In the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as with previous ones, the accusation of Israel being an “apartheid state” continues to rear its head within the litany of slanders and lies leveled against the only Jewish state and its inhabitants. For obvious reasons this particular accusation carries an especially strong cachet for us South Africans, and it is brandished by demagogues both here and abroad in the public discourse with devastating effect.
This slander has been raised yet again most recently in the pages of Politicsweb by ‘Ambassador’ Carl ‘Mpangazitha’ Niehaus, esteemed President-leader of the African Radical Economic Transformation Alliance, who quite astonishingly sees fit at this time to rise in defense and praise of the murderous Hamas organization and in slander of his ever-growing list of enemies, at the top of which now appears the beleaguered state of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.
Whilst the non-factual and rather incoherent ramblings of ‘Ambassador’ Niehaus really need not detain us much at all, given the current moment it does behoove us to spend a bit of time to try and understand the potency of the “apartheid Israel” accusation, and why it has no basis whatsoever in reality, both historically and in current times.
“Apartheid” is the name that was given to the racial policy developed and enacted by the Afrikaner Nationalist Party of South Africa starting in the late 1940’s, and which was ultimately abolished with the advent of a democratic non-racial South Africa under the leadership of Nelson Mandela in April 1994.
The system of apartheid can be characterized as a social and political system in which certain racial groups in South Africa such as black, coloured and Indian people, did not enjoy the same political, economic and civil rights as white people, and were subjected to discrimination under law on the basis of their race.
Apartheid was underpinned by a vast network of laws and regulations which enforced such discrimination, on both a “grand” scale, such as having to live in separate areas, and not being allowed to vote, as well as a “petty” scale, such as having to use different toilets and sit on separate benches.
Importantly for our current purposes, the ascent of the Afrikaner National party and its implementation of apartheid as a system of control and governance coincided with the end of World War 2 and the rapid onset of liberation and decolonization of countries in the third world. A newfound political power now existed in these liberated countries and starting in the 1950’s this saw a fundamental shift of power in international organs such as the United Nations.
Countries such as India and Ghana along with many other newly liberated countries began to assert their strength at the United Nations and similar such bodies and one of the first targets of these countries was South Africa. A global campaign against “Apartheid South Africa” accelerated rapidly and before long sanctions in various sectors were imposed on South Africa by many countries, both on a bi-lateral and multilateral basis.
South Africa was increasingly isolated in world bodies and this culminated in its expulsion from the UN in 1974. Even before this however another major milestone in the global struggle against apartheid was the passing at the UN in November 1973 of the “Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid”.
Whilst apartheid was regularly condemned by the General Assembly of the United Nations starting in 1960 until its demise in 1990, the passing of the Apartheid Convention was the ultimate step in the condemnation of apartheid as it not only declared that apartheid was unlawful because it violated the Charter of the United Nations, but in addition it declared apartheid to be a crime. Apartheid was thus by definition an international crime which could in no way be countenanced or compromised with, but which required complete and unconditional abolition.
For purposes of this article, let us at this point note something which in all honesty should not even need mentioning, namely, that there is nothing whatsoever in Israel’s constitutional, legislative or legal framework that bears any resemblance to the above-described system of “apartheid”. To the contrary Israeli society is premised on an equal-rights based legal system where (to quote from a recent publication of the ADL (the US Anti Defamation League): “…there are safeguards aimed at ensuring the equal treatment of all citizens, Jewish or Arab, and Israeli laws and democratic institutions, including the independent courts and robust free press, assigned to uphold and speak out for these rights.”
Most importantly Israel’s Arab minority population actively participates in the political process. There are Arab parliamentarians, Arab judges (including on the Supreme Court), Arab cabinet ministers, Arab heads of hospital departments, Arab university professors, Arab beauty queens, Arab diplomats in the Foreign Service, and very senior Arab police and army officers.
Any visitor to Israel will immediately become aware of the colour-blind nature of its society. In Israel discrimination on the basis of race or religion is a criminal offense. This is indeed the polar opposite of the race-based system which was applied in apartheid South Africa, and the verbal and logical contortions required to equate Israel to an apartheid state make it clear this accusation is an absurdity unworthy of consideration for even a moment.
This leads us to the perplexing question as to why such an accusation was ever levelled against Israel. To answer this, some history must be recounted. Whilst South Africa was justly prosecuted by the international community for the terrible crime of apartheid, at the same time a very different agenda, one characterised by harassment and bullying, was being undertaken by another grouping of often undemocratic and totalitarian nations countries willing and able to flex their power in the international arena, and the target country of this agenda was the tiny Jewish state of Israel.
From 1948 at its founding until 1967, Israel, whilst facing unrelenting military aggression from its Arab neighbours, had generally been considered a member in good standing in the international community. This should not be a surprise given that Israel herself was one of the very first offspring of the United Nations, her creation one of the very first direct results of the global consensus in the new past-World War II order.
However, following Israel’s resounding victory over the 5 Arab armies which had massed on her borders to destroy her in 1967 things began to change. After this defensive war Israel found herself in control of Arab territories with significant Arab populations, from Gaza in the south to the Golan Heights in the north and the West Bank along her eastern border with Jordan.
This fundamental shift in the power equation between Israel and her Arab neighbours, with “David” becoming the new “Goliath”, slowly but surely began to affect Israel’s standing in the international arena. Whilst there had already been changes in global perception towards Israel starting even back in the 1950’s, this began to pick up pace after the Six Day War.
The geopolitical context of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union is also of paramount importance in understanding what transpired in the following decade that was to so change the perception of Israel in the international community.
In the 1970’s the Soviet Union and her allies in the so-called Non-Aligned Movement began a concerted effort to paint Israel and Zionism in a negative light. As one scholar puts it, the Soviet Union’s campaign against Israel and the Jews “succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid.”
This campaign infamously culminated in 1975 with the passage by the UN’s General Assembly of Resolution 3379, that “Zionism is a form of Racism”. This Resolution was put forward by the Arab nations at the UN and strongly supported by the Soviet Union and members of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Whilst the Resolution had no legal affect (as a resolution of the General Assembly it was a non-binding recommendation) it nevertheless poisoned the international discourse against Israel and served to delegitimise Israel and Zionism in the eyes of many on the left. As Patrick Daniel Moynihan (US Ambassador to the UN at the time the resolution was passed) has explained, if states based on apartheid and racism are (as per the Apartheid Convention) criminal states, it follows that states based on ideologies which are designated as equivalent to them, as is Israel to Zionism, are likewise criminal, and importantly, may be morally, legally and forcibly resisted by any national liberation movement.
It thus becomes clear that the campaign in the 1970’s to define Israel and Zionism as a form of racism was without substantive merit but was simply a continuation by the Arab states and its allies of its perennial battle against the Jewish state by other means, using the updated currency of international condemnation to cast Israel in the worst possible light, and to justify the on-going conflict with the Jewish state in the international arena under “international law”.
After 15 years of efforts the US finally succeeded in having Resolution 3379 rescinded at the UN, but in reality Israel’s opponents were by no means ready to admit Israel into the family of nations on an equal and respected basis. In the ensuing years the campaign against Israel and Zionism by its enemies continued apace. 2001 marked another high-water point in this campaign, with the convening of the “World Conference against Racism” in Durban.
Israel and Zionism became the central focus of this Conference and the Conference fast unravelled as the US and many other western countries withdrew, leaving it to degenerate into what has been described by some as an antisemitic hate fest, with Tom Lantos, a member of Congress from California, Holocaust survivor, and part of the US delegation, referring to it as “the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”
The Conference gave further impetus to those wishing to pursue with renewed vigour the international isolation of Israel. In 2004 the call went out from a number of Palestinian NGO’s to commence an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, and this was followed by the founding of the BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) campaign in July of 2005.
The BDS campaign was modelled on similar such campaigns conducted historically against South Africa by the anti-apartheid movement, and it is clearly no coincidence that BDS was formalised in the wake of the Durban conference. It is reported that in Durban Palestinian activists met with certain anti-apartheid veterans who identified “parallels” between Israel and apartheid South Africa and recommended campaigns like those they had used to defeat apartheid. And again, it was clear that the weaponisation of such accusations against Israel was intended to render her defenceless in the face of attack and prosecution in international institutions, and to strengthen those wishing to bring about her downfall.
It should be clear from the above brief history of anti-Zionism in the global arena that the “Israeli apartheid” slander is just that: the repackaging of a baseless lie, simply intended to carry on the hate-filled and antisemitic campaign against Israel and her inhabitants from where it was left off in the Soviet-era 1970’s.
Given that Israel is clearly NOT a practitioner of apartheid in any sense of the word whatsoever, it becomes clear that this lie is required exclusively to justify the continued rejection by the Palestinians and their allies of the right of the Jewish people to its own nation-state. However, rather than being guilty of this outrageous accusation, quite to the contrary Israel is a liberal democracy which has demonstrated an unusual capacity to persist with western liberal norms in the face of a quite unique set of unrelenting threats of a military, diplomatic, and terror-based nature which have threatened its very existence ever since its foundation.
Like all other countries Israel is not perfect but it should never be doubted that her supporters can hold their heads high with pride at what she has accomplished given the odds and that, notwithstanding the naysayers, she can and should be held up as a paragon of morality and virtue in the family of nations.
In closing, let us return briefly to the public space of late in South Africa, where a final crucial point must be addressed. In the diatribe of ‘Ambassador’ Niehaus in these pages as well as in some other recent public statements by certain political leaders in this country, the situation in Israel has once again been equated with aspects of our own history, with the purported analogy this time taken to even greater extremes than the equating of Israel with an apartheid state.
Following the invasion of Israel and the attack on her by an enemy which displayed a ruthlessness and barbarity comparable only to that of ISIS in Syria and Iraq in the middle of the last decade, one of these leaders stated his and his party’s full and unequivocal support for Hamas, who, to his telling, was in its recent attacks resisting Israeli occupation (and racism and apartheid) by means no different than those pursued historically by the ANC in its struggle against apartheid South Africa.
This is a vicious and deplorable lie which needs to be called out as such. By now it is incontrovertible that in carrying out its attack Hamas murdered innocent civilians at close quarters. It butchered unarmed men and women, toddlers and babies, the elderly and the disabled, over many hours, in a paroxysm of barbaric violence untethered from any rational tactic or strategy, serving no purpose other than to “annihilate the Jews” and to terrorise the broader population of Israel.
Anyone with the slightest inkling of knowledge of South African history knows that any comparison of these actions of Hamas to the armed struggle of the ANC against apartheid South Africa is nothing but a lie which besmirches the struggle against apartheid South Africa. Whilst towards the end of its struggle the ANC was indeed pushed to attack civilian targets on several occasions this was a short-lived strategy arguably borne of desperation, which bears no comparison whatsoever to the recent barbarism of Hamas.
To talk of the cadres of Umkhonto we Sizwe in the same breath as the mass-murdering Hamas beheaders of babies and rapists of young women is a disgusting sentiment which should not need refuting. Alas in this current crazy atmosphere it does. It should be condemned vocally and loudly by all the decent people of this country, along with all the other lies being thrown at Israel and her supporters, and may sanity prevail!
