Apartheid
Apartheid
Apartheid
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22<br />
particular by armed frontier settlers. 11<br />
A further difference between South Africa and Israel is that South Africa was<br />
conquered by the barrel of the gun, whereas a large portion of what today is Israel was given<br />
in 1948 to the Jews by the United Nations and the British, who had ruled it as a colony up to<br />
that point, though more than half of what is today Israeli-controlled territory was later<br />
conquered with military force. The UN-granted independence of a Jewish state, one of the few<br />
elements of international law to which Israel adheres, however, is also in my view a<br />
superficial difference from the total illegitimacy of white supremacist rule in South Africa,<br />
mainly because Palestinians and Arabs had no voice at all in the UN at the time of the birth of<br />
the modern state of Israel, nor were they ever asked. The establishment of Israel therefore<br />
amounts to a de facto invasion by foreigners. One group of foreigners handed over the land to<br />
another, without even asking the indigenous people what they thought about this. Egypt under<br />
Greek rule presents a scenario much more similar to modern Israel than to South Africa in this<br />
regard. The country was taken over by the Macedonians and Greeks from earlier, colonialist<br />
occupiers, namely the Persians.<br />
In summary, these three apartheid societies share being so-called ‘civilized societies’.<br />
They all had strong centralized states. They all built cities. They all knew and used the<br />
inventions of phonographic writing, metallurgy, the wheel, the sail, money, and more. These<br />
are all inventions which only go back 5,000-6,000 years. I am not aware of any earlier<br />
apartheid societies, or of any that do not share these basic characteristics. This sets apartheid<br />
societies apart from the vast majority of human societies. But then they are also different from<br />
the vast majority of civilized societies. They are countries, to some extent even ‘civilizations’<br />
in their own right (though the root meaning of ‘civil’ may be overstretched by such strong<br />
states as apartheid states), where the land was conquered by force or mainly by force by an<br />
invading group of people who shared much with each other but little with the indigenous,<br />
conquered, and oppressed group of people, who remained the majority. My definition of<br />
apartheid is at the same time an analysis of these kinds of human rights violations. The second<br />
part of this book is the evidence that provides an empirical underpinning for the use of the<br />
concept of apartheid for Graeco-Roman Egypt, for South Africa under white rule, and for<br />
modern Israel.<br />
In the course of this first part I hope to point to the desirability of a powerful general<br />
theory of war and oppression, especially of one that takes the – in my opinion so far<br />
underestimated – role of ethnicism into account. 12 That underestimation is not necessarily one<br />
11 Cf. Fredrickson: Racism: A Short History, 2002: 4: ‘racism does not require the full and explicit support of the<br />
state and the law.’ This is a very simple but, in my opinion, crucial insight, necessary especially for the<br />
understanding of apartheid, but also for genocide and for domestic kinds of ethnicism.<br />
12 An opposite and pessimistic outlook can be found in US philosopher Richard Rorty’s post-modernist essay,<br />
‘The End of Leninism, Havel and Social Hope’, 1998: 239: ‘We shall have to get over the hope for a successor to<br />
Marxist theory, a general theory of oppression which will provide a fulcrum that lets us topple racial, economic,<br />
and gender injustice simultaneously.’ It is unclear what Rorty means exactly by ‘simultaneously’, but I see it as<br />
being a rather inclusive term in his context, which would justify my calling his idea ‘pessimistic’. Marxism, of<br />
course, never was as general a theory of oppression as many came to believe. (See, for instance, footnote 14,<br />
below.) By overemphasizing economic injustice in particular, it effectively – and to some extent probably<br />
unconsciously – marginalized other kinds of injustice. Feminist theory seems to do the same in favor of gender<br />
issues. (See Chapman: The Feminist Perspective, 1995: 113.) An improved theory of ethnicism should be careful<br />
not to perpetuate that trend. Not only if it understands itself as a successor to Marxist theory: it must be more<br />
differentiating and less reductionist than that. To cite just one example of reductionism, exaggerating the<br />
importance of racism, or rather, overlooking the importance of economic injustice: in an otherwise excellent<br />
treatment of the insidious and in many ways very special kinds of racism perpetrated against middle-class Blacks<br />
in the USA, author Ellis Cose mentions different kinds of discrimination in that country beside racism, including<br />
sexism, ageism, and discrimination of people due to their sexual orientation. In this context, however, he entirely<br />
forgets about economic discrimination and exploitation (of employees) and state discrimination against noncitizens<br />
in particular, but also against citizens, as well as the many mixed forms of oppression that exist between