Apartheid

likely that there are now more unemployed and poor Jews in Israel than there were poor
Whites in apartheid South Africa or poor Europeans in Graeco-Roman Egypt, simply because
of these demographic facts. There may therefore be an opportunity to enlist disenfranchised
and economically marginalized Israeli Jews into the resistance against apartheid. 835 The
reserve laborer army of third country nationals is being mobilized by Israel, though rather late
in comparison with South Africa, and there are also Jewish losers in this process. Ideological
considerations, i.e. especially the need to fall within the US or western category of
‘democratic states’, as well as its ‘success’ with ethnic cleansing seem to have necessitated a
relatively large Jewish underclass for Israel. Nonetheless, the great number of illegal and legal
Palestinian migrant workers from the Occupied Territories, and the migrant workers of other
nationalities within Israel, not to mention the historically unparalleled aid that Israel receives
from the USA, have on the whole kept profit margins very comfortable indeed for Israeli
businesses, and together with the state elites, the Jewish underclass can therefore be plausibly
expected to remain powerless.
South Africa is in a way the human success story among my three apartheid examples.
The oppressed majority was able to rise up and cast off the yoke, to a large extent of its own
accord, only in South Africa. 836 Yet the legacy of apartheid in South Africa remains, and it
may yet take a long time until it is overcome in a similar way to the traces of the Graeco-
Roman system of apartheid in Egypt, which are now all but a memory. The main leftovers of
apartheid in South Africa are wealth distribution and land ownership – these two were
certainly intended by the apartheid elites to be lasting legacies – and to a lesser but still
noticeable extent: access, violence with impunity (including indigenous femicide),
repopulation, education, language, and thought.
15-nation bloc. No action was seriously considered, but it was at least potentially harmful to business confidence
in Israel, whose main trading partner is the EU. See Chalmers: EU’s Empty Sanction Threat Could Still Hurt
Israel, 2002. The Palestinians themselves, like the South Africans resisting apartheid, have consistently called for
and practiced boycotts. See N.N.: Facts on Boycotting Israeli Goods, June 25, 2002. In August 2004, finally, the
115-member Non-Aligned Movement, consisting of developing countries a great deal more mindful of human
rights than the EU, announced it would ban Israeli settlers from visiting their countries and boycott firms
involved in building the illegal Apartheid Wall. Israeli commentators as well as outsiders drew parallels with the
international sanctions against South Africa towards the end of apartheid in that country. See Heller, C.: Non-
Aligned Boycott Stirs Sanctions Fears in Israel, 2004, and footnote 857 below.
835 Chomsky: Prospects for Peace in the Middle East, 2001
836 According to Chomsky, South Africa would not have been liberated from apartheid without the reversal of
US policy towards it in the late 1980s, and he believes that the same kind of reversal might have to occur for the
liberation of Palestinians from Israeli apartheid to become reality. See Chomsky March 4, 2001; Chomsky:
Neocolonial Invitation to a Tribal War, 2001. US approval may indeed be necessary at the beginning of the 21 st
century, yet it may still not be sufficient to prop up a violent and oppressive minority rule regime. Only a quarter
of a century ago, the Vietnamese people proved this, although the costs were horrific: an estimated three million
Vietnamese lives, along with another two million killed due to US interventions in the neighboring countries,
Cambodia and Laos, and over 60,000 American lives. US citizens nowadays, however, on an average believe
that only 100,000 Vietnamese were killed in the war, a stark reminder of the effectiveness of US propaganda.
See Chomsky 2002 (1991): 36f. The losses also included countless permanent disabilities, and widespread
environmental devastation, which is still taking its toll, for instance in the form of children stillborn or born with
gross deformities, unnaturally high rates of leukaemia and other kinds of cancer, as well as other fatal illnesses,
due to residues of chemical weapons, such as napalm and Agent Orange. These most cowardly weapons were
employed by the US army during the war and are in some cases still active today. Moreover, explosions of
ordnance from the Vietnam War, the vast majority of it distributed by the US troops – some of it also forbidden
under international law – still kill and maim dozens of civilians each year. See Herman & Chomsky 1994 (1988):
Chapters 5 and 6; Mikkelsen: Clinton Sees Vietnam War’s Painful Legacy, 2000; N.N.: Old Cluster Bomb Kills
Three Children in Vietnam, January 17, 2003; Mulvihill: More Agent Orange Sprayed in Vietnam than Thought,
2003. The Vietnam scenario for the USA has, incidentally, been compared to the Palestine scenario for Israel.
The militarily superior powers in each case won all the battles but would ultimately lose the war, according to
the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the USA, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. See Fenwick: Saudi Compares Israeli
Conflict to Vietnam War, 2002.
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