Unlike South African apartheid, which backed supremacy and exploitation, Israeli apartheid condones ethnic cleansing, even mass atrocities – as evidenced by the obliteration of Gaza and anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.
New York (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – On November 10, the Israeli parliament passed the first reading of a bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners convicted of killing Israeli individuals, with 39 votes in favor and 16 against out of 120 members.
The bill would make it mandatory for Israeli courts to impose death penalty against individuals convicted of killing an Israeli “either intentionally or recklessly” if the act is motivated by “racism or hostility towards the public” and “committed with the objective of harming the state of Israel or the rebirth of the Jewish people.”
The controversial and murky bill has been widely condemned by international and Palestinian human rights organizations and prisoners’ groups. As Amnesty International put it, “The shift towards requiring courts to impose the death penalty against Palestinians is a dangerous and dramatic step backwards and a product of ongoing impunity for Israel’s system of apartheid and its genocide in Gaza.”
However, as I have argued (here and here), such a shift would be consistent with the Israeli far-right’s redemptionist dreams of Jewish supremacy and Greater Israel, which the Netanyahu cabinet has effectively condoned. It would also codify the move beyond classic apartheid.
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Institutionalization of apartheid
In South Africa, racial discrimination against black people began with large-scale colonization over four centuries ago. By the early 19th century, British settlers began to colonize the frontier regions. As takeoffs accelerated in in the late 19th century Europe, South Africa industrialized on the back of mining and infrastructure investment. But the Mineral Revolution was a revolution by, of and for the white colonial settlers.
Following the European powers’ scramble for Africa, the Anglo-Zulu War and two Boer Wars, the Boer republics were incorporated into the British Empire. Meanwhile, South Africa began to introduce more segregationist policies towards non-whites. The goals were reflected by the Afrikaans term apartheid (“separateness,” or “apart-hood”).
After the 1948 all-white elections, the National Party enforced white supremacy and racial separation. When the South African republic was established in 1961, it withdrew from the British Commonwealth.
International counter-reaction, black resistance
A year later, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 1761, which requested member states to break off diplomatic relations and cease trading with South Africa and to deny passage to South African ships and aircraft.
A special committee was set up calling for a boycott of South Africa. Though initially ignored, it found allies in the West, including the UK-based Anti-Apartheid Movement.
By 1973, the UN General Assembly agreed on the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. In the process, “apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa.”
Popular uprisings ensued in black and colored townships in 1976 and 1985. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the last vestiges of apartheid were abolished, and a new constitution was promulgated into law: one person, one vote.
South Africa and Israel as “apartheid states”
The apartheid association between South Africa and Israel is not something new. After the UN vote against the South African apartheid in the early 1960s, the country’s prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was particularly annoyed by Israel’s vote against South Africa’s segregation.
“Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude,” Verwoerd lamented. “They took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”
In effect, martial law had been imposed on the Arab citizens of Israel from 1948 to 1966, and it continues to be intermittently enforced to the present.
Effectively, the Israeli government imposed various restrictions on Palestinians, including on their mobility, with security checkpoints set up to enforce these permits allowing entry. Meanwhile, requests for government services for Arab Israelis were directed to military courts instead of civil courts. These measures were subsequently adopted in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank.
Subsequently, the UN adopted the (non-binding) Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, sponsored mainly by the Arab League, the Soviet bloc and many new African states.
After the 1967 Six-Day-War and the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian resistance intensified, domestically and internationally.
The debate on Israeli segregation
Following the Yom Kippur War, the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 3236 recognized the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, inviting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to participate in international diplomacy.
The oil crisis in 1975 paved the way to resolution 3379, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In the UN, Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog, the future president of Israel, stated the decision was “devoid of any moral or legal value.” Then, he tore the resolution in half.
At the end of the Cold War, Resolution 3379 was revoked by the UN Resolution 46/86, introduced by U.S. President George H. W. Bush. It contributed to Israel’s sense of impunity and the rise of its Messianic far-right. But Bush’s UN address wasn’t just about Zionism and racism. It was about wheeling and dealing. The revocation was Israel’s precondition for participation in the Madrid Conference of 1991, which paved the way to the Oslo Accords – which the Netanyahu cabinets have shunned ever since then.
In 2021, Isaac Herzog, the son of Chaim Herzog, became Israel’s president. When South Africa launched its genocide case against Israel, he declared it a “blood libel” against Jews. Later he shredded the UN Charter in protest of the UN General Assembly vote to boost the status of the Palestinian mission.
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And yet it was in 2021 that Human Rights Watch warned that Israel had crossed the apartheid threshold. Many Israeli leaders agreed. A year later, Israel’s former attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, said that “my country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime.”
Two years later, he was seconded by the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg. A month before the October 7 offensive, Mossad’s ex-chief Tamir Pardo concurred: “There is an apartheid state here,” since “two people are judged under two legal systems.”
In the case of South African apartheid, international restrictions fostered domestic opposition. But in the case of Israel, those measures proved soft. It was the ineptitude of the international community that reinforced the marginalization of the Israeli anti-apartheid opposition and the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022.
File photo of Palestine by Hammam Fuad on Unsplash
Apartheid and hyper-apartheid
In South Africa and Israel, apartheid rule has sought to crush all opposition by fragmenting territories, restricting mobility, forcing inequality and imposing segregation. Under the Likud and Netanyahu governments, Israel has been morphing into an apartheid state and its occupied territories into Palestinian Bantustans.
Yet, there are major differences with classic apartheid as enforced in South Africa and its Israeli version in the occupied territories. Apartheid policies can be formal and legal as in South African apartheid, or informal and semi-legal as in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
In apartheid South Africa, a white minority dominated a black majority, whereas in Israel a Jewish population discriminates against a Palestinian population, both about equally numerous, by keeping the Palestinians beyond the Green Line under military occupation.
Third, in South Africa, the objective of apartheid was to sustain a system of racial segregation in which one group is deprived of political and civil rights, and exploited as low-cost labor. During apartheid rule, the per capita income of South African blacks relative to the whites climbed from 8.6 to 13.5 percent. The Palestinians’ starting point relative to the Israelis was almost twice as high in percentage terms. But even before October 7, 2023, it had plunged to a lower level than that of South Africa’s blacks at the end of apartheid rule.
But the ultimate difference between South African apartheid and Israel’s hyper-apartheid is ethnic cleansing – as a prelude to worse.
The ultimate difference
Unlike classic apartheid and its territorial fragmentation, degree of formality and labor exploitation, Israeli apartheid aims further. Since the UN Partition Plan, its ultimate purpose has been the Judaization of Arab Palestine and the drastic expansion of Israeli borders. Apartheid is an instrument to that goal.
Apartheid South Africa was willing to live with segregated, exploited and underprivileged black people. By contrast, since the late 1970s, the Israeli system has sought to use segregation as an interim instrument to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories through Palestinian displacement, dispossession and, if necessary, abject devastation.
In this sense, Israeli apartheid differs from South African apartheid. It is hyper-apartheid. In Greek, “hyper” means “over, beyond, overmuch, above measure.” Going beyond the norm, hyper-apartheid officially shuns classic apartheid, yet benefits from the low-cost labor while ultimately seeking its obliteration.
Today, hyper-apartheid is the inspiration of settler violence in the West Bank and the “judicial reforms” by the Netanyahu cabinet, to accelerate the transformation of the secular and democratic Jewish state into a religious and autocratic regime.
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