, CNN’s website again
blatantly ignored coverage of Palestinian victims of the conflict – of three quarters of the
killed victims in this Intifada (and an even higher share of victims of injury and oppression –
and again referred to illegal Jewish settlements as ‘neighborhoods’. The ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was perversely related by CNN to the
USA’s ‘War on Terrorism’, implicitly equating all Palestinians with terrorists.819
Heavy pro-Israeli pressure is also exerted on what for many must seem to be very
unlikely targets. Powerful media that display deep pro-Israeli bias, such as the New York
Times, Washington Post, CNN, and the BBC, are subjected to a barrage of criticism, even
(temporary) boycotts, for being pro-Palestinian (!) as soon as there is the slightest hint of
criticism of Israel voiced or implied within these media. Many critiques of Israel, such as this
one, are simply not published, largely or partly because of publishers’ fear of being labeled
‘anti-Semitic’. Publishers, news agencies, media outlets and authors alike are afraid of
criticizing Israel. Self-censorship with regard to human rights violations and other misdeeds
committed by Israel or Israelis remains a serious, global problem today, and it has a worrying
way of constantly developing new forms.
When applied to Israeli policy and practice, labels like ‘apartheid’ and ‘ethnic
cleansing’ are vigorously attacked by the Israeli propaganda machine, precisely because they
are true, but also because they refer to phenomena that are forbidden under international law.
The propaganda against the obvious truth is therefore a constant, uphill battle. The Israeli
author of ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, Ilan Pappe, spoke in 2006 of:

…the cloak of complexity that Israeli diplomats trot out almost

instinctively and Israeli academics hide behind when fending off
outside attempts to criticise Zionism or the Jewish state for its policies
and behaviour. ‘Foreigners’, they say in my country, ‘do not and
cannot understand this perplexing story’ and there is therefore no need
even to try to explain it to them. Nor should we allow them to be
involved in the attempts to solve the conflict – unless they accept the
Israeli point of view.820

In the following year, Mearsheimer and Walt mentioned the labels, ‘anti-Semitic’ and
‘self-hating Jew’, first among the many ‘modus operandi’ of the Israel lobby in the USA, and
showed how they can be used against anyone who even talks, let alone writes, about Israeli
crimes against humanity or about the lobby’s influence.821 No doubt the lobby has taken note
of substantive critiques such as Said’s, Pappe’s, and Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s. It is now
probably busy switching strategies somewhat, already. But we can be confident that these
labels will remain important weapons of the Israel lobby for a long time yet.

819
Abunimah & Parry: CNN Negates Victims and Ignores International Law, 2002. On Fox News and its parent
corporation, News International, created and run by Ruper Murdoch, see Coogan: Phone Hacking, News
International and the Perils of the Popular Press, 2011.
820
Pappe 2006: xviii
821
Finkelstein, N. 22003; Ackerman, G.: Israel Freezes out BBC over “Biased” Reporting, 2003; Sadeh:
Boycotting the Beeb, 2003; Bathish et al. 2004; Wolff: Gaarder, Israel, etc: Von der Kritik zum Tabu, 2006;
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 9, 188-196. On Israel lobby attacks against Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu,
among others, see Dugard: Two States or Apartheid? 2009. On my own experience, see Preface above. Pappe
has analyzed another label increasingly used by the Zionists to propagandize against critics. The latter are
allegedly ‘threats to the very existence of Israel’. This label is becoming more common now that many Jews are
becoming increasingly vocal in their criticism of Israel. “If you dare to criticise Israel by talking about removing
the separation wall or releasing their illegally detained prisoners they turn around and say, ‘you are questioning
the basic right of Israel to exist’, but this is not true.” Chehata 2010 (italics in the original)
396

The same power is at work in academia and intellectual circles, and now perhaps
especially here, since the mainstream global media, the US Congress, and much of the White
House have already practically been influenced to the point of veto by the lobby. Many
publications containing criticism of Israel, as well as the authors of such criticism, are not
only criticized, vilified, and publicly disparaged, but also receive death threats and become the
targets of anonymous cyber-attacks, such as hacking, e-mail viruses, and hate-mail. Some
outstanding scholars, such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, have needed police
protection at speeches, at work, and at home because of their criticism of Israel. On the whole,
US academic discourse on Arabs and Islam abounds with stereotypes and misrepresentations,
since well before 2001. Yet, there is also obviously more objective knowledge in academia
than in the news media or in politics. And the Israel lobby does not take it well that students
are still to some extent being told and taught the truth about Israel and Palestine. For this
reason, blacklists of academics critical of Israel are being circulated in the USA, reminiscent
of the McCarthy era witch hunts of alleged Communists during the 1950s.
In September 2002, for example, the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, a pro-
Israel research and policy group, launched a web site (www.campuswatch.org) to monitor
what it regards as biased scholarship and teaching at some of the most prestigious US and
Canadian universities. It urged (and keeps urging) students to monitor their professors and
report alleged cases of bias so that dossiers could be built up. Six months later, the site already
had files on 35 institutions. When it went online, however, nearly 100 outraged professors
asked to be added to the list to protest against the intellectual intimidation.822
Otherwise – unlike the 1960s reactions to such unfreedoms and human rights abuses –
the ongoing persecution of people in the USA who are critical of Israel has so far elicited only
marginal resistance, if any, from the general public, including the civil rights and civil
liberties groups, as well as the media. In some cases, US academics and media professionals
critical of Israel have lost their jobs due to such campaigns. Ellen Schrecker, a courageous
critic of the new thought-police, even considers the current witch hunt of academics critical of
Israel in the USA as worse than McCarthyism since grounds for ostracizing and firing
professors are now being sought in the classroom, in that supposed haven of academic
freedom, as well as in the curriculum, whereas the comparatively primitive Communist-haters
during the 1950s only sought and produced evidence against academics in the extracurricular
spheres.823
822
Elsner: U.S. Mideast Academics Fight Charges of Bias, 2003; Beinin: Wise Words on Deaf Ears, 2003: 51-
59. See also Campus Watch: Monitoring Middle East Studies on Campus, no date; Loewenstein: Hanan Ashrawi
and the Price of Dissent, 2003; Fisk: When Did ‘Arab’ Become a Dirty Word? 2003; Khleif: Distortion of
“Islam” and “Muslims” in American Academic Discourse: Some Observations on the Sociology of Vested
Enmity, 1998: 279-292. Hacktivist supporters of the Palestinians have also engaged in web wars, but they are
critically inferior in terms of technology. See Naveh: The Palestinian-Israeli Web War, 2007: 176. In 2004, an
even more rabidly Zionist copy of Campus Watch opened in Israel, Israel Academia Monitor, a blunt thought-
police device, which apparently equates criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and terrorism. It was later joined
by two other groups, Isracampus and Im Tirtzu, in the same vein: seek out and destroy any criticism of Zionism
in Israeli academia. See Gordon: Academic Witch-Hunt in Israel, 2005; Scheindlin: Academic Freedom Under
Attack? Interview with Prof. Neve Gordon, 2011. On the support for intimidations and threats against academics
critical of Israel by the mainstream mass media, especially by the New York Times, see Cole: New York Times
Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt, 2005; Herman: The New York Times Supports Thought Control: The
Massad Case, 2005; Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 178-187.
823
Schrecker: Worse than McCarthy, 2006: Page B20; Herman, November 25, 2002. Apparently, two major US
Zionist organizations, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, practiced witch-hunts
already during the McCarthy era, even denouncing Jews over Communism. See Finkelstein, N.G. 22003: 15.
Schrecker mentions the Boston-based ‘David Project’, and the misnomer, ‘Students for Academic Freedom’,
among the leaders in the quest for an American academia void of criticism of Israel. See also ProFusion: Basic
Facts of the Academic Freedom Violation at Roosevelt University, 2006; Mearsheimer & Walt 2006: 20-30;
Solomon: The Lobby and the Bulldozer: Mearsheimer, Walt and Corrie, Truthout, April 13, 2006; Findley: They
Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, 32003; Makdisi: Academic Freedom Is at
Risk in America, 2007. See Abraham: A Defining Moment: Standing Firm with Norman Finkelstein and
 397

Not only ‘leftist’ or ‘fringe’ personalities or messages are targeted. The former US
president, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and veteran Middle East negotiator and observer,
Jimmy Carter, faced outrageous accusations over his mild criticism of Israeli apartheid. In his
2006 book, ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’, Carter argued against Israeli apartheid in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories only, i.e. (as opposed to me) not at all in ‘Israel proper’. In
the book he also largely ignored the plight of the majority of Palestinians, who have been
exiled and are kept exiled from their homeland by Israel. He even referred to Israel within its
1967 borders as a model democracy. These are three major attestations for the Israel lobby in
favor of Israel. But Carter’s book was slammed brutally by the so-called quality media in the
USA. In the Washington Post it was called ‘foolish and unfair’, in the New York Times
‘dangerous and anti-semitic’, and the Boston Globe said it was ‘irresponsibly provocative’.824
A CNN journalist and commentator called Carter a ‘fathead’ because of his book. The New
Republic said Carter would be remembered as a ‘Jew hater’.825
Elsewhere in the world similar events take place. Anthony Loewenstein, a Jewish
critic of Israel in Australia had to experience this as calls circulated to stop the publication of
his book on the conflict before it was due to be published by a university press.826
As a result of the media and academic propaganda, US citizens, especially, and
secondly, also, other users of English-language media, are often very anti-Palestinian. But the
Israel lobby in the USA takes center stage. The USA is where the ideological warfare is most
intense in the media, political, and academic spheres. On the level of basic education, Israel
keeps up its intense indoctrination of its own population, as we saw in Section II.7. The US
system of public primary and secondary education, aside from many private Zionist or nearly
Zionist schools, has also become a Zionist tool to ensure US support. The indoctrination in
schools starts early, as Edward Said wrote shortly before his death:

For decades it has been decreed to [US] schoolchildren there were no

Palestinians when the Zionist pioneers arrived [in Palestine] and so
those miscellaneous people who throw stones and fight occupation are
simply a collection of terrorists who deserve killing. Palestinians, in
short, do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality,
and so they must be transmuted and dissolved into essentially negative
images. This is entirely the result of a distorted education, doled out to
millions of youngsters who grow up without any awareness at all that
the Palestinian people have been totally dehumanised to serve a
political-ideological end, namely to keep support high for Israel. What

DePaul’s Heroic Students, 2007 on the denial of tenure, in this case to Professor Norman Finkelstein, another
weapon used to silence intellectuals by the academic elites and by the pressures to which they yield, in this case
to eliminate criticism of Israel.
824
Carter 2006; Finkelstein, N.: The Ludicrous Attacks on Jimmy Carter’s Book, 2006. See also O’Connor:
Blind New York Times Continues Attacks on Jimmy Carter, 2007. Although Carter’s criticism of Israel is mild,
the well-chosen title of his book brings home my point at the beginning of Part II: apartheid is the opposite of
peace, apartheid is war. Carter himself says that apart from publishing attacks on his books by members of
Jewish organizations who have probably never visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories, US newspapers have
been trying to hush down the existence of the book by ignoring it. See Carter: Israel, Palestine, Peace and
Apartheid: Americans Need to Know the Facts about the Abominable Oppression of the Palestinians, 2006. To
his credit, Carter stands by his book despite the ugly media onslaught which also includes accusations of ‘lies’,
‘distortion’, and ‘indecency’. He also says that most Americans, most American Jews, and even most Israeli
Jews actually agree with him. See Bigg: Carter Says Majority in U.S. Support Views in Book, 2007.
825
Brown, M.F.: Debate? What Debate? 2007. In apparently concerted attacks, many other members of the
American Israel lobby also denounced the book and Carter himself with bitter venom, a unique treatment of a
former US president in his home country, see Finkelstein, N.: Words Even an Ex-President Can’t Say in
America: The Media Lynching of Jimmy Carter, 2006; Brown, M.F.: Vile Jibes at Carter Ignored by Media,
2006; Cockburn: First Bomb Carter; Then Nuke Iran! The Israel Lobby Trips and Tilts, 2007. Since then Carter
has been marginalized to the extreme by the US (and western, and world) media and politicians.
826
Loewenstein: Stop the Press! Attempts to Squash my Book on Israel/Palestine, 2005
398

is so astonishing is that notions of co-existence between peoples play

no part in this kind of distortion. Whereas American Jews want to be
recognised as Jews and Americans in America, they are unwilling to
accord a similar status as Arabs and Palestinians to another people that
has been oppressed by Israel since the beginning. . . . The intellectual
suppression of the Palestinians that has occurred because of Zionist
education has produced an unreflecting, dangerously skewed sense of
reality in which whatever Israel does it does as a victim…American
Jews in crisis by extension therefore feel the same thing as the most
right-wing of Israeli Jews, that they are at risk and their survival is at
stake. This has nothing to do with reality obviously enough, but rather
with a kind of hallucinatory state that overrides history and facts with
a supremely unthinking narcissism.827

The Holocaust Industry plays a central role in this scheme. Finkelstein pointed out that
Americans in general are able to historically identify the (time and number of victims of the)
Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe more accurately than the US Civil War, Pearl Harbor, or the
US nuclear attacks on Japan. Ever since 1967, when it became abundantly clear to the world
that the Israeli Jews are not victims but aggressors, armed to the teeth, the Holocaust Industry
has shouted hysterically about the imminence of a ‘second Holocaust’, as if that is what the
Palestinians, Arabs, and neutral actors would want, or could do.828
This, then, is how the wide concept of hasbara, Israeli propaganda and propaganda for
Israel, works, and why, as Said indicated, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to practice,
i.e. why it is, perhaps, the most expensive propaganda enterprise ever: On a first level, words,
expressions and images are carefully selected, eliminated and manipulated to give both
reporting and commentary a pro-Israeli spin. This is a very costly and labor-intensive
enterprise. Pro-Israeli editors, sub-editors, and producers (rather than reporters,
camerapersons, and correspondents, who will often find their best work on the cutting floor if
they are reporting from Palestine) must first be produced, i.e. educated and set on a career
path, or won. Lies do not yet necessarily appear at this stage, but reality is often bent out of
recognition, due to extreme bias and selectivity. The people carrying out this manipulation,
however, are not necessarily being paid by the Israeli state or by any other Israeli apartheid
institutions. The American Israel lobby does much, probably most, of this work on the global
scale. Some media workers are even doing it unconsciously, taking over bits of propaganda
directly from Israeli or pro-Israeli spin doctors, or second-hand, from news agencies and other
powerful media, reorganizing them superficially, and passing them on to the public without
even realizing their deep bias. An example of this can be provided by the ubiquitous
references to the 2006 war ‘between Israel and Hezbollah’. Although by far most of the
victims of this war were non-Hezbollah Lebanese civilians, it was styled as a war between
‘Israel’, i.e. civilians as well as soldiers, against a militant Arab group. The vast majority of
victims of the war, all of them innocent, became non-victims. Why? Because they were killed
by Israel. Similarly, Israel has officially (and in the news media) been at war lately against
Hamas, not the Palestinian civilians who were the majority victims, again. Once you have
seen the same phrase a few times from a small number of trusted sources, you do not stop to
question them any more. That is simply part of common journalistic practice, even if it goes
against some of the most central journalistic standards. Moreover, public relations
professionals have made sure that young, attractive, even sexy, and European-looking
spokespersons for the Israeli army, such as Olivier Rafowic, Sharon Feingold and Jacob
Dallal charm journalists and the public into believing that army operations are necessary and

827
Said: Crisis for American Jews, 2002. See footnotes 221-225 above on further pathological dimensions to the
hallucinatory states that emerge with apartheid.
828
Finkelstein, N. 22003: 11, 37
 399

as humanitarian in execution as humanly possible. Middle-aged, European-looking and

conservative government spokespersons like Avi Pazner, Raanan Gissin, Dore Gold or Daniel
Seaman are also made up in a way for the west to identify with them. Their command of spin
uttered in perfect American or English accents also help to enable them to speak
authoritatively about the urgency of the global threat of terrorism every time a 12-year-old
Palestinian has thrown a stone. The character and extent of human rights violations
perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and settlers and by the Israeli political, judicial and civilian
elites are thus downplayed severely and often entirely ignored by the global media. Violations
perpetrated by Palestinians, on the other hand, are, as we have seen, habitually exaggerated
and repeated ad nauseam. In the US, western, European and Israeli entertainment media,
moreover, billions are spent on providing Israeli and Zionist perspectives, something for
which their rich audiences pay generously, in an exorbitant variety of ways, as we noted
above.
Second, there is in hasbara a great deal of lobbying, courtship and even bribery of
important information-brokers. The pundits airing ‘analyses’ of news from the Middle East in
the US mass media are hardly ever academic experts. They are usually members of Zionist
think tanks, i.e. privately funded propaganda groups, usually styled with academic-sounding
titles, such as ‘Senior Fellow’, and the like. Not only the mass media consult them rather than
the more objective academic specialists, various US government agencies do too, even for
basic information. Two-thirds of American international relations scholars asked in 2006, for
example, believe that the Israel lobby has too much power in determining US foreign policy.
But the real experts are not consulted and so the US public is unaware of what they think
about US foreign policy. The US media and government do not go to people with neutral and
objective knowledge. They go to biased and even bought pundits, to propagandists
masquerading as scholars and to prostituted intellectuals. This is also the result of a rather
expensive kind of propaganda activity, which the Israelis and their allies can afford, but the
Palestinians and theirs generally cannot. But the Zionists are amazingly able to squander US
taxpayers’ money in this way, too. Taxpayers fund the government and legislative agencies
that use Zionist think tanks rather than people who have a stake in being accurate, objective,
and unbiased as experts and consultants.829
Third, there are misleading official Israeli and US statements of denial, suppression of
the truth and downright lies that are spread and upheld as much as possible, and then often
again denied, i.e. the Israeli or American government employees lie a second time by denying
that they ever told the original lie, which is by now old news. Because of that, journalists are
often too confused and weary to follow up on the story, and media consumers usually too tired
or too distracted to follow. Arabs involved in the conflict also lie to or distort through the
mass media, but nowhere near as convincingly as the Israelis, and, in my estimation, nowhere
near as frequently.830
Fourth, if they should persist with trying to show the world some of the ugly truths
that define Israeli apartheid – even if unintended – writers, reporters and camerapersons are
obstructed, intimidated, threatened, beaten, shot at, often wounded and sometimes killed by
Israeli armed forces, with almost total impunity. Cameras, film, videotapes and other kinds of
records of human rights violations, in particular, are also confiscated and/or destroyed by the
Israeli powers that be and by their allies abroad or from abroad, especially by the Americans.
Articles, books and documentary and research projects are rejected due to their contents by
pro-Israeli editors and publishers. Other media and academic executives are only afraid of

829
Bishara, Amahl: Local Hands, International News: Palestinian Journalists and the International Media, 2006;
Löwstedt: The Rights and Duties of Journalists with Regard to Dignity, Death, and Dying, 2005; Whitaker: US
Thinktanks Give Lessons in Foreign Policy, 2002; on the survey of the international relations academics, see
Maliniak et al: Inside the Ivory Tower, 2007: 66, cited in Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 10.
830
Van Teeffele: Israelis Better at Manipulating Media, 2003; Löwstedt & Madhoun 2003; Parry June 4, 2004;
Zayani 2005; Miles, H. 2006 (2005): 196, 78-99.
400

being associated with ‘anti-Semites’, even if they know that the person in question is merely
telling the truth, but the results are the same as if these executives were part of the Israel lobby
themselves. Books and articles never get published, questions do not get asked. The truth does
not come out. Journalists and academics are harassed, intimidated and/or fired, or (with
growing numbers of freelance journalists, researchers and teachers) simply not asked to come
back and then ignored. Writers of school literature and schoolteachers are of course unlikely
to be completely unaware of this.
Finally, if all else fails, media hardware and infrastructure, including whole
broadcasting stations, are also destroyed by the Israelis with heavy military means. 831 The
latter three levels of violations of the freedom of expression and of the right to free access to
information – basic human rights according to Article 19 of both the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which both
Israel and the USA are signatories – are the easiest and cheapest for the oppressor. Journalists
and writers are unarmed, non-combatant civilians. At least a quarter of the Israeli weapons
and ammunition, along with unparalleled political, diplomatic and ideological support, in
contrast, come entirely free of charge from the US federal state budget. The media are
nominally free in the USA and Israel, unless they criticize atrocities carried out or supported
by Israel or the USA. In that case, the media can be turned into enemies.
If the events defining the Second Intifada had taken place in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia
or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq instead, then the soldiers would certainly have been referred to in
the western media as what they really are (a brutal occupying army) and the Palestinian
protesters would probably have been referred to in the same media as ‘pro-democracy
demonstrators’, which is also a much more accurate and informative description.
Subsequently and consequently, NATO bombs might very well have been dropped on Jewish
targets in Tel Aviv as if it were Baghdad or Belgrade.832

831
Campagna: Picking Up the Pieces, 2002. Israeli government ‘inquiries’ into the violence against journalists
perpetrated by Israeli soldiers during the Second Intifada left all soldiers blameless, except one verbal warning
and one suspended jail sentence, both for attacks on Jewish journalists, one American and one Israeli. The
inquiries into the deaths of at least seven Palestinian journalists, as well as one British and one Italian journalist,
all killed by Israeli troops, found no one guilty, as was the case with scores of other shootings of journalists. In
fact, the victimized journalists were being implicitly blamed for getting themselves in harm’s way by the Israeli
authorities, a typical response or excuse offered by the enemies of the freedom of expression worldwide, either
ignorant or hostile towards the nature of news reporting. (This is in principle no different from blaming a
murder-rape on the victim for wearing a short skirt.) Non-lethal crimes against Palestinian journalists, including
over a hundred near-lethal attacks, mainly shootings, were not even considered in any of the Israeli inquiries. See
Aboudi: Israelis Fire at Reporters to Intimidate -Watchdog, 2002; Bathish, N. et al. 2004; Dadge (ed.) 2002,
2003, 2004.
832
Which, of course, would not be a good solution, either. See further Solomon: Media Spin Remains in Sync
with Israeli Occupation, 2000; Fisk: When Journalists Forget that Murder Is Murder, 2001. In its daily news
show, Tagesschau, the German public broadcaster, ARD, for example on October 22, 2000, also referred to the
Israeli occupying forces as ‘Sicherheitskräfte’ rather than as ‘Besatzungstruppen’ or something else equivalent to
their actual status under international law. On the pro-Israeli spin in the German-speaking world, fed by guilt
feelings over judeophobic traditions and Nazi crimes against the Jews, as well as insufficient facing of
inconvenient historical facts by generations of post-war Germans, convenient scape-goating of a few Nazi
leaders by means of the Nuremberg trials, and even rewards for useful ex-Nazis, such as the rocket scientist,
Wernher von Braun, by the Cold War powers, especially by the USA, see Lewan: Ist Israel Südafrika? 1993: 97-
102; Köndgen: Die “Neuen Historiker”: Israel Revidiert sein Selbstverständnis, 2001: 147ff. See also Schechter:
Perception vs. Reality In The Middle East “Press War”, 2000. Binyamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, rather
implausibly states that Israel has not yet lobbied and propagandized at all in Europe, as can, alleges Netanyahu,
be seen in occasional (and, in reality, extremely diplomatic and careful) criticism of Israel by European
governments and by the EU: ‘We are to blame for much of it because we did not do enough explaining in
Europe. The Arabs have kept up an anti-Israeli propaganda campaign there while we did nothing of the kind’.
Interview by Pumpyansky, July 2002. In November 2003, the publication of an EU-commissioned poll revealed
that 59 percent of EU citizens believed that Israel is a threat to world peace – more than any other country
scored; the USA came second in the poll of most dangerous countries with 53 percent. In one of many
unconstructive official responses from Israeli officialdom, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and Jerusalem,
 401

In conclusion, as Joel Kovel put it so eloquently: ‘Zionism has woven an amazing web
of deception to conceal its racism and evade the linkage with South African apartheid.’833
These are of course two intimately interconnected deceptions that underlie the racist violence
that Israel, with the help of North Atlantic, especially US, elites, has perpetrated and is
perpetrating continuously and with impunity.
Yet, as Ilan Pappe says in the now following quote, it is we activists and academics
who are winning – in fact, knowledge has already won – in the struggle against Israeli
apartheid.

[W]hile Palestinians may not have military might, economic strength

or even basic resources at hand, they do have activists and academics
on their side, so the deception can and should be challenged even if
the occupation, physically, cannot. There is at least one arena in the
struggle between the Zionists and the Palestinians where there is a
more even playing field and where the Palestinians are winning: Israel
vs. Palestine is also rich vs. poor; diplomatic strength (Israel is
supported by a superpower) vs. a fragmented national movement;
military might vs. a civilian population. However, the balance of
power when it comes to knowledge is won by Palestine. Thanks to the
dissemination of genuine knowledge and a true historical narrative,
the Palestine solidarity movement, the internet, honest media reporting
and so on, “Israel has lost”.834

We must of course continue to tell the truth, especially to the powerful people and
organizations, but we must also find ways to assist the other strands of the resistance,
especially the judicial, political, economic, mainstream media (news, entertainment,
advertising), artistic and other civilian strands. The judicial struggle is also going well. The
entire foundation, basement, and the first floors of international law are already firmly on the
side of the Palestinians and humanity; only the anti-democratic vetoes from the western
nations led by the USA are still preventing access to enforceable and enforced measures, to
the top stories of international law, such as UN Security Council resolutions. In international
law, Israel is really on a precipice, held from falling over the brink only by anti-democratic
structures and measures, and by western muscle, mainly in the form of diplomatic weight,
weapons, and the use of them.

Natan Sharansky, dismissed both the poll and the EU as ‘anti-Semitic’. See Pomeroy, R.: Israel Outraged at
‘Peace Threat’ EU Poll, 2003; Zweynert: Israel’s Sharansky Blames “Anti-Semitism” for Poll, 2003. More than
three years later, a similar opinion poll, sponsored by the BBC World Service and designed by Globescan and
the Washington-based Programme for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), was made in countries around the
world. Again, Israel was the least liked country, with 56 percent against it. Iran came in second place, closely
followed by the USA. See Lobe: Israel, Iran, U.S. Least Liked Countries, 2007. While these poll results may
seem to suggest that the pro-Israeli propaganda is not working, I am very sceptical. The attitude against Israel
could in my view be over, say, 98 percent if it were not for the propaganda. Some votes in the UN General
Assembly and other organizations representing, defending, and promoting international law and human rights, as
well as facts and statistics incriminating Israel and Israelis (on both, see Part III below), would indeed suggest a
percentage of that size order, rather than only 59 or 56 percent. In my own case: I was a doctor of philosophy by
1994 and I still had no particularly critical attitude towards Israel. I had not paid very much attention to news or
politics or law until then, and I had never acquainted a Palestinian, though I had come to know several Israeli
Jews. I had also most likely been influenced by slanted, pro-Israeli news headlines and other mass media
phenomena. I believe there are unfortunately many people who are similar to the way I was in this regard, i.e.
until the mid-1990s.
833
Kovel 2007: 164f. See also Chehata 2010: “‘Zionism is a very successful project of deception.’ Deception can
be challenged even if the occupation cannot.” The quote is from Pappe’s address to the British Parliament on
March 10, 2010.
834
Chehata 2010 (italics in original). See also Rose & Rose: Stephen Hawking’s Boycott Hits Israel Where It
Hurts: Science, 2013.
402

In a sense, we are now back where we started; we have gone full circle through the
definition of apartheid. Apartheid thought has proven to be essentially and intimately
connected with apartheid violence (Section II.1 and this section). Since life in general is
usually seen by members of the elite race of an apartheid society as a perpetual zero-sum
struggle for survival (ideology), and since they know they possess considerable military
superiority, they would rather continue stealing and fighting (i.e. carry out atrocities) than
start negotiating and sharing.
The nine oppressive structures of apartheid form a system, which has remained
remarkably constant in different places and times throughout the 2,300 years of superficially
disconnected history that we have been investigating. This system is based on violence, a
consequence of the initial invasion, whether it is only de facto – as in the case of Alexander’s
conquest of Egypt by superseding the Persian occupiers or the UN-granted establishment of
the state of Israel and the Jewish armed forces superseding British occupiers of Palestine in
1948 – or actually accompanied by entirely illegitimate physical and structural violence – as
in South Africa 1652-1994 or Israel’s conquest of land since 1948. But from these last eight
sections we have also learned that everything about apartheid cannot be reduced to physical
violence. Apartheid is more like a spiral than a circle, a vicious spiral.
The defining traits of apartheid are all essentially gross human rights violations. They
are crimes against humanity. They add up to a particularly heinous state of war imposed on
the indigenous population as well as on the racialized migrants themselves and their
descendants, whether or not ‘war’, ‘peace’, ‘peace process’, ‘truce’, etc. is declared. It is now
time to take a concluding look at the possibilities and opportunities for true peace, i.e. at
liberation from apartheid and redress for its gross human rights violations.
 403

III. Conclusions
I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a
description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
could describe events in South Africa.
(Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Jerusalem on Christmas Day, 1989)835

1. Apartheid Human Rights Violations

The three societies that have been investigated here are apartheid societies in the wide
sense. They all manifest racist gross human rights violations (also in a wide sense) in the
realms of physical violence; repopulating activities; grants, demands, and denials of
citizenship; land confiscation, discriminatory land redistribution and forced removals;
exploitation in the production process; engineered, racially motivated differences in access to
necessities; education; language; and ideological thought, including de-secularization and vast
spectra of racist myths that have led to powerful, collective misperceptions of reality, often
with resultant psychopathological diseases among both perpetrators and victims. These gross
human rights violations stem from the military and paramilitary conquest of land, natural
resources, and people by a de facto invading racial minority, which bases its system of gross
human rights violations against the country’s indigenous majority upon its own superior
military technology, an ideologically conditioned readiness to develop and use it, and an
actual use of it. The expenses needed to finance such a system of oppression are huge, and as
can be seen in the cases of Rhodesia, the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, Guatemala, and in
the end even in South Africa and Graeco-Roman Egypt, the system will crumble if the
necessary funding can no longer be raised. I believe that due to the structural parallels,
investigated in detail above, Israeli-ruled Palestine and Graeco-Roman Egypt are the societies
that bear the closest overall resemblance to apartheid South Africa.
Apartheid works in the following way: A country is more or less invaded by a foreign
group of people with superior military capabilities and an attitude to match. This group of
people introduces privileges for its own members, and discriminates against the indigenous
majority. Even after the invasion and the military or semi-military conquest, an overwhelming
majority of human rights violations are carried out by the racial minority, victimizing the
racial majority in each of the nine realms that we have investigated. One of the most basic
features of those violations is the racist inequity of value attached to human rights, human
dignity, and human lives.
If one member of the oppressive minority is killed, then a proportionate punishment in
the eyes of the elites will often be the retaliatory, extrajudicial and indiscriminate killing of
sometimes ten, or fifteen, or more, members of the indigenous majority. Yet, on the whole,
Africans did not choose Whites as enemies, Palestinians did not choose to fight the Jews. It
was solely the invaders who made a more or less collective choice to fight the indigenous.
That choice, however, was more often than not an undemocratic choice, even within the
invader community. In each case, there are identifiable elites that made the decisions that led
to apartheid. They are political, economic, military, and cultural (especially religious) elites.
The inequity takes many forms aside from physical violence: If 70 percent of the
population is not allowed to own more than 13 percent of the land, as in 20th century South
Africa, then that is also considered by the apartheid elites as sound, lawful, just, and
proportionate, of course only as long as that majority is indigenous, and the other 30 percent
are not. If a few members of the indigenous majority (most of which has been forcibly exiled)
owns only two percent of the land, as in 21st century Israel, then that is even better, from the

835
Quoted in Abulhawa: Apartheid’s Accidental Prophecy, 2002
404

perspective of the apartheid perpetrators. The same goes for wages, taxes, rents, etc. If each of
the majority Palestinians get a fifth of the water that the average Israeli gets, it is appropriate
in the eyes of the Israeli elites responsible, even if the average Palestinian under Israeli
military occupation, whose well-being legally falls under the responsibility of the Israeli state,
gets much less water than the WHO recommends, while the nearby illegal Jewish settlers
waste water on shiny lawns and in large swimming pools and enjoy a vast array of other rights
and privileges that are illegally denied the Palestinians. In the mass media and in public
debate, finally, the ruling racial minority stances and perspectives are overwhelmingly
misrepresented, in a corresponding way, as majority positions.
Michael Kleiner of the Herat party, who wants to strip Arabic of its tattered status as
official language in Israel (see Chapter II.8.3), remarked with regard to the Second Intifada,
that ‘for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians’.836 Former Sephardic
Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu called for the carpet-bombing of Gaza and the killing of ‘a
million’ Palestinians in 2007, if Gazans do not stop shooting homemade rockets into the
nearby Israeli town of Sderot.837 The most extreme viewpoints to this effect that I have come
across in published form, in fact, originated with religious authorities. Another example: ‘One
million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail’, Rabbi Yaacov Perin declared in 1994 while
he was eulogizing the Israeli settler and mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein.838 Rabbi Yisrael
Rosen, director of the Tsomet Institute, a religious institution attended by settlers, soldiers and
students in the illegally occupied West Bank said in 2008: ‘All of the Palestinians must be
killed; men, women, infants, and even their beasts’, basing his edict on the Torah. 839 There are
unfortunately many more, equivalent or similar, statements made by Israeli celebrities, also by
Israeli heads of state and government, nowadays usually made by Jews who profess to be
deeply religious.840
Yet, the mainstay of their faith, the Jewish Holy Writ, explicitly commands ‘life for
life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ (Exodus: 21.23-24). i.e. proportional retribution. The pacifist
strand of Judaism, the one followed up (to a great extent) by the New Testament, even
demands in the Sixth Commandment that: ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (ibid: 20.13; this may of
course be interpreted ethnocentrically as ‘Thou shalt not kill Jews’, but that is not what it
says). Both of these mutually contradictory ethical positions are contradicted yet again by the
quotes from contemporary Israelis, such as Rabbis Eliyahu, Perin, and Rosen, as well by the
ancient authors of the Book of Joshua, and those touting its unambiguously genocidal policy,
including the former prime minister, Ariel Sharon (see previous chapter and Chapter II.7.3).
From the human rights and cultural diversity perspectives, the latter represent the ugly
aspect of Judaism. But its not so ugly and its good and beautiful sides should never be

836
Fisk October 22, 2002
837
Wagner, M.: Eliyahu Advocates Carpet Bombing Gaza, 2007
838
Quoted in James: Israel’s Apartheid Must End, 2000. In February 1994, Goldstein, an Israeli settler, fired
around 100 bullets into a crowd of Palestinian worshippers, killing 29 people and wounding 100 more inside a
religious site at Hebron, before he was killed himself by Palestinians. In 2002, on the eighth anniversary of the
massacre, Jewish right-wingers pilgrimaged to celebrate it at Goldstein’s grave in the illegal settlement of Kiryat
Arba, near Hebron. Israeli police cordoned off the gravesite but did nothing to stop the celebrations. See Goldin:
Mass Killer Feted by Jewish Extremists in West Bank, 2002; Kovel 2007: 30. In comparison, Bartolomeo de Las
Casas, an unusual Spaniard for his time, as he opposed the genocide of Native Americans during the 16th century,
reported that the Spanish settlers on Hispaniola ‘…made a rule among themselves that for every Christian slain
by the Indians, they would slay a hundred Indians’. Hispaniola, the largest Caribbean island, today comprising
Haiti as well as the Dominican Republic, was soon totally ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population. See
de Las Casas: Hispaniola [excerpts], 2003: 78. Rabbi Yaacov Perin and those ultra-racist Jewish invaders and
recent invader descendants who agree with him could thus be seen as at least 10,000 times more racist than the
utterly genocidal Spanish invaders and destroyers of Hispaniola.
839
Al-Naami: Genocide Announced, 2008
840
Z: Ariel Sharon’s Generation, 2002. See, further, Eldar: No Longer David: The State of Israel as Goliath,
2013, a review of Blumenthal: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, 2013, a merciless challenge of the
racist giant and giant racist in today’s world. See also Chapter II.9.3 above.
 405

forgotten. A racist perspective on Judaism and Jews is in my opinion a major obstacle to

liberation from Israeli apartheid; a return to the racism of the Nazis and like-minded
murderous bigots is undeniably counter-productive with regard to Israeli apartheid as well as
morally corrupt in general. Judaism is not the same as Zionism. There are many anti-Zionist
Jews, secularists as well as deeply religious people.841 And there are also many Zionist non-
Jews. Only non-violent victories, only inclusive solutions in terms of race, class, and gender,
can in my opinion lead to true reconciliation and true justice.
Throughout this context, the ugly sides of Christianity and Islam should not be
forgotten either. In all of the biblical religions, and others, the anti-ethnocentric aspects often
appear to be but a thin veil for something that is at times much more powerful within the
individuals and groups who superficially profess to represent the best and the moral sides of
the religions: namely, racist hate. During the struggle against apartheid, one should therefore
never lose sight of the struggle against the broader enemy of racism. Palestinian liberation
fighters should continue to take their cue from the dominant views within the ANC, during its
struggle and since then, on this matter, although there is always room for improvement, both
in apartheid Palestine and in epiapartheid South Africa.
The important differences between apartheid societies are, as I mentioned in the
introduction, mainly differences of degree. Egypt and Israel share the complication of having
been taken over by (or handed over to) the apartheid minorities from earlier occupiers, the
Persians and British, respectively. The Cape, on the other hand, had belonged to Khoisan
people from time immemorial. The rest of South Africa, however, could be said to have been
taken from earlier Bantu-speaking ‘occupiers’, although the latter had hardly colonialized the
land, but rather assimilated with the indigenous – at any rate to a much greater extent than the
Whites would do. The pastoralist and hunter-gatherer Khoisan, who first inhabited the region
and the farthest southern Bantu-speaking, agriculturalist and pastoralist people, the Xhosa,
had accomplished a ‘high degree’ of assimilation before the Whites arrived in South Africa.
The ubiquity of click-sounds in the southernmost Bantu languages, Xhosa and Zulu, is
evidence of this, as well as the facial features of Nelson Mandela, for example, which
manifest strong Khoisan features, no doubt connected with the Xhosa royal family (to which
Mandela belongs) tradition of intermarrying with Khoisan people. In this regard, most of sub-
Saharan Africa, in fact, seems to have functioned quite well prior to white invasions, with an
informal system in which new immigrants initially assumed a ‘subservient’ status to groups
already settled.842 One could even go so far as to call this system a natural and morally
superior opposite of apartheid. Obviously, the indigenous people, or the earlier settlers,
generally know the land, the climate, the histories and cultures of neighbors, etc., better and
should often be the authorities on such issues (though of course not on all issues). However,
one runs the risk of adopting an unqualified and patronizing attitude towards immigrants in
this way. The immigrants may know some of the histories and cultures of neighbors better
because they just came from there. There are also likely to be aspects of their culture, e.g.
their technology or their cuisine, which are superior to the indigenous and/or which will
enrich the host culture. It is obviously better from a human rights perspective, and probably
even from a universal human survival perspective, that nobody is ever subservient.
Another main difference between apartheid societies is the large extent of de-
secularization in Egypt under Greek and Roman rule. It enabled priests to become the class
favored by the apartheid authorities, with privileges that mirrored those of certain indigenous
political and business leaders in Israel/Palestine and South Africa. This condition also reflects
the high degree of admiration that the Greeks had held towards Egyptian culture prior to
invasion in 332 BCE, especially during the eighth to early fifth centuries BCE. Perhaps it
could be compared to Jewish admiration (and assimilation) of Islamic and Arab culture during

841
Weiss: Zionism and Judaism: Let Us Define Our Terms, 2002
842
Lester 1996: 35 and Reader 1998 (1997): 258, respectively
406

the time of the European Middle Ages and later. Only South African apartheid did not have
this lengthy pre-history of ancestors of the subsequent invaders actually condoning, adopting
and admiring the culture that their descendants would eventually oppress and to some extent
even destroy, obviously and naturally in the South African case because of the longer distance
between the home of the invaders and their new country and their lack of contact prior to
European invasion and apartheid.
Ptolemaic Egypt represents a unique and dramatic, though short-lived success of
apartheid. It became the leading military, political, economic and cultural power in the world
during the first two centuries of its three-century existence. Neither South Africa nor Israel
ever reached that kind of position. Of course, it cannot be compared with the hegemonic scope
of US world dominance today, or with British dominance during the 18th and 19th centuries, or
even with that of the Roman Empire. Yet Ptolemaic Egypt does share a great deal of
additional characteristics with the USA. In this comparison, the Greeks play the role of the
British pilgrims, colonialists and pioneers. It was ruled by emigrées from the leading military
power of the previous era, who had made themselves independent in a land across the sea. No
doubt, the USA was, and to some extent: still is, more genocidal in kind, but all the overlaps,
with apartheid and even with colonialism were (are) there, as well. The USA is still largely
run by white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant males, who may well have learned a lesson or two in
oppression and hanging on to and extending their power and wealth from taking their
Ptolemaic predecessors as role models. Like the USA, South Africa and especially Israel
appear to display more genocidal aspects (in the concrete, physically violent sense) than
Ptolemaic Egypt did, but the historical record that we now possess with regard to Egypt is still
not extensive enough to definitively support (or contradict) this assumption.
A so far spectacular difference between South Africa and Israel/Palestine is the
relative Israeli failure to cause Arab-on-Arab violence in comparison to South Africa proper,
where Black-on-Black (ANC-Inkatha) violence cost more lives than the White-Black conflict
itself between 1948 and 1994. I have speculated that this difference may be correlated with
the problems of rapid and extreme urbanization to which South Africa’s population adapted
less easily than the Palestinians, as well as the cultural diversity of South Africa’s many
indigenous peoples, including a great number of different languages used. It is, however,
hardly the case that Israel has not tried. In Lebanon, and later in Iraq, the Israelis and their US
allies registered their greatest successes to date with this divide-and-rule strategy, i.e.
fomenting or causing violence between different groups within the resistance. And this is a
direct parallel to apartheid South Africa’s role in the southern African context. In Israeli and
Palestinian areas, however, the Israelis and Americans have failed to cause serious rifts, that
is, until 2007, when Fatah and Hamas were relentlessly pushed to the brink of civil war. The
creation of Palestinian Bantustans – and Palestinian security forces dependent on Israeli and
US aid and directives – has in fact led to violence between the Palestinian Authority and
Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists, respectively, and to violence between Fatah loyalists of the
democratically elected president and Hamas loyalists of the democratically elected
government since 2006. The outcome of the Fatah-Hamas power struggle is uncertain at the
time of writing, but it looks as if there will be no Palestinian winner, but a debilitating stale-
mate, for some time to come.843

843
By late February 2007, a total of over 100 people had died in clashes between Hamas and Fatah loyalists. See
Rose, David 2008; Pleming & Barkin: Quartet Skirts Decision on Palestinians amid Split, 2007. At least 11
people were killed in clashes between Hamas and Fatah security forces already in May and June 2006. Al-
Mughrabi: One Dead as Fatah, Hamas Clash, 2006. See also Reinhart: The Hamas Government Should Be
Recognized, 2006. Prior to that, in the worst fighting between Palestinians since 1994, at least six people were
killed and more than 80 wounded in a gun battle between militants and Palestinian police in the Jabaliya refugee
camp in Gaza in December 2001. A PLO security crackdown on suicide attackers and their sponsors, demanded
by Israel and the west, had prompted the hostilities. Al-Mughrabi: Hamas Suspends Suicide Bombings,
Palestinians Fight, 2001. The great exception to the relatively low level of civilian crime in the Occupied
 407

Thus, Israel and the USA have achieved a geographical as well as political split down
the spine of Palestinian politics, which may be a prelude to a kind of Bophuthatswana-
Zululand relationship between Gaza and the West Bank. This political as well as geographical
bifurcation has become the perhaps most important division of Palestinians since the ethnic
cleansing of 1948, when the huge masses of Palestinian refugees were created by Israel, and
subsequently kept out and ignored by Israel and the international community. The division
between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ Palestinians became one of law and geography: international
law gave Israel sovereignty over (part of) the land, but refugees were given the right of return
and right to compensation. The refugees were then relatively successfully turned into an
‘Arab’ problem, i.e. they have now been in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, etc. for so long,
and Israel has been so adamantly (and illegally) opposed to resolve their problems and has
propagandized in this regard for so long, that Israel, the USA, and many other members of the
international community consider them ‘foreigners’ with regard to Israel. Yet, the majority of
the world, accustomed by now to colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, instigated by western
Europeans and their descendants, has not fallen for the hype. Not yet, anyway.
The ANC-Inkatha conflict spread over all of South Africa during the early 1990s, and
it is to be hoped now that Fatah-Hamas will not take the bait like their black predecessors did,
as they both anticipated and expected to assume power. An increased awareness that Israeli
policies, so far, have been pre-eminently apartheid policies, but sometimes colonial and
sometimes genocidal policies, too, could certainly help prevent this catastrophe from taking
place.
A third great difference between South Africa and Israel is that the Israelis themselves
have not suffered as serious inner tensions as South Africa or any of the other apartheid
benefactors that I have investigated (with the possible exception of Guatemala, see Section I.4
above). The British fought the Afrikaners in South Africa, the Romans fought the Greeks in
Egypt, both Greeks and Romans practiced femicide on their own infants, the crusaders fought
each other over parts of Palestine and the Middle East, sometimes even allying themselves
with Muslims, but the Jews or the Israelis did not have to fight a war against the British for
control of Palestine. (There was only a small group of Jewish terrorists.) The Israelis have also
so far avoided a civil war between Jews, which could have been – or could still become –
possible, for example between the privileged Ashkenazy (European) and the Sephardic (non-
European) Jews. Alternatively, the USA or perhaps even a newer superpower may take over
the role of the Romans in Egypt and the British in South Africa. If the Middle East were to
descend into a major war, including, say, nuclear warfare, the USA would be a likely
candidate for undemocratic military rule with continued privileges for Israeli Jews over the
indigenous peoples.
On the other hand, the rivalry between radical and moderate Zionist Jews did already
lead to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by a radical Zionist Jew – uncannily
similar to the 1966 assassination of South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, by a
man who (similarly) thought the prime minister’s apartheid policies against the indigenous
population were too liberal or lenient. There has also been some violence between settlers and
government agents over a few dismantled settlements in the illegally occupied Palestinian
territories and in the Sinai, although these incidents were always accompanied by expanding
settlements elsewhere in the territories, and never, as far as I know, led to any killings of Jews.
In fact, the dismantling was primarily or only done for strategic reasons.844 These ‘conflicts’
between Jewish settlers and Jewish executive power appear to have been largely orchestrated
for the international media in order for them to show Israeli ‘sacrifices’ for ‘peace’ to the
world. A civil war between Israeli Jews is probably as unlikely as a civil war between

Palestinian Territories is of course the apartheid-related indigenous femicide. See Chapter II.1.3 above. On
Lebanon, see also footnotes 278-279 above.
844
Miftah: In the Spotlight: Settlement Dismantling: Don’t Let Them Fool You, 2002
408

Afrikaners ever was, but it cannot be ruled out. Apartheid will always breed and foster all
kinds of violence.845
The Israelis have been most successful with the practice of apartheid repopulation.
They were able to mobilize veritable armies of Jewish and other non-Arab immigrants along
with Jews fleeing anti-Jewish persecution in Europe since the 19th century and in Arab
countries since 1948. Moreover, Israel has no doubt achieved a high Jewish birth rate in
comparison with, for instance, the South African white birth rate. Of course, the Israeli Jewish
birth rate is still lower than the Palestinian ones (all three of them, i.e. the Palestinians with
Israeli citizenship, the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and the Palestinians in the
diaspora), and there is nothing to suggest that this will change as long as apartheid remains a
basic fact of life in Israel, in the occupied Palestinian territories, and in the Palestinian
diaspora. Related to the Israeli immigration and birth rate performances is the relatively
successful ethnic cleansing of Israel from 1948 and of most of the illegally occupied
territories since 1967. It is the determinant factor in the present repopulation of Palestine.
Only the Khoisan suffered a lasting similar fate in South Africa.
The quantifiable dynamics of apartheid operate on at least two very different levels.
On the top level of analysis, apartheid moves towards either genocide or colonialism, or it
stays in the middle. On the next level, within each of the realms, there are smaller, partly
independent movements or dynamics, which, if enacted in concert, will affect and cause
changes on the upper level: there is more or less violence, more or less repopulation, more or
less exclusive citizenship, more or less land confiscation, more or less exploitation of labor,
more or less racially defined access, more or less incitement to violence, etc. If there are more
of all (or most) of these, then the whole society is moving towards genocide. If there are less,
then the apartheid society is moving towards either colonialism or liberation. (Colonialism,
however, should not be seen as a step on the road to liberation. In South Africa, British
colonial rule brought more misery to indigenous South Africans, just like Roman rule did to
indigenous North Africans previously under Greek rule. It may be a step on the road to
physical survival, but not much more. Cultural genocide took place on a grand scale under
Roman rule in Egypt as well as under British rule in South Africa.) If there are equally strong
contrary movements, for instance less violence but more land confiscation, i.e. a dynamic but
volatile equilibrium, then the society remains in place within the spectrum from genocide over
apartheid to colonialism.
Lastly, apartheid is much more than an analogy to what is happening to Palestinians. It
is not just like apartheid. It is apartheid. And if the narrow concept of apartheid (South Africa
from 1948-1994) is used, then it is still more than an analogy, namely a homology. Just like
the bones in my hand are the same as those in a whale flipper or a bat wing, though with
different proportions and functions, all of the nine necessary ingredients of South African
apartheid, as defined here, also exist in Israel/Palestine.846

2. Struggle
The Israeli success with repopulation in particular, and ethnic cleansing in general,
however, is bought at a price. More than four-and-a-half million Palestinian refugees around
the world and the friends they have made in exile and others, aware of the injustices and the
plethora of illegal measures against Palestinians, especially Arabs and Muslims, are now
doing what they can to work against Israeli apartheid. Israel may indeed be heading towards

845
Heller, J.: Echoes of Rabin Assassination Sound in Israel, 2002
846
Jamjoum: Not an Analogy: Israel and the Crime of Apartheid, 2009; Catron 2012. On homology outside
natural science, see Koestler: The Ghost in the Machine, 1990 (1967). See also White: Analyses of Israeli
Apartheid Are Ever More Crucial, 2013.
 409

the same kind of international isolation that apartheid South Africa experienced in its final
years.847 Furthermore, the Jews no longer have an Arab majority within Israel to exploit. It is
likely that there are now more unemployed and poor Jews in Israel than there were poor
Whites in apartheid South Africa or poor Europeans in Graeco-Roman Egypt, simply because
of these demographic facts. There may therefore be an opportunity to enlist disenfranchised
and economically marginalized Israeli Jews into the resistance against apartheid. 848 The
reserve laborer army of third country nationals is being mobilized by Israel, though rather late
in comparison with South Africa, and there are Jewish losers in this process, too. Ideological
considerations, i.e. especially the need to fall within the US or western category of
‘democratic states’, as well as its ‘success’ with ethnic cleansing seem to have necessitated a
relatively large Jewish underclass for Israel. Nonetheless, the great number of illegal and legal
Palestinian migrant workers from the Occupied Territories, and the migrant workers of other
nationalities within Israel, not to mention the historically unparalleled aid that Israel receives
from the USA, have on the whole kept profit margins very comfortable indeed for Israeli
businesses, who, working together with the state elites, can therefore be plausibly expected to
make sure the Jewish underclass remains powerless.
South Africa is in a way the human success story among my three apartheid examples.
The oppressed majority was able to rise up and cast off the yoke, to a large extent of its own
accord, only in South Africa.849 Yet the legacy of apartheid in South Africa remains, and it

847
Although very little and very late, the EU decision in 2004 to slap punitive taxes on Israeli-made products
imported to EU member states from the Israeli-occupied territories could signal the beginning of such a trend.
Goods worth around $200 million are exported from the illegal Jewish settlements every year, but they enjoyed
preferential tariff terms since they are labeled ‘Made in Israel’. In this way the EU has lost nearly $10 million in
income each year, and, more importantly, Israeli occupation and repopulation of the Palestinian territories gain
indirect respectability and acceptance. See N.N: EU to Warn Importers over Israel Settlement Exports,
November 22, 2001; N.N.: EU Gives Israel Last Chance on Settlement Exports, October 18, 2002; Chalmers: EU
Raises Pressure on Israel in Sensitive Trade Row, 2002; N.N.: Israel Gives Ground to EU in Sensitive Trade
Row, November 24, 2003. On August 5, 2004, a ‘compromise’ was reached whereby Israel is allowed to call its
illegal settlements ‘Israel’ whereas the EU will charge tariffs on all settlement exports provided Israelis declare
them honestly. N.N.: EU, Israel Settle Trade Dispute over Settlements, August 5, 2004. One might conclude that
money is more important than human rights to the EU, the main importer of Israeli goods in general. One might
also speculate that the Israel lobby made international law capitulate yet again to vital Israeli interests. There was
also an initiative by the Belgian aid group, Oxfam Wereldwinkels, along with the country’s Green Party, to
boycott agricultural products from all of Israel, at least until a Palestinian state has been founded. The initiative
also involved seeking preferential treatment for Palestinian products. See Crols: Belgian Groups Seek Boycott of
Israeli Produce, 2002. In April 2002, moreover, after repeated refusals by Israel to withdraw its military forces
from occupied territories previously under the Palestinian Authority, the European Parliament called on the EU
to suspend the six-year-old Association Treaty under which Israel enjoyed preferential trade terms with the then
15-nation bloc. No action was seriously considered, but it was at least potentially harmful to business confidence
in Israel, whose main trading partner is the EU. See Chalmers: EU’s Empty Sanction Threat Could Still Hurt
Israel, 2002. The Palestinians themselves, like the South Africans resisting apartheid, have consistently called for
and practiced boycotts. See N.N.: Facts on Boycotting Israeli Goods, June 25, 2002. In August 2004, finally, the
115-member Non-Aligned Movement, consisting of developing countries a great deal more mindful of human
rights than the EU, announced it would ban Israeli settlers from visiting their countries and boycott firms
involved in building the illegal Apartheid Wall. Israeli commentators as well as outsiders drew parallels with the
international sanctions against South Africa towards the end of apartheid in that country. See Heller, C.: Non-
Aligned Boycott Stirs Sanctions Fears in Israel, 2004, and footnotes 207 above and 869 below.
848
Chomsky: Prospects for Peace in the Middle East, 2001
849
According to Chomsky, South Africa would not have been liberated from apartheid without the reversal of
US policy towards it in the late 1980s, and he believes that the same kind of reversal might have to occur for the
liberation of Palestinians from Israeli apartheid to become reality. See Chomsky March 4, 2001; Chomsky:
Neocolonial Invitation to a Tribal War, 2001. US approval may indeed be necessary at the beginning of the 21 st
century, yet it may still not be sufficient to prop up a violent and oppressive minority-rule regime. Only a quarter
of a century ago, the Vietnamese people proved this, although the costs were horrific: an estimated three million
Vietnamese lives, along with another two million killed due to US interventions in the neighboring countries,
Cambodia and Laos, and over 60,000 American lives. US citizens nowadays, however, on an average believe
that only 100,000 Vietnamese were killed in the war, a stark reminder of the persistent effectiveness of US
410

may yet take a long time until it is overcome in a similar way to the traces of the Graeco-
Roman system of apartheid in Egypt, which are now indigenous femicide and the still
dominant cultural identification of Egypt through the Greek apartheid prism. The main
leftovers of apartheid in South Africa are wealth distribution (or rather the lack of it) and land
ownership – these two were certainly intended by the apartheid elites to be lasting legacies –
and to a lesser but still very much noticeable extent: access, violence with impunity (including
indigenous femicide), repopulation, education, language, and thought.

[D]evelopments since 1994 have gradually reduced the capacity of

South Africa’s participatory democracy to breach the barriers to
economic power for the benefit of the majority. Indeed, for the
majority of South Africans, the South African success only becomes
obvious when compared to the Palestinian case.850

The system of gross human rights violations that makes up apartheid must not be seen
as universal.851 There is not more or less apartheid everywhere.852 No doubt, there is more or
less racism and more or less discrimination by ethnicity everywhere, but not apartheid. In fact,
it only appears in a minority of societies, most, if not all of them, apparently associated with
European or white military and demographic expansion, powerful and wealthy states, and, in
some instances, with slave labor-based economies. The Europeans, the Whites, did not
determine that outcome in any biological sense, and neither did the Jews. Only the last 500
years and the ancient period of Graeco-Roman dominance happened to be times when the
west’s dramatic advances in military technology were linked with geographic and
demographic expansion and a perceived lack of laborers. They also happened to be times, as
we have seen, when elitist, social Darwinist, and racist ideologies were predominant.
Most importantly, a full-blown apartheid society will exhibit instances of all nine of

propaganda. See Chomsky 2002 (1991): 36f. The losses also included countless injuries and permanent
disabilities, and widespread environmental devastation, which is still taking its toll, for instance in the form of
children stillborn or born with gross deformities, unnaturally high rates of leukaemia and other kinds of cancer,
as well as other fatal illnesses, due to residues of chemical weapons, such as napalm and Agent Orange. These
most cowardly weapons were employed by the US army during the war and are in some cases still active today.
Moreover, explosions of ordnance from the Vietnam War, the vast majority of it distributed by the US troops –
some of it also forbidden under international law – still kill and maim dozens of civilians each year. See Herman
& Chomsky 1994 (1988): Chapters 5 and 6; Mikkelsen: Clinton Sees Vietnam War’s Painful Legacy, 2000;
N.N.: Old Cluster Bomb Kills Three Children in Vietnam, January 17, 2003; Mulvihill: More Agent Orange
Sprayed in Vietnam than Thought, 2003. The Vietnam scenario for the USA has, incidentally, been compared to
the Palestine scenario for Israel. The militarily superior powers in each case won all the battles but would
ultimately lose the war, according to the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the USA, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. See
Fenwick: Saudi Compares Israeli Conflict to Vietnam War, 2002. See, however, footnote 68 above on the US
elites’ sacrifice of all these people and these three Southeast Asian countries in order to win the wider, globalized
Cold War.
850
Younis 2000: 175. See also Mseteka: Seven Years On, South Africa Black Empowerment Stalls, 2001.
851
Do compare this statement, however, with the Sellassie-Marley quote at the beginning of Part II above.
Apartheid in the (post)modern world is universal in the globalized economic sense that South African and Israeli
products and services were/are being sold all over the world, bringing profits to and thus supporting and
strengthening apartheid perpetrators. In the moral sense, too, people abroad who do not act against it, e.g. by
mindlessly breaking economic sanctions, for instance by buying South African or Israeli arms, gems, fruit, etc.,
help to perpetuate the system. See Reinhart: Stop Israel, 2001. On the broader ethical issue, see King Jr: Letter
from Birmingham Jail, 42001 (1963): 197: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Apartheid as
injustice is a crime against humanity, and an apartheid society is permeated by injustice, although it also has
other aspects. Moreover, doing nothing when one can do something, such as the Israeli ‘left’, NATO, the USA,
the UK, the EU and their allies paying nothing but hypocritical lip service to human rights concerns with regard
to the victims of both South African and Israeli apartheid, but also when one despairs and cynically denies the
possibility of improving or changing things, all seem to be further global effects (rather than features) of modern
apartheid.
852
See footnotes 79-84 above.
 411

my structural, defining categories. From 1966 onwards, the United Nations, the Geneva
Conventions, and the International Criminal Court condemned apartheid in the narrow sense
as a ‘Crime against Humanity’, i.e. not just a crime against South African non-Whites, not just
a crime against all South Africans, but also a crime against you and me, against any human
being.853 The UN General Assembly strengthened its opposition to apartheid by passing the
1973 ‘International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of
Apartheid’, in my terminology: to cover definitionally, prevent and punish apartheid in the
wide sense. The aims and goals of this convention, however, can only be said to have been
implemented so far to a very slight degree, if any. In February 2007, however, the UN Human
Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, John Dugard, a
South African law professor with anti-apartheid experience, explicitly supported charging
Israel with apartheid (and, additionally, with colonialism and foreign occupation) at the
International Court of Justice (ICJ). This is still not the International Criminal Court, and the
rulings of this court are not binding, but only advisory. But, still, significant progress is
obviously taking place on the international legal level.854
The proximity of human rights abuses perpetrated by Israel to apartheid in the narrow
sense, and the identity in the wide sense, as proposed in this investigation, became formally
obvious at the latest on October 19, 2000, when the United Nations Human Rights
Commission condemned Israel for ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against Humanity’ in the wake of
the surge of lethal acts of aggression against Palestinians, acts carried out with impunity on
what was nominally Palestinian territory.855 In resolutions adopted annually from 1975 until
1991, the UN General Assembly had equated Zionism with racism, but the resolutions had
ended after the 1991 Madrid Middle East peace conference, which led to peace talks and
agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as with Jordan and Syria. 856 On May
17, 2001, the head of the International Red Cross delegation to Israel and the Palestinian
territories, Rene Kosirnik, said Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza were
a ‘war crime under humanitarian law’. However, the statement was later withdrawn after the

853
N.N.: A United Nations Priority: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no date
854
N.N.: The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, November
30, 1973. See Dugard 2007 and Tilley (ed.) 2009 on the recent progress, and N.N.: UN Alarm at Gaza-Israel
Violence, March 6, 2008, in which Dugard reiterates the charge of apartheid against Israel. See also footnote 4
above.
855
Nebehay: UN Rights Body Condemns Israel, Launches Inquiry, 2000. The US and the EU country
representatives on the commission voted against the resolution, which was nevertheless passed by a simple
majority. Israel dismissed the resolution as ‘hostile, unbalanced and unnecessary’ and vowed not to cooperate
with the proposed UN inquiry, and it never did. N.N.: Israel Says It Won’t Cooperate with UN Inquiry, October
20, 2000. On the following day, the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Israel for ‘use of excessive
violence’. The UN Security Council had also condemned Israeli violence on October 7, but stopped short of
mentioning Israel by name, a measure introduced by the USA along with its threat of otherwise vetoing the
resolution. The GA resolution, however, reiterated that ‘Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory,
including Jerusalem, are illegal’ and an obstacle to peace. The GA resolution further called for ‘the prevention of
illegal acts of violence by Israeli settlers’. Only the USA, Israel and the Pacific Ocean states of Marshall Islands,
Micronesia, Nauru and Tuvalu opposed this resolution. Under intense pressure from the USA, Israel and the EU,
the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, had opened the session of the debate, asking for a conciliatory message
from the assembly and telling members that ‘words can inflame or soothe’. See Leopold: Israel Condemned at
UN for Excessive Use of Force, 2000. A year later, the USA (alone) vetoed a Security Council resolution on the
escalating violence, and the UN General Assembly again branded Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas ‘as
illegal and an obstacle to peace’. In a second resolution, it also called on ‘the occupying power’ – Israel – to
refrain from ‘wilful killing, torture (and) unjustified restrictions of free movement’. Only the Marshall Islands
and Micronesia joined the United States and Israel in opposing the second resolution. Arieff: Countering US
Veto, UN Assembly Boosts Arafat Role, 2001. On August 5, 2002, the UN General Assembly passed a further
resolution expressing grave concern over Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian cities and the ‘dire
humanitarian situation’ facing the Palestinian people. Again, only the USA, Israel, the Marshall Islands and
Micronesia voted against the resolution. Arieff: ‘Concerned’ UN Assembly Demands Israeli Withdrawal, 2002
856
N.N.: Israel Alarmed at UN Racism Forum Agenda, July 4, 2001
412

USA had threatened to cut aid to the organization.857

On September 2 in the same year, a global conference of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) on racism condemned Israel for being a ‘racist, apartheid state’
committing acts of ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’. The declaration, which also labeled
Zionism ‘racist’, was passed in a majority vote by representatives from nearly 5,000 NGOs.
That conference coincided in time and place with the intergovernmental conference, hosted by
the UN, the third World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and
Related Intolerance, and the NGO declaration, itself partly backed by the UN, was designed to
lobby the governments taking part in the UN conference. The USA and Israel responded as so
many times previously and since with regard to human rights by opting to end dialogue, i.e.
by withdrawing their already insultingly low-level delegates to the UN conference.858 Along
with the vast majority of attending delegates, on the other hand, the ANC, the main liberation
movement against South African apartheid and now governing party in South Africa,

857
Goller: Red Cross Says Jewish Settlements War Crime, 2001; After the US threatened to withhold financial
support to the Switzerland-based humanitarian organization over the statement, the International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC) President, Jakob Kellenberger, made the following promise in a letter to Eliot Engel, the
US Congressman who was threatening the suspension of aid: “The expression ‘war crime’ has not been used by
the ICRC in relation to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories in the past and will not be used anymore in
the present context. The reference made to it on May 17 was inappropriate and will not be repeated.” Monaghan:
ICRC Says Israeli “War Crime” Comment was Wrong, 2001.
858
N.N.: NGO Declaration at UN Race Meet Slams Israel, September 2, 2001; Swindells: US, Israel Quit UN
Racism Conference, 2001; Swindells: Activists at Durban Brand Israel a Racist State, 2001. See also footnote
861 below. In a reaction to the US withdrawal, Charles Ogletree, co-chairman of the (Atlantic slavery)
Reparations Coordinating Committee, a US pressure group, said that Washington’s decision to turn its back on
all other issues just because of its anger at the treatment of Israel was offensive to the South Africans. ‘It offends
our hosts (South Africa) who have succeeded in carrying out a bloodless revolution with the overthrow of
apartheid,’ he said. See Waddington: African Americans Blast Bush over UN Race Meet, 2001. The final
declaration made by the conference, under continued pressure from the US (the UN’s main financial resource)
and Israel, mainly through the detour over representatives from Canada and the EU countries, stopped short of
condemning Israel and merely expressed ‘concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign
occupation’ and ‘recognised the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the
establishment of an independent state’. N.N.: Highlights from U.N. Global Plan to Combat Racism, September 8,
2001. The total withheld US debt to the UN at this time stood at over $2 billion, much more due to elite
maneuvering than to popular sentiments in the USA. See Arieff: Americans Want Washington to Pay Its UN
Dues -Poll, September 10, 2001 (the next morning’s terrorist attacks on the USA came as a godsend to
Washington’s foreign policy and diplomacy, and to the main US elites, in general, both with regard to the UN
and the subsequently deteriorating state of international law, and with regard to racism and profits made from it).
The EU countries also served their own and US interests by staying on at the conference in order to make sure
that the Atlantic slavery system, though condemned as a crime against humanity, was not to become subject to
reparation payments, such as those now being issued to victims of Nazi crimes against humanity (see footnote
889). English-language literature usually refers to the Atlantic system of slavery as ‘the Atlantic Slave Trade’,
thereby more or less consciously sweeping under the carpet both the genocidal and value-creating aspects (work-
aspects) of the phenomenon. With regard to the issue of slavery, the official British comment was: ‘What is
important now is to move on’, which appears to imply that the issue would best be buried. The official EU
statement was even more adamant: ‘The declaration and the programme of action are political, not legal
documents. These documents cannot impose obligations or liability or a right to compensation on anyone. Nor
are they intended to do so.’ They thus refused to pay for or apologize for slavery in the same way that white
South African politicians, soldiers and businessmen refused to pay for or apologize for apartheid. N.N.: States
Voice Reservations to U.N. Race Pact, September 8, 2001. The western European and western European
descendant elites were the instigators and the greatest profiteers from the Atlantic slave trade and the American
slave-labor-powered industries, which lasted for 400 years and whose brutal exploitation of tens of millions of
unpaid black laborers, not to mention the violent deaths of tens of millions more, could arguably be considered to
have provided the capital accumulation and some of the crucial industrial cornerstones responsible for their
countries’ and companies’ wealth and power today. More than ever before, the North Atlantic governments and
corporations, in some instances so rich that they do not know what to do with all their money, are able to
contribute to peace and reconciliation on a worldwide scale, but it appears that they refuse to do so for fear of
short-term losses, and in some cases also probably out of lingering racism. See also Ankomah 1999: 16-19.
 413

reiterated its opposition to Israeli ‘apartheid’ and ‘racism’.859

Similarly, in a later condemnation of Israeli apartheid, the Chairperson of South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel
Peace Laureate of 1984, does not mince his words with regard to Israeli oppression, to its
supporters and apologists and to what he believes is its inevitable fate:

I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it

reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South
Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints
and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers
prevented us from moving about. . . I have experienced Palestinians
pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. .
. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the
apartheid government on security measures? People are scared in this
country [the USA], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is
powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is
God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government
was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini,
Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in
the end they bit the dust. Injustice and oppression will never
prevail.860

Who else but the South African anti-apartheid veterans could be the ultimate
authorities on whether or not Israel is an apartheid society, and whether or not Israel is
victimizing Palestinians with apartheid? If I had not noticed such intense and extensive
opposition to Israeli apartheid by victims of South African apartheid, I certainly would not
have written this book. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the modern state of Israel, a
state that is the result of concerted acts of ethnic cleansing and racist discrimination, an
impressive roster of anti-apartheid notables issued the following statement, which I quote in
full:

We fought apartheid; we see no reason to celebrate it in Israel now!

We, South Africans who faced the might of unjust and brutal
apartheid machinery in South Africa and fought against it with all our
strength, with the objective to live in a just, democratic society, refuse
today to celebrate the existence of an Apartheid state in the Middle
East. While Israel and its apologists around the world will, with pomp
and ceremony, loudly proclaim the 60th anniversary of the

859
N.N.: World Cannot Ignore the Plight of the Palestinian People, August 24-30, 2001. See also Boyle: South
Africa Hardens Policy on Middle East Crisis, 2001, which reports on how the South African cabinet minister and
ANC member, Ronnie Kasrils, himself a Jew, officially ‘equated the Palestinian struggle for self determination
with the black fight against apartheid’. Jews in apartheid South Africa were classified as Whites, some of them
profited a great deal from apartheid, but they were kept out of government by the Afrikaners. See further Jeter:
South African Jews Polarized over Israel: Anti-Racism Leaders Equate Country’s Treatment of Palestinians to
Apartheid, 2001. A few weeks later, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, South African president Thabo
Mbeki asked the world to stop ‘sacrificing’ Palestinians, without, however, going into specific details. See N.N.:
Mbeki Urges End to Palestinian ‘Sacrifice’, November 10, 2001.
860
Tutu: Apartheid in the Holy Land, 2002. In a later mainstream opinion article, ‘Build Moral Pressure to End
the Occupation: An International Campaign’, 2002, Tutu went further and bravely urged economic divestment
against Israel in the USA and elsewhere, as this had proved successful against apartheid South Africa, claiming
again that apartheid conditions were present on Israeli-held territory. In a reaction, the Los Angeles-based Simon
Wiesenthal Center, a major US Jewish lobby group, called Tutu’s comparison ‘both disingenuous and a
distortion of the truth’. N.N: US Jewish Group Hits S.Africa’s Tutu on Divestment, June 20, 2002
414

establishment of the state of Israel this month, we who have lived with
and struggled against oppression and colonialism will, instead,
remember 6 decades of catastrophe for the Palestinian people. 60
years ago, 750,000 Palestinians were brutally expelled from their
homeland, suffering persecution, massacres, and torture. They and
their descendants remain refugees. This is no reason to celebrate.

When we think of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960,

we also remember the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948.

When we think of South Africa’s Bantustan policy,

we remember the bantustanisation of Palestine by the Israelis.

When we think of our heroes who languished on Robben Island and

elsewhere,
we remember the 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails.

When we think of the massive land theft perpetrated against the

people of South Africa,
we remember that the theft of Palestinian land continues with the
building of illegal Israeli settlements and the Apartheid Wall.

When we think of the Group Areas Act and other such apartheid
legislation,
we remember that 93% of the land in Israel is reserved for Jewish use
only.

When we think of Black people being systematically dispossessed in

South Africa,
we remember that Israel uses ethnic and racial dispossession to strike
at the heart of Palestinian life.

When we think of how the SADF troops persecuted our people in the
townships,
we remember that attacks from tanks, fighter jets and helicopter
gunships are the daily experience of Palestinians in the Occupied
Territory.

When we think of the SADF attacks against our neighbouring states,

we remember that Israel deliberately destabilises the Middle East
region and threatens international peace and security, including with
its 100s of nuclear warheads.

We who have fought against Apartheid and vowed not to allow it to

happen again can not allow Israel to continue perpetrating apartheid,
colonialism and occupation against the indigenous people of Palestine.

We dare not allow Israel to continue violating international law with

impunity.

We will not stand by while Israel continues to starve and bomb the
people of Gaza.
 415

We who fought all our lives for South Africa to be a state for all its
people demand that millions of Palestinian refugees must be accorded
the right to return to the homes from where they were expelled.

Apartheid was a gross violation of human rights. It was so in South

Africa and it is so with regard to Israel’s persecution of the
Palestinians!861

These condemnations by the international community, by former victims of apartheid,

by representatives of the overwhelming, but in world politics comparatively underrepresented,
majority of the world’s population, do show the isolation of the state of Israel, and that only
its reliance on military might and the powerful ally are artificially keeping its system of gross
human rights abuses alive. Still, those condemnations (except the two last quoted, i.e. Tutu’s
and the collective South African condemnation of Israeli apartheid) are perhaps too focused
on the Israeli state, which has relegated several apartheid functions to parastatal agencies,
especially the religious authorities. It thus becomes easier for Israeli Jewish civilians, as well
as for foreign beneficiaries, to avoid being charged with or even facing the reality of their own
systematic oppression of the indigenous Palestinian population. That also goes for South
African Whites, in the past and the present, though not to the same great extent as in Israel.
The strong statements issued by the international community – minus the USA and its
bullied or cowardly dependants – have also supported the growing resistance against Israeli
apartheid within Israel. Hundreds of conscientious objectors are now refusing to serve in
Israel’s conscription troops, its ethnic cleansing battalions and legalized death squads. They
prefer being jailed for refusing to do so. The Israeli army, on the other hand, will not admit
nor release numbers on the growing number of conscientious objectors and draft dodgers.
Some of the former have contested the legality of their imprisonment in Israel’s Supreme
Court with reference to international law. Their case was not only that they should have a
right to object to and refuse to do what their personal conscience abhors. They were taking the
issue one step further. By (correctly) arguing that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories
on the West Bank and Gaza is illegal, they also argued that they have a duty not to take part in
an illegal enterprise. By June 2003, their number was estimated at over 1,100. In May 2008,
the ‘refuseniks’ reportedly numbered 1,681 courageous people. There are also thousands or
even tens of thousands of draft dodgers, young men and women who prefer being in the gray
zone with regard to the illegality of their not perpetrating Israeli military service. Most of
them are privileged people, able to afford to study at universities abroad, or to work abroad, or
to produce medical reasons, in order not to be drafted, or in order to postpone their service to
the Israeli apartheid army.862

861
End The Occupation South Africa: We Fought Apartheid; We See No Reason to Celebrate It in Israel Now!
2008. The statement was signed by Ronnie Kasrils, Minister of Intelligence, Blade Nzimande, General Secretary
of the South African Communist Party, Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of the Congress of South African
Trade Unions, Ahmed Kathrada, a close associate and co-prisoner of Nelson Mandela’s, Eddie Makue, General
Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Sydney Mufamadi, Minister of Provincial and Local
Government, Mosioua Terror Lekota, Minister of Safety and Security, Mosibudi Mangena, Minister of Science
and Technology, Alec Erwin, Minister of Public Enterprises, Essop Pahad, Minister in the Presidency, five
deputy ministers, numerous academics, artists, human rights workers, and other South Africans opposed to
Israeli apartheid. It was endorsed by the three most powerful groups in the South African government, the
African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the South
African Communist Party, as well as the South African Council of Churches and many other South African
organizations. Only Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Desmond Tutu, and the Republic of South Africa, appeared
to be missing conspicuously from the list of signees (but perhaps they were not asked to sign). See also N.N.:
Solidarity with Palestine song, 2014.
862
Jews for a Just Peace: Refusenik Watch, 2008; Soueif 2003: 185; Camiel: Israeli Soldiers Say ‘Hell No, We
Won’t Go’, 2001; N.N: Israeli Teens Refuse to Serve in Army of ‘Terror’, September 5, 2001. The Second
Intifada seems to have been a watershed. Peretz Kidron, a member of the now 30-year-old Israeli grassroots
416

There is an enormous potential in this situation to form a kind of ‘Canaanite National

Congress (CNC)’ modeled after South Africa’s ANC, a non-exclusive coalition of
Palestinians and Israelis, i.e. Arabs, Jews and others, to scrap the binational idea and build a
new, secular, democratic and non-discriminatory unitary state and society instead of Israel and
the Occupied Territories and instead of Israel and Palestine. This idea has been promoted by
people as different as the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, and the director of the London-
based Middle East Institute, Robert Springborg. The most promising attempt in this direction,
I believe, is the One Democratic State (ODS) movement, which counts Israeli Jews,
Palestinians, and others among its fast-growing groups of supporters and activists.863 In any
case, it would be exactly what the resistance movement to South African apartheid insisted
upon and finally achieved, after the Bantustans had been created there, i.e. after South Africa
had ventured even further than Israel (so far) down the formal road of separation. The parallel
in resistance development is in fact so perfect, that it becomes difficult to believe that
liberation will not happen soon. Just as young Israelis are deserting from their oppressive and
murderous army, others could be interested in deserting from other institutions upholding
Israeli apartheid oppression. In a self-critical moment, however, Edward Said reflects:

We have never addressed the Israeli public – particularly those

citizens disturbed by current developments, which in effect condemn
Israel to unending strife – nor, unfortunately, do we now have
anything to say, for example, to the hundreds of reservists who have
refused military service during the Intifada. There is a constituency
inside Israel which we must find a way to engage, exactly as the ANC
made it a point of policy to engage whites in the struggle against
apartheid.864

group, Yesh Gvul, which opposes Israeli military occupation of Palestinian areas, said in January 2002 that more
than 400 Israeli soldiers had thus far refused to serve in the occupied territories since October 2000. A group of
52 combat reservists, some of whom were officers who had served in the Israeli army for over 10 years,
published a statement in January 2002 saying ‘We will not continue to fight beyond the Green Line [the pre-
1967 borders] in order to rule, to expel, to destroy, to blockade, to assassinate, to starve, and to humiliate an
entire people’. The soldiers said that they would follow orders for ‘any assignment that serves the defense of the
state of Israel’ but that ‘the assignment of occupation and oppression does not serve this cause, and we will have
no part in it.’ Lazarof: Reservists Refuse to Serve in “War for Peace of Settlements”, 2002. On February 2, the
group had mushroomed, with over a hundred signatories, also mentioning ranks and units, to a repeat of the
original statement published in the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot. Now, Prime Minister Sharon and
Shaul Mofaz, the army’s chief of staff, started responding to questions, threatening their critics in the army with
court martials for sedition. The army also began to relieve dissenting officers of their commands. Curtius: Israeli
Reservists Refuse West Bank, Gaza Duty, 2002. By October, there were 491 signatories, several of whom were
already serving prison sentences for refusing to carry out the Israeli regimes’ dirtiest work. The Israeli army later
admitted that only a third of its reservists turned up for duty during 2001, although most of the missing two thirds
of the soldiers found medical or other excuses for failing to appear. See Steele: ‘I Couldn’t Believe I Was Doing
This’, 2002; Bronner: An Open Letter to the General, 2002.
863
Ashby: Gaddafi Sees New Mideast “Road Map”, Unified State, 2003; N.N.: ODS: One Democratic State
(http://www.onedemocraticstate.org); Qumsiyeh: Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-
Palestinian Struggle, 2004. My proposed Canaanite National Congress or the ODS should not be confused with
the Israeli Jewish literary movement around Yonatan Ratosh, the ‘Cana’anite Movement’, which was anti-
Zionist, proposing a radical break with Jewish traditions, yet also wanting to replace it with a re-invented
‘Hebrew nation and Hebrew identity’, with a program to ‘assimilate’ Palestinians. See Ramras-Rauch: The Arab
in Israeli Literature, 1989: 117f. On another strategy of modeling the organization of Palestinian resistance on
the previously successful South African ANC, see Kassis: Fatah Chapter Closed: Creating a Palestinian National
Congress, 2006.
864
Said: These Are the Realities, 2001. On February 18, 2002, a group of fourteen Palestinian civil society
organizations signed a proclamation in solidarity with Israeli soldiers refusing to serve in the occupied territories.
See LAW Society: Statement of Solidarity with Conscientious Objectors, 2002. By this time 251 Israeli soldiers
had signed the Yesh Gvul statement (see footnote 862). Jews have also joined hands with Palestinians in several
peace initiatives, in demonstrations against Israel’s illegal Apartheid Wall, and in acting as ‘human shields’
 417

The ANC was open to Whites from the beginning, and it actively sought out Whites
and other non-Blacks to join. Said also remarked with regard to the failure of the Oslo ‘Peace
Process’ and the renewed outbreak of widespread violence: ‘A new sense may actually be
dawning that only a mass movement against Israeli apartheid (similar to the South African
variety) will work.’865 It is not yet so similar, but that should not be a discouraging sign.
Palestinians all speak Arabic, whereas the South African black opposition alone spoke a
dozen languages. For them, English and Afrikaans were just two more languages. Palestinians
are already utilizing English and other languages, Hebrew among them.
There is, however, a danger lurking in cooperation of Palestinians with oppositional
Israeli Jews, namely that the latter, no matter how well-meaning, may start to dictate the
conditions of resistance, leaving Palestinians even more powerless. Steve Biko pointed out
how liberal Whites quite naturally assumed that they knew best how to overthrow apartheid in
South Africa, and that they, whose voices weighed more heavily than black voices in the non-
violent resistance groups, frequently slowed down liberation by unconsciously clinging to
their inherited illusion of superiority and, indeed, to their inherited social, political, and
economic privileges.866
It is in the last resort irrelevant if the PLO, the ODS, or a coalition of existing
organizations, domestic or foreign, or a new organization such as the proposed CNC, or
perhaps another form of coalition, or even groups of Israeli Jews, bring about the demise of
Israeli apartheid. In my opinion, outsiders can help through encouraging desertion in the ranks
of the Israeli army, as well as divestment and comprehensive or even partial boycotts and
sanctions. To support Palestinian terrorist activities or a guerilla war, however, at this stage, is
in my opinion much more likely to end up being counter-productive.
Moreover, the priority, under all circumstances, must be to stop the gross human rights
violations from occurring. Whether that will involve future violence or armed resistance
remains entirely up to Israel, or very nearly so. Only if the Israeli army and the Jewish settlers
stop killing Palestinians and other dissidents, will there even be a possibility of a negotiated
peace. The criminal use of excessive force is the crux of the matter. If a Palestinian throws a
stone, he gets killed. If a Palestinian shouts loudly at a demonstration, he or she gets killed. If
a Palestinian attends a demonstration, he or she gets killed. If a Palestinian crosses a street, he
or she gets killed. If a Palestinian obeys a curfew and stays home, he or she still gets killed.
And the beginning of the spirals of violence that emerge from this basic situation remains an
overwhelmingly Jewish-Israeli responsibility, although, as we have seen, western Europeans,
including Britain and Germany, the USA and its Arab allies could also be made partly
accountable.
The Palestinians who have committed or abetted violent acts are in my opinion
primarily to be seen as victims of an ongoing grand crime against humanity. Therefore they
should only be considered guilty in a third tier of responsibilities, after Israeli Zionist Jews,
and after their supporters in the USA, the EU, and elsewhere, as well as their Nazi and other
judeophobic enemies. The charges against Palestinians may indeed include responsibility for
crimes against humanity, but only certainly with regard to the targeting of innocent civilians
with lethal force, and perhaps also with regard to incitement to violence and dehumanizing
ideology, though in this case, as with regard to the violence, many more Israelis and
Americans should also be charged. A crucial question is whether anyone but the suicide
attackers themselves may be held accountable for their crimes against humanity. Those who

against Israeli threats to kill or expel the former Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat. See Ass’adi: Thirty
Foreigners, Israelis Vow to Protect Arafat, 2003.
865
Said: Double Standards, 2000. Said is hinting here at the end of the two-state solution and the adoption of a
single, unitary state for Jews and for Palestinians. See Shavit: Interview with Edward Said, 2000, and, especially,
Kovel 2007, for further elaborations on this theme.
866
Biko 2004 (1978): 98ff.
418

assist, influence, and direct them may perhaps only be prosecuted for crimes, but I will leave
that question open.
In any case, as I argued in Section II.1, the crimes against humanity and all other
crimes committed by Palestinians resisting apartheid should be seen as crimes of a lesser
magnitude than apartheid itself. The severity of the punishment for their crimes should in my
opinion not exceed that meted out to apartheid perpetrators. The Israeli state death squads are
at present in clear violation of international law as well as justice, and not only because of the
large numbers of ‘collateral killings’ (which actually also amount to targeting of civilians due
to their extremely high numbers, more than five times higher than the victims of Palestinian
killers since 2000, and possibly as many as 20 times higher overall) and injuries and other
damage caused. Two months after the last quote above, but before the commencement of
Palestinian suicide attacks in 2001, Said added:

In our case, the fighting is done by a small brave number of people

pitted against hopeless odds, i.e. stones against helicopter gunships,
Merkava tanks, missiles. Yet a quick look at other movements – say
the Indian nationalist movement, the South African liberation
movement, the American civil rights movement – tell us first of all
that only a mass movement employing tactics and strategy that
maximise the popular element ever made any difference on the
occupier and/or oppressor. Second, only a mass movement that has
been politicised and imbued with a vision of participating directly in a
future of its own making, only such a movement has historical chance
of liberating itself from oppression or military occupation. The future,
like the past, is built by human beings. They, and not some distant
mediator or saviour, provide the agency for change.867

They provide the agency but in doing so they must also hold accountability and
responsibilities. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Palestinians involved in violent activities
during the present Intifada as well as the previous one are in my opinion not guilty of any
crimes at all. To resist a crime against humanity such as apartheid is not only brave, but
righteous and just, as well. Not only the Geneva Conventions provide justification for self-
defense. Moreover, if laws and decrees are immoral, then it is moral to break those laws and
decrees. To do something illegal under Israeli law may be a crime, but it may also be a moral
duty. The problem with Palestinian responsibility and accountability appears most obviously
when unequivocally civilian people are targeted with violence by Palestinian freedom
fighters. This may be seen as not only criminal, but also as counterproductive to liberation.868

867
Said: The Tragedy Deepens, 2000
868
Dominick: Ambushing the Occupation, 2002. It may be argued that the strategic introduction of Palestinian
suicide attacks on Israeli civilians have raised the Jewish death tolls in relative terms from around 10 percent in
the first Intifada to over 20 percent in the second. In either case, however, the Palestinians are losing the battles
on the ground. There are slightly less than twice as many Palestinians as there are Israeli Jews. If the current
relative death tolls are extrapolated to the extreme, many Israeli Jews will still be around long after the last
Palestinian has been killed. And (as far as we know) Israel has not yet started using its most lethal weapons of
mass destruction. Moreover, Palestinians in general are losing battles in the propaganda war as long as (any)
Palestinians employ terrorist tactics, whereas, let us not forget, Jewish Israeli terrorists are not losing wars
against Palestinians. The Palestinians are also suffering much larger losses in absolute terms than in the previous
Intifada, although the Israeli army appeared even less concerned about human rights from the very beginning of
the 2000 uprising, that is, from well before the very first suicide attack in this phase of the conflict. For similar
arguments (rejecting suicide attacks on Israeli civilians) regarding these moral, strategic and propaganda issues,
see Finkelstein, N.: Personal Reflections On Palestine: Postscript To German Edition Of The Rise And Fall Of
Palestine, 2003. See also, however, footnotes 176 and 229 above, on the problematic civilian status of (any adult)
Israeli Jews, and of drawing a red line between civilian and other targets, in general. This observation must not
be interpreted as an invitation to discard the difference between civilians and others, nor as an apology for
terrorism. It is just a fact that a spectrum from civilian to non-civilian represents the difference(s) more
 419

In any event, if the Palestinians had access to weapons like those which Israel uses, then there
would be no suicide attacks, and, in my opinion, probably no targeting of civilians by
Palestinian fighters. For decades now, Palestinian attacks on military targets have been
extremely unsuccessful. In many cases, it is enough for a Palestinian to get killed if s/he even
looks at a military installation or a soldier the wrong way.
The military superiority of the oppressor rules out a military victory in the case of
Palestinian liberation at least as strongly as it did in the South African struggle. Sticks and
stones have nothing on ABC weapons; neither do the bombs or firearms used by suicide
attackers, nor the firearms used by other Palestinians. It is crucial that apartheid victims – just
like victims of colonialism and even of genocide – are not only seen as victims, but also as
people who after all can shape their destiny to some extent, and that they can make and do
make mistakes.
When the MK, the militant wing of the ANC, was formed, a phased strategy of
violence was wisely agreed upon and then employed. Sabotage against state and corporate
property without any resultant loss of human life was the first phase (during which the first
MK commander, Nelson Mandela, was captured), guerrilla warfare the second. Terrorism and
open revolution only came up as the last strategic resorts.869 I believe that terrorism was and is
neither morally nor strategically acceptable as a weapon against apartheid, neither in South
Africa, nor in Israel, nor anywhere else. Its employment against apartheid and civilians in both
South Africa and Israel, however, also tells us how bad things have actually become.
Terrorism is a crime against humanity, but it is also a symptom. Terrorism should in my
opinion always be condemned, prosecuted, avoided, and stopped, but the structural conditions
that prompt it should be ameliorated as a primary policy, especially if those conditions include
crimes against humanity. In my opinion, apartheid in the three examined examples of Part II
above is a bigger crime against humanity than terrorism (other than state terrorism of which
apartheid is a prime example) is or ever was, so far. Only when such a great crime as
apartheid is removed does the question of the implementation of justice come into the picture.
A ‘war against terror’, on the other hand, is and remains a cynical contradiction in terms, a
war against itself. It is a war which cannot be won.
The struggle against apartheid is a defensive struggle. In its moral essence, it is
nothing but self-defense. The invaders started hostilities and it is crucial for the struggle itself
that everyone involved is informed and reminded of this, and that includes taxpayers and even
commodity consumers around the world.
Since apartheid perpetrators have been so successful with divide-and-rule practices,
the question whether apartheid divide-and-rule practices can be successfully countered must
finally be addressed. Are Gaza and the West Bank not like Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei
and Zululand? Are Hamas and Fatah not like the ANC and Inkatha, or like the Xhosa and the
Zulu? Yes, they are, and therefore it is important at this stage to reiterate the warning that
most of the many killings within South Africa during the years of apartheid in the narrow
sense were Black-on-Black killings. We are facing a similar scenario with the ongoing
oppression of Hamas supporters in the West Bank and of Fatah supporters in Gaza.
Palestinians have not fallen into this apartheid trap. They have been pushed, beaten, and
bulldozed into it (just like the South African Blacks were). For that reason, they now need
international, global assistance more than ever. But apartheid victims themselves have proven
repeatedly that they can uphold or at least repair unity against the aggressors. The greatest
counter-example to the power of divisive and destructive apartheid rule is South Africa from
1994 onwards. That is exactly what must happen in the Holy Land: inclusive unification. If

accurately than strictly defining criteria could, at this point in the struggle. In the end, though, it is in my view
always better to solve conflicts with words and the rule of laws demanding respect for human rights (especially
international law) than with weapons.
869
Mandela 1995 (1994): 282-286
420

not, Israel may soon succeed with its continuing programs of ethnic cleansing and/or even
with genocide.
Another equally strategic and moral decision at this stage of the struggle is the need, in
my opinion, to highlight non-violent resistance against Israeli apartheid. Since the Israeli and
complicit western powers that be are doing all they can to bury this story, which truly reflects
the dominant form of Palestinian resistance, it is not in the public consciousness (see Chapter
II.9.3 above), neither among normal Israelis nor in the world at large. Here, Palestinians need
to be related much more to the liberation struggles of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and other winners and heroes of recent,
successful and peaceful revolutions – not as propaganda, but as a more accurate reflection of a
vigorously repressed truth, a truth that only the Israeli elites and the Palestinians themselves
really know. In the struggle, some discipline is also needed occasionally to enforce the non-
violent character of mainstream Palestinian resistance. But the degeneration of the Palestinian
National Authority to self-policing the Bantustan, to a mere tool of Israeli domination, must
also be rejected.
Non-violent resistance involves a wide range of activities from diplomacy to boycotts,
to sanctions, to protests to strikes. For the moral international community outside
Palestine/Israel comprehensive statements on plans of action against Israeli apartheid have
been developed in strategic and inspirational remembrance of the struggle against apartheid in
South Africa. The perhaps most important one so far is the 2008 Bilbao Initiative, a ten-point
plan for civil society action for justice in Palestine, which refers to ‘apartheid’ five times. It
calls for phased and flexible boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli state and
Israeli business, i.e. against the political, military and business (including academic and
cultural) elites of apartheid Israel and its supporters.870
A third aspect of the ongoing struggle is the demographic race. As we have seen with
Egypt, and we can see in South Africa, (Chapters II.1.1-2 and 2.1-2), the demographic race
should be avoided because it will almost certainly have negative consequences in the
epiapartheid and post-apartheid futures of Palestine, perhaps not only for centuries but for
millennia to come, mainly in the forms of femicide and environmental damage.
I do not wish to rank these three aspects of strategy and moral resistance in terms of
importance or urgency. They are merely conclusions that I draw from my research and that
appear important to me at the time of writing. The largest loss of life, the worst human rights
violations, will in my opinion take place in Palestine/Israel and beyond, if these three precepts
are ignored or deliberately rejected in the near future. It is now time to take a look at what is
required to ensure that the least amount of human rights violations take place.

3.Minimum Requirements for Ending Israeli Apartheid

Some people are enraged by comparisons between the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict and what happened in South Africa. There are
differences between the two situations, but a comparison need not be
exact in every feature to yield clarity about what is going on.
Moreover, for those of us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors
of the apartheid era, the comparison seems not only apt, it is also

870
Global BDS Movement – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions for Palestine: The Bilbao Initiative, 2008; Gordon,
N.: Boycott Israel, 2009. After recounting the successful actions and the rapid growth and globalization of the
BDS movement, even into Israel itself, Omar Barghouti writes triumphantly, and with good reason: “the
Palestinian ‘South Africa moment’ has arrived.” Barghouti, O.: Commentary: Besieging the Siege, 2010. See
also Davison 2012; Tutu: My Plea to the People of Israel: Liberate Yourselves by Liberating Palestine, 2014.
Four years after Barghouthi, Tutu reminds us all that Palestinians may still only have just begun their liberation
from apartheid, and that we all need to help this endeavor.
 421

necessary. It is necessary if we are to persevere in our hope that things

can change. . . . Most South Africans did not believe they would live
to see a day of liberation. They did not believe that their children’s
children would see it. They did not believe that such a day even
existed, except in fantasy. But we have seen it. We are living now in
the day we longed for. . . . I am compelled to testify – if it can happen
in South Africa, it can happen with the Israelis and Palestinians. There
is not much reason to be optimistic, but there is every reason to hope.
(Desmond Tutu, 2007)871

Israel must implement United Nations Resolutions, abide by the Geneva Conventions
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, change some of its ‘Basic Laws’, and many
of its other laws, and more in order to end apartheid in the state of Israel and in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. As a member of those international organizations and signatory to the
relevant documents, it has a non-negotiable duty not to violate them. The entire international
community has a corresponding duty to make sure that Israel implements its promises
enshrined in those documents and principles (not to mention those of Israel’s own laws that
are supposed to safeguard human rights and prevent crimes against humanity). If need be,
Israel should be stopped by the international community by force. More than anything else,
the arrogant power of the USA, including its undemocratic UN Security Council veto power,
is of course blocking enforced implementation, but Israel itself has to take full responsibility
for its continued violations of international law and basic human rights. Israel has most of the
options now, the Palestinians hardly have any. But the Palestinians must also take
responsibility for human rights violations and gross human rights violations committed by
them. The following are in my view the specific requirements necessary for jump-starting a
‘peace process’ in the real meaning of that phrase.

1. The Law of Return must be eliminated from Israel’s Basic Law, and it is not to be
replaced by anything that could be interpreted in the same way. The Law of Return
is a racist repopulation law.
2. The Basic Law text on the ‘Jewish character of Israel’ must also be scrapped. It
goes against all principles of democracy in general and elsewhere in the world
today to define a country’s people in racial terms, rather than in terms of its
citizens. Despite the Bible, and despite Jewish suffering in the past, Jews cannot
and should not expect special treatment or racist privilege. Israel is obligated under
international law to introduce a democratic Constitution, one that outlaws
discrimination against non-Jews. It has failed to do so for over 66 years. It is high
time for the world to either demand democracy in the place of ethnocracy and
enforce the implementation of the former in Israel or to expel Israel from the
United Nations and impose other effective sanctions on the country.872
3. The Israel Land Authority, which only allows Jews to own land, must be scrapped,
and its administrative work must be taken over by a secular, non-discriminatory
body.

871
Tutu: Realizing God’s Dream for the Holy Land, 2007. As far as I know, all the people who were ‘enraged’
by the comparison were also supporters of Israeli apartheid. Perhaps the South African Blacks should have their
‘Apartheid’ like the Jews have their ‘Shoah’ and their ‘Holocaust’ and the Palestinians their ‘Al-Nakba’, as a
lexical testimony to their unique suffering, but I have yet to hear or see this sentiment expressed with rage. It
speaks for black South Africans, such as Tutu and so many others, that they graciously ‘allow’ other victims,
faraway victims, to express themselves using a word that still represents suffering, injustice and evil in a very
personal way to all black South Africans. The usefulness (both descriptive and strategic) of the word and the
concept of apartheid for Palestinians, in particular, has never even been challenged by a black South African, as
far as I am aware.
872
See footnotes 437-439 above, and Ben-Dor: Israeli Apartheid Is the Core of the Crisis, 2007.
422

4. Secular and/or interfaith marriage must also become possible. In order to make
Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement possible, civil marriage must be introduced in
Israel alongside religious marriage, which is now used cynically by the apartheid
elites to keep the two races apart. The Palestinian National Authority must also
introduce civil marriage. Civil society, here in the form of religious authorities,
whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, can also surely do more, for instance
encourage the state to introduce civil marriage and allow and perform interfaith
marriage in case the state or state-like authorities still lag behind.
5. Israel must recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Not only
Israelis will be prosecuted. There are also many Palestinians who should stand
accused of crimes against humanity. They too must welcome this, since Palestinian
jurisdiction makes use of capital punishment, since Israel uses state death squads,
since Palestinian as well as Israeli jailers would torture them, and since Israelis
would bulldoze their families’ houses and deport their relatives and indulge in
other (often lethal) kinds of collective punishment, conditions which the ICC does
not and is not ever likely to carry out, endorse, or tolerate, given the prominence
and fame or notoriety of each person it tries and convicts, the global scope of its
jurisdiction, and the rules governing the court itself. Israelis in general should
welcome ICC jurisdiction because it is much better equipped to achieve peace than
the Israeli state measures, described in this paragraph, are. They must also
welcome justice (rather than the all too often employed and instrumentalized
collective punishment and revenge) being served to Israeli victims of Palestinian
violence.
6. All Israeli troops must completely evacuate the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east
Jerusalem, immediately. Access must in principle be allowed to all these areas for
non-Jews as well as for civilian Jews. During a period of transition, security
measures and peace can be monitored and enforced by the Palestinian National
Authority in cooperation with international peacekeepers.
7. Truly democratic elections must be introduced. A referendum for all Israeli
citizens and all Palestinians (including all refugees and their descendants, who
must be given the option of citizenship) should ideally decide whether a) or b)
below will be chosen.
a) Arrangements will be made for Palestinians to vote alongside Jewish settlers (if
they should wish to stay) for a democratic and secular Palestinian-Israeli state,
consisting of Palestine prior to the 1967 invasion by Israel, alongside a new,
democratic and secular Israeli-Palestinian state. The borders may of course be
adjusted according to a 1:1 land exchange deal as provided for in the so-called
‘Geneva Accords’, agreed upon in 2003 by Israeli and Palestinian civil society-
based groups with strong ties to moderate representatives of Israeli and Palestinian
authorities.873 However, any occurring differential quality of the land being
swapped in that way cannot be a result of an imposed desire by the militarily
mightier negotiating partner.
or b) Arrangements will be made for all Palestinians (again, including refugees) to
vote alongside all Israeli Jews in a unitary, democratic and secular state comprising
all Israeli and Palestinian territories.

873
See N.N.: The Geneva Accords, October 24, 2003; Bennis: Talking Points on the Geneva Accord, 2003. See
Kovel 2007 and Kfoury: Overcoming Zionism without Getting Bogged Down in an Idle Debate: A Review of
Joel Kovel’s Book, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, 2008 for
exchanges on the one- and two-state solutions.
 423

Once these primary measures are implemented and option 7 a) or b) has been chosen,
three supplementary requirements must be allowed for and be initiated.

8. Following a recognition of the right of return of Palestinian refugees by Israel,

negotiations and implementation must begin on the right of return of, and/or
monetary compensation for Palestinians who lost their property and family
members in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians due to the formation of the Israeli
state in 1948 or due to expropriation by Israelis on the basis of race, ethnicity or
religion perpetrated since 1948, in particular due to the illegal seizure of land for
Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967. This (and
my requirement number 6 above) is in fact nothing but the implementation of UN
General Assembly Resolutions 181 and 194, and of UN Security Council
Resolutions 242 and 338. The work is obviously going to be a piecemeal affair,
dependent on painstaking research and much patience on the side of the victims,
similar to the work of the South African National Land Committee, but it cannot
be based on the ‘willing seller-willing buyer principle’, still employed in South
Africa and, initially, also in Zimbabwe, which hopelessly stalled the process of
land repropriation in both of those countries. Instead, state funds, for instance those
now (more or less blindly) financed by the USA to be used for Israeli military
purposes, could easily be redirected and used to forcibly buy land from occupiers
who have invested in and improved the land, and give it back to its rightful
owners. Indeed, if the USA were serious about wanting peace and democracy in
the Middle East, it should have demanded, or at least suggested this already.
9. Work must begin on a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with the power to
deny or award amnesty for gross human rights violations, similar to the South
African TRC, but with a wider definition of those crimes, including all nine kinds
of apartheid crimes outlined above, i.e. in this sense more similar to the
Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. On the other hand, it should not mete out
punishment (other than the denial of amnesty) like a tribunal. Alongside the TRC,
an unbiased and independent judiciary will prosecute and handle crime and
punishment in a regular fashion. Such a judiciary must, however, first replace the
Israeli military courts’ illegal jurisdiction over the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. In these areas, it could initially be staffed by neutral third party
personnel as well as existing Palestinian law and justice employees, preferably
aligned with, and working alongside, the International Criminal Court. Obviously,
more needs to be done by Palestinian authorities to stop crimes such as ‘honor’
killings, as well as corruption, police brutality and other kinds of normal problems.
With regard to ‘honor’ killings, however, it is possibly of equal or more
importance that Israel puts an end to its demographic warfare against Palestinians,
i.e. to stop racist immigration and fertilization policies and practices.
10. Other measures must eventually also follow. As we have seen, they should include
changes to Israeli governmental handling of schools and universities, public
service as well as private broadcasting, the Law of Entry, the Citizenship Law, the
Military Service Law, access to public amenities and public services, employment
opportunities, social security, and welfare services, all areas in which Israeli
society still proves to be racist against non-Jews (especially against the indigenous
people), in law and policy as well as practice. In order to further redress
discrimination, racism and discrimination based on race, culture, sex, age, and
religion should be outlawed constitutionally (in both countries or in the unitary
successor state), and affirmative action programs should eventually be introduced.
Lastly, the name(s) of the country or countries and its (their) flag(s) and other
424

official symbols should be reconsidered, in order to be representative of more than

only Jews and Judaism, or for that matter of more than only Palestinians, Arabs, or
Muslims.874

All in all, these are nothing but simple and basic demands for democracy, the rule of
international law, a minimum respect for human rights, and for common human decency.
They could be summed up by two simple two-word slogans: ‘Stop Apartheid!’ or ‘Introduce
Democracy!’ It is certainly not too much to demand these very basic things in this day and
age. They should under no circumstances be seen as favors to ask of the Israelis (or of the
Americans). But perhaps most of all, we simply need, as Archbishop Tutu says, hope. And if
hope can be implanted into and allowed to grow in the minds and hearts of Palestinians and
Israelis, there is no reason why peace and reconciliation should be seen as impossible. On the
contrary, there is every reason to hope.

4. The Quantities of Responsibility

It is time now to draw a conclusion concerning the balance of human rights violations
under apartheid conditions. Although the following calculations are based on empirically
rough estimates, and more on the analytic structure than on quantification of the subject
matter itself, I believe they are representative for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular,
and for apartheid societies in general. In other words, I am referring to how guilty the two
main groups of perpetrators really are.
I have shown above that all gross human rights violations in the seven realms of
repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education and language are exclusive
responsibilities of the elite minority and its allies and supporters.875 Only in the two realms of
violence and thought do gross human rights violations partly fall under the responsibility of
members of the indigenous racial majority and their allies and supporters. But even here, they
are few and far between, especially compared with those acts of violence and the racist

874
Abuhamdeh 2002 (see footnote 574). See also a parallel recipe for success by Ilan Pappe: ‘…Israel and the
West have to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and the ethnic cleansing since then. I think Israel should
also be held accountable. This would open the way for Palestinian normal life. And I think only then can you ask
the Palestinians to accept the Israelis.’ Elshhati, Seki & Löwstedt: An Interview with Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine, 2010. See also N.N.: Full Findings, the Cape Town Session of the Russell Tribunal on
Palestine’s recommendations (Article IV), 2011, and a list of 25 apartheid laws, starting with the 1950 Law of
Return, which will all have to be scrapped before an end to Israeli apartheid is possible. Among many other
concrete, constructive and useful measures, the Tribunal also calls for “the UN General Assembly to reconstitute
the UN Special Committee against Apartheid, and to convene a special session to consider the question of
apartheid against the Palestinian people. In this connection the Committee should compile a list of individuals,
organisations, banks, companies, corporations, charities, and any other private or public bodies which assist
Israel’s apartheid regime with a view to taking appropriate measures” (Ibid.)
875
As we saw in Chapter II.2.3, Israeli Arab families eventually became the main beneficiaries of Israel’s
monetary awards for families with ten children or more, which was why Golda Meir immediately discontinued
the awards. I would be very surprised, however, if the total money paid to Israeli Arabs in this regard and during
this short span of time amounted to as much as a millionth of a percent of the total investment in the Jewish
repopulation of Palestine by the states of Israel and the USA and their non-governmental, national and
transnational Zionist sister organizations since 1948. Similarly, it is conceivable that an Israeli Arab at one
occasion or more has exploited Jewish labor in Israel since 1948, or that a black employer exploited a white
employee in South Africa before 1994, but again, these would but be drops in the oceans of exploitation within
apartheid societies. This does not mean that such stories should be eliminated from the history of apartheid. On
the contrary, that is why I included the one I have found. But they are negligible from the statistical point of view
in this context. The Palestinian-Israeli ‘honor’ killings, however, must be left out of this context altogether, for
two compelling reasons. First, both Palestinians and Israelis are responsible for them, and it is hard if not
impossible to say in which ratio. Second, there is no remotely reliable estimate for a body count.
 425

ideologies perpetrated by members of the privileged racial minority. The ratio of Palestinians
to Israeli Jews killed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies somewhere between 1 to 12 and 1
to 25.876 Let us take the lower estimate, multiply it by one-ninth, since violence is but one of
nine realms of gross human rights violations under apartheid: 1/12 x 1/9 = 0.009, and keep
this result in mind. By the way, we are not counting the many tens of thousands of non-
Palestinian Arabs killed directly or indirectly by Israel, primarily in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq,
nor any instances of injury or rape.
In the realm of thought we only witnessed sporadic outbursts of racism and incitement
to violence among Palestinians, whereas racism against Palestinians and incitement to
violence against Palestinians is both widespread and systematic in Israeli, US, and
transnational mass media, academic and state institutions, and in other aspects of daily life. In
the International Press Institute tally of press freedom violations related to the Second Intifada
in Israel and Palestine at least 88.4 percent of these violations of a basic human right were
perpetrated by Israelis. They were also by far the more serious and systematic press freedom
violations. The killings of at least six Palestinian journalists and two western journalists by
Israeli troops since 2000 (the beginning of the Second Intifada) are not matched by any
killings of Israeli or foreign journalists by Palestinians. Nor have there been any shutdowns of
or physical attacks on Israeli or western media stations or offices by Palestinians, but several
such attacks and shutdowns by Israelis of Palestinian media.
Let us take the IPI tally, then, in reality an extremely low estimate, as the Israeli
responsibility for gross human rights violations in the entire realm of thought. If we now
multiply Palestinian violations in the same realm (maximum 11.6 percent) by one-ninth we
get 0.013. Thus, in grand total, my analysis suggests that a maximum 2.2 percent (0.009 +
0.013) of all gross human rights violations in the conflict so far were perpetrated by
Palestinians, a minimum 97.8 percent by Israelis.
This figure is similar to the 93 to 97 percent of gross human rights violations
committed by Guatemalan elites against the indigenous majority during the most violent
phase of that apartheid society’s history (so far), according to Guatemala’s own truth
commission (see Chapter I.1.4 above). It should be added that structural violence against the
indigenous people, of which there was and is a great deal in Guatemala, was not included in
that tally. An analysis and investigation along the lines of the one I have attempted here would
therefore probably come out with less than one percent indigenous majority responsibilities
for gross human rights violations in Guatemala’s recent history, and even less if the last 500
years were investigated similarly. It would probably also come close to a calculation of

876
See Chapter II.1.3 above. The relationship of one Israeli death per five or six Palestinian deaths since the
outbreak of the Second Intifada in the year 2000 does not involve a total death toll large enough to make a
difference. This death toll was still under 6,000 in mid-March 2007. See Miftah March 19, 2007. With the total
death toll of Palestinians in the conflict since 1948 now approaching 270,000, even the current tragedies of the
Second Intifada and Gaza wars can become statistically negligible, or nearly so. See footnotes 283-285 above.
On ceasefire violations statistics see Abunimah: Infographic: Who Violates Ceasefires More, Israelis or
Palestinians? 2014. At first glance they seem to belie my approach to suggest a more balanced set of
responsibilities with regard to physical violence: 75 Palestinian versus 191 Israeli ceasefire violations between
November 2012 and July 2014. 39 percent were thus Palestinian violations. A closer look however, reveals that
none of the Palestinian violations themselves were lethal as opposed to Israeli violations which killed 18 or 19
people and injured many more. Ibid. Moreover, some legitimacy (but not very much) may be afforded
Palestinian militants by Geneva Conventions standards that allow them the right to resist foreign occupation.
Rockets and mortars fired from Gaza have killed innocent people in Israel both before and after Abunimah’s
article. Nevertheless, we can easily see another parallel to the maximum 2.2 percent Palestinian responsibility for
my overall violations statistical estimate in the statistics gathered and analyzed by Abunimah and in an earlier
statistical investigation of ceasefire violations, cited by Abunimah. See ibid. and White: What a ‘Period of Calm'
Looks like in the Occupied Territories, 2013. But are Israelis not allowed the right to defend themselves?
Normally, yes, but not if they are defending an apartheid system, i.e. a crime against humanity. If they identify
too closely with that system, then they do not have the right (in moral rather than legal terms) to defend
themselves. They have only the right to retreat.
426

responsibilities behind gross human rights violations in apartheid South Africa or in Outremer
or Graeco-Roman Egypt, although I am not aware of any such calculations or estimates. Yet
my analysis of gross human rights violations under apartheid should at least make such a
rough calculation possible. Perhaps the contextual discussion can be even more useful than
that: a feminist analysis of inter-sex violence is likely to come up with similar percentages.
Sometimes women attack men because they are men, but much more often men attack women
because they are women. In fact, any kind of social conflict between groups or sets of people
of unequal strength could manifest common traits that have yet to be discovered or made
conscious.
I wish to reiterate that these calculations are rough. The results are not analytic enough
to identify the crucial responsibility of apartheid supporters as a group separate from the
perpetrators. Therefore the quantitative importance of domestic voters, or that of foreign
financiers, profiteers, zealots, and other supporters of apartheid are unfortunately left out of
the terminology I have used here. But the essence of apartheid becomes apparent through
these numbers. In my opinion, the actual figure of gross abuses committed by Palestinians is
more likely closer to one than to two percent.
Strictly speaking, it is obviously never an all-or-nothing affair when it comes to
responsibilities for human rights violations in apartheid conflicts. But it is near enough (at
least 97.8 percent) to justify the labeling of the elite racial minority, whose superiority is
based on military advantage and whose domination of territory, politics, culture, the economy,
and life in general is based on invasion, and whose privileges are illegal under international
law, as a group of ‘perpetrators’. And conversely, the subjugated racial majority, the
indigenous group, is statistically speaking basically a group of ‘victims’ of apartheid human
rights violations.

5. Epiapartheid, Truth, and Reconciliation

Beyond statistics and numbers, societies that have displayed apartheid or other kinds
of intense oppression and armed conflict in practice, such as present-day Israel, could benefit
greatly from a Truth and Reconciliation Commission along the South African lines, though
probably not until the State of War in the sense of John Locke (see Introduction to Part II
above) is ended. This is where the fate of numerous manifestations of epiapartheid may be
sealed.
Epiapartheid, which I understand as oppressive apartheid leftovers after a political
revolution claiming to end it – i.e. originally apartheid phenomena that continue to benefit the
apartheid elites, including also the indigenous elites, and their mainly male descendants –
should be a central focus of future truth and reconciliation measures. In the cases of both
Egypt and South Africa, where apartheid can meaningfully be said to be over, we can still
observe the following instances of epiapartheid, which I will not define as rigorously as
apartheid itself, since epiapartheid is not the subject of this investigation. Thus, this is an
impressionistic description rather than a scientific definition, which is what I attempted in
Section I.7 above:

1. Violence: Egyptians and Greeks no longer kill each other over apartheid, but Blacks and
Whites in South Africa apparently do, especially in rural areas and especially over other
epiapartheid phenomena, such as land. Moreover, there is probably still violence, though no
longer lethal, and certainly resentment between rival black factions of the resistance, in
particular between ANC and Inkatha followers. There is also certainly interethnic black
violence which is at least partly kept alive due to apartheid era atrocities and related
resentment, both outside and inside South Africa. Most importantly, however, Egypt still
practices femicide as does South Africa. Female genital mutilation and ‘witch’-burnings are
 427

legacies as well as companions of apartheid and they urgently need to be addressed as such,
also in their Palestinian-Israeli form, ‘honor’ murders, whether as apartheid or epiapartheid
phenomena.
2. Repopulation: The extreme population explosions of apartheid countries, ostensibly more
than two-and-a-half times larger than the global average population explosion, in South Africa
as well as in Israel, and possibly also of that order in Graeco-Roman Egypt, are truly apartheid
as well as epiapartheid phenomena. I have argued above (Sections II.1-II.2) that the
indigenous people do not carry responsibility for this, but only as long as apartheid conditions
prevail. In epiapartheid, however, a continued population explosion must be considered a
shared responsibility of all races. Of course, there are many non-apartheid factors involved
here, as well, such as improved education, medicine and hygiene, or increased immigration,
which are also contributing to the population increase. In Egypt, however, there was a poorly
understood population decline after liberation. I believe this is at least explainable as a
consequence of the decisive end of the Greek-Egyptian demographic war. There was no
longer such a strong reason for producing more soldiers. There may also even be indirect
consequences of apartheid in this regard, such as homophobia in Egypt and South Africa (and
Zimbabwe), and I am not sure whether this should be considered epiapartheid. Yet obviously,
a culture where racialized competitive population growth is paramount will not easily
condone or accept homosexuality or bisexuality. The lack of freedom to choose partners is
also clearly linked to many cases of femicide.
3. Citizenship: Perhaps it is still harder for African than for white immigrants to gain
citizenship, or just residence and work permits, in South Africa today, but in that case it is in
my view mostly because of subterfuge or simply bad habits, because this appears to be one of
the aspects of life in post-apartheid South Africa in which there are fewer problems with
epiapartheid. However, the neoliberal world order of today is making it even easier for
wealthy people to move around freely and gain privileges, among other things through the
mantra of the ‘need’ for foreign direct investment. And white males are still disproportionally
wealthy, something that South Africa experiences along with the rest of the world, and for
this, the European global expansion and racism over the last half-millennium, including
apartheid in South Africa and elsewhere (e.g. Guatemala, Bolivia, Israel, Rhodesia, etc., but
also more short-lived (i.e. when Whites were still minorities there), e.g. in the USA, Canada,
Australia, Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere, and of course also because of colonialism and
genocide), must be held both responsible and accountable. In this sense there is epiapartheid
citizenship: white, male, wealthy, English-speaking individuals are still treated better than
others in decisive ways today, and they can often gain citizen rights and privileges more easily
than others.
4. Land: This category, on the other hand, is where epiapartheid is sometimes
indistinguishable from apartheid. Especially in South Africa, the actual racial divide in land
ownership has not changed significantly since 1994. What is different is mainly a mere
formality, the legal changes from a system that made it illegal to change the racial lop-
sidedness of land ownership into a system that allows everybody to own land. But if we look
at post-apartheid Egypt, there are reasons for hope and change, here too. If there is any Greek
land ownership in Egypt today because of apartheid in late antiquity, then it is probably with
descendants of Greeks who are not even aware of their Greek ancestry today. Those
landowners most likely carry Arabic names, their ancestors having given up their Greek
mother language many centuries ago. Nonetheless, it is not completely fair in Egypt, either, if
the descendants of some Greeks, who are known to have hung on to state jobs after the switch
to Muslim and Arab rule, were also able to hang on to pieces of land that had ultimately been
stolen from indigenous people, whether by Romans, Greeks, or even Persians. Unlike South
Africa, however, the end of apartheid in Egypt from 642 CE was much more clear-cut, since
so much of the land was returned to indigenous people during or soon after liberation.
428

5. Work: Land ownership, of course, is just one form of material wealth, and with regard to
work, to human, as opposed to natural, resources for and creators of wealth, epiapartheid is
also depressingly present in South Africa today, in fact even more so. The main capital
owners are still white. 83 percent of the land is still White-owned, but 95 percent of the capital
in South Africa, owned by a few members of the 9.6 percent white minority. Black labor is
still being exploited, and unemployment has stayed roughly equal since the 1970s, at an
alarming rate of around 40 percent. Again, the perceived need for foreign investment and the
constructed fear of capital flight are invoked to justify reasons not to tax the wealthiest people
in the country that still has the largest income disparity in the world. Together, land ownership
and work, the economic dimensions of epiapartheid, appear to be its most central constituent
parts. White people in South Africa voted to dismantle apartheid in 1992, but only once it was
clear that existing private ownership would afterwards remain sacrosanct. It seems as if it can
only take centuries for a fairer distribution of wealth to take place. But it will take place, just
as it must have done in Egypt after the end of apartheid there. Slowly but surely, black people
will marry into the rich white families and start spreading the wealth in an informal,
unsystematic, and decentralized manner. If the chronic unemployment is eased, taxes on
wealth can be raised as well, especially if a post-neoliberal global economic order is allowed
to develop. This wealth distribution process, however, is very slow and still leaves much to be
desired from the perspective of justice. The most exploited people, the ones who suffered
actual apartheid, are so far only receiving very little redress, if any at all. From 87 percent
white land ownership to 83 percent in eighteen years of liberation is not really a jump at all,
especially as this land is owned by a shrinking racial minority.
6. Access: In Chapter II.6.2, I argued that improved access is one of the surest signs of an end
to apartheid. Petty apartheid was one of the most visible aspects of the system and thus it
needed to be eliminated immediately in case doubts remained regarding the development of a
truly post-apartheid society. In South Africa, access to running water, electricity, and shelter is
also improving currently. However, there is also still much left to do here. Parts of what I
treated under ‘Access’ are economic conditions: e.g. access to employment, to social security,
health care, etc., and here there are also still many facts of life that have not yet changed
essentially since the end of apartheid.
7. Education: The more privatized education for members of the previous racial elites, the
stronger the epiapartheid aspects of it, since state schools will be more and much sooner
responsive to government initiatives in education content. Nevertheless, private schools (for
all races) also have an important role to play in the resistance against apartheid, since
apartheid also uses state mechanisms, to create and enforce apartheid education. Yet,
epiapartheid has generally been giving in to postapartheid in this realm. The successful racial
desegregation of schools in South Africa since the 1990s and in the USA since the 1960s
show among other things how quickly children can overcome racism, quicker than any other
human beings.
8. Language: Here, again, epiapartheid can be very strong, as with the economic aspects and
violence, and perhaps even stronger. If ‘Alexandria’, ‘Egypt’, and ‘egyptology’ would be
renamed again with indigenous names it would in my opinion be a great blow to epiapartheid
and apartheid alike. But, frankly, I do not see this coming for decades, maybe even centuries,
despite some revolutionary aspects of change in Egyptian society at present. I saw in South
Africa during the late 1990s how very large numbers of vestiges of apartheid were left
standing and un-renamed, and it is not difficult to see how Egypt must also prioritize
numerous, and much more urgent, problems at present.
9. Thought: This, I believe, is the aspect of epiapartheid that is the hardest to disentangle
from other social phenomena. Racism against Egyptians today takes place for a huge number
of reasons, some of which are the ways that ancient Greeks and Romans devised or initiated.
The same can be said for black South Africans with regard to white initiatives and
 429

mechanisms against them. But it would appear that the Atlantic slave trade and persistent
racism against the descendants of slaves in the Americas could have a bigger impact here than
merely racism against black South Africans by white South Africans. I must admit I feel
powerless to answer the questions implied here.
With the hindsight of the South African TRC’s shortcomings in mind, the economic
rights violations, in particular, need to be remembered and redressed in Israel/Palestine. But
its successes should not be forgotten, either. For Israelis and for Palestinians in general, a
TRC or TRC-like mechanism is an infinitely more desirable carrot than the mere Bantustan-
like statelets for the Palestinians that are now on offer from the Israeli elites and their
dominant allies in the international community, and it is also somewhat more desirable and
less undesirable than full amnesty for all Israeli apartheid criminals.
There are, however, also many issues of arbitrariness involved in this endeavor, due to
limitations of resources as well as to political pressures. For instance, the TRC in South Africa
was forced to set cut-off dates. It would not cover any human rights violations committed
before 1960 or after 1994.
The appropriateness of deadlines and other limitations may be criticized, they may be
better or worse, but the basic pattern of human rights violations must be stopped before truth-
finding and reconciliatory mechanisms based on forgiveness can really set in. There must also
be at least some sort of realization amongst the perpetrators that they are committing or have
committed violations. That seems indeed to have been the case in South Africa, when its TRC
started working in 1996. But for Israel and Palestine, this prospect still appears remote, as
Said suggested while the second Intifada was already months old: ‘It is too early, perhaps, for
a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but something like a Historical Truth and Political
Justice Committee would be appropriate.’ By that he meant a forum where Jewish, Palestinian
and other historians and intellectuals could come together and agree on at least some of the
many disputed issues. Soon thereafter, such a project became reality, namely, the Palestinian
Israeli Academic Dialogue, founded by Ilan Pappe and other brave Palestinian and Israeli
historians.877
This may not seem to be much, but it is a commendable beginning, which in a way is
also all that can be said of the South African TRC. In fact, journalists (both foreign and local)
in South Africa early on sensed that ‘Reconciliation’ is a very big concept to use in the mass
media with regard to the aftermath of apartheid, and they therefore usually referred to the
TRC consciously as the ‘Truth Commission’ in their reporting, rather than by its full name or
by its acronym. Recently, calls have been made for a new or re-opened TRC in South Africa,
a TRC without cut-off dates in either direction, i.e. apartheid in South Africa also existed
and/or exists before 1960 and after 1994. From this perspective, and with a non-state
mechanism that nevertheless wields justice, both truth and reconciliation could be served
better.878
A ‘peace process’ on paper can do nothing by itself with regard to raising human
877
Said December 17, 2000. Pappe refers to the methodological and political challenges the project faces, in
Pappe: Histories and Historians in Israel & Palestine, 2006b. In particular, he describes how the project, The
Palestinian Israeli Academic Dialogue, (commendably) distances itself from modernizationism, elitism, and
nationalism.
878
Krog 1998: 32. In addition, Krog says that the acronym (TRC), if used by journalists, would ‘conceal the
essence of the Commission behind a meaningless abbreviation’. See Ntuli: ‘Government Failed Us’ after TRC,
2014, on former TRC chairman and vice-chairman, Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine, among others, criticizing
the post-Mandela governments of South Africa for ignoring and refusing to implement TRC recommendations
and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s Kenneth Lukuko suggesting the re-opening of the TRC as
described. This all happened at an event called ‘Unmasking Reconciliation: 20 Years On... Moving beyond the
Cliché’, which was hosted by the the Durban International Film Festival. If reconciliation is truly to move
beyond being a cliché, then listening more closely to the reconciliation experts, such as Tutu, Boraine, Lukuko,
Randera, Mahlasela, Lewin, and others would seem to be imperative, not just for South Africans, but also for
Israelis and Palestinians.
430

rights violation awareness, especially if that process only involves one outsider, which
happens to be the most powerful country in the world, and which happens to be the closest
ally of one of the parties, which in its turn happens to be the militarily most powerful country
in that part of the world.879 The Oslo Agreement and its aftermath are in fact more
appropriately referred to as ‘the Oslo War Process.’ It is an agreement imposed on the weak
indigenous majority, which now consists mostly of abused, expelled, excluded and ignored
refugees, collectively victimized by the strong invading minority and its all-powerful ally,
amazingly similar to Rome’s immoral perpetuation of a privileged, racist Greek minority in
Egypt, or to Britain’s equally immoral perpetuation of European privileges in South Africa,
with the so far minor difference that what the USA and Israel are doing is now illegal, as well.
In present-day Israel, the violence and the oppression with impunity have thus continued, as
have the many other gross human rights violations, including the building of illegal
settlements, checkpoints, and roads by the apartheid government. And for now, the only
principle that is being honored, in political and diplomatic negotiations as well as on the
ground, is that ‘might is right’.

One day maybe there will be a Middle East “Truth and Reconciliation
Commission”, à la that in post-apartheid, multi-racial South Africa.
But at the moment, one of the greatest ironies of contemporary times
is that while the Apartheid of South Africa was boycotted by the world
and eventually brought down, the neo-apartheid the Palestinians are
subjected to [in] the Israeli-occupied territories, is not only tolerated,
but in many cases applauded and financed!880

879
See also Evans, D.: Arab League Says Wants Mideast Peace, Not ‘Process’, 2001, wherein Arab League
Secretary General Amr Moussa is cited as telling reporters that Arabs would not be ‘duped’ by an artificial
resumption of peace talks between Israel and Palestinians, both pressured by the USA aiming merely at calming
Muslim concern over the US invasion of Afghanistan during the fall and winter of 2001/2002.
880
N.N.: Was Hammarskjöld Killed by the West? 1998. The fascinating background to the title of this article:
The TRC uncovered secret South African government documents that appear to prove a plot by the South
African, US and British secret services as well as the Belgian mining company, Union Minière, to assassinate the
United Nations Secretary General and citizen of Sweden, Dag Hammarskjöld, in 1961. He was in fact killed on
September 18 of that year in a mysterious plane crash in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) while attempting
to end the Cold War-related Congolese civil war. Union Minière, which had a monopoly on mining in the
country, was deeply involved in the secession attempt of the mineral-rich Katanga province from the Congo,
which had sparked the civil war. The CIA and the government of Belgium were also instrumental in that
secession attempt as well as in the assassination of the democratically elected Congolese president, the socialist,
African Unionist and anti-apartheid activist, Patrice Lumumba, and in his replacement by the army chief and
subsequent dictator, Sese Seko Mobutu, a few months prior to Hammarskjöld’s ‘accident’. The brutal and self-
enriching rule of Mobutu, hand-picked by the CIA, lasted for 36 years and plunged the country into further
violence, corruption and extreme poverty from which it is still suffering. In fact, the on-going war in the Congo
is the bloodiest in the world since World War II, alongside the US war on Indochina in the 1960s and ‘70s. The
former Belgian Congo has yet to reverse the callous assassination of democracy by Mobutu and his white
‘western’ (actually more northern and southern) friends. The documents unearthed by the TRC also implicate
white South African involvement in Lumumba’s assassination. The TRC Chairperson, Desmond Tutu, himself
announced the recovery of the documents at a press conference in Cape Town on August 19, 1998. Following
Tutu’s revelations, the US and British governmental spy agencies, CIA and MI5, immediately denied having had
anything to do with Hammarskjöld’s death and later claimed the documents were forgeries by the Soviets, and
the story was unfortunately soon largely forgotten. See, however, Burger: UN Chief Killed by the Brits, 1998;
Evans, M.: West ‘Plotted to Kill’ UN Chief, 1998; Thomasson: Letters Say Hammarskjold Death Western Plot,
1998; N.N.: License to Kill, October 2002. On Belgium’s role in the matter, see Nguyen: Belgium in Quandary
over Role in Lumumba Killing, 2001; Nguyen: Belgian King Knew of Plan to Kill Lumumba, Stood By, 2001,
Misser: Mrs Lumumba Speaks, 2002; and especially Williams, S.: Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the
Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, 2011; Williams, C. J.: ‘Significant New Evidence’ Cited in 1961
Death of U.N.’s Hammarskjold, 2013. The latter describes a dramatic new turn in the story, as the UN asked the
USA for cooperation in the matter after the National Security Agency had admitted it possessed evidence widely
considered conclusive proof that Hammarskjöld’s plane had in fact been shot down. At the time of writing the
NSA has yet to release the documents that should already have been made public according to US law, i.e. their
 431

Once the time for possible collective forgiveness arrives, there should be an
opportunity for coordinating the quests for truth and reconciliation, on the one hand, and
opportunities for amnesty, on the other. A crucial question is how far that amnesty should be
allowed to extend. In South Africa, it was obviously allowed too far. Furthermore, it was
applied only to one end, the wrong end, of the decision-making hierarchy of the state, i.e. only
to the lowest levels. Not that the apartheid assassins and torturers did not deserve punishment,
but, in effect, the state and the TRC exonerated the entire civil society and all the top and mid-
levels of the state from the entire range of apartheid crimes. 881 With regard to reconciliation:
just as it is taking centuries for America to get over 400 years of racist slavery, with its total
impunity for still existing perpetrators, such as governments, royal and other families, banks
and other large corporations882, and with Western Hemisphere Blacks still being
systematically disadvantaged, it may yet take centuries, centuries of epiapartheid, for South
Africa to get over its 350 years of severe apartheid, though it does not have to do so.
Nevertheless, with regard to South African criminal justice and the TRC, still, something is
better than nothing.
For some of the family members of victims, the TRC was also useful merely for
finally confirming to them that their child or spouse, etc. was indeed dead. The point of
unearthing secret burials was not just to prove that crimes had taken place but also to help
provide emotional certainty to those left behind. It brought to rest a great deal of anxiety as
well as false hopes. Although not dramatically, it did bring closure to mourning in some
instances.883
This is the good side of truth. Although it may hurt, the truth still heals, at least in the
long term. The truth about apartheid as a whole is simple, but it is hidden in a deceptive way,
as the following quote from Ilan Pappe, the dissident Israeli Jew, suggests.

I think what came out [of my work as a historian] is something which

I think many, many Palestinians before me realized, but for me it took
this individual journey into the past to understand that. I was taught as
an Israeli academic that there is a very complex story there, and in fact
what you find out is that this is a very simple story, a story of
dispossession, of colonization, of occupation, of expulsion. And the
more I go into it, the clearer the story becomes, even it becomes
simpler, and it also brought me to think of the state of Israel, and the
Jewish majority in it, in very much the same terms that I used to think
about places such as South Africa, and the white supremacy regime

50-year secrecy has expired. Incidentally, apartheid South Africa is also widely held responsible or partly
responsible for the 1986 assassinations of Mozambiquan president Samora Machel (also the first democratically
elected head of his country) and of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, one of South Africa’s (and the USA’s,
and Israel’s) most outspoken critics on the international stage. Eugene de Kock, an apartheid death squad
commander, testified in a South African court that the apartheid regime had been involved in the Palme killing,
but Swedish police, who visited South Africa and interviewed suspects, could apparently not find incriminating
evidence that would hold in a Swedish court. No one has been convicted of the Machel or Palme murders as yet.
See Thörn 2009 (2006): 221; Abrahams: Death of a President, 2011.
881
See Stanley: Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2001: 525-546; Löwstedt & Madhoun: “In
the End They Bite the Dust” – Tutu Receives Honorary Doctorate, 2009, and above.
882
In 2004, US lawyer Edward Fagan (see footnote 889 on his attempts to sue apartheid profiteers and his
success with suing Third Reich profiteers) helped launch a lawsuit against Lloyd’s bank and insurance of
London, the US government, and others for reparations over cultural and physical genocide of Africans and
various other crimes against humanity in the context of the Atlantic system of slavery. See Walsh: Slave
Descendants Sue Lloyd’s for Billions, 2004. On the heavy involvement in these matters of Barclays Bank,
Barings Bank, and others, see Mac Mathúna: Slavery and London, 1999.
883
See Suleman (director): Zulu Love Letter, 2004.
432

there. So I think this is the natural, main conclusion.884

In the end, I confess to being hopeful, as well as an optimist, though a long-term one,
regarding reconciliation as well as an end to apartheid and epiapartheid in Israel/Palestine.
Jews as well as Muslims have had a much harder time through history in getting along with
Christians, especially European Christians, than with each other. As Zionists continue to live
their hopelessly eurocentric, 19th-century dreams of racial purity and racial supremacy, the
rest of the world is moving on, and perhaps most of it has moved on already. At this stage
reconciliation is to some extent thus a matter of making the Zionists catch up with the rest of
the world, as well as defeating them. In this regard, the rest of the world can help, immensely.
True, there are still epiapartheid phenomena plaguing the descendants of victims of Graeco-
Roman apartheid in Egypt. But we know this now, so we can help avoid repeating the
mistakes of history, and international law has appeared and developed along with other
aspects of globalization that are intended to end and prevent atrocities such as apartheid. The
truth about apartheid is largely a matter of information and education, as well, of course, as a
struggle against the persistent and still abundant misinformation and miseducation. And in
this way, too, it is a very similar struggle to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa. I
believe the following words by Jerusalem historian Karen Armstrong, who concentrates on
conflicts of faith, illustrate and show the way towards truth and reconciliation as flip sides of
the coins of two kinds of defeat, factual and moral, that now should be and need to be
delivered to Zionist Israel. This is also the truth that, once grasped, can turn a Zionist into an
ex-Zionist: Zionism is not even in the interest of a Zionist or any other Jew.

We have seen that all monotheistic conquerors have had to face the
fact that Jerusalem was a holy city to other people before them. . .
King David, as far as we can ascertain from our admittedly imperfect
records, stands up fairly well. He did not attempt to eject the Jebusite
incumbents from Jerusalem. . . The State of Israel has not measured
up to his example. In 1948, thirty thousand Palestinians lost their
homes in West Jerusalem [and many hundreds were murdered there,
too], and since the 1967 conquest there has been continual
expropriation of Arab land and, increasingly, insulting and dangerous
attacks on the Haram al-Sharif. The Israelis have not been the worst
conquerors of Jerusalem: they have not slaughtered their predecessors,
as the Crusaders did, nor have they permanently excluded them, as the
Byzantines banned the Jews from the city. On the other hand, they
have not reached the same high standards as Caliph cUmar. As we
reflect on the current unhappy situation, it becomes a sad irony that on
two occasions in the past, it was an Islamic conquest of Jerusalem that
made it possible for Jews to return to their holy city. cUmar and
Saladin both invited Jews to settle in Jerusalem when they replaced
the Christian rulers there. . . Zionist Jerusalem today falls sadly short
of the ideal. . . The societies that have lasted the longest in the holy
city have, generally, been the ones that were prepared for some kind
of tolerance and coexistence in the Holy City.885

884
Pappe: Interview with Steve Zeltzer, 2005, quoted in Kovel 2007: 197. The reasons why my book is so long
are simply that documentation has been a priority to me, and that all sorts of deception and destructive habits of
thought, in my opinion, unfortunately have to be cleared out of the way. But I still insist that the defenders of
apartheid are waging an uphill battle. This book was not hard to write. See Preface above.
885
Armstrong, K.: 1997 (1996): 420, 427. Perhaps one can even say that the more tolerant the rulers of Jerusalem
have been the more successful they have been (in terms of time they remained in power), but I admit I do not
possess nearly enough knowledge to speculate thus. In any event, this quote contains a compelling argument that
Israel should be moved and pressured to give up all aspects of apartheid to ensure continued Jewish presence in
the city, not the other way around. Partly because they did not give up, the Greeks’ influence on Egypt today is
 433

6. Justice?
As long as South Africa played a strategic role for ‘The West’ in the Cold War,
apartheid there was also applauded and financed, and at the very least tolerated by the western
elites. For the Palestinians and Israel, the stakes are no less geopolitical, but there is also the
added complication of oil in the region to which the USA, most of all, wishes and intends to
have ‘strategic access’, with scant regard for the people or for human rights in the region.
We will perhaps have to wait for an economy and a technology carrying it that are less
dependent on oil in order for the USA to let up its crucial and deadly support for Israel and its
apartheid system, or at least to epiapartheid. In the same way the US elites dropped South
Africa’s racist and undemocratic regime when the perceived need to defend the world against
communism disappeared, it may drop Israel’s undemocratic and racist regime when the
perceived need for oil disappears, as it certainly will one day.
Yet, we are not condemned to wait for the oil wells to run dry.886 The same goes for
demographic development, the consistently higher fertility rates of apartheid victim
populations. It seems as if it will eliminate apartheid in time, unless, of course, intensified
genocide or ethnic cleansing sets in. But the future itself remains unwritten, and the nearly or
actually inevitable overthrow of any apartheid regime still usually happens in an unexpected
way. It is not only dependent on geopolitical, demographic and economic trends, but also, as
Edward Said insisted, on the actions and the mentalities of people.

Israel and South Africa are different, but there are commonalities. . . .
One of these commonalities is that a large part of the population feels
itself denied access to resources, rights, ownership of land and free
movement. What I learned from the case of South Africa is that the
only way to deal with a complex history of antagonism based on
ethnicity is to look at it, understand it and then move on. What I have
in mind is something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
And I think we, the Palestinians, are the ones who have to do it. Just as
Desmond Tutu and the blacks did it. Of course, they had first won.
They got rid of apartheid.887

Although the TRC in South Africa has been successful in revealing numerous truths

much weaker than the influence of the Dutch and the British in South Africa. Of course, the demise of the Greek
apartheid system is 1,350 years older, but their own actions forced many if not most of the Greeks to flee the
liberation of Egypt from most aspects of apartheid in 642 CE. They fought to protect their own exclusive
privileges for far too long against an overwhelming majority of indigenous, increasingly resentful people. The
Whites in South Africa may yet do the same, but their voting by referendum to dismantle political apartheid in
the 1990s was a promising beginning for reconciliation and justice, and, secondly, for continued white presence
in southern Africa. See footnote 446 above, however, on how far the Israeli Jews still are from progressing to the
point of white South Africans during the early 1990s in this regard. Barack Obama’s words at the 2013 memorial
service for Mandela nevertheless demonstrate that it takes two to tango: “It took a man like Madiba to free not
just the prisoner, but the jailor as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that
reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and
truth. He changed laws, but also hearts.” See Obama: President Obama Speaks at Nelson Mandela Memorial,
Transcript, 2013. Thus, the oppressor must cease his oppressive activity, but the oppressed must also pro-actively
cease mere reactive and passive responses for a lasting peace, reconciliation, and cooperation to commence.
886
Mearsheimer & Walt 2007: 56f, argue compellingly that although Israel has managed to sell itself to the USA,
especially the US military establishment, as a strategic resource for US access to Arab oil, it has very little real
value as such. See ibid: 143 on the so far very successful US policy of not letting any country (other than itself)
become ‘too strong’ in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
887
Said, in Shavit 2000, see footnote 865. See also Index On Censorship, 2001: 5. Further: Sahyoun: The
Unlikely Road to Peace: Truth and Reconciliation, 2001.
434

and in bringing about reconciliations, and although a TRC may prevent vigilante acts in which
innocent and relatively innocent people are harmed or killed, the future application of its basic
principles in other conflict zones could still be improved upon. Most importantly, it can never
totally replace the function of criminal justice. South Africa’s apartheid perpetrators wanted a
blanket amnesty. But the victims would never have accepted that. They would understandably
have preferred to continue their militarily hopeless armed struggle. My primary suggestion for
internal improvement of TRCs would be to widen the concept of gross human rights
violations from focusing only on the occurrence of physical violence for awarding and
denying amnesty and to include at least some of the additional aspects of apartheid touched
upon here.
After all, the Nuremberg Tribunal also worked with a much wider (though not
necessarily consistent) concept of gross human rights violations than the South African TRC
did in this, judicial, sense. The example of the Nazi media mogul, Julius Streicher, and his
conviction, death sentence, and execution (see Section II.9) illustrates this point sufficiently.
In the end, the global criminal court is likely to improve the external conditions for TRC
work, both for epiapartheid and for other kinds of societies emerging from institutionalized
human rights violations.
This is not just an academic exercise in what would happen if guns and bombs would
not speak the loudest. On September 7, 2004, the ruling Likud party of Israel sent a medium-
level delegation to South Africa to meet with prime minister Mbeki and other members of the
ruling ANC-led government and ‘discuss how they [Likud] can learn from its relatively
peaceful transition’, according to South African officials. It should be remembered that only
15 years earlier, Likud (as well as Israel’s main ‘opposition’ Labor party) was supporting
apartheid in South Africa, which to a large extent still consisted of killings of people
perceived as connected with the ANC. It should also be remembered that the ANC today
officially condemns Israeli apartheid. Likud, of course, wants most South Africans to forget
all about this, but according to the delegation leader, the deputy minister of trade and industry
Michael Ratzon, discussions at the meeting would include ‘Israel as a state of Jewish people, a
review of the conflict between Israel and the Arab people and the political and historic process
as well as relations between the two countries’. So even if the Israeli delegation did not come
to learn, they might have learned something anyway. However, a communiqué, released after
the talks had ended, implied that no apparent progress had been made on improving the
strained relations between the two countries. Nevertheless, only a few weeks later, Ehud
Olmert himself, the communications, industry, trade and labor minister, as well as deputy
prime minister at the time, visited South Africa, apparently for the same reasons. The future
prime minister was fittingly greeted by protesters, some holding placards saying ‘Free
Palestine’ or ‘Isolate Apartheid Israel’.888
It might seem overly utopian to even consider invoking the concept of justice at these
stages of the apartheid conflicts, with regard to South Africa as well as to Israel. The
combined efforts of the courts, the Justice Department and the TRC in the new South Africa,
as well as those of the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the
World Conference Against Racism and other UN initiatives, only managed to hold a tiny
number of people and no institutions at all responsible for apartheid – for three and a half
centuries of racist oppression, slavery, genocide (physical as well as cultural), millions of
people killed, and many other crimes against humanity. Merely a few lower-level police force
assassins and some extreme right-wing paramilitary murderers, but no politicians, no civil

888
N.N.: South Africa to Host Israel’s Likud Party at Talks, September 6, 2004; Sigonyela: South Africa, Likud
Hold Historic Talks on MidEast, 2004; Esipisu: S.Africa-Israel Talks End on Lukewarm Note, 2004; Quinn:
Israel’s Olmert Hails New Era of S.Africa Ties, 2004; Macharia: S.Africa Defends Ties with Israel amid
Protests, 2004. On criticism of US and Israeli constraints on South African foreign policy and a resultant South
African realpolitik of complicity with Israeli crimes on a par with the complicity of other non-combatant powers
such as the EU, see Gresch 2009.
 435

servants, no soldiers, no businessmen, no companies, no foreign beneficiaries: i.e. no real

apartheid elites were punished or even brought to trial yet. There are, however, further
possibilities, especially with regard to large civil lawsuits.
Starting in 2002, lawsuits claiming damages worth more than 400 billion US dollars
have been filed against South African as well as western European and American companies
that profited from South African apartheid in ways illegal under international law.889 Money,

889
Adam & Moodley: Reconciliation without Justice, 2003: 382-386. The possibility of redress for apartheid
crimes, once criminal law had been blocked, appeared to open up with the prospect of these lawsuits. A class
action lawsuit for up to $50 billion against the two largest Swiss banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, as well as US-
based Citicorp. Inc., which owns Citibank, was announced by US lawyer Edward Fagan on behalf of victims of
South African apartheid on June 17, 2002. It was first filed by four apartheid victims two days later in New
York. Fagan had previously won $1.25 billion from Swiss banks in 1998 to be paid to victims of gross Nazi
human rights violations. All together he helped win $6.75 billion from German, Austrian, Swiss, and other
institutions in two much-publicized class action cases over Nazi atrocities. (Both the Nazi and the apartheid
lawsuits, however, were dwarfed that same summer with the announcement of a $1 trillion dollar lawsuit against
a long list of individuals and Middle Eastern institutions over the deaths of 3,044 people in the terrorist suicide
attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. It appears strange that 3,044 deaths in the USA
could be so much more damaging than tens of millions of deaths in Africa and, even, in Europe. See Appleson:
US Lawsuits Allege Iraq Involved in 9/11 Attacks, 2002.) The South African case is based upon the illegal
funding of the apartheid government during the UN sanctions between 1985 and 1993. When Fagan announced
the lawsuit at a press conference in Zürich, he was jeered and pushed by a hostile Swiss crowd, and forced to
retreat from Zürich’s Paradeplatz to carry on the press conference in a hotel. He subsequently criticized Swiss
police for not protecting him. The lawsuit was on behalf of 80 South African victims. They were joined by
another 500 plaintiffs on the next day. Fagan also announced that he would file additional lawsuits against other,
unnamed, Swiss companies, as well as companies and banks in Germany, France and Britain, which he said had
also benefited from human rights violations under apartheid in South Africa. Spokespersons for the banks, of
course, denied that there were any merits to the case, just as they had done with regard to victims of Nazi
Germany. Also on the following day, plans for another lawsuit over South African apartheid was announced in
New York by a team of around 20 prominent lawyers and legal academics. This lawsuit was eventually filed in
New York by 85 apartheid victims supported by the Khulumani Victims’ Rights Group and the anti-debt
campaign, Jubilee South Africa, on November 11, 2002, for an undisclosed amount of damages, and named as
defendants the following global businesses: Credit Suisse, UBS, Barclays, Exxon Mobil, BP, Caltex, Royal
Dutch Shell, TotalFinaElf, Citigroup, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank (unit of Allianz), Fluor
Corp., Ford Daimler-Chrysler, General Motors, Fujitsu (formerly International Computers Ltd.), IBM, JP
Morgan Chase, and Rheinmetall, adding that up to 100 companies might eventually be named. See Stoddard:
S.Africa Groups File Apartheid Suit against 20 Firms, 2002. Yet another lawsuit by apartheid victims,
represented by the South African attorney, Gugulethu Madlanga, was announced later in the same week, naming
the German banks, Dresdner Bank and Deutsche, as well as the US computer giant IBM and Ford, the US car
company, as defendants who had profited from apartheid. Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell was later also named as a
sanctions-buster that would be targeted by Fagan. Desmond Tutu, Chairperson of the TRC and Nobel Peace
Prize laureate, one of the world’s most respected authorities on the suffering as well as the profits caused and
engendered by apartheid, voiced support for the Fagan lawsuits. Fagan was later joined by former South African
judge and TRC investigator, Dumisa Ntsebeza, to lead the legal action, which was now also to include French
firms among the companies targeted by the lawsuit. Both Fagan and the plaintiffs were repeatedly accused of
opportunism. However, the former US Deputy Secretary of State, Stuart Eizenstat, who had successfully been in
charge of representing victims in the ‘Holocaust Lawsuits’ against Swiss banks for the Clinton administration,
now joined the other side to represent US and Swiss firms against victims of racism under apartheid. That is
where the ultimate and blameworthy opportunism lies, in my opinion. See also Finkelstein, N. 22003: 263.
Apparently Eizenstat, as Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury, earlier also destroyed documents to sabotage
lawsuits against the US government over its ethnic cleansing and illegal expropriation of Native Americans. Ibid:
267. See ibid: 131-134 on some of Eizenstat’s additional, mercenary approaches to milk the poor for the
Holocaust industry. There are many additional powerful, more or less mercenary, sources involved in trivializing
apartheid, representing both state and business interests. See, for instance, Lyman: Paying the Price for
Apartheid, 2010, in which a former US ambassador to South Africa uses the tired neoliberal argument that North
Atlantic-based companies who illegally profited from apartheid should be exempt from or above international
law and not be sued by victims, since they ‘can’ create jobs and reduce poverty in epi- or post-apartheid South
Africa, but of course only if they remain ridiculously rich. Unfortunately, the struggle against South African
apartheid must continue due to such initiatives. On April 4, 2003, Fagan went on to claim $6.1 billion in
damages on behalf of hundreds of thousands of black apartheid victims against Anglo American, the world’s
second largest mining company, which has South Africa’s biggest capitalization, and its diamond business, De
436

the stand-in for justice in civil law, is not justice and it never has been. But it is often present,
as an obstacle or a means, on the road to justice. And although priceless items such as lives,
homes, and land are taken, in order to achieve or even approach justice with regard to
apartheid, suffering, winnings, and responsibilities must to some extent be quantified.
The South African government, the ruling party from 1948 until 1994 (the National
Party), and the South African state as a whole, never admitted liability nor did they take any
responsibility for the gross human rights violations that were committed in their names, and
even upon orders originating from their top levels. The TRC Final Report recommended
monetary compensation for over 21,000 people in 1998. Four years later, however, only a
handful had received interim payments.890 In this depressing sense, justice appears almost as
distant today as it did under South African apartheid.
The vicious circles or vicious spirals of apartheid, for instance the fact that the
oppressed majority was barred from voting and their military inferiority which made demands
for the vote useless, are now being repeated at another level. Blacks receive inferior health
care and lower quality education because they cannot pay, whereas Whites keep inheriting
wealth from their ancestors without much being taxed by the state, which, in its turn, says it
needs white skilled labor and cannot afford to let Whites emigrate in too high numbers.
Moreover, the high unemployment in South Africa today forces underpaid black labor to bite
the bullet. Unskilled black employees do not complain much to their bosses because there are
millions like them who would take those jobs with those low salaries, the lowest in the world
relative to the top wages in the country.
Yet the ideal of justice should never be forgotten, especially not in the face of
seemingly insurmountable practical obstacles and atrocities. Justice in this world may be
unattainable, but we are condemned to injustice if we give up on the ideal of implementing
justice. At least, the constitutional and legalized exclusion of Blacks from the political process
has been broken, and South Africa is launching a truly new chapter in its history. But even in
the service of truth and reconciliation, justice must never become a disturbing factor for a
peace process worth that name.
Furthermore, justice cannot be reduced to the mere administration of existing national
law, even if the latter has been relieved completely of apartheid. The laws themselves must be
just. In South African law today, apartheid is absent, but it is apparently too absent. There can

Beers. These were the first lawsuits to target large South African firms over profits made with the aid of
apartheid. Shares in Anglo American dropped almost four percent on the news. See Engelmann: Swiss, US
Banks Face Huge Apartheid Lawsuits, 2002; Schuettler: Apartheid Suit Faces Hurdles, Reparations Row, 2002;
Appleson: Apartheid Victims Sue Citigroup, Other Banks, 2002; Ginsberg: Apartheid Suit Lawyer Targets U.S.,
German Firms, 2002; Boyle: US Lawyer Says to Sue More Firms in Apartheid Case, 2002; Boyle: Tutu Backs
U.S. Lawyers’s Apartheid Claim, 2002; Boyle: S.Africans to Cite Shell in Apartheid Damages Claim, 2002;
N.N.: Former S.Africa Judge Leads Apartheid Lawsuit Team, August 29, 2002; Rostron: The Business Of
Apartheid: The Role of Multinational Corporations and Banks under South Africa’s Racist Regime Is Finally
Coming to Light, Some Would Rather It Didn’t, 2002; Mink: Stuart Eizenstat wechselt Seite: Der frühere US-
Unterstaatssekretär lobbyiert neuerdings gegen Sammelklagen, 2002; Chege: Anglo American Hit by Apartheid
Lawsuit, 2003. Later on in the year, however, US Secretary of State Colin Powell killed much hope for justice
with a request that the South African government intervene, which they did. “[J]ustice minister Penuell Maduna
defended big business, arguing in a nine-page brief in July 2003 that the judge must not discourage ‘much-
needed foreign investment and delay the achievement of the government’s goals’.” In 2006, the cases were still
pending following an initial loss in US courts. See Bond, P.: North versus South: Expect More Global Apartheid
-- and SA Collaboration -- in 2006, 2006. In May 2008, however, a US Supreme Court ruling allowed the three
lawsuits to continue, despite US and South African government as well as transnational big business opposition.
See Vicini: Top Court Lets Apartheid Claims Proceed, 2008. Five years later, the outcomes of the lawsuits were
still unclear, their eventual success again looking more remote after a most conservative US Supreme Court
decision on April 17, which will make it more difficult for foreigners to sue US corporations for serious human
rights abuses on foreign soil. See Human Rights Watch: US: Supreme Court Limits Suits against Rights Abusers
Abroad, 2013; Jobson: Unanswered Questions for the South Africa Apartheid Litigation as US Supreme Court
April 17 Rules against the Kiobel case, 2013.
890
Schuettler June 18, 2002
 437

and must be more social justice. In particular, the laws and the administration of law should
take history, in particular the history of apartheid in the wide sense, into account.
Epiapartheid, which exists not only in today’s South Africa, but even in present-day Egypt,
nearly 1,400 years after the end of formal apartheid, must also, and still, be defeated.
Especially as murderers are being given amnesty for the purpose of national reconciliation,
stolen goods and property must also be returned to the rightful owners, for the purposes of
both justice and reconciliation. From the point of view of this investigation, private property
laws, in particular, have been treated in a disturbing way as vastly more important than
economic justice.
Apocalyptic scenarios for South Africa abound today, not least because there is a
widespread perception that apartheid has by no means disappeared from the scene. Wealth,
especially, and power have largely remained in white hands. Much resentment related to this
state of affairs persists, and frustration may be mounting. For Chomsky, liberation from
apartheid in the narrow sense:

…is an extremely partial victory. For most of the people of South

Africa, it’s not much of a victory, if any. . . .Take a look at the
townships outside of Cape Town and the slums of Johannesburg. The
people there didn’t have any victory, and they know it. There’s
probably a blow-up coming there.891

Legal responsibility cannot simply be assigned to each individual South African White
for this, due to the facts that some resisted apartheid, and others were simply not responsible.
Yet, there is much that Whites could do as a collective to ameliorate the situation. After all,
most of the few Whites who did fight apartheid were still richer, and all of them were much
more privileged than their black brothers and sisters at the end of the day. Nonetheless, the
climate of impunity for crimes against humanity has been developed by even more powerful
forces, as Chomsky again reminds us in his bitterly ironic style.

In fact, if minimal honesty were even imaginable among US and

European elites, they would not be talking about debt reduction and
economic aid (and doing virtually nothing), but rather about massive
reparations for what they did to Africa, Central America, and other
regions subjected to the kind tutelage of European imperialism and its
offshoots...892

Not only the US and European corporations and other private initiatives that profited

891
Chomsky, March 4, 2001. Chomsky does not elaborate on the possible nature of, or point of no return for the
‘blow-up’. The increase in killings of white farmers by frustrated, poor, and landless Blacks was one indicator of
worse things to come in the new century. 145 farmers were killed in 1,000 attacks in 2001, compared to 84
murders in 433 attacks in 1997, according to South Africa’s main farmers’ organisation, Agri SA. See Thomas:
S.African Farmers Warn of Zimbabwe-Style Crisis, 2002. Another disturbing indication of patience running out
for some of those who suffered most under apartheid was the lawsuit filed against TRC Chairperson, Desmond
Tutu, as well as several top government officials, including President Thabo Mbeki, over reparation delays and
downright failure to pay victims after the TRC in its Final Report had recommended the government to pay
compensation of over $282 million to more than 21,000 victims of apartheid. By the time of the lawsuit, many of
the victims, destitute and in poor health, had been waiting for reparations in vain for nearly four years since it
was first promised to them. Analysts predicted a coming avalanche of lawsuits against the state as well as against
the many local and foreign businesses that profited from apartheid. See Schuettler: S.Africa Victims’ Group Files
Suit against Tutu, 2002; Ntuli 2014, and footnote 858 above.
892
Chomsky, September 2001, quoted in N.N.: Reparations, no date. The former US Congresswoman, Cynthia
McKinney (effectively ousted from Congress by the Israel lobby over her careful support for human rights in the
Middle East), has pointed out that the wide proliferation of small arms in Africa today, a considerable factor in
the continent’s numerous civil, international and transnational conflicts, goes back to the number one and
number two small arms exporters to Africa: The EU and the USA. See Medina: Cynthia The Great, 2004: 66.
438

or still profit from apartheid in South Africa and Israel owe reparations to the victims, but the
states and governments do, as well. Those corporations brought home their illicit profits in the
forms of investment capital (creating jobs at home) as well as tax money to their home
countries, who thus profited as wholes, albeit indirectly. In consideration of the fact that the
US and European elites today claim payments from the victims, for instance in the forms of
high tariffs slapped on goods imported from developing countries, and debt repayment
regimes, rather than the other way around, the future for justice appears very dim.
In the slightly longer run, however, there might be some grounds for hope. A
comparison with Egypt following Graeco-Roman rule may seem far-fetched, but it could still
be instructive, considering the close structural parallels during the preceding eras of apartheid
that I have established above.
The most obvious way in which the Muslim invasion ended apartheid is manifested
through a comparison with the previous, Roman invasion of Egypt. Instead of siding with the
original apartheid invaders, the Muslims took the side of the oppressed racial majority and
ended racial privilege for Europeans. Both Rome and Britain chose to perpetuate apartheid by
rewarding the previous wave of European invaders (the Greeks and the Dutch), whereas the
Arabians finally rescued the Egyptians after a millennium of apartheid rule against them. This
is similar to the liberation of Palestine and adjacent territories from crusader apartheid rule, by
Arab, Kurdish, Muslim, Christian and Jewish forces. In South African terms it would have
been, if Angola, Cuba, Namibia, and/or Mozambique had liberated South Africa with military
or other means.
Egypt flourished again under Arabian rule. Once the Muslims had conquered all of
North Africa (within a few decades) and after an initial overall demographic retreat, probably
due to drought and/or disease, but also possibly due to an end to the apartheid demographic
war, stability ruled. There were some Egyptian uprisings, but against heavy taxation rather
than racial or religious discrimination or persecution. The Muslims were on the whole far
more tolerant than their Christian predecessors, which can be seen in the fact that ten percent
of Egypt’s population is still Christian today. (State Christianity, the late Roman state religion,
in contrast, had previously wiped out the ancient Egyptian faith along with the Greek, Roman
religions and still others.) Although power in Egypt has rested rather firmly in Muslim hands
since 642 CE, it took more than three centuries before the Muslims became a majority in
Egypt, since they were so tolerant, in relative terms, towards both Christians and Jews. It was
not until Napoleon’s invasion and then the British colonial adventures in the 19th and 20th
centuries that the Muslims would lose power over the country to non-Muslims. Since then,
things have not been as good as they were during certain periods of the European Middle
Ages, with only a few major exceptions, in particular: female genital mutilation, slavery, and
low population densities. And the latter of those three can only be considered a mixed
blessing.
Under Muslim rule the new capital of Cairo (near one of the ancient capitals,
Memphis, and away from Europe-oriented Alexandria) became the most important economic
center in the world and also its political hub. The Ptolemaic era was the only era of the
country’s long history during which the capital of Egypt lay on the coast. During the early
second millennium CE, on the other hand, Egypt experienced ‘prosperity and power
unequalled since the New Kingdom’, i.e. since two and a half millennia earlier. Even
Ptolemaic Egypt, which led the world in several decisive ways for over a century, is dwarfed
in importance by those two (non-apartheid) Egypts.
During the European ‘Middle Ages’, in particular, Egypt was the focal point of most
of the regular trade between the Atlantic and China. But, of course, all was not well, as it is
not in the USA today, or in Britain two centuries ago. An Arabian aristocracy clung to
privileges that were later inherited by the Turk, the Fatimid (of Berber and other origins) and
the Kurdish rulers of Egypt. But only patriarchy, the aristocracies, the bureaucracies and the
plutocracies were oppressive, not the ethnicities.
 439

On the other hand, there were slaves, mainly women. At first Berbers, then
predominantly Whites from Europe as well as Blacks from tropical Africa were brought to
Egypt as slaves. There were also ‘numerous paupers’ in the new, epi- or post-apartheid
Egypt.893 It may seem fair to add that similar unfreedoms, or worse, were existent everywhere
else in civilized societies at the time. And Egypt’s economy did not become a mainly slave-
labor-based one, i.e. not like the ancient Greek or Roman parasitic ones, nor like the equally
parasitic economies and racist societies in the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, the southern
antebellum USA or the Dutch Cape Colony.
There are, however, some little known exceptions to the general inequalities of the last
couple of thousand years. In particular, the remarkable inland Niger Delta civilization in West
Africa, around the city of Jenne-jeno, was most probably a great deal more egalitarian and
possibly more mindful of human rights than any of the famous civilizations during its long
lifespan, especially during the 8th and 9th centuries CE. There were also some very similar
civilizations in China at approximately that time.894
On the whole, racism seems to have been overcome by the Muslims in Egypt, for the
time being. They would later also use and exploit Sudanese slaves on cotton plantations and
for the industrialization of the country. But Islam is one of the non-racist religions par
excellence. Due to the complex interaction of all these factors, there was for the first time in a
thousand years no longer apartheid in Egypt, at least for several centuries to come. There was
no longer a perpetual state of war, other than the struggles of the sexes and the economic
classes, within Egyptian society.
What could South Africa and Israel learn from this? If apartheid is abolished in
political spheres only, the masses will get scant comfort from the fact that there are a new,
small indigenous political elite and a new, small indigenous plutocracy alongside the old one,
as long as the old one did not just take its money and run. In other words, to be worth the
name, liberation from apartheid must be an economic, social, and cultural as well as a political
phenomenon.895
Furthermore, liberation from apartheid must also include an end to femicide. In this
important regard, even Egypt is still not liberated from Graeco-Roman rule. Although
femicide in Egypt is perhaps not unrelated to patriarchalism before the Greek conquest, and
although it took on a life of its own which nobody, so far and as far as I know, has considered
intimately related to Graeco-Roman rule, I hope to have shown that it is indeed a legacy of
that rule and that female genital cutting/mutilation urgently (at least as urgently as
epiapartheid femicide in Israel/Palestine and in South Africa) needs to be relegated to the
dustbin of history along with all other aspects of apartheid.
Both sides in apartheid conflicts frequently voice a claim to a monopoly on suffering,
even Israeli Jews (mainly due to European racists) and Afrikaners (mainly due to British
atrocities in the Anglo-Boer War). But nobody can sustain such a claim, and even black South
Africans and Palestinians, who have no doubt suffered the most from South African and
Israeli apartheid, are so far lucky, when seen as whole ethnicities, compared, for example, to
many Native American ethnicities. (Many Palestinians reflect this with the oft-repeated
words: ‘it can always get worse’.)

893
Iliffe 1995: 43ff, quotes: 47 and 45, respectively. It is also perhaps significant that some of the last remaining
vestiges of the overwhelmingly alienated Egyptian religion, already strictly forbidden by the Christian Romans
for centuries, for instance the practice of mummification, only disappeared under Muslim rule. On the immediate
economic effects of the Muslim conquest on Egypt, including the initial demographic retreat of the overall
population, see Alston 2002: 361ff.
894
Reader 1998 (1997): 217ff; Oliver & Fage: A Short History of Africa, 61995: 59ff; McIntosh: Early Urban
Clusters in China and Africa, 1991: 199-212. A much earlier, similarly ‘unelitist’ society, starting around 3500
BCE and ending in 2750 BCE has recently been unearthed at Cukurici Höyük in western Turkey. See
Schönberger: Altmetallverarbeitung, 2013.
895
See Biko 2004 (1978): 169f.
440

Perhaps the fate of apartheid in Egypt can also teach us something more positive and
general about the future: that there is hope, somehow. Things do change, and people do, too.
And still more can probably be learned, as well.
Cultural diversity, for one thing, is a basic value, comparable to nothing less than that
of human rights as a whole. Variety is the spice of life, but it is also much more than that.
Cultural diversity is more than merely instrumentally good. When UNESCO adopted its
Declaration on Cultural Diversity in 2001, the organization’s Director-General, Koïchiro
Matsuura, poignantly expressed hope that it would ‘one day acquire as much force as the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.896
No wonder that only the USA and Israel voted against UNESCO’s adoption of the
legally stronger Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural
Expressions in 2005, while 148 countries voted for it!897 As we saw in Chapter II.9.3, of all
the countries in the world Israel and the USA are especially interested in further oligopolizing
information, entertainment, and culture on the worldwide stage, because, in Palestine at least,
they stand for discriminatory invader minority rule and cultural hegemony with a large dose
of propaganda that is unmatched by anything in today’s world.
The UNESCO votes manifest a closely intertwined relationship between the enemies
of cultural diversity and those of human rights. The USA is the richest country in the world,
and it has over 300 million people, yet only one de facto official language since genocidal
white rule established and entrenched itself (see Chapter I.4 above). The Palestinians are now
losing their land and their identity like the Native Americans and southern African Blacks
before them. And the USA routinely vetoes international condemnation of Israel’s continuous
violations of human rights. US vetoes in favor of Israel in the UN Security Council since 1982
actually outnumber all other vetoes by all other permanent Security Council members
combined. Despite NATO, or rather beneath the surface of NATO, it appears that the USA’s
closest ally is in fact Israel, bilateral aid being another aspect of that alliance which is
unreflected in the USA’s relationship with any NATO ally. And so perhaps Israel feels
obligated to assist the USA when the USA wants backing for less cultural diversity, less
variety, and for more homogenized cultural products and markets at home and abroad. And

896
N.N.: Press Release, General Conference Adopts Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, November 2,
2001. The full text of the declaration is also available on that page. If a world republic ever materializes, then
cultural diversity and biodiversity should, in my opinion, have equal status to human rights as top priorities in its
laws and in its constitution. See, further, Löwstedt 1995: 20ff; Giddens & Hutton: Fighting Back, 2000: 213-223;
Held: Cosmopolitanism: Ideas, Realities and Deficits, 2002: 305-324. Only a democratic world republic can in
my opinion overcome the undemocratic and pro-NATO – i.e. the practically racist and classist – deficits of the
United Nations and other leading international organizations. These deficits are partly to blame for the
establishment of a racist state in Israel, and for many other misfortunes and injustices. Yet the UN should also be
lauded for the Universal Declarations of Human Rights and on Cultural Diversity, and the broader development
of international and global law, among many other things. The UN can therefore, from my perspective, not be
dismissed entirely. The realization of its ideal successor, a democratic, transparent, and just world republic – it is
to be expected – would continue to be sabotaged and vigorously prevented by the most wealthy and powerful
nations and organizations in the world today. The reasons are obvious, especially perhaps the basic political
economic one: the majority of world parliamentarians as well as the first democratically elected world president
are more than likely to be non-Whites, and, if they truly represent the electorate, more in favor of wealth
redistribution than wealth concentration, as opposed to the leaders of today’s world, who are of course mainly
unelected (e.g. the members of the European Commission, or the many advisers, cabinet members and other
appointees of elected western leaders or entirely unelected powerhouses such as the various national security
councils and of course almost all major business leaders), or only elected by privileged minorities, from the
global perspective. In this important regard, there is global apartheid. (However, the term, ‘apartheid’, as defined
in Part I above, becomes more useful in an analytic way.) Due to the global reach of their immense influence and
powers, the leader of News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch) and the president (and the national security council)
of the USA should otherwise be electable by a global constituency, and not only by the privileged, relatively few.
On Murdoch, see Coogan 2011. See also footnote 152 above.
897
Unescopress: General Conference Adopts Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of
Cultural Expressions, October 20, 2005. Additionally, four countries abstained from voting.
 441

the increased global spread of overwhelmingly pro-Israeli cultural products of Hollywood and
the other US media products dealing, if ever so slightly, with the Middle East, are of course
also in apartheid Israel’s direct interest. Anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and Zionism are far
from uncommon in the largely US-owned media content of the world today.
The destruction of cultural diversity is a hallmark of apartheid. It may always be and
has indeed been achieved by apartheid, as well as by other kinds of racism. For this reason
alone, racism as a whole should join the narrower concepts of genocide, colonialism, and
apartheid as a ‘crime against humanity’. (We have also looked at many other reasons in the
course of this investigation.) Apartheid would then no longer be seen as a fringe phenomenon
among crimes against humanity and its long overdue dismantling in the one place where it
still exists unabashed and in full force – in Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories –
could be accelerated. Let colonialism and majoritarian racism instead belong to the ‘fringe
crimes against humanity’ (see Part II.Introduction), of course as long as they do not become
genocidal in character. According to the theory proposed here, however, a predominantly
colonialist society would have to become apartheid before it could ever become genocidal.
Even if only for a short while, that is exactly what happened to the indigenous people in the
Americas, in Australia, in the European colonies in southern Africa, and elsewhere. They
were all oppressed majorities before being turned into oppressed minorities (or suppressed
mere memories).
Moreover, the Bantustan conditions imposed on the Palestinians by Israel and the
USA through the Oslo Accords and since then – are apartheid crimes. They are thus part and
parcel of a crime against humanity and as such they should be eliminated, the sooner the
better. Mistakes of the past can be avoided, especially if the past is known well and well
known. The Palestinian ‘state’ so far proposed by the Israeli apartheid elites and the USA is
an elusive carrot, which may seem like an attractive prize compared to the stick of continued
military occupation. Yet, it should not be recognized as a state by the international
community, for exactly the same reasons that not one state other than South Africa recognized
its Bantustans as independent states during the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, although Israel, apartheid
South Africa’s closest ally, very nearly recognized the ‘Homeland’ of Bophuthatswana, a
fragmented ‘entity’ of poor land with a high population density, rife with violence, i.e. similar
to what are now referred to as the ‘Palestinian self-ruled areas’ in the West Bank and Gaza.
History has shown that elites will use whatever means are available in order to divide and
rule, and Palestinians should continue to beware of the apartheid carrots, sticks, and other
tricks with which the Israeli elites will continue to hide but also rear their ugly heads.898
The symptoms have been located, mapped, charted and investigated systematically.
The diagnosis is terminologically and conceptually the same or very nearly the same, across a
wide range of different researchers starting from vastly different perspectives for vastly
different reasons. After diagnosis comes treatment of the infirmity. The necessary operation,
clearly, is to remove apartheid. Only then can healing set in.
Removing apartheid, however frightening it may seem to elite race civilians, is not
removing people; it is bringing people together, to work together, to improve the future, to
honor the land and the ancestors, ending overprivilege as well as underprivilege. That is the
only way that all societies that suffered from apartheid so far have healed, to the extent that
they have healed. Some became genocidal, others still cling to apartheid vestiges today.
Perhaps an entirely completed healing process has never taken place. Yet, many former
apartheid societies have regenerated dramatically and there are plenty of good reasons for
Palestine/Israel to follow the example of South African reconciliation and liberation: no
guarantees, but many good reasons.

898
See footnote 483 above; Hedges 2014, and Biko 2004 (1978): ‘By making it difficult to get even the 13% of
the land [that the Whites had promised to the Blacks since 1936] the powers that be are separating our ‘struggles’
into eight different struggles for eight false freedoms…’
442

Finally, in my opinion, genuine Egyptian culture, free of direct and indirect apartheid
influence, free of epiapartheid, will flourish again when Alexandria is renamed, for instance
as Ra-Kedet, just like Pretoria has become Tshwane and South Africa’s Orange river has now
again become the Gariep,899 and when the international community, i.e. the speakers of
European languages, and Europeans in particular, start calling the country itself Kemet or Misr
(its pre- and post-apartheid names), or anything else Egyptian, rather than by its Greek name,
its apartheid name. The contemporary Egyptians should not be held responsible for this. They
are more or less forced to use English, German, French, Swedish, etc. and to call their country
by its Greek name. The cultural liberation of South Africa has started, as indicated, although
there is still a long way to full liberation. But Israel/Palestine is still going in the opposite
direction: original names are still being obliterated in favor of the racist newcomers’ fancies
and ethnic cleansing policies.
A modern Canaan, i.e. an inclusive, secular, democratic state for Arabs, Jews and
others, indeed seems to be a worthy goal, but it is not the only solution, nor even necessarily
the best one. The solution is almost deceptively simple: to eliminate apartheid, and thus to
save lives, money, and environment and to spread more widely both human rights and wealth.
Except with a very short-term perspective, it is neither hard nor expensive to destroy
apartheid; it is in fact much more expensive and difficult to uphold it. Apartheid is an
extremely unnatural thing. The Israeli and US business elites are learning this (over and over
again) as well as the South African elites did. They do, however, manage to raise the money
(over and over again), both through exploitation of the indigenous and others, through taxes
and private donations, with votes from their electorates, with generous assistance and
collaboration, as we have seen, from the most powerful states, armies, and from many if not
most of the largest privately and publicly owned mass media in the world, among many
others.
It may be the case that no upper social class has ever voluntarily given up economic
privileges. The South African Whites merely gave up a few political and social privileges in
the 1990s. Since then, the overwhelming majority of them (in particular the elites) also cling
to the political and social privileges of unaccountability and impunity for apartheid crimes, the
biggest crimes in the country during the last three-and-a-half centuries, as well as to illicitly
obtained wealth, as do the many foreigners (mostly western and white) who profited from
apartheid, supported it and/or perpetrated it.
Still, that does not mean that liberation cannot be accomplished. We are heading into a
new era, in which nation-states, i.e. limited, two-dimensional surfaces, over which national
governments, legislative assemblies and judiciaries exercise sovereign power, seem to be
playing an ever-diminishing role. Both international integration on regional as well as global
bases and the globalization of democracy and other human rights – as opposed to the already
accomplished economic or corporate globalization – seem to be additional ways out of the
crisis, for Israel/Palestine as well as for the whole region.
One example of the peace-making potential of regional international integration is the
way in which the establishment of European integration led to a breakthrough in the peace
process in Northern Ireland. Prior to that, the fate of the British-held territory, which has also
manifested several symptoms of apartheid (see Section I.4 above), was expected to be
determined within the triangle London-Dublin-Belfast. Now there are also the newly relevant
power centers of Brussels, Vienna, and Strasbourg, of which both the Irish and the British are
subject as member states of the European Union, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the European Court of Human Rights, and the Council of
Europe. With the USA superseding Britain as the main military, political and economic power
on the global stage in 1914, the same kind of extended constellation of power had led to the

899
See footnotes 451 and 102, respectively.
 443

establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1921, not least due to a strong immigrant Irish
lobby in America.
Similarly, a solution to the conflict between the Basque people and the Spanish state
could perhaps only have become possible now that Spain is member of those same four
intergovernmental organizations. (The roles of the UN and many NGOs as guardians and
promoters of human rights and cultural diversity also come to mind as facilitators, both in
Ireland and Spain.) A Middle Eastern Union, an Eastern Mediterranean Union, or just a
Mediterranean Union – headquartered in, say, Ra-Kedet (Alexandria), Nicosia, Dubrovnik, or
Benghazi – could thus transform ‘either-or’ situations at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict into ‘both-and’ or ‘neither-nor’ situations.900
An instance of global integration, even more able to soon yield positive results, is the
formation and operationalization of the International Criminal Court, for which the Belgian
war crimes probe against the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, could perhaps be seen as a
failed dress rehearsal, failed because it was not yet a truly global jurisdiction. The ICC is still
working only with charges against African war criminals, and that must change. But at least it
is trying and punishing criminals. In the long run, the globalization of democracy and justice
is unequivocally working against apartheid and other kinds of violent racism (which, as we
have seen, is one of the main reasons that the USA and Israel are so vigorously attempting to
counteract and even sabotage the formation, establishment and work of the global criminal
court and other crucial aspects of global democracy and justice), but this aspect of
globalization is also working against other, even more powerful, hegemonic interests, in
particular corporate ones. And the latter will no doubt present humanity with even tougher
problems than the comparatively simple gross human rights violations caused by apartheid.
Apartheid in South Africa was brought down by enemies internal (ANC, PAC, the
South African Communist Party, SWAPO, the Black Consciousness Movement, UDF, etc.)
and external (Angola, Cuba, Mozambique, etc.), by demographic developments, by the
victory of globalized capitalism and the end of the Cold War, by global civil society boycotts
(consumer boycotts, sports boycotts, cultural and academic boycotts, etc.) and divestment, as
well as by international sanctions, the development of international law, the weapons
embargo, by an emerging global civil society, and by individuals. All of these sorts of
resistance or dynamics are again at work in order to bring about Palestinian liberation from
Israeli apartheid, although some are only in the starting blocks. But that is a very inspiring and
hopeful sign that, yet again, apartheid will not prevail.
After all, it is mostly down to and up to both those who profit from and those who are
directly victimized by apartheid to get rid of it. Although a crime against humanity victimizes

900
On Ireland, see also footnotes 72-73 and 188 above. On the Basque-Spanish conflict, see Wilkinson: Basque
Separatist Group Ends Four-Decade War with Spain, 2006. An overlap between the MEU, the EMU, and/or the
MU with the EU would in my opinion be preferable, whether it be defined by Turkey’s western or eastern
borders. (And one cannot expect Israel as a Jewish state to ever support its coming to existence. Moreover, Chad,
Congo, or Iran should have as much to say about its circumstances as Portugal, Sweden, or Germany, which also
do not border the Mediterranean.) The reason behind my support for an overlap is that the development of even
less permeable frontiers between the EU and its neighbors, in my view, is eventually likely to cause a scenario
similar to the global power-constellation described in George Orwell’s novel, ‘1984’, i.e. a world which consists
of only a handful of countries. Under such circumstances, there is, in my opinion, an even greater risk of
totalitarianism, systematic human rights violations, and perpetual warfare developing than in the present state of
the world or in a single world state. Moreover, a much more direct democracy would be preferable to the
intergovernmentally established European Commission, which makes decisions over the people’s heads. Apart
from these two serious flaws, i.e. its insularism and its undemocratic aspects, the European Union has, in my
opinion, largely been a good thing for Europeans, though not necessarily for non-Europeans, especially not for
Africans. See Löwstedt 1995, Einleitung, and Löwstedt: Weltstaat gegen Weltmarkt, 2000. On the spreading
wisdom among Palestinians that a Palestinian state based on PLO (Bantustan) agreements with Israel may be less
desirable than an alternative peaceful solution to the conflict centering more on rights than statehood, see
Khalidi: A West Bank Anachronism: The PLO Goal of Statehood Has Lost Its Glitter as a New National Mood
Transforms the Palestinian Struggle, 2011.
444

us all, we all owe it to the most directly affected victims, past and present, to let them have the
last say and to decisively form the process of liberation from apartheid. And in that last say,
they should be given space. My last suggestion here is that the main apartheid victims should
be able to relate in a meaningful way to their pre-victim indigenous ancestors within the space
of their last say. The victimized society should be able to pick up at least something from the
indigenous culture’s unique development where the pre-apartheid society had left off, as it
became a culture under siege. In this way, I believe, the full humanity of the victims, and the
full potential of their cultures can be revived. A few years before he was murdered by the
South African state, Steve Biko wrote something similar, something which could also be said
about both ancient Egyptians and postmodern Palestinians:

We must relate the past to the present and demonstrate an historical

evolution of the modern African. We must reject the attempts by the
powers that be to project an arrested image of our culture. . . . It is
through the evolution of our genuine culture that our identity can be
fully rediscovered.901

Justice may seem elusive for all apartheid victims, but history is certainly not only and
not always written by the victors. The condemnation, conviction, and sentencing for crimes
against humanity are exactly what apartheid warrants, and not only because international law
– the UN, UNESCO, the ICC, the ICJ, the Geneva Conventions, etc. – say so. It is mainly
because of heroic resistance against overwhelming odds, but also through objective research,
the wisdom of experience, conscientious ethical judgment and informed critical assessment,
that apartheid has become known, repudiated, and judicially categorized as a crime against
humanity. Any of these enemies of apartheid are things that any human being is more or less
capable of carrying out. Divestment, boycotts, sanctions, and protests, are also relatively easy,
and most importantly, also non-violent forms of resistance. This is where people everywhere
can really become active and make a difference, too. Even if it is a tortuously slow method of
liberation: the social, economic, political, cultural, and personal consequences of colonial,
apartheid and genocidal conquests and oppressive systems are devastating, and they are going
to be with us in this generation and the next, but we can at least try to enable future
generations to live without them.
My focus here on apartheid is obviously not enough to defeat apartheid. As Håkan
Thörn has suggested: anti-apartheid is more important than apartheid for humanity, society as
well as for social science.902 Anti-apartheid represents the decency, dignity, and goodness of
humankind. And its policies and practices, fallible and human, warrant even more scrutiny in
the future. Which was the most moral anti-apartheid movement? Which was the most
effective one in bringing down apartheid? Which ones led to the largest and smallest amounts
of gross human rights violations, respectively? Which one led to the least loss of life? We do
not yet know. But anti-apartheid and apartheid are mutually dependent on each other, and I
believe discovery, scrutiny, and knowledge of apartheid are still, unfortunately, very
important in today’s global society as well as for understanding the past. We are still divided
by race, gender, and class (and perhaps also even of age), much more than by countries or
civilizations, and possibly even more than by religions or cultures. The world system is not
the international system, it is far more subtle. It is largely characterized by its deep structure,
which is very different from its surface structure. It is still largely hierarchical, aggressive and
violent, and often unconscious. If we can make it more conscious, we may perhaps be able to
defeat its many oppressive structures and prevent them from reappearing, and make the world
a less violent and less unjust place. Perhaps.

901
Biko 2004 (1978): 76f.
902
See footnote 152. Thanks to Håkan Thörn and Husam Madhoun for helping me develop this thought.
 445

The penultimate idea here belongs to the great Old Kingdom philosopher, Ptahhotep,
who wrote the following stanza around forty-three and a half centuries ago, two thousand
years before the invading Greeks would arrive to set up their version of apartheid in his home
country. Across the millennia, an inalienable sense of justice, backed by the determination and
the courage required to defend and to implement it, appears to be able to both overcome and
defeat evil, and eventually to assign historic apartheid figures and societies to either the halls
of shame (as a short-term remedy) or oblivion (as a truly long term remedy) where they
belong.

Great is justice, lasting in effect...

Baseness may seize riches.
Yet crime never lands its wares
In the end it is justice that lasts...903

Mandela voiced a philosophically closely related claim, a negation of the negation of

Ptahhotep’s assertion, as he defended himself in an apartheid court against racist charges by
an apartheid state. It is somewhat less optimistic than Ptahhotep’s strong statement, but in the
most desperate of circumstances, it still provides a reason, or a window, for hope:

Men are not capable

Of doing nothing,
Of saying nothing,
Of not reacting
Against injustice…904

903
The Instruction of Ptahhotep, in Lichtheim 1973: 63ff. See Brunner 1997: 111ff, for an updated and much
improved interpretation and translation of Ptahhotep’s book. On Ma`at, the ancient Egyptian concept of justice
and truth, see Assmann 1995 (1990) and Karenga 1995. On the two ancient Egyptian concepts of constancy, Djet
and Neheh, or ‘permanent sameness’ and ‘permanent change’, see Thausing: Sein und Werden. Versuch einer
Ganzheitsschau der Religion des Pharaonenreiches, 1971; Assmann: Zeit und Ewigkeit im alten Ägypten, 1975;
Allen: Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts, 1988; Löwstedt 1995: 143-
157. The Bikoesque revitalization of genuine, pre-apartheid Egyptian culture is well underway since the
decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and the reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian language, the birth of
scientific egyptology, and the preservation and scientific archaeology of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Despite an
initially, and still recurringly overbearing positivistic approach, sometimes looking for trees and missing the
forests, egyptology now also crucially involves a kind of spiritual archaeology of the three main monotheistic
religions, which were all born in Egypt and/or its vicinity (Palestine and western Arabia), with Judaism
emphasizing one aspect of ancient Egyptian spirituality with its ten commandments, Christianity another with its
doctrine of neighborly love, and Islam yet another with its emphasis on justice and truth (also, of course, harking
back to Ma`at). And there is still much more to be found in this spiritual archaeology, especially as research into
ancient Egyptian philosophy, science, and the rich secular culture of ancient Egypt deepens. For a perhaps rather
‘romeophobic’, but still instructive example of such an archaeology, see Osman: Christianity: An Ancient
Egyptian Religion, 2005 (1998), where the author contends that Jesus was Egyptian and shows that the religion
that was to become the largest and most powerful one in the world was in fact based on numerous crucial
elements of ancient Egyptian religion, ethics and culture, elements that were denied, however, by powerful and
egyptophobic Roman Christians, and the written evidence for which was largely destroyed in library sackings
and fires in Alexandria during the fourth and fifth centuries, in any event, if directly or indirectly, if intended or
unintended, a part of a memoricide or cultural genocide of huge proportions.
904
Mandela 2002 (1965): 136. The quote is from Mandela’s brilliant defense in the 1962 trial, which
nevertheless found him guilty of ‘inciting’ black Africans to lay down their tools and strike (which they were not
allowed to do under any circumstances) and of leaving South Africa without a valid travel document (which was
hardly ever granted to Blacks). For this, Mandela was sentenced to five years in prison and had to spend 23 hours
a day in solitary confinement, sewing mailbags. His sentence was cut short a year later when he was charged
with new-found evidence against him and faced a death sentence for planning sabotage and terrorism, a sentence
he narrowly escaped in favor of a sentence to life in prison with hard labor, starting off with breaking rock in a
stone quarry. In the introduction to this collection of articles and speeches by Mandela, Ato Quayson writes of
Mandela’s mindset: ‘…[I]njustice naturally generates its own negation, sowing in its devastating path the desire
for freedom and the unquenchable urge to strive for it. Beyond his obvious stature as one of the great icons of the
446

Ptahhotep’s conception of justice – along with its profound implication that justice
will not automatically generate its own negation, as injustice appears to do – is strangely
echoed, almost verbatim, by Souad Srour al-Mere’eh, most of whose family were shot dead in
Shatila refugee camp, Beirut, Lebanon, in 1982 CE by gunmen allied with the Israelis, with
substantial Israeli military, financial, and political assistance. The Lebanese gunmen possibly
even carried out the massacre of many hundreds of defenseless refugees under direct orders
from the Israeli army. Srour, then 14 years old, was gang-raped by the murderers of her
family, who forced her dying father to watch the rape, and then she was also shot and left for
dead. The killers returned a little later, found that she was still alive and shot her again.
Somehow, she survived the ordeal. In 2001 one bullet was still lodged in her spine and
she only walked with the aid of crutches. At the time, Srour represented twenty-three still
living survivors of the massacre in filing charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and
personal compensation in Belgium against Ariel Sharon, then president of Israel, for
complicity in and responsibility for the massacre of her family and many hundreds, maybe
thousands, of other Palestinian refugees during those three days in Beirut. In so doing, she (as
far as I know) unwittingly but unforgettably related her own wisdom to that of Ptahhotep, her
spiritual ancestor of 4,350 years ago, as well as to that of Mandela. In other words, Srour
reflects Mandela’s careful and sober idea back to its positive and even more optimistic origin
in pre-apartheid Egypt. On the occasion of filing the charges, nineteen years after the crimes
had been committed and her living nightmare had begun, she said:

First justice and then peace.

Money always disappears
But justice will last.905

twentieth century, it is this idea that gives Mandela a significance beyond his country and his time…’ Ibid: xv.
Incidentally, Quayson also mentions Palestine first among countries suffering from evils similar to apartheid in
South Africa. See footnote 33 above. Mandela is an icon, of course, for saving lives, for making or helping a
huge, diverse, divided and contradictory country avert a bitter and bloody total war that was generally thought
inevitable. In doing so, he also had to become a Realpolitiker and eventually make compromises with global
powers, vastly superior to even his erstwhile hegemonic enemy, the South African apartheid society. Perhaps
those compromises were not his best legacy, but Mandela’s bargaining position, from before the outset, was
weak and his options, it must be remembered, were not numerous.
905
Quoted in Nguyen June 18, 2001. See footnotes 278-279 above, on the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and on
Sharon’s responsibility for it. I owe gratitude to my former student and current colleague, Dr. Lydia Wazir-
Staubmann, for first telling me the story of Sabra and Shatila, right after she had taken a political science
methodology course with me in 1997, the first university course I ever taught, at a time when I (believed I) had
no particular interest in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For a critical view of the escapist potentials within the
belief or faith that crime or baseness never (or only seldom) pays, see footnote 691 above.
 447

Postscript (2014)

By Richard A. Falk

This is a magisterial treatment of the theme of apartheid as viewed from conceptual,

legal, human rights, and ethical perspectives. Its comprehensiveness and breadth and depth of
research is quite extraordinary, especially the presentation of the various dimensions of
apartheid. The comparisons of apartheid systems draw on both geographically and
chronologically diverse material.
A major contribution of this work is to show that the crime and structure of apartheid
should not be ascribed authoritatively to the South African experience, which is then deployed
as a model. Thus, there is an inner logic of apartheid from which the South African racial
elites sometimes distanced themselves, either making matters worse, by imposing on the
entire African majority a genocidal approach, or making apartheid less bad, either in the
directions of colonialism or even of liberation. This conclusion is consistent with the
treatment of apartheid as one of seven types of ‘crimes against humanity’ according to the
statute of the International Criminal Court. Also, I believe that Löwstedt’s monograph lends
authoritative support to those who have been contending in recent years that the Israeli regime
of occupation and discrimination in relation to the Palestinians is an instance of apartheid.
Apartheid is prohibited under international and transnational law, and Israel is not
exempt from this prohibition. Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination, for example, provides that ‘States Parties particularly
condemn racial segregation and apartheid and undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all
practices of this nature…’ It is therefore not only the moral duty of human beings to end this
particular crime against humanity, but also the legal duty of states, governments and
intergovernmental organizations to prevent and to end Israeli apartheid. This may be achieved
through the International Court of Justice as well as through the International Criminal Court,
or, at present rather less likely, through actions undertaken by the state of Israel itself.
The ongoing Israeli policy and practice of apartheid includes denial of the right to life
and liberty of person, whether man, woman, or child, including by murder, serious bodily and
mental harm, infringement of freedom, torture, arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment.
Methods of torture and ill-treatment include sleep deprivation, excessive use of handcuffs,
beatings, verbal abuse, stress positions, solitary confinement, humiliation, and threats of
killing, sexual assault and house demolitions, against the detainee or his or her family.
Continuing excessive use of force by Israeli security forces, a social climate of impunity for
crimes against Palestinians, and a lack of accountability for violations of international
humanitarian law are well-documented by successive United Nations resolutions and reports
as well as by reliable NGOs. Palestinians are frequently killed as a result of regular Israeli
military incursions into occupied Palestine, lethal use of force against demonstrators, abusive
nighttime arrest procedures, official endorsement of targeted killings, and large-scale military
operations. Not only Israel and Israelis, Palestinians may also be prosecuted in international
and other courts for violent crimes against Israelis and others, but crimes perpetrated by
Palestinians are much fewer, in numbers as well as kinds and impacts, and, mostly, much less
severe than those perpetrated by Israel and Israelis.
Violations by Israel of the rights to work and education and of freedom of movement,
residence, expression and assembly have been highlighted by intergovernmental and
nongovernmental organizations in the context of discussing the Israeli separation wall and its
448

associated regime, and policies and laws related to the development of settlements, including
those in East Jerusalem. The basic human rights to work, to freedom of movement, and to
leave and return to one’s country, are particularly relevant to Gaza. In the West Bank, the
denial of rights to Palestinians is made possible by the existence of parallel legal systems
operating in the same territory: one set of civil and criminal laws for Jewish-Israeli settlers
tied to Israel and another for Palestinian Arabs, subject to Israeli military orders, as well as a
variety of administrative decrees. It is clear that Israeli measures, in the form of policies, laws
and practices, have the effect of preventing Palestinians from full and normal participation in
the political, social, economic and cultural life of Palestine and arguably also prevent the
exercise of their legal rights in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The expropriation of Palestinian land is an obvious dimension of the expansion of
settlements and of the construction of the separation wall. The fragmentation of Palestinian
land and creation of separate reserves and enclaves, including plans and practices threatening
to cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, is well documented. It seems
incontestable that Israeli measures seek to divide the population of the Occupied Palestinian
Territory along racial lines, creating separate, shrinking reserves for Palestinians and
expropriating or otherwise confiscating their most productive and valuable properties.
Concerning persecution of those who oppose apartheid, this provision potentially
relates to a wide range of human rights violations against Palestinians in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory, who are a people entitled to self-determination and oppose the
segregation, restrictions and discriminatory regime imposed by Israel on them. In this sense,
the punitive responses often meted out to those who nonviolently demonstrate against the wall
and its associated regime, or more generally oppose Israeli violations of human rights,
arguably fall under this provision. It is apparent that anyone who actively opposes Israeli
measures amounting to apartheid risks various forms of punitive action because of her or his
opposition. Basic civil and political rights, such as the freedom of opinion, freedom of speech,
freedom of information, or freedom of expression, are not guaranteed and often violated for
those opposed to Israeli policy.
Finally, Israeli apartheid is systematic. None of the human rights violations discussed
here in the context of possibly constituting ‘inhuman acts’ for the purpose of the International
Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid or of the statute of
the International Criminal Court can be regarded as isolated events. Rather, they reflect
systematic discriminatory Israeli policies, laws and practices, which determine where and
often when in the occupied land Palestinians may or may not travel, live and work. Laws and
policies have also institutionalized just how lightly a civilian Palestinian life may be weighed,
when placed on the scales against claims of overarching Israeli security concerns, contrasting
sharply with the legal protection of the Israeli constitutional system given to unlawful Israeli
settlers. The combined effect of the measures designed to ensure security for Israeli citizens,
to facilitate and expand settlements, and, it would appear, to annex land, is hafrada,
discrimination and systematic oppression of, and domination over, the Palestinian people.
These are my conclusions concerning patterns of human rights violations including,
crucially, Israeli apartheid against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I was
entrusted by the United Nations Human Rights Council with investigating the human rights
situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and reporting to it and the United Nations
General Assembly in this regard from 2008 until 2014. Israel and its powerful North Atlantic
allies (representing a minority of countries and people worldwide), however, dismissed and
disregarded the apartheid allegations in each of my reports. Writing now as a scholar, an
investigator, and a former rapporteur, and still in the interest of the international and global
communities, I am nevertheless pleased and encouraged to see that several investigations,
quite independent of mine, including those of Anthony Löwstedt, Virginia Tilley, Uri Davis,
the Russell Tribunal, Ben White, Suraya Dadoo and Firoz Osman, Hazem Jamjoum, Dror
Green, Mats Svensson, Azmi Bishara, John Dugard, Eron Davidson and Ana Nogueira, Petra
 449

Wild, Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Edward W. Said, Ronnie Kasrils, Shulamit Aloni, Nicola
del Vecchio, Edward S. Herman, Ilan Pappe, Hanan Chehata, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Oren Ben-
Dor, Ali Abunimah, Noam Chomsky, Omar Barghouti, Marwan Bishara, Joe Catron, James
Bowen, Eitan Felner, Arjan El Fassed, Neve Gordon, Flore de Préneuf, Amira Hass, Gideon
Levy, Michel Warshawski, Chris McGreal, Amos Schocken and Tanya Reinhart, among
others, have come to similar conclusions. This allegation of apartheid can no longer be
explained away as a mistake, or as an irresponsible or partisan accusation, or as an analogy, or
as one-sided; it is rather a matter of reasoned identification and a reasonable assessment. It is
even getting to the point that the contention is of such a well-evidenced character as to be
beyond any reasonable doubt. Social scientific research, including political science and
sociology, as well as scholarly historical and human rights research, intergovernmental legal
research, and investigative journalism are converging in agreement on this core issue. ‘Israeli
apartheid’ cannot be dismissed as mere prejudice or hostile propaganda; it is a matter of
established fact and responsible legal interpretation and assessment.
As an academic work, Anthony Löwstedt’s book represents a major contribution to
general scholarship by providing a generally reliable and powerfully reasoned assessment of
apartheid in Palestine and elsewhere from several important angles of perception. It is likely
to generate great interest, widespread commentary, and create an important debate both on the
generality of the analysis and its application to the current Israel/Palestine conflict. I learned a
great deal from this treatise, and would rely upon it as a reference source for any further
discussion of apartheid as structure and practice. The historical comparisons are also
fascinating, and add unfamiliar material to standard discussions of apartheid. Standing on its
own, this is an exceptional work of scholarship and it should assist those who are trying to
work toward peace and justice for the embattled peoples living in historic Palestine.
450

Bibliography

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Ireland.

I have tried to provide as much online access as possible to the sources below. If the web address of
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Appleson, Gail: Apartheid Victims Sue Citigroup, Other Banks, Reuters, June 19, 2002
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454

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N.N.: Terralingua: UNHCHR Submission on Linguistic Rights in Education, Submitted May 15, 1998, to the
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N.N.: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, Presented to President Nelson Mandela on 29
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N.N.: The Use of Torture against Palestinian Prisoners in Israeli Jails, Miftah, February 15, 2000,
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N.N.: Poverty Forcing Palestinian Children to Work, Reuters, April 10, 2000

N.N.: Apartheid Weapons Boss Asked for HIV-Tainted Blood, Reuters, May 24, 2000

N.N.: Israel Says Jewish Settlers Number Almost 200,000, Reuters, July 27, 2000

N.N.: !Xu, Khwe to Live On on South African Radio, Reuters, August 18, 2000
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N.N.: Israel Confiscates More Palestinian Land for New Bypass Road, Orient House Press Release, Jerusalem:
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N.N.: Israel Says It Won’t Cooperate with UN Inquiry, Reuters, October 20, 2000

N.N.: Amnesty Slams Israel’s “Excessive Force”, Reuters, October 22, 2000

N.N.: Vandals Destroy Crosses at Beit Jala Cemeteries, Reuters, December 4, 2000

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N.N.: 13,000 More Jewish Settlers Arrived in Palestinian Territories in 2000, Agence France-Presse, December
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N.N: France World’s Third Biggest Arms Exporter in ‘99, Reuters, December 13, 2000

N.N.: Zimbabwe’s Mugabe Says Land Resettlement to Continue, Reuters, December 20, 2000

N.N.: Dreaming of Altneuland, The Economist, December 23, 2000

N.N.: Index On Censorship, Editorial, pg. 5, No. 198, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2001

N.N.: Palestinian Dies at Israeli Checkpoint - Hospital, Reuters, January 24, 2001

N.N.: Radical Deputies Urge EU Membership for Israel, Reuters, January 30, 2001

N.N.: The Report of the Regional Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hawaii
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N.N.: Israel’s Sharon Urges Jewish Migration to Homeland, Reuters, February 27, 2001

N.N.: Palestinian Dies, Kept by Blockade from Hospital, Reuters, March 14, 2001

N.N.: Black Income in South Africa Nears Whites’, Still Lags, Reuters, March 18, 2001

N.N.: Press Release, The Mossawa Center, The Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, March 20, 2001

N.N.: South Africa Says Countries Must Confront Slavery Past, Reuters, March 22, 2001

N.N.: EU Presidency Condemns Illegal Israeli Settlements, Reuters, April 5, 2001

N.N.: Palestinian Bomber Talks on Video of Vengeance, Reuters, May 19, 2001

N.N.: WHO Assembly Condemns Israel, Associated Press, May 21, 2001

N.N.: Israel and the Palestinians: Yes to a Ceasefire, No to a Halt on Settlements, The Economist, May 26, 2001:
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N.N.: Mbeki Says South Africa is Still Two Nations, Reuters, May 29, 2001

N.N.: Expatriate Workforce in Israel Jumps since Intifada, Reuters, June 7, 2001

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N.N.: Israel: Palestinian Children Still Being Tortured in Israeli Prisons, OMCT Appeal, World Organisation
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 489

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N.N.: Paris-Based Group Slams Israel on Arab Rights, Reuters, July 4, 2001

N.N.: Israel Alarmed at UN Racism Forum Agenda, Reuters, July 4, 2001

N.N.: Israeli “Colonialism” in Final Throes - Egypt, Reuters, August 14, 2001

N.N.: Palestinians Would Exploit Weakness - Israeli Official, Reuters, August 16, 2001

N.N.: Amnesty Seeks to Halt UK Arms Exports to Israel, Reuters, August 16, 2001

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N.N.: Tibetans at Racism Meet Accuse China of Apartheid, Reuters, August 29, 2001

N.N.: NGO Declaration at UN Race Meet Slams Israel, Reuters, September 2, 2001

N.N.: Torture Complaint against Israeli Envoy Rejected, Reuters, September 4, 2001

N.N: Israeli Teens Refuse to Serve in Army of ‘Terror’, Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2001

N.N.: Highlights from U.N. Global Plan to Combat Racism, Reuters, September 8, 2001

N.N.: States Voice Reservations to U.N. Race Pact, Reuters, September 8, 2001

N.N.: One Year After the Beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, OMCT Expresses its Deep Concern Regarding the
Deteriorating Human Rights Situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, OMCT Press Release,
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N.N.: Israel, Palestinians Accused of Torturing Inmates, Reuters, September 28, 2001

N.N.: Sharon Ruining Palestinian Environment - Minister, Reuters, October 5, 2001

N.N.: Press Release, General Conference Adopts Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, UNESCO,
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N.N.: ‘You Are Either with Us or against Us’, CNN, November 6, 2001,
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N.N.: Sharon Says Wants One Million More Jews in Israel, Reuters, November 7, 2001

N.N.: Mbeki Urges End to Palestinian ‘Sacrifice’, Reuters, November 10, 2001

N.N.: Amnesty International Calls for Mideast Observers, Reuters, November 13, 2001

N.N.: Annan Backs New U.S. Middle East Peace Initiative, Reuters, November 19, 2001

N.N.: UNICEF Slams Israel on Jailed Palestinian Children, Reuters, November 20, 2001

N.N: EU to Warn Importers over Israel Settlement Exports, Reuters, November 22, 2001

N.N.: LA Man Accused of Shipping Nuclear Parts to Israel, Reuters, November 26, 2001

N.N.: UN Fears ‘War-Like’ Situation, Agence France-Presse (English Service), December 2, 2001

N.N.: Syria, Lebanon: Fight against Israel not Terrorism, Reuters, December 20, 2001
490

N.N.: Sharon: “Wir Werden Bleiben”, Kurier (Vienna), December 28, 2001

N.N.: The Middle East in the Shadow of War: A Special Report of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Spring
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N.N.: Heftige Israelische Kritik an Französischer Presse und Regierung, Utl.: Levy: „Voreingenommenheit“
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N.N.: Israeli Attacks Hit EU-Funded Palestinian Projects, Reuters, January 22, 2002

N.N.: Kritik an Israels Erziehungspolitik in der Schweiz Nicht Unzulässig: Presserat Weist Antisemitismus-
Beschwerde Zurück, APA (Austrian Press Agency), SDA (Swiss Press Agency), January 22, 2002

N.N.: EU Could Ask Israel to Pay for Damage, France Says, Reuters, January 23, 2002

N.N.: Lebanon Minister Fingers Israel in Hobeika Killing, Reuters, January 24, 2002

N.N.: Afrikaner Backlash to South African Name Changes, Reuters, January 31, 2002

N.N.: Israeli Police Murder 14 Year Old Boy, The Palestine Monitor, The Voice of Civil Society, February 12,
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N.N.: Israel: IDF Troops Destroy Palestinian Broadcast Facilities in Gaza, Committee to Protect Journalists,
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N.N.: Gulf Media Slam ‘Racist’ Israeli Buffer Zone Plan, Reuters, February 23, 2002

N.N.: Russia’s Putin Meets Jewish Leaders, Reuters, March 19, 2002

N.N.: Bosnian Leaders Strike Deal on Equal Ethnic Rights, Reuters, March 27, 2002

N.N.: Settlers Control 42 Pct of West Bank-Rights Group, Reuters, May 13, 2002

N.N.: US Restates Opposition to International Court, Reuters, April 11, 2002

N.N.: Israeli Arab Lawmaker Slams Sharon “Apartheid” Plan, Reuters, April 21, 2002

N.N.: Palestinian Rights Group Slams Israeli Occupation, Reuters, May 6, 2002

N.N.: Israel Strengthens Apartheid Policies, Law Society Press Release, May 23, 2002

N.N.: East Timor Says No Reconciliation without Justice, Reuters, June 17, 2002

N.N: US Jewish Group Hits S.Africa’s Tutu on Divestment, Reuters, June 20, 2002

N.N.: Facts on Boycotting Israeli Goods, Miftah, June 25, 2002,

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N.N.: Israel Opts Out of International Criminal Court, Reuters, July 1, 2002

N.N.: Factbox: Africa Ravaged by AIDS Epidemic, Reuters, July 5, 2002

N.N.: Factbox: Roots of the Northern Irish Conflict, Reuters, July 9, 2002

N.N.: Israel and the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian Authority: Without Distinction - Attacks on
Civilians by Palestinian Armed Groups, Amnesty International, July 11, 2002,
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N.N.: Information Update: Humanitarian Crisis in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, The Palestine Monitor, July 29,
2002

N.N.: Israel Says UN Jenin Report Ends “Misconceptions”, Reuters, August 1, 2002

N.N.: Citizenship Annulment Threats in Israel Draw Fire, Reuters, August 7, 2002

N.N.: Israeli Army Destroys Palestinian Militants’ Homes, Reuters, August 13, 2002

N.N.: Immigration to Israel Down 27 pct, Reuters, August 13, 2002

N.N.: Israeli Security Cabinet Sets West Bank Fence Line, Reuters, August 14, 2002

N.N.: Miftah Fact Sheet, Israeli Settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (updated), August 17, 2002,
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N.N.: Former S.Africa Judge Leads Apartheid Lawsuit Team, Reuters, August 29, 2002

N.N.: Honor Killing: Killing of Women on the Basis of Family Honor, The Palestinian Human Rights Monitor,
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N.N.: Stripping Israeli Arab of Citizenship Causes Outcry, Reuters, September 10, 2002

N.N.: LAW Files More Petitions against Israel’s Apartheid Wall, LAW Society Press Release, September 11,
2002

N.N.: Mandela Calls U.S. a “Threat to World Peace”, Reuters, September 12, 2002

N.N.: Sharon Unrepentant on Israeli Claims, Army Conduct, Reuters, September 14, 2002

N.N.: Palestinian Delegation Attacks U.S. at U.N., Reuters, September 17, 2002

N.N.: Amnesty Wants Justice for Beirut Massacre Victims, Reuters, September 25, 2002

N.N.: 11,000 Palestinians Between Israel’s Apartheid Wall and Green Line, LAW Society Press Release,
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N.N.: Row Erupts over Israeli Minister “Snake” Remark, Reuters, September 26, 2002

N.N.: Israeli Closures Harm Palestinians’ Health -U.N., Reuters, September 27, 2002

N.N.: Israelis, Palestinians Target Children-Amnesty, Reuters, September 30, 2002

N.N: Thousands of Palestinian Children Denied Access to Schools, UNICEF, October 2, 2002,
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N.N.: Israel Curfews Hurt Palestinians’ Schooling-UNICEF, Reuters, October 2, 2002

N.N.: Israelis Scream Abuse at Fatah Leader in Court, Reuters, October 3, 2002

N.N.: Apartheid Wall Saga Continues, LAW Society Press Release, October 15, 2002

N.N.: EU Gives Israel Last Chance on Settlement Exports, Reuters, October 18, 2002

N.N.: Israel Readying US Aid Request, No Iraq Link-Source, Reuters, October 21, 2002

N.N.: South Africa Lags Behind Land Reform Target, Reuters, October 22, 2002

N.N.: License to Kill, New African, October 2002

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N.N.: Interview With Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, ZNet, November 8, 2002,
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N.N.: British Empire Blamed for Modern Conflicts, BBC News, World Edition, November 15, 2002,
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N.N.: US Promises Israel $2.16 Bln. Military Aid in 2004, Reuters, November 21, 2002

N.N.: US Promises Israel $2.16 Bln Military Aid in 2004, Reuters, November 21, 2002

N.N.: S.Africa to Revamp Apartheid-Era Education, Reuters, December 9, 2002

N.N.: Race Not Reflected in Genes, Study Finds, Reuters, December 16, 2002

N.N.: Israel Annual Report, 2002, Paris: Reporters Sans Frontières, 2003

N.N.: “Wer Kritik an Israel verbietet, zwingt mich, in einem Apartheidstaat zu leben”: Michel Warschawski
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N.N.: Old Cluster Bomb Kills Three Children in Vietnam, Reuters, January 17, 2003

N.N.: Black History Timeline: Change and Challenge, MSNBC News, Black History Month, February 2003,
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N.N.: Kenya Plans Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Reuters, February 13, 2003

N.N.: The Torture of Palestinian Children under Israeli Occupation, Miftah, February 22, 2003,
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N.N.: Israeli Security Fence Illegal-U.N. Investigator, Reuters, March 27, 2003

N.N.: Adalah Continues to Seek Criminal Investigation into ILA [Israel Land Administration] Following Further
Spraying of Toxic Chemicals on Naqab Crops, News Update, Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Legal
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N.N.: Amnesty Says Israel Shutting Out Foreign Scrutiny, Reuters, May 9, 2003

N.N.: Suicide Bombers Strike Again in Israel, Reuters, May 19, 2003

N.N.: Israel Considers Applying to Join EU, Reuters, May 20, 2003

N.N.: UN Agency Protests after Israel Holds Top Official, Reuters, May 23, 2003

N.N.: Factbox: U.S. Help to Israel, Reuters, June 4, 2003

N.N.: Retrial of Wouter Basson Denied, South African Press Agency, June 4, 2003

N.N.: Factbox: Three Militant Palestinian Groups Unite for Attack, Reuters, June 9, 2003

N.N.: Factbox: Jewish Settlements on Middle East Road Map, Reuters, June 9, 2003

N.N.: Israel Soldier Made Woman Drink Cleaning Fluid-Court, Reuters, June 23, 2003

N.N.: Australia Police Use Aborigines’ Photos as Targets, Reuters, July 7, 2003

N.N.: South Africa – Economic Powerhouse Ravaged by AIDS, Reuters, July 8, 2003

N.N.: Israeli Firms Abuse Migrant Workers – Rights Group, Reuters, August 28, 2003
 493

N.N.: EU Joins US in Denouncing Hamas as Terrorist Group, Reuters, September 6, 2003

N.N.: World Must Pressure Israel over Nukes-Arab League, Reuters, October 1, 2003

N.N.: Israeli Army Blasted for Lack of Non-Lethal Weapons, Reuters, October 1, 2003

N.N.: Factbox: Tension Rises between Israel and Syria, Reuters, October 7, 2003

N.N.: US Let Israel Stretch 1973 Truce – Documents, Reuters, October 7, 2003

N.N.: Israel to Expel Three More Palestinians to Gaza, Reuters, October 15, 2003

N.N.: The Geneva Accords, Information Clearing House, October 19, 2003,
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N.N.: U.S. Will Seek $2.22 Bln Military Aid for Israel, Reuters, November 3, 2003

N.N.: Israel to Let Wives Harvest Dead Husbands’ Sperm, Reuters, November 13, 2003

N.N.: Belgium Mends Israel, US Ties after War Crimes Spat, Reuters, November 18, 2003

N.N.: Israel’s Military Admits Error in Report on Raid, Reuters, November 19, 2003

N.N.: Israel Expels Three West Bank Palestinians to Gaza, Reuters, November 23, 2003

N.N.: I Was a Democrat, Says Chile’s Pinochet, Reuters, November 24, 2003

N.N.: Israel Gives Ground to EU in Sensitive Trade Row, Reuters, November 24, 2003

N.N.: IAEA Chief Urges Israel to Scrap Nuclear Weapons, Reuters, November 26, 2003

N.N.: Israel Expels Eight Palestinians to Gaza -Sources, Reuters, December 4, 2003

N.N.: Uprising Leader to Remain Isolated in Israel Jail, Reuters, January 26, 2004

N.N.: Factbox: Israel’s West Bank Barrier on Trial, Reuters, February 9, 2004

N.N.: Aborigines Riot after Death of Teen, The Globe and Mail (Associated Press), February 16, 2004

N.N.: Sharon Accuses Palestinian Govt of Murder, Lies, Reuters, February 24, 2004

N.N.: Israeli Nuclear Arsenal a Mystery to UN Watchdog, Reuters, February 25, 2004

N.N.: Israeli Security Fence Aims at Annexation-UN Envoy, Reuters, March 10, 2004

N.N.: Israel Appoints Arab to Supreme Court, Reuters, May 7, 2004

N.N.: Israel Razed 3,000 Homes since Intifada - Amnesty, Reuters, May 18, 2004

N.N.: Folter im Irak, Routine in Israel, Kurier (Vienna), May 24, 2004 (the article is attributed to Mojon, Jean-
Marc, and Agence France-Presse, no date)

N.N.: Ancient University Classrooms Found in Alexandria, Reuters, May 27, 2004

N.N: Border Policemen Indicted for Abusing Palestinians, Reuters, June 2, 2004

N.N.: U.N. Aide Warns Caterpillar over Sales to Israel, Reuters, June 16, 2004

N.N.: US Congress Panel Halves a Bush Foreign-Aid Request, Reuters, June 23, 2004

N.N.: Factbox: Facts and Fears on Israel’s Suspected Nuclear Arms, Reuters, July 4, 2004
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N.N.: Factbox: World Court Ruling on Israel Barrier How It Works [sic], Reuters, July 9, 2004

N.N.: Terrorists Are Not Crazy, Says UK Psychiatrist, Reuters, July 9, 2004

N.N.: Sharon Rejects World Court Ruling on W. Bank Barrier, Reuters, July 11, 2004

N.N.: EU, Israel Settle Trade Dispute over Settlements, Reuters, August 5, 2004

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N.N.: South Africa to Host Israel’s Likud Party at Talks, Reuters, September 6, 2004

N.N.: Israel Shuts Palestinian Poll Offices in Jerusalem, Reuters, September 13, 2004

N.N.: Palestinian Intifada – 4th Anniversary, The Palestine Monitor, September 27, 2004,
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N.N.: Israeli Police Charged with Abusing Palestinians, Reuters, September 28, 2004

N.N.: French Racism Report Causes Controversy, Agence France-Presse, ABC News, October 21, 2004,
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N.N.: Factbox: Jewish Settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, Reuters, October 25, 2004

N.N.: An In-depth Look into the Dossier on Collaborators: Palestinian Security Official: We Arrested 30
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N.N.: Arab Population in the West Bank & Gaza, January 10, 2005, http://www.pademographics.com,
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N.N.: Racist Legislation, Editorial, Ha’aretz, January 18, 2005

N.N.: Dealing with Alleged Child Collaborators in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the Spirit of the
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N.N.: History of Female Circumcision, Controversy of Female Circumcision, December 13, 2005,
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N.N.: SA, Israel Carried out Nuclear Test in 1979, Agence-France Presse, May 19, 2006

N.N.: History of the Conflict; A Sinn Féin Education Publication, 2006, http://www.sinnfein.ie/history/, August
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N.N.: Codes of Ethics, Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri, June 9, 2010,
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N.N.: Torture and Abuse under Interrogation, January 1, 2011, B’Tselem, http://www.btselem.org/torture,
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