Why Israel and apartheid can never be the same thing

HAAFIZAH BHAMJEE

But what does the term really imply, is it accurate, and what implications does it have for the remembrance of apartheid, as it were, here in South Africa?

Let us take a step back for a moment and remember apartheid. Apartheid was a social, political, and economic system of power premised on the basis of race. This is complicated by the history of the key word in that description: race.

The history of the word race is complex. Going back even a mere thirty or forty years would afford you with a completely distinct connotative meaning of the word. Apartheid, which was established in 1948, premised its workings on a racial ideology of white supremacy that championed the establishment of racial category premised on biology. The biological fixation here is necessary to understand the thinking that went into the engineering of apartheid. Biology was the key tenant of the whole system. This way of thinking about race can be broken down into three elements: 1. Race is defined by physical characteristics, for example skin colour and hair texture. But also, height, the proportionality of facial features and the shape/size of anatomy. 2. Different races are indicative of different stages of human evolution. This view also underpinned theories of racial superiority and the belief that certain races are mentally or psychologically “advanced”. 3. Because of the aforementioned traits, different races are cut out for different climates, different types of environments, and different living conditions. Thus, segregation.

Today, we understand race differently. For us, as residents of an ever globalising world, race is subject to ideas of geography, and is much more tied to location than biology. A person’s race is determined by their geographic ancestry.

In an even more distinct past, pre 1900, race referred to class or family name which is why Celtic whites were considered a different race to English whites.

From this, we see that the term race is not stagnant, and because of this when we undress the meaning of apartheid the very time-conscious connotative meaning of the word must be applied.

But why do we need to be conscious of time-specific meaning? Aren’t all words constantly shifting their meaning? Yes. Most of the words we use in everyday language used to mean different things in the past. However, even in our language we often reserve certain terms for certain historical events. For example, the term “holocaust” is a historically preserved word with a specific and definite meaning. Subjecting a historical term to everyday use ensures that the word becomes devoid of meaning. Attempting to appropriate the word “apartheid” to mean something that is not the historical event, contributes to a denialism or an erasure of apartheid as it occurred in South Africa.

During apartheid, our mothers, fathers, and grandparents were subjected to humiliating bodily inspection including the infamous pencil test in which pencils were stuck into people’s hair to determine their race. Does this happen in Palestine? Absolutely not. In fact, Palestinian is not a race as such. It’s an ethnic identity. There are no biological criteria for the word Palestinian. Palestinian might be considered, by some, as a race today, but subject it to the scrutiny of apartheid logic, and it is not a race. In fact in apartheid logic, Palestinians, like all Arabs, would be considered Caucasian. Which is why the world’s best known champions of that version or ideology of race, the Nazis in Germany, considered many Arab leaders to be their allies. Therefore, it is impossible to have an “apartheid” against Palestinians as an ethnic identity.

Furthermore, apartheid was a deeply economic system that maintained a white utopia on the backs of black labourers. How was this achieved? Through the accumulation of a black workforce that could be subjected to working conditions so harsh, this could be compared to slave labour. Mine labour is a fantastic example of this. At any given time, there were more black labourers in the mines than white labourers.

In a 2013 census, only 23% of people in Israel were identified as Arab. It’s clear then that Israel is not driving its economy through racialised labour. This would be an impractical assumption even if the entire Arab population of Israel was employed by Jewish owned industries, which they are not.

However, the anti-Israel movement doesn’t define apartheid this way. The anti-Israel movement has forgotten what apartheid was. It has forgotten the pain and trauma, the humiliation and dehumanisation. Instead, it engages in an erasure of what apartheid was, a belittling of the struggles experienced by victims of apartheid legislation.

The anti-Israel movement has sheared the term down to mean simply: segregation. And then it compacted it further, or it must have, because Israel isn’t a segregated state. In Israel, people of different races, religions, and ethnicities attend the same schools, frequent the same parks, malls and beaches, and enjoy the same rights given that they are citizens of the state of Israel. There is even Arab representation in the highest level of Israeli law; its Parliament.

So, if Israel isn’t engaged in an apartheid, why do these so-called activists and other propaganda puppets keep feeding us this misinformation?

The misrepresentation of the situation, in the first place, is in pursuit of a political agenda that requires the support of foreign leaders, foreign wealth, and foreign military power.

The political agenda is not one that embarks on a valiant human-rights crusade for the well-being of Palestinians, as we are so often told. If the pushers of this false narrative were serious about the life enrichment of Palestinians, they would not be so fiercely encouraging counter-productive, hateful, and misleading language which leads to violence. Instead, they would be looking for ways to calm tensions between stakeholders and encourage co-existence and peaceful negotiation. The real desire here is the desire for the destruction of Israel as a state that protects and promotes the rights of Jewish people, economic migrants, and refugees, many of whom were displaced due to fascism in Europe, anti-Semitism in the Middle-East and conflict in Africa. It hardly needs to be said that the destruction of Israel would be the beginning of stripping thousands of people of their sovereignty as citizens of the region.

The apartheid Israel narrative, which we have established as grounded in a false premise, is simply a tool to convince people to support a sinister and hateful campaign against Israel. But, what we should be concerned with as South Africans is why this narrative is targeting us specifically.

Every single South African of colour feels emotive when confronted with the history of our country. We all feel personally hurt. Even young South Africans, who did not experience apartheid personally, are experiencing the generational trauma of apartheid. Thus, the use of emotional blackmail is insensitive towards the painful history of our nation, it is an insult to those who suffered through it. Comparing what many of our parents and grandparents endured to a democratic, multi-cultural Israel is, aptly put, a pathetic theatrical attempt to sway public opinion.

Israel is a healthy, prosperous nation. It is a country which makes the well-being of its citizens a priority, champions women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, uses its resources to fund aid relief, and has time and time again promoted the need for dialogue between its own and Palestinian leaders. In spite of the questionability of some of its actions, its existence should never be questioned. South Africans, during our struggle, never questioned the validity of South Africa, and we never lied about what we experienced. We, better than anyone, should be aware of the need for conflict to be dealt with in a just, democratic manner; and we, of all people, should understand when we are being used, insulted and lied to in our own country about our own history.

• Haafizah Bhamjee is a writer and activist from Johannesburg. She is a graduate of literature with a research interest in politics, language and history.