Are we really as terrible as all that? Anyone who tries to draw a comparison between the occupation regime in the territories to the South African apartheid regime - and their number is rising constantly - is instantly labeled anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. But the facts justify the comparison. No, Israel is not an apartheid state, but the occupation in the territories is apartheid.
The comparison is legitimate. It's a good thing that it upsets a lot of Israelis - perhaps their anger will prod them into looking at the occupation for once. But that isn't to say there are no differences between the two regimes, between the tyranny of the Israeli occupation and segregation regime of preliberation South Africa. The biggest difference, unfortunately, is that apartheid is gone while the occupation is only becoming further entrenched.
Brian Brown, a South African cleric who was forced into exile as a result of his antiapartheid activities and is currently Moderator of the Synod of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, gave a fascinating and learned lecture on the comparison at a conference in Scotland a few months ago. Rudolf Hinz, a professor of intellectual theology at the University of Kiel, Germany, gave me the highlights of the lecture. Brown's conclusion was that the similarities justify the comparison.
Brown says that one must speak about apartheid in terms of dispossession, from land, rights, dignity, nationality and power - of blacks in apartheid South Africa and Palestinians in the territories. In both cases, the ruling communities, the white community in South Africa and the Jewish community in Israel, themselves were victims of oppression. The Boers had felt the sting of the British Empire's lash, while the Jews had been through the infinitely more terrible horrors of the Holocaust.
Some of the Boers in South Africa and the Zionists in Israel based their right to the respective lands on divine decree. Both societies conquered territory in violation of international law. After the 1910 formation of the Union of South Africa, the state conquered its neighbor to the east, present-day Namibia, and governed it under a League of Nations mandate; Israel conquered the Palestinian territories around 50 years after that.
The fact that both of the occupying societies saw themselves as victims helped cement ties between Israel and the apartheid regime, despite the latter's support for Nazi Germany in the past. Both societies saw themselves as defenders of civilization, and viewed the struggle against, respectively, blacks and Palestinians, as a struggle between Western values and barbarians in one case and jihadists on the other. South Africa saw itself as a fortress against the Soviet Union during the Cold War; Israel viewed itself as "the only democracy in the Middle East." Most importantly, in both cases, the original, institutionalized, violence was that of the regime. The violence of the African National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organization, respectively, was reactive.
Both societies were characterized by institutional discrimination. In South Africa the nation was white; in Israel the state is Jewish. Non-whites in South Africa and non-Jews in Israel had to find a different national identity for themselves. In South Africa, national identity for blacks was assigned to the Bantustans, the so-called National Homelands that were not recognized by any other state, just as there is no state that recognizes the Israeli occupation.
Immigration policy was also similar: In both regimes it was based on ethnic or racial identity. Only whites were permitted to immigrate to South Africa; only Jews are allowed to immigrate to Israel. In South Africa white immigrants had to undergo naturalization; in Israel any Jew can become a citizen immediately. In both regimes there was no relationship between the size of the population and its control of territory.
Brown notes the distinction between "petty apartheid" and "grand apartheid" within South Africa and between the two regimes. In the case of petty apartheid - racial segregation in places of entertainment and the like - the difference between the regimes is indeed great. But South Africa's blacks, he says, did not launch their battle in order to be able to sit on the same park bench as whites. Their fight was against grand apartheid, the apartheid of institutionalized, violent dispossession. The Palestinians are fighting the same battle. Should we call this comparison ridiculous, baseless, anti-Semitic?
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