Apartheid

to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of
one’s hair or the size of one’s lips. 92
Not least due to the consequences of such policies and practices and their profound
political contexts, racism reveals itself to be the most superficial judgment of a person’s
character and worth. In Israel, however, the religious confession of a given person (or of at
least one of his or her recent ancestors) often establishes his or her race. This may seem like a
more humane distinction. It is obviously not as superficial as skin-color or hair-texture or lipsize
racism. It introduces an element of choice. But it de-secularizes society and, moreover,
oppressively divides it within itself just the same, and it is therefore on the same level of
mismatch with reality as skin-color, lip-size, or hair-curl. People are born with these traits,
and into religions, too. It must never be forgotten that the reason or excuse for cultural or
purported racial difference is above all a distinction which, whether it is skin-color, religion,
mother language, upbringing, or other accidents, decides whether a person will be a first-,
second-, third- or even fourth-class citizen in an apartheid society. Furthermore, religious
confession is not and can never be a watertight criterion for dividing people into groups,
either. In Israel, agnostic or atheist Jews are counted among the privileged due to the religion
of their parents or grandparents and/or due to their mother language. Agnostic and atheist
Arabs are being oppressed for the very same perverse reasons. At times, the frequently
changing Israeli state criterion of Jewishness has even been that the person to be classified is
‘…declaring sincerely that he is a Jew’. Moreover, the traditional, orthodox definition of
Jewishness, and the official one in Israel from 1948 until 1970, namely, that one has a Jewish
mother, introduces a racial or at least biological criterion of ethnicity through the back door,
as it were. Since 1970, the most utilized official definition of a Jew by the state of Israel is that
of a person who has at least one Jewish grandparent. 93 The explicit argument for extending the
traditional definition here is that if someone was Jewish enough for the Nazis to murder, then
s/he is Jewish enough for state-granted privileges in Israel. The argument crucially forgets,
however, firstly that the Nazis were neither Palestinian or Arab nor Muslim, and secondly that
the Jewish state was not erected on virgin soil. The implicit argument is that by thus extending
‘Jewishness’ by 200 per cent, along with other measures of demographic warfare, including a
host of racist citizenship, immigration and naturalization laws and policies, the high
Palestinian birth rate can be ‘neutralized’ in order to keep the Jewish state Jewish.
In the end, ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ criteria for racism are equally unfair and equally
oppressive. At times, it might even turn out impossible to separate the two. For instance,
racism is often manifested by the victims being described and treated by the racists as
‘underdeveloped’, ‘retarded’ or ‘child-like’. Essentially and unscientifically, this refers to both
organic and experiential immaturity, or to one of these only, or even more likely, to a fuzzy
mixture of both, whereby racists attempt to salvage their ‘arguments’ by means of devious
sidestepping and double standards.
I am not absolutely certain about which criteria were the crucial ones in Graeco-
Roman Egypt, but the body of evidence presented in Chapters II.6.1, II.7.1, II.8.1, and II.9.1,
below, suggests that they were mainly related to the mastery of the Greek language and other
Greek cultural peculiarities. The racist criteria there appear to have been more similar to
modern Israel than to South Africa, more cultural than biological, less based on visual criteria,
yet in effect no less oppressive. As we shall see, European (i.e. Greek or Roman) and to some
extent Jewish ethnicity in Graeco-Roman Egypt also had to be ‘proven’ by means of both
paternal and maternal ethnicity, in order to gain access, rights and privileges. In sum, the
criteria for racial distinctions are basically political, and they are fundamentally and
essentially excuses for oppression, discrimination and incrimination. In apartheid, then, the
92 Mandela 1995 (1994): 121f.
93 Cook 2006: 113, 199; Sand 2009 (2008): 286-288 (quote: 288)
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