The apartheid system was based on three main pillars: the Population Classification Law, the Separate Housing Law, and the Land Law. (Shutterstock)
"We know very well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians."
Nelson Mandela
In an unprecedented historical situation that could change the course of Israel's war on Gaza, which has been raging for more than a hundred days, South Africa has filed its case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, accusing it of violating its obligations under the United Nations Genocide Convention. This war has resulted in the martyrdom of more than 24,60 Palestinians so far, most of them women and children, and the fall of more than <>,<> wounded, in addition to the displacement of nearly a million and a half people from their homes, and the destruction of thousands of public and private buildings and facilities.
According to international law experts, if the International Court of Justice concludes in its judgment that Israel is directly responsible for genocide, it will be the first time that a country has been convicted of committing genocide directly. Militias in Srebrenica, the Court has not previously established the direct responsibility of any state for genocide (1).
With the start of the trial, a comparison between the nature of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Israeli occupation was imposed on the scene, as well as between the struggle of the two peoples in South Africa and Palestine, in an attempt to understand South Africa's position and support for the Palestinian cause, and to draw inspiration from its struggle in the current conflict against the Israeli occupation.
Israeli violence in the context of Western colonialism
"The West has not won over the world by the superiority of its ideas, values or religion, but by its superiority in the application of organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, but non-Westerners never forget this."
Samuel Huntington
Israel was established in the region as a model of Western imperialist colonialism that established the principle of the use of violence as a necessity to defend the white colonizer (the representative of civilization) against the indigenous population as representatives of barbarism or less civilized, a principle invoked by the nature of Israeli violence and the discourse of collective punishment. In light of this, the emergence of racist regimes in both South Africa and the Israeli occupation state can be seen as an extended part against colonialism, as the Dutch were the first to colonize the territories that later formed South Africa in the seventeenth century, and began the process of expropriating land from the indigenous population, and later joined by the British, in a situation similar to the Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine, which came under the umbrella of the British Mandate.
In both contexts, colonialism was framed by false civilizational endeavors, while the colonizer viewed his presence in South Africa as a gift of British civilization to the less civilized indigenous people, he viewed Palestine as an opportunity to create a new future and reality for the Jews, and an opportunity to bring modern civilization and exploit lands whose indigenous inhabitants are not good at exploiting their resources. 700,<> indigenous Palestinians.
All this in a context that evokes the Western historical colonial model that was successful (practically) in the past two centuries, but now seems anachronistic in its time, according to the historian Tony Jawdat in his article (2) published in 2003 in the New York Review of Books entitled "Israel: The Alternative": "The problem with Israel is not that it is a European enclave in the Arab world, but that it arrived too late, it imported a distinctive separatist project from the late nineteenth century to A world that has moved forward, a world of individual rights, open borders, and international law. The idea of a "Jewish state" – a state in which Jews and Judaism enjoy exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. In short, Israel today is anachronism."
Israel is the new face of apartheid
Apartheid began in South Africa in 1948, and by historical coincidence it was the same year as the Palestinian Nakba. (Shutterstock)
According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2002, apartheid is defined as a system of systematic oppression and domination committed in an institutional context by one ethnic group over any other ethnic group or groups with the intention of maintaining the system. The apartheid regime in South Africa began in 1948, and coincidentally it was the same year as the Palestinian Nakba, in which the establishment of the Israeli occupation states was proclaimed. The SNP government in South Africa initially promoted this system as a tool to enable equal development, freedom of cultural expression and allowing groups to manage their own affairs, but the reality was different (3).
The apartheid system was based on three main pillars: the Population Classification Law, the Separate Housing Law, and the Land Law. Individuals were divided into ethnic groups and separated, and the majority of blacks were confined to their own Bantustans reservations, ranging in size from 7 to 13% of the total area of the country, in parallel with the imposition of restrictive measures on blacks to ensure the supremacy of the white minority. These include allocating buses, restaurants, ticket windows and beaches for whites, as well as separating them in hospitals, public facilities and even churches. Blacks, of course, were singled out for inferior facilities, suffered from poor quality education and sanitation, were prevented from voting and owning land, restricted their movements, and prevented from doing business outside the Bantustans unless they had exceptional permits (4).
Comparisons are often made between apartheid in South Africa and the situation of Palestinians and Arabs under Israeli occupation, where Jews enjoy full citizenship benefits, Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are granted no political rights whatsoever and are treated as second-class citizens. According to a 2010 report published by Human Rights Watch, "Separation and Inequality: Israel's Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the OPT," "Palestinians face systematic discrimination solely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, denying them electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all these state-provided benefits."
John Dugard, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories, summarizes these general violations in his report, noting that the international community has identified three hostile human rights regimes: colonialism, apartheid, and foreign occupation, all of which meet in Israel. It is clear that Israel occupies the Palestinian territories militarily, while at the same time the occupying power practices forms of colonialism and apartheid, which, according to Dugard, makes Israel an embodiment of the central principles of international human rights.
There are many similarities between apartheid in South Africa and the current regime in the OPT, even in practice. For example, there are two practices of spatial segregation that we can see almost identically in both South Africa and Israel: the first is the policy of the permit system to limit population movement, where the apartheid government in South Africa used a complex traffic system to control the movement of blacks, and in a similar way Israel has put in place a complex system of movement permits, checkpoints that make it difficult for Palestinians to move from one area to another and restrict their movement, making it difficult for daily activities such as accessing health care or commuting to the workplace.
Israel's separation wall near the Qalandia checkpoint, between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the West Bank. (Shutterstock)
The second practice is to deliberately create ethnic enclaves to isolate the black population of South Africa (Bantustans), and to create similar enclaves in Palestine, most notably in the case of the besieged Gaza Strip, making it more like the largest open-air prison as it has always been described. Another crude example of this practice can be seen in Israeli settlements, where more than 123 settlements have been built since 2012, often located around major Palestinian urban centers, isolating them from the rest of the territory.
Legally, different laws have also been used for different ethnic groups in South Africa's apartheid regime, and in the Palestinian territories separate laws exist for both Palestinians and Israelis leading to disparities in legal rights, and Palestinians face a range of discriminatory policies, including the Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as a Jewish-only state, effectively placing Palestinian citizens in the second class (5).
South Africa has witnessed many massacres and violent practices during its struggle against apartheid, but it has never seen such shelling, siege and the large number of deaths and prisoners witnessed by civilians in Palestine. (French)
Talking about the similarity between the two experiences and describing Israel as an apartheid state is not just a rhetorical analogy, but an almost complete fact that makes Israel a full-fledged apartheid regime (6). However, despite the strength of the legal arguments for classifying Israel as an apartheid state, some object to a direct comparison between the situation in South Africa and the current situation in Palestine, and these objections can be summarized in a number of basic points: the first is that Jews and Palestinians do not represent ethnic groups, and that Israel does not discriminate on ethnic grounds but on the basis of citizenship like other nation-states, an objection that can be answered and refuted simply by the broad characteristics of the classification between Jews and Palestinians. It falls under the broad definition of race under international law.
Even in terms of citizenship, Israeli law discriminates between Arab and Jewish Israeli citizens. The so-called "Israeli Arabs" represent more than 20% of its population, and descend from more than 160,1948 Palestinians who remained within the borders of the occupied territories after 7, and suffer discrimination between nationality and citizenship, despite holding Israeli citizenship, they are treated as second-class citizens, face discrimination in the field of employment and housing, and suffer from land confiscation, all of which confirm that discriminatory practices in Israel are based on race and not citizenship, which confirms that it is an apartheid state (<>).
A long history of common struggle
The late President "Yasser Arafat" with the former President of the Republic of South Africa, "Nelson Mandela". (Social Media)
It is no exaggeration to say that the success of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa inspired Palestinian resistance. Just two weeks after his release from prison in 1990, the activist and leader Nelson Mandela traveled to Zambia to meet with leaders who supported the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, most notably the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, and the late leader Nelson Mandela was known to wear the Palestinian keffiyeh on a number of important occasions. As an expression of support for the cause (8).
Many prominent figures and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa have also criticized the Israeli occupation and declared their solidarity with the Palestinian cause, most famously: Dennis Goldberg, who was among the most important members of the armed wing of the African National Congress, and Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
From left: South Africa's apartheid propaganda chief Eshel Ruddy, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, South Africa's apartheid intelligence chief Hendrik van den Berg and Shimon Peres in 1975. (Social Media)
On the other hand, despite the Israeli public condemnation of apartheid policies in South Africa, a political and military alliance developed between Israel and the apartheid government in South Africa, during the seventies of the last century, under the government of Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres, Minister of Defense at the time, played a key role in this relationship, as the architect of the Israeli nuclear program through secret meetings held in the mid-seventies of the last century, and resulted in a number of military deals, including Israel's offer to sell South African nuclear warheads (9).
For years, Israeli arms exports to South Africa have boosted Israel's economy, helping to reinforce the besieged and isolated apartheid regime in Pretoria, at a time when the rest of the world was turning against it. The two countries also formed an alliance that allowed South Africa to develop advanced nuclear missile technology, and provided Israel with the raw materials and testing space it needed to expand its arsenal of missiles and nuclear weapons (9).
In addition to this cooperation, we cannot overlook the ideological rapprochement between the two regimes, as noted by former IDF Chief of Staff Gen. Rafael Eitan, who served as Minister of Agriculture and Environment and Deputy Prime Minister during Benjamin Netanyahu's first term as Prime Minister, in his statement that "Black people in South Africa want to control the white minority just as the Arabs here want to control us... We, like South Africa's white minority, must work to prevent them from seizing power."
In sum, while the eyes of the world are on the International Court of Justice awaiting its decision, South Africa's legal action has roots in its history and not just an occasional moment of solidarity.11 South Africa's move is also an implicit call for the so-called "Global South" to change the rules of the game after the international community's hypocrisy in the face of the violence of the disaster was exposed.
——————————————————————-
Sources
1- All you are interested in knowing about the case of South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Will the war in Gaza stop? – CNN Arabic
2-South Africa's support for the Palestinian cause has deep roots
3- A history of Apartheid in South Africa | South African History Online (sahistory.org.za)
4-The doctrine of apartheid : Native policy of the South African Nationalists
5-Comparing apartheid: South Africa and Palestine's ongoing struggles
6-Apartheid' claim, Israel and the verdict of international law
7-: Assessing the Israel – apartheid South Africa comparison
8- Why South Africa is Sympathetic to Palestine & the Reason Behind African Nations Divided on Support | EXPLAINED
9- The unspoken alliance: Israel's secret relationship with apartheid South Africa
10- South Africa's ICJ Case Against Israel is a call to break free from the Imperial West
Source : Al Jazeera