Beyond
Compare
Julie
Peteet
Julie
Peteet, an editor of this magazine, is professor
of anthropology at the University of Louisville.
The
Israeli permit for Palestinian farmers needing
to pass through the separation barrier to
reach their olive groves. (Reto Albertalli) |
“Rolling
into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming,” writes
the novelist Alice Walker. “There is a flavor to
the ghetto. To the bantustan. To the ‘rez.’ To the
‘colored section.’” In a poetic vein, Walker captures
the confinement and marginality one senses in the
Gaza Strip, and its familiarity to those who have
lived in segregated spaces in the United States and
South Africa. It is the latter parallel that has
captured the collective imagination in the early
2000s. More and more, Israel’s system of rule over
Palestinians in the lands occupied during the 1967
war is compared to South African apartheid.
Apartheid
is the Afrikaans term meaning “separation” or “apartness,”
and is used most commonly to refer the system of
white rule over blacks in South Africa that lasted
until 1994. But in international law, apartheid is
a general category of state practices and it is prohibited
wherever it occurs. The 1973 International Convention
on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of
Apartheid defines the word as acts “designed to divide
the population…by the creation of separate reserves
and ghettoes for the members of racial groups, the
prohibition of mixed marriages…[or] the expropriation
of landed property.” In South Africa, apartheid was
state-sanctioned segregation governing nearly all
aspects of social life. A system designed to maintain
white dominion over the indigenous black population
and its resources, it rested on a complex legal system
that severely hindered blacks’ mobility, denied them
civil and political rights, and mandated that they
live in townships and bantustans—semi-rural enclaves—kept
separate from white areas. The indigenous population’s
resources, particularly land, were transferred to
white settlers. Blacks were subjected to forcible
relocation in the service of the white-dominated
economy in which they participated as cheap labor.
The
apartheid project in South Africa was aided by the
anthropological tradition of volkekunde, or
knowledge of the native, which classified populations
on the basis of identifiable physical traits, mainly
skin color, as well as language, tribe and ethnicity.
This anthropology derived from a German-Dutch idealistic
tradition that worked to identify and preserve the
cultural ethos of a particular population. The formation
of territorial “reserves” for blacks in the early
twentieth century was grounded in this pseudo-scientific
conception of difference.
It
was thus no small thing when the South African Human
Sciences Research Council issued a report in 2009
concluding that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank,
East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip is a “colonial
enterprise that implements a system of apartheid.”[1]
Why
Then, Why Now?
Maysoun
al-Ghawi, recently evicted by settlers from
her home in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem,
waters her plants from the outside. (Wendy
Marijnissen) |
In
November 1974, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organization, addressed the UN General
Assembly, shortly before the PLO was accorded observer
status. In the previous month, the General Assembly
had voted to exclude South Africa from its deliberations,
and Arafat tailored his speech accordingly. He denounced
the state of Israel for “bolstering the settler-colonialists
in Africa” and “practicing racial discrimination
more extensively than the racists of South Africa.”
Here the PLO leader sought both to tar Israel by
association, pointing to its economic and security
ties with successive South African governments, and
to aid his people by comparing their plight to that
of South African blacks.
In
fact, the African National Congress and the PLO were
founded upon visions radically at odds with those
of the South African and Israeli states. The ANC
advocated a democratic South Africa that would be
a state for all its citizens, blacks and whites,
and initially the PLO advocated a democratic secular
state in Palestine that would embrace Jews as citizens.
In
1975, the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379
declaring, “Zionism is a form of racism and racial
discrimination.” Other organizations followed suit:
The Conference of the International Women’s Year
declared that international peace required the end
of colonialism, occupation, apartheid and Zionism.
The Organization of African Unity stated that South
Africa, Rhodesia and Israel shared a common imperialist
history. Israel found itself in a diplomatic bind
similar to South Africa’s, though not as severe;
just as the United States, Britain and France had
blocked a move to expel South Africa from the UN
entirely, so it was often the US veto alone that
saved Israel from Security Council sanction. Resolution
3379 was revoked only in 1991, as a condition of
Israel’s participation in the Madrid talks, and under
pressure from Washington.
The
apartheid analogy resurfaced with renewed relevance
in the mid-1990s, when white rule in South Africa
had ended. The PLO had long since accepted the idea
of two states rather than one secular state, and
Arafat had become president of the Palestinian Authority
(PA), a non-sovereign entity with administrative
powers in Gaza and patches of the West Bank, but
nothing close to independence. There were striking
similarities between Area A, as the districts of
PA administration were known under the Oslo agreements,
and bantustans: The cantons were non-contiguous,
separated from each other by Israeli settlements
and military bases and ubiquitous checkpoints, and
travel between them or into Israel was severely restricted.
Israel began building a network of roads connecting
settlements in the Occupied Territories to West Jerusalem
and Tel Aviv and “bypassing” Palestinian population
centers. These measures were adopted even as the
PA, Israel and their international sponsors spoke
of a comprehensive peace leading to Palestinian statehood.
In reality, as Leila Farsakh writes, the Oslo process
“paved the way for the ‘bantustanization of the area.’”[2]
The
Oslo era closed with Arafat’s PA seemingly acquiescent
in a barely autonomous Palestinian entity whose borders,
waters and airspace were in the hands of Israel,
whose sovereignty extended from the Mediterranean
Sea to the Jordan River. With the outbreak of the
second intifada in the fall of 2000, Israel
tightened the closure of Gaza and West Bank towns
that had been in place periodically since the early
1990s, penning in Palestinians amidst rising unemployment
and poverty. The Israeli army invaded swathes of
Area A, imposing days-long curfews, and checkpoints
multiplied. But the parallels with apartheid began
to take concrete shape, literally, when Israel broke
ground on the wall being erected in East Jerusalem
and the West Bank. The wall starkly illustrated Israel’s
logic of separation—Jews here, Palestinians there—and
became a rallying point for a host of solidarity
movements. Since 2003, when wall construction commenced,
political activists have readily adopted the apartheid
analogy. So the question becomes: What does the comparison
mean and what is its utility?
Unambiguously
negative in valence, apartheid in South Africa had
few self-proclaimed adherents outside that country’s
white community. By the late 1980s, with divestment
movements in full bloom on American college campuses,
almost no one would defend it or even downplay its
horrors. Anti-apartheid events elicited few calls
for a “balanced” approach or demands to invite pro-apartheid
speakers. The same is emphatically not true of Israel’s
system of control over Palestinians. “End the occupation,”
though gaining currency as a slogan, does not carry
anything like the same automatic moral weight as
“end apartheid,” and occupation has numerous influential
defenders, some who ruefully describe it as a grim
necessity for Israel’s security, and others who unapologetically
reframe the debate by lumping Palestinians together
with al-Qaeda. Attempts to apply the word “apartheid”
to Israel-Palestine run up against an additional
problem of scope: Does the term apply merely to the
Occupied Territories since 1967, to Israeli dispossession
of Palestinians since 1948 or to the entire Zionist
project? If “security” and “terrorism” are all-purpose
buzzwords that mean too many things, and are applied
with little precision, apartheid seems at risk of
meeting the same fate.
Comparison
Playing
cards in Majdal, before its depopulation
in 1950. The Israeli city of Ashkelon now
stands there. (George Pickow/Three Lions/Getty
Images) |
For
Palestinians and their supporters, who have struggled
for decades to advance their cause, only to suffer
repeated setbacks, the impulse to compare can be
overwhelming. Invoking a comparison with South African
apartheid, as Arafat did before the UN, is a rhetorical
device meant to make sense of enforced ethno-religious
separation and mobilize action along the lines of
the successful anti-apartheid movement. The comparison
need not be exact. South Africa is not the benchmark
against which all claims of apartheid must be measured;
by the terms of the 1973 UN convention, apartheid
is a crime wherever it occurs. Pinpointing differences
between apartheid-era South Africa and Israel-Palestine
need not render comparison an inappropriate method
of inquiry. Indeed, one value of the comparative
method that is often overlooked is that it throws
important distinguishing characteristics into relief.
A
number of prominent persons have lately echoed Palestinians
in making the comparison between South Africa and
Israel-Palestine. In June 2001, Ronnie Kasrils and
Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid
struggle, made it in an open letter published in
a Pretoria newspaper under the heading, “Not in My
Name.” The next year, Rev. Desmond Tutu, the former
Anglican archbishop of Cape Town honored with a Nobel
Peace Prize for his role in ending apartheid, caused
a stir when he wrote: “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.”[3] In 2006, John Dugard, a South African lawyer
and former special rapporteur on Palestine to the
UN Human Rights Council, said that Israel’s wall,
checkpoints, permits, bypass roads, house demolitions
and destruction of agricultural lands “in severity
go well beyond,” “surpass” and “far exceed any similar
practices in apartheid South Africa.”[4]
Dugard
was writing partly in defense of former President
Jimmy Carter, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, who
had recently published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
In the US, the book was rapidly and repeatedly trashed
in most newspapers of note, illustrating South African
apartheid’s powerful legacy in American moral sensibilities.
The furious response came, in part, because the term
dramatically challenged the dominant narrative about
Palestinian intransigence, “Islamic” terror and Israeli
security, as well as the evangelical Christian narrative
about a Chosen People with a God-given right to Palestine.
In place of these familiar frames, Carter substituted
a narrative of dispossession and occupation. It was
equally the former president’s stature (and perhaps
his own evangelical Christianity) that raised hackles.
Human rights organizations had compiled and disseminated
information about Israeli practices for decades.
With only one paragraph on the comparison to apartheid,
the book did not really make the case and, in fact,
offered little that was new. But here was the man
who helped broker the peace between Israel and Egypt
placing Israel under a highly critical lens. The
lens of “apartheid” illuminates an offensive rather
than defensive posture on the part of the occupying
forces and a well-designed plan of action rather
than a series of hurried, situational responses to
the violence of the occupied. Most significantly,
it exposes the trumping of international law in the
name of security.
Carter’s
book supplied an object lesson in the power comparison
can have. Comparison is a way of taking charge. If
Israeli occupation practices are comparable to apartheid,
then they must be condemned and made subject to sanctions.
The
Named and the Unnamed
A
Jewish settler in Hebron throws wine at a
Palestinian woman. (Rina Castelnuovo/The
New York Times/Redux) |
While
South Africa was explicit about the goal of apartheid
policies, Israel engages in discursive subterfuge
so that the intent and effects of their policies
must be seen on the ground to be fully comprehended.
Shulamit Aloni, the former Israeli minister of education,
relates an episode at a bypass road built for settlers
in the West Bank:
On one occasion I witnessed such
an encounter between a driver and a soldier who
was taking down the details before confiscating
the vehicle and sending its owner away. ‘Why?’
I asked the soldier. ‘It’s an order—this is a
Jews-only road,’ he replied. I inquired as to where
was the sign indicating this fact and instructing
[other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing
short of amazing. ‘It is his responsibility to
know it, and besides, what do you want us to do,
put up a sign here and let some anti-Semitic reporter
or journalist take a photo so that can show the world apartheid exists here?’[5]
Part
of the appeal of the apartheid comparison is that
apartheid is a recognized name for an ideology and
practice of separation. There is no similar name
for what Israel has done. Neither the pre-state Zionist
movement nor the state of Israel has ever spelled
out an official policy of discrimination against
the Palestinians, and Israel did not institute discriminatory
practices in one fell swoop. Instead, it has worked
in a piecemeal fashion to constrain Palestinian rights
and access to resources. In other words, separation
in the Occupied Territories has been a process whose
legal contours are harder to discern and whose name
has yet to circulate abroad.
A
corollary assumption underlying the comparison is
that Israeli practices cannot be condemned as discriminatory
in and of themselves. They cannot stand on their
own, partly because they are difficult to understand
unless they are seen up close. Most people understand
that Zionism, as an ideology and a project, calls
for Jewish communal security, and due to centuries
of pogroms and the Holocaust, this project commands
considerable sympathy. But many people do not understand
that Zionism, as put into practice, calls for an
exclusivist state that leads to policies characteristic
of apartheid, as defined by the UN.
Zionism
retains a significant body of supporters in the West,
particularly among Jews and evangelical Christians,
but also the public at large. For numerous historical,
cultural and political reasons, the American public
in particular “stands with Israel,” a fact demonstrated
by poll after poll and not lost on successive US
administrations. Israel and its backers work constantly
to cement this support, in part by equating criticism
of Israel, the “Jewish state,” with anti-Semitism.
Thus, drawing attention to the parallels between
Israel’s occupation and apartheid has been one way
to turn the tables, framing the occupation (and not
criticism of Israel) as inherently racist. But the
introduction of race into the conversation heats
it up to the boiling point: As the Jews of Europe
suffered from persecution and genocidal racism, and
Jews comprised a large percentage of the white Americans
who put their bodies on the line for civil rights,
equating the practices of Zionism with racism is,
for many, inconceivable. Rational debate shuts down.
It
may be time to develop a new language. “Apartheid”
cannot thoroughly explain Zionist ideology or Israeli
practices. It can simply offer broad points of comparison,
a framing in an already powerful concept. Yet the
Afrikaans term does have a Hebrew counterpart in
the term hafrada, meaning separation from
and putting distance between oneself and others,
in this case, the Palestinians. In Hebrew, the wall
is often referred to as the “hafrada barrier.”
Components
of Comparison
An
Israeli policeman chases a stone thrower
in East Jerusalem, October 9, 2009. (Darren
Whiteside/Reuters/Landov) |
The
similarities between South African apartheid and
Israel’s control over Palestinians, indeed, are best
appreciated in terms of the most prominent difference—that
of demography. In apartheid South Africa, whites
(English and Afrikaners) were a small minority of
the population—around 16 percent. Black labor was
pivotal to economic development and thus policy was
designed to keep blacks impotent and docile, but
in the country. Blacks and whites were socially and
politically separated but economically integrated,
though unequally. In Palestine, the early Zionists
also came face to face with the reality of an overwhelmingly
Arab population. At first, there were attempts to
integrate the Arabs as workers, but as more Jews
arrived and Palestinian nationalism grew in potency,
the Zionists decided upon a policy of population
thinning. The result is that, within the internationally
recognized borders of Israel today, Jews are an estimated
78 percent of the population. If the Occupied Territories
are included, the Jewish population is 48-49 percent
of the total. These figures make for a markedly different
colonial dynamic than what obtained in South Africa.
So
where do the grounds for comparison lie? At the level
of description, in apartheid South Africa, as in
Israel-Palestine today, there was a striking gap
between the rulers and the ruled. Israel is a First
World nation, as was white-ruled South Africa, and
the Palestinian population, especially in Gaza, suffers
high poverty rates, as South African blacks still
do. As colonial entities premised on separation and
dominance, both ruling systems have forcibly expropriated
natural resources, contained the native population
and worked to ensure their economic dependency. Both
states have pursued policies toward the local population
out of step with modern, secular, democratic ways
of organizing the social order (though they were
hardly alone in doing so). Both states have used
violent repression to squelch dissent and induce
compliance. Opponents of apartheid in South Africa
were labeled communists and often legally charged
as such and Palestinian militants have been deemed
terrorists. Apartheid South Africa routinely used
torture and engaged in mass detention of militant
opponents, as does Israel. Israel is a nuclear power
in a region where its neighbors do not have the bomb,
as was apartheid South Africa.
Both
states also developed elaborate ideological justifications
for how they acted. White-ruled South Africa and
Israel took root, to varying degrees, with the assistance
and in the service of the prerogatives of Western
powers. The early Zionists and white settlers in
South Africa both claimed to have found a Promised
Land that was also “a land without a people” (though,
in fact, both lands were densely populated). Each
state assiduously defined itself as Western and thus
distinct from its immediate surroundings. Thus both
countries attempted to fashion, against the will
and interests of the local population, ostensibly
Western spaces in the heart of the Arab and African
worlds.
Both
states went on to draw distinctions among the population
in domestic law, along racial lines in South Africa
and ethno-religious lines in Israel. In South Africa,
the legal system promoted, protected and reproduced
white privilege over blacks. Beginning in 1913, laws
were passed to deprive blacks of their resources
and rights, and confine them in the “reserves” that
later became bantustans. Especially after the National
Party came to power after World War II, laws compelled
black Africans to move to bantustans and allowed
for their deportation there, forcing them to become
migrant laborers. And, concomitantly, a law was passed
that made resistance to deportations illegal.[6]
Israel
has also enshrined privilege in law, either with
the purpose of excluding Palestinians or assuming
minimal responsibility for them, in line with the
different colonial dynamic. The Basic Law—there is
still no constitution—establishes a “Jewish state”
and states that Jews across the world are eligible
for citizenship. This right is denied to those Palestinians
who were born in what is now Israel and became refugees
in 1948, to the refugees’ descendants and to Palestinians
born in the areas under occupation since 1967.
In
the Occupied Territories, two legal systems are operative:
Israeli civil law, which applies extra-territorially
to Jewish settlers, and military courts for the Palestinians.
The South African Human Sciences Research Council
said of these courts that their procedures “violate
international standards for the prosecution of justice.”[7] The 1993 Oslo accords spawned still a third
legal system that, together with the second, bears
some resemblance to what obtained in the bantustans.
The PA built a court system with nominal jurisdiction
over Area A—Gaza and the main West Bank towns—while
in Area B, authority is shared with the Israeli army
and in Area C the military holds unfettered sway.
Palestinian jurisdiction over Area A is nominal,
because the Israeli army moves into these districts
at will to arrest and extrajudicially execute Palestinians.
From 1967 to the present day, settlements, checkpoints,
barriers and bypass roads have been erected in breach
of international law, and occasionally overriding
Israeli civil law. In 2004, the International Court
of Justice called upon Israel to “cease forthwith
the works of construction” upon the wall, while the
Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly ordered the
wall rerouted so as to infringe less upon Palestinian
lands and livelihoods. At the same time, Israel is
spared the mundane tasks of law enforcement in Area
A; the PA stops motorists for speeding and collects
the garbage.
Land
and Space
South
African human rights activists and MPs visit
Hebron, July 9, 2008. (Najeh Hashlamoun/APA
/Landov) |
The
most striking parallel between white rule in South
Africa and Israeli rule over the Palestinians is
land policy. Both of these settler-colonial formations
sought to transfer land ownership to members of the
dominant society and then prevent its alienation.
Over time, blacks and Palestinians were dispossessed
and confined to smaller and smaller areas. Blacks
could not own land in white areas. Until very recently
in Israel, once the Jewish National Fund owned a
plot of land, it could not revert to Arab ownership,
and Palestinians who are citizens of the state still
face various restrictions on building. Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories cannot buy land in a
Jewish settlement.
But
the different demographics required different means
of physically separating the dominant and dominated
populations. Blacks in South Africa were forcibly
removed to the bantustans, assigned on the basis
of an official tribal classification. In the white
imagination, each bantustan correlated with a cultural
identity such that Swaziland, for example, was home
to the Swazi, Ndebele to the Ndebele and Kwazula
to the Xhosa. Most significantly, with the bantustans
classified as “independent” by the state, their residents
were no longer citizens of South Africa. Yet control
over defense, security, economic policy and activity
and the monetary system was in the hands of the South
African government. Interestingly, on the diplomatic
front, only Israel and South Africa recognized the
bantustans. The bantustans tended to be located in
resource-poor rural areas that could not support
sustained agriculture. Thus did the white rulers
maintain a pool of readily available labor.
The
Zionist movement did not desire to integrate the
indigenous population into a new political entity.
Thus expulsion became a mode of dealing with demography.
In 1948, the fledgling state of Israel expelled or
engineered the flight of the bulk of the Palestinian
population, with many of the refugees and native
Gazans and West Bankers winding up under the rule
of Egypt or Jordan. In 1967, Israel conquered the
areas occupied by Egypt and Jordan, and since then
it has tried in various ways to compel voluntary
migration. The interlocking system of permits, bypass
roads, the wall, checkpoints and settlements is a
policy of territorial control but also one of immiseration.
After
1993, the resemblance of the Occupied Territories
to apartheid South Africa increased. Officially,
the Oslo accords fragmented the West Bank and Gaza
into Areas A, B and C, which already rendered the
Palestinian polity non-contiguous and subject to
varying systems of law. The PA was accorded control
over civilian functions in the areas under its nominal
control. Israel continues to control the borders,
trade and the civil registry. In effect, the PA has
limited jurisdiction over the population and little
over the bulk of the land. Security is in the hands
of the Israel military as well as joint Palestinian-Israeli
committees in which Israel retains overall control.
Unofficially, but intentionally, the zones allotted
to the Palestinians have been further disaggregated
by settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints. Three
main settlement blocs jut eastward into the West
Bank, effectively chopping this zone into three parts.
But the lattice of settlements and roads means the
three parts are really an archipelago of enclaves
corresponding loosely to Palestinian towns or regions:
Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem,
Hebron and South Hebron. After 2003, the wall sliced
the land into still more pieces.
The
West Bank enclaves are self-contained to varying
degrees, with Qalqilya at the extreme end being surrounded
on three sides by the wall with only a narrow aperture
on the fourth. Whereas the bantustans were legislated
and named, in the West Bank the spaces of confinement
are still emergent and unnamed. People have not been
assigned to them. As Israel has circulated no plan
to carve out enclaves, they constitute a sort of
gray area, with ambiguous and shifting borders in
contrast to the tidiness, as it were, of the bantustans.
But they also correspond to Area A—the districts
given over to PA administration under Oslo and intended
to be the kernels of an eventual Palestinian state.
Thus Israeli leaders can speak about Palestinian
independence and statehood while at the same time
building settlements and further obstructing any
possibility that this state could be contiguous.
And
then there is Gaza, the enclave that, in the post-Oslo
era, probably comes closest to resembling an actual
bantustan.[8] Like the bantustans, Gaza has
scant hope of economic growth, with its population
reduced to penury and, despite the coastal strip’s
“takeover” by Hamas in 2007, near total dependence
on Israel for everything from hard currency to electricity.
There is little pretense in Israeli discourse today
that Gaza—“Hamastan” in the parlance of Israeli wags—is
part of a proto-state for the Palestinians. Its main
function, like the bantustans, is to enforce segregation
and contain the dislocated. And yet there is a key
difference, again resulting from Israel’s demographic
imperative: Palestinians in Gaza resemble a surplus
population, abandoned because they no longer provide
labor and are no longer a major market for Israeli
goods.
In
the era of apartheid, black and white South Africans
lived and worked in some proximity. Blacks worked
the mines and factories, labored on farms, cleaned
white houses and reared white children. With an economy
highly dependent on black labor, black-white interaction
was hardly uncommon. Indeed, it was so common that
it had to be strictly regulated by law lest apartheid
be corroded from within. For example, mixed marriages
were outlawed and blacks could not reside in white
areas. It has been decades since Jews and Palestinians
had such interaction, with poignant exceptions like
anti-wall activist groups and Palestinian work gangs
in settlements proving the rule. Israeli Jews are
increasingly so distant from the Palestinians of
the Occupied Territories that laws prohibiting meaningful
contact may not be needed.
Labor
The
realm of labor illustrates some of the most significant
differences between South African apartheid and Israeli
practices. White South Africans envisioned an integrated
economy but one oriented toward white ownership and
low-wage black labor. That South Africa’s economy
was sustained by cheap black labor seems inevitable
given the lopsided demography. Work in the industrial
and agricultural sectors, as well as the mines, compelled
black workers to spend months away from their families
living in dormitories.
From
the beginnings of the Zionist project in Palestine,
the quest for separation—for exclusive Jewish land
and labor—was paramount. Jewish farmers weaned themselves
of the Arab helpers who knew how to grow crops in
the dry climate, and the pre-state Zionist movement
made a priority of acquiring the most fertile land.
Massive Jewish immigration after World War II meant
that Israel could easily staff its nascent industrial
and service sectors with Jews. Palestinian labor
was appealing, however, because it was available
and less expensive than Jewish labor. After 1967,
Israel began to import cheap Palestinian labor across
the Green Line. It was a colonial measure, because
Israel simultaneously stymied the growth of Palestinian
agriculture and industry through land expropriation
and structural obstacles. Thus was labor freed for
work in Israel and the settlements; passage into
Israel was regulated by the state, through the permit
system. Palestinians were made “dependent on Israeli
demand and regulations.”[9] In the mid-1980s, 45 percent of the Gaza labor
force and 32 percent of West Bank workers were employed
in Israel. By the mid-1990s, Israel was replacing
the Palestinians with Thais, Filipinos, Romanians
and Russians. At the same time, the Israeli economy
began a discernible shift toward the high-tech security
industry and exporting on a global scale.
In
short, “security” aside, black and Palestinian mobility
beyond their bantustans or enclaves has been largely
a function of the dominant economy’s demand, or lack
of it, for their labor. South Africans spoke openly
about the surplus population, that is, those not
working in the white-dominated economy. They were
to be confined to the bantustans. In Israel-Palestine,
those still needed for work are given permits to
move about and those not needed find themselves increasingly
cooped up in their cantons. Again, Gaza is the most
powerful case in point.
Mobility
Colonial
regimes impose controls upon mobility in order to
organize labor, to maintain designated spaces free
of the colonized, to the extent of literally preventing
their visibility, and to obstruct political organizing.
Apartheid in South Africa mandated that blacks carry
on their persons at all times a passbook containing
a photograph, fingerprints and employment history.
The passbook made it easy to classify each black
person and allow him to move from one place to another—or
not.
Comparisons
to South Africa’s notorious passbooks sprung up in
Israel-Palestine after the Oslo accords, which lent
a veneer of legality to draconian controls over Palestinian
mobility. Until the early 1990s, human movement across
the Green Line was fairly open. In the late 1980s,
Israel began to issue permits to workers from Gaza.
After Oslo, the permit system was extended and gradually
tightened to where it is today, such that one needs
a permit to enter Israel but also to move from place
to place in the West Bank, often to reside in one’s
own village or town, and to enter Jerusalem. Palestinian
farmers living near the wall often need permits to
go to their fields on the “Israeli” side of the barrier,
which cuts through the hinterlands of their villages.
The permit system not only regulates the movement
of labor, it also acts as a form of punishment and
disciplining of the native population. In this regard,
it appears analogous to the South African passbook
system. The permits also serve as a mechanism for
depriving Palestinians of access to their land. If
one’s land is left uncultivated because a gate in
the wall is closed, the land can be more easily expropriated.
With
replacement workers from abroad, there was no longer
much need for a supply of Palestinian labor. A Palestinian
desiring a permit to enter Israel, particularly a
man, was increasingly seen as a potential suicide
bomber rather than a strong back. Thus the permit
system was recast under the rubric of security, and
permits became more and more difficult to acquire.
Israeli controls on Palestinian mobility are arguably
worse than the passbook system, because they are
capricious and random. A trucker headed from Ramallah
to Hebron never knows which checkpoint along the
way will be backed up for hours and where on the
road a “flying checkpoint”—one or two army jeeps
and a cement block—will appear. The constant and
arbitrary changing of the rules renders daily life
for Palestinians in the West Bank unpredictable.
Apartheid in South Africa was highly regulated and
predictable.
Historically,
South Africa and Israel have induced high levels
of forced migration. The white South Africans engaged
in mass deportations of blacks from one area to another,
especially during the 1960s, when the government
was attempting to consolidate the bantustans and
draw boundaries in response to white farmers’ desire
for more land. In these years, nearly 2 million blacks
were removed from their homes to another area.[10] Half the Palestinian population
of about 8 million is made up of refugees, most from
the fighting in 1948 and some from the war in 1967.
Today Palestinians are being displaced through of
a policy of immiseration designed to induce ostensibly
voluntary migration from rural areas to urban areas
and abroad.
A
Strategic Question
By
the terms of international law, there is apartheid
in the Palestinian lands occupied by Israel in 1967.
The Israeli system of rule over Palestinians can
be credibly described, and to some extent analyzed,
as something akin to apartheid as it was practiced
in South Africa until 1994. But as a framework for
activism and advocacy, the language of apartheid
is heavily freighted with history, to wit, its indelible
association with one particular historical experience.
The international community eventually rejected and
sanctioned apartheid in South Africa, whereas it
has been difficult to mobilize international support
for Palestinian rights. Apartheid South Africa had
little external support comparable to Israel’s and
defenders of its ideology and practices were precious
few.
Another
critical difference is that the UN and the international
community gave South African apartheid the cold shoulder;
the world body and other nations (except, again,
Israel) refused to recognize the bantustans as independent
political entities. In Israel-Palestine, there is
a long history of warm world support for the concepts
of territorial partition and ethno-religious separation.
The UN formally endorsed partition in 1947, and today
every major effort to bring peace to Israel-Palestine
or engender amity between its peoples is predicated
upon the two-state solution. More to the point, the
international community, led by the US, has thrown
its weight behind the untenable two-state vision
associated with the Oslo accords and their successor,
the “road map” drawn up on the watch of President
George W. Bush. The “Quartet” of the US, the European
Union, Russia and the UN secretariat is promoting
a peace process that calls for neither a complete
Israeli withdrawal from all territories captured
in 1967 nor the dismantlement of the bulk of the
settlements built since then. The international community
has given its blessing to the idea of a non-contiguous
Palestinian entity.
The
international community, or at least the precincts
of it that call the shots, also continues to view
the apartheid-like practices of Israel in the Occupied
Territories through the prism of security. The US
harshly rejected the 2004 advisory opinion of the
International Court of Justice against the wall in
East Jerusalem and the West Bank (and Sen. John Kerry
of Massachusetts, then on the presidential campaign
trail, hastened to concur, lest anyone find partisan
daylight between him and Bush on this score). The
US sees the wall as a legitimate means of deterring
Palestinian attacks on Israel, a defense it extends
to checkpoints, restrictions on Palestinian freedom
of movement, home demolitions, extrajudicial executions
and other violations of international law. Most dramatically,
the US, with the tacit backing of European and Arab
allies, has eagerly enforced the years-long siege
on Gaza and acquiesced in several Israeli assaults
upon the territory, including the egregious Operation
Cast Lead over the winter of 2008-2009. The international
community appears to see no contradiction between
its simultaneous support for a “viable Palestinian
state” and the physical and virtual amputation of
Gaza from the Palestinian body politic. The siege
of Gaza is an apartheid measure, if ever there was
one.
All
this suggests that there is long, hard work ahead
in the effort to mobilize international support for
Palestinian rights. The question of what language
to use in that effort is therefore strategic, not
tactical. Ferreting out the parameters of the analogy
to apartheid in South Africa suggests a new direction,
the local language of separation. It may be time
to question the use of the analogy seriously and
explore the terminology used by the Israeli state
to frame its own actions, just as activists adopted
the word white South Africans used for their system
of rule. Perhaps the Hebrew hafrada can one
day become a rallying cry as powerful as “apartheid”
was in its day.
Endnotes
[1] Human
Sciences Research Council, Occupation, Colonialism,
Apartheid? A Reassessment of Israel’s Practices in
the Occupied Palestinian Territories Under International
Law (Cape Town, May 2009), p. 13.
[2] Leila Farsakh, “Independence,
Cantons or Bantustans: Whither the Palestinian State?” Middle
East Journal 59/2 (Spring 2008), p. 238.
[3] Desmond
Tutu, “Apartheid in the Holy Land,” Guardian,
April 29, 2002.
[4] John
Dugard, “Israel Adopts What South Africa Dropped,” Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, November 29, 2006.
[5] Shulamit Aloni, “This Road Is
for Jews Only. Yes, There Is Apartheid in Israel,” Counterpunch,
January 8, 2007.
[6] Barbara Rogers, Divide and
Rule: South Africa’s Bantustans (London: International
Defense and Aid Fund, 1976), pp. 9, 17-24.
[7] Human
Sciences Research Council, p. 17.
[8] See
Darryl Li, “Disengagement and the Frontiers of Zionism,” Middle
East Report Online, February 16, 2008.
[9] Leila Farsakh, “The Political
Economy of Israeli Occupation: What Is Colonial About
It?” MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 8
(Spring 2008), p. 48.
[10] Rogers,
pp. 26-27.
