Apartheid

8
course of this investigation, I will deal with several propaganda smokescreens and ideological
traps – more or less consciously devised by the oppressive racial minorities and their allies –
in order to obscure the nature of the beast, so that it can remain poised to strike, as it were,
entirely unsuspected, from a well-camouflaged ambush position. Once the system of apartheid
has been formally defeated, personal and institutional responsibility for apartheid is also
shirked with the aid of such manipulations. For example, no civilian member of South
Africa’s white population has been found guilty of apartheid, a crime against humanity, by
any court of law. And in that country, the (still largely white) elites still talk far more often
about the ‘apartheid state’ than about any ‘apartheid society’. So far, consciously intended
mystification has proven to be one efficient, although far from sufficient, way among many of
prolonging the lives of apartheid societies, even beyond their formal or official demise.
Apparently, then, there is life after death for apartheid. For phenomena such as the practical
impunity for civilian as well as state-employed apartheid perpetrators, or the persistence of
relative white affluence and disproportionate white political influence in South Africa, I will
use the term ‘epiapartheid’. This also becomes a burning issue with governmental attempts to
prevent white capital flight and to encourage foreign investment, among other neo-liberal
reforms of South Africa’s economy after the end of political apartheid, which statistically
have made white families richer and black families poorer, at least between 1996 and 2002,
and which have increased unemployment for black people, though in a manner fundamentally
different from apartheid in the traditional sense. Previously boycotted and sanctioned South
African commodities started to bring in profits again after 1994, and most of the profits ended
up in the pockets of business owners, investors and executives, who were mostly white. On
the other hand, there are of course also many truly ‘post-apartheid’ conditions in South Africa,
especially in political, cultural, and social spheres. There is much that Israelis and Palestinians
can learn from the South African experience, perhaps especially if they should achieve a
similar end to legalized and political apartheid – but not informal or economic apartheid – like
South Africa did.
Another reason why apartheid still eludes easy classification is that, like most armed
conflicts today, it does not readily fall under the classification of war, since the relationship
cannot be defined as a formal state of war between two states, except under highly unusual
circumstances. War is never formally declared, except under these rare conditions.
Today, in most conflicts, the two main warring groups usually lay claim to the same
territory as their homeland, and apartheid is just one example of this kind of conflict, an
example in which the two groups are not equally indigenous, nor equally large, nor equally
strong in the military sense. The apartheid wars in which the traditional sense of war does
apply are mainly colonial invasions, in which invader civilian settlements may be planned, but
are not yet an established fact. They also include wars with neighboring countries, such as
Israel’s wars of 1948-9, and in 1956, 1967, and 1973, in the latter three of which the disarmed
and isolated Palestinians were not significant participants. The Israeli invasions of southern
Lebanon from 1982 through 2011 or the continuing invasions of the West Bank and Gaza
since 1967, however, are not wars in the traditional sense since Israel (in contradiction to
international law) neither declared (or even admitted waging) war nor recognized the
sovereignty or rights to self-determination of the states or nations that they invaded.
Moreover, the Palestinians in Palestine and Israel, just like the South African Blacks in South
Africa, including the Homelands, were both disarmed and surrounded, during most of these
wars of the apartheid states against their neighbors. Lacking states as well as military
hardware, it was thus next to impossible for the main victims of apartheid to wage war
anyway. In Section III.4, I will argue that less than 2.2 per cent of all gross human rights
violations in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have been perpetrated by Palestinians and their
allies and supporters, and more than 97.8 per cent by Israeli Jews and their supporters and
allies. In the Gaza war of 2008-2009, one hundred times as many Palestinians as Israelis were
killed. Long wars, especially those that rage for over 50 years, do not usually manifest such