Don’t Accuse Israel of Apartheid

[FarrenH]

25. Your argument is very strange

Last edited Wed Jul 23, 2014, 11:25 PM - Edit history (7)

Recognizing South Africa as being originally a single state that was carved up had NOTHING to do with the world's condemnation of SA Apartheid.

The world condemned South African Apartheid because our government dispossessed a native population of land and residency and contrived a fiction that they were all residents of "autonomous" scraps of land that whites didn't want and were under the de facto control of the Apartheid government anyway, for the convenience of whites and to the detriment of blacks. The previous historical incorporation of the land into the modern state is basically irrelevant trivia. In fact, doing it outside your asserted borders (to displaced former residents of land from within those borders) is arguably worse. Let me repeat this: The majority of Gaza's population are refugees or the descendants of refugees that lived in what is today Israel. That is the formal position of the UN.

Your moral compass must be completely broken if you think that the world's opprobrium had anything to do with formal past incorporation. If we took land by force of arms and forced black South Africans all to become residents of the tiny neighbouring state of Swaziland, then militarily surrounded and occupied Swaziland itself, taking the lions share of essential resources like water there, built white suburbs everywhere in between their towns and enforced different laws for different people in the nominally African state, of *course* we would have attracted the exact same criticism. Maybe more. What a silly proposition!

No, that has nothing to do with why we call it Apartheid. It certainly isn't part of the definition of Apartheid the Rome Statute calls "The Crime of Apartheid". In fact that crime in international law was described in a manner that did not match the exact legal structure and history of Apartheid precisely because the intention was to prevent particular features of Apartheid from happening again, not every tiny detail that doesn't have moral bearing.

And aside from that definition in international law there is a broader, common sense understanding shared by virtually every moral titan of our own struggle to throw off Apartheid, many of whom have (having actually spent time in Israel and the OT) called the situation there unmistakably equivalent and even worse than Apartheid. That's right. Numerous black leaders of the struggle against Apartheid here actually went there, saw what was going on, and said the Palestinians in the OT are more oppressed than black people here were.

And before you launch into a red herring about Gaza having no settlers, let me head that off by saying Gaza and the West Bank are two parts of one phenomenon. I mentioned it because the fact that the majority of its population are displaced natives is supremely relevant. Theft and control, for the benefit of one ethnicity, to the detriment of another. Those were defining features of Apartheid.

Its incredibly tiresome hearing the same straw clutching arguments over irrelevant historical minutiae over and over again in this debate when that argument is already settled in International legal terms. The nations of the world already reached consensus on what the actual crime was, and it wasn't "exactly what South Africa had". It was "these aspects of what South Africa had". And South Africans, especially my fellow black South Africans have a hell of a lot more moral authority to say what the defining evils of Apartheid were than someone trying to justify Apartheid elsewhere.