Apartheid

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 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 the British and transnational Zionist lobbies played huge roles
in bringing about that bias, and they still do so 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 19 th -century Europe, which was to a large extent dominated by
western European, especially British, thought (as well as British military, political and
economic dominance). 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. 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 airport in 2004-5, when I saw numerous
unmarked airplanes land and take off there. 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 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. 185
(1997): 665ff. I am not treating Rwanda at any point 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 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
colonialism, apartheid, and genocide may also play important roles.
185 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,
133