Apartheid

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‘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 often 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, since 1976. 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 measurable, degrees. Here I will also attempt to place the phenomenon of apartheid
in sociological and legal contexts and 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 841 below, and Section I.4, 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 N.N.: United Nations in the Struggle against Apartheid, no date.
5 In previous editions of this book I used the term ‘ethnicism’, mainly because of what I see as the difficulty of
many Americans and western Europeans 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 (for races of horses, cattle, cats, dogs, etc.), 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’. 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 policies. The ethnicized discourse, at least in the form of Latin American
mestizaje, encompassing both indigenous and mixed-race Latin Americans, 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. Truly 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 humans of the same magnitude as those between dogs. But the danger