What Apartheid South Africa Taught Me About Israel

[Reuters / Mohamad Torokman]

By Tony Karon

The idea that Israel maintains a system of apartheid – as Human Rights Watch declared last week, echoing the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem – was not news to the millions of Palestinians living under that system. Nor would it have surprised many South Africans who fought for liberation against a white supremacist system of the same name, which had counted Israel as its closest ally.

Nelson Mandela, who led South Africa’s liberation struggle, famously intoned that “we know too well that our freedom is not complete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” And Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza in 2014 sparked what may have been the biggest ever street demonstration in my home town of Cape Town, where more than 100,000 residents turned out in solidarity with Palestinians under fire.

I was in my teens when I became aware of the connection between Israel’s Jewish supremacist system and the white supremacist one I’d grown up under in apartheid South Africa. Any illusions I might have harbored about Israel as a moral alternative to the injustice I saw all around me were shaken in 1976, when Israel welcomed as an honored guest South Africa’s Prime Minister B.J. Vorster. The South African leader was not only running a vicious racist police state at the time, he was also an unrepentant Nazi, having run an underground paramilitary organization allied with Hitler’s foreign intelligence service during WWII. But Vorster was in Israel to seal military deals, Israel ignoring the international anti-apartheid arms embargo to help equip South Africa’s white supremacist regime with aircraft, assault rifles and nuclear weapons.

A couple of years later, on a visit to Israel in 1978, I was warned by committed Zionists who had emigrated from South Africa to start new lives on a “socialist” kibbutz that Israel was on the road to apartheid.

Jewish civilians were being illegally settled, en masse, in territories occupied in the 1967 war in order to create intractable “facts on the ground” that would cement Israel’s grip on the occupied Palestinian territories. “And so,” one anxious South African Zionist told me in 1978, “Israel now has control over more than 3 million Palestinians. If it annexes the West Bank, they become citizens of Israel, they get to vote and Israel quickly loses its Jewish majority. So that’s not an option. [They were Zionists, remember.] But the settlement policy will make it more and more difficult for Israel to envisage letting go of the territories. So, what are you left with? An apartheid situation.”

Indeed. And yes, Israel is a democracy. Apartheid South Africa was too. But both were also fundamentally racist states whose democratic systems excluded millions of people over which they ruled on the basis of their birth.

The democracies of both Israel and the South Africa of my youth were structured to ensure the domination of one particular group over others. For Black South Africans and for millions of Palestinians, the “democracies” that ruled them also excluded them from the rights of citizenship, ruling them in the manner of a colonized people.

Here’s the big question, though: Why has Israeli apartheid significantly outlasted South African apartheid with no end in sight? 

Remember, South African apartheid ended decades ago when the combination of intractable internal resistance and increasingly painful international isolation and sanctions made the cost of maintaining apartheid intolerable to the white regime, which chose instead to negotiate a transition to democratic equality. And that’s the difference: Israel faces negligible international consequence for maintaining and violently enforcing the system HRW warns is a crime against humanity.  

Israel’s ability to avoid international consequences for its systematic abuse of Palestinians rests on two narrative pillars: 

• Cynically smearing as anti-Semitic all opposition to Israel and Zionism, the nationalist ideology underpinning its apartheid system.

• Sustaining the illusion that the occupation, which began in June 1967, is a temporary interlude, and that Palestinian rights will be achieved through a “peace process” leading to some form of Palestinian statehood.

However, the recent adoption by a group of mostly Jewish scholars of the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism signals a growing willingness among people of conscience to separate the fight against anti-semitism from its use as a shield for Israeli apartheid.

Whether or not the Oslo “peace process” could have achieved Palestinian rights is a moot point; it ended 20 years ago, and all that remains of it are the elements that help Israel maintain its apartheid status quo – the administrative and security institutions of the Palestinian Authority. Today, the “two-state solution” is a hollow incantation by foreign powers seeking to absolve themselves of moral responsibility to act against a system defined in international law as a crime against humanity. Watch Biden State Department spokesman Ned Price’s absurd answer to questions about where Palestinians should take their human rights complaints, and you’ll see how this works.

By basing their findings on the definitions of apartheid in international law, both HRW and B’Tselem have torched Washington’s “two-state” fig leaf. Their calls to action are focused on Palestinian human rights and equality –  a profound challenge to the conventional wisdom of Western governments that Palestinian human rights can be deferred to some future partition.

Still, attempts to hold Israel accountable in international criminal courts face aggressive opposition from the U.S. government and politicians on both sides of the aisle. Even the mildest moves on Capitol Hill to tie U.S. military aid to restraining Israel’s increasingly brazen abuse of Palestinian civilians under occupation are slapped down by bipartisan consensus. And at the state level, Israel’s partisans are quite happy to violate U.S. freedom of speech by criminalizing support for BDS. 

Israel and its enablers have long recoiled from the apartheid label because they remember what happened with South Africa. International revulsion at apartheid got South Africa banned from international sports. It faced an international cultural boycott with artists who performed there subjected to harsh public criticism. And most importantly, it faced economic and financial sanctions and divestment. By the late 1980s, that pressure had reached a critical mass that played a major role in convincing the regime to end apartheid. 

Though Israel may take comfort in the fact that such international consequences as it currently faces for its system are nowhere near on the scale directed at apartheid South Africa, the reality is that in the South African case, those consequences took decades to muster.

A quarter century of campaigning among church and student groups, trade unions and other civil society groups eventually generated the public support necessary to press Western governments to end their support for a regime they had supported as a Cold War ally. 

Small localized actions – like the celebrated 11 Irish supermarket workers who risked their livelihoods to stop their employer selling South African fruit, or the Bay Area longshore workers who refused to offload South African ships in the 1980s (and have more recently done the same to an Israeli cargo) – eventually created a civil-society common sense that left Western governments no choice but to act against apartheid.

So, when such high-profile artists as Lorde or Lauryn Hill or Elvis Costello refuse to perform in Israel, or when Argentina’s soccer squad votes to cancel a match there, those actions disrupt Israel’s efforts to normalize its apartheid system. And, cumulatively, they build momentum. Divestment decisions by U.S. Presbyterian and United Methodist churches have an impact far beyond any immediate economic consequences for Israel: They represent a shifting consensus. Such efforts to shift democratic public opinion are clearly boosted by the HRW findings. And that gives the perpetrators of Israeli apartheid good reason to worry – but only if it’s accompanied by anti-racist civil society doing the kind of work it did to press U.S. and Western governments to act against South African apartheid. 

---

You might also enjoy