“Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid,” a collection of essays edited by historian Ilan Pappe and published late last year, takes for granted the validity of the assertion that Israel is an apartheid state. What this book explores are the similarities and dissimilarities between Israel today and South Africa during the latter's apartheid era. Pappe claims in his book that understanding the historical roots of these commonalities and differences is essential to realising why Israeli apartheid is of “a special type” and has been more difficult to overcome. While the book opens with essays that provide overwhelming evidence of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state, it concludes with several essays suggesting why new perspectives are needed to defeat this special type of apartheid. The overlap and differences between Israeli and South African apartheid became apparent in a single year, 1948. In that year the white minority South African government proclaimed apartheid – Afrikaans for “apart” or “separate” – to be official state policy and establishing laws that rigidly separated whites from the country's black majority while claiming 87 per cent of the land for whites. The same year a minority settler-colonial population officially proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Israel's foundation involved the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, with the explicit aim of establishing an overwhelming Jewish majority on more than three-quarters of the land while rigidly separating itself from the newly created Palestinian Arab minority. South African apartheid lasted until 1994 when black majority rule was achieved following an international boycott that included sanctions imposed by the US Congress. Yet, Israel's form of apartheid persists to this day, and Israel is even accorded the status of a “special relationship” with the US government. Why? The essays in Pappe's book suggest that it's precisely the differences in the two types of apartheid that help account for this persistence. But the commonalities have by now become obvious too. The book presents overwhelming evidence that both Israel and South Africa violated the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid. Approved by the United Nations in 1973, this established a universal definition for this crime against humanity. Both countries were established as settler-colonial states. Both were ethnocentric states, and both created Bantustans, or zones of limited autonomy, for the oppressed indigenous population. Less examined are the differences between the two countries. As Ronnie Kasrils, a leading member of the South African National Congress (ANC) during the apartheid era, points out in his essay in Pappe's book, South African settler-colonialism sought to exploit the labour of the indigenous African majority while Zionist settler-colonialism sought to exclude and expel the native Palestinians. Apartheid South Africa's attempt to keep the blacks in Bantustans failed because its economy was dependent on black labour. Israel, on the other hand, has “sought to rid itself of the Palestinian workforce on its doorstep.” Having established an overwhelming Jewish majority through the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Israel allowed its Palestinian minority the right to vote. This attempt at “visible equality,” journalist Jonathan Cook's phrase in his chapter in the book, helped disguise Israel's special type of apartheid. Although Palestinian citizens of Israel have been able to vote, Cook notes, their vote has been meaningless because any Palestinian political party has had to accept the framework of a Jewish state and no Palestinian political party has ever been invited into a governing coalition in Israel. Likewise, some of Israel's high court decisions have attempted to promote a veneer of “visible equality” in the country, but Cook offers devastating evidence of the apartheid nature of Israel even inside the 1949 armistice line separating it from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ironically, yet another reason for the persistence of Israeli apartheid lies in the fact that the Bantustan approach, unlike in South Africa, has succeeded in Israel, or so argues Leila Farsakh, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts in the US, in her contribution to the book. Through the Oslo Accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the mid-1990s, Farsakh maintains, Israel succeeded in legitimising the whole notion of separateness, or apartheid, by attempting to frame it in nationalist rather than racial terms. Farsakh details four main ways in which Israel manipulated the Accords to impose a Bantustan solution and confine Palestinians “in territorially fragmented areas that are unviable economically and politically.” Her insights also set the stage for the concluding essays in this volume, which attempt to suggest new perspectives and strategies of resistance that will finally bring an end to Israel's apartheid system. Steven Friedman, a South African academic, finds the greatest similarity between the two countries lies in challenging the very notion of ethnocentric states. The Afrikaner elites in South Africa, he argues, eventually concluded that South Africa could no longer continue as an ethnocentric state. This came about due to the internal contradictions of the South African system and the external pressures of international boycott, divestment and sanctions. The ethnocentric state of Israel now faces the same dilemma, Friedman writes, and a two-state solution cannot rescue it. If two such states existed in historic Palestine on truly equal terms, Friedman notes, their interdependence would soon become apparent and the perceived need for two states would quickly dissolve. Virginia Tilley, a US-based political scientist, suggests a similar approach in highlighting how international law has both enabled and undermined Israeli settler-colonialism. She calls attention to the UN partition plan of November 1947, showing how the plan aimed to create two states based on ethnic population majorities but also insisted on equal rights in both states. Subsequent UN decisions, notably General Assembly Resolution 194, recognised the right of the Palestinian refugees to return, effectively negating the notion of an ethnocentric state like the one Zionism had created in Israel. Tilley notes that shifting the Palestinian struggle to a framework of equal rights for all aligns it with the approach taken by the ANC in South Africa, although she worries that it also sacrifices the Palestinians' right to national self-determination. The essay by Ran Greenstein, a sociologist working in South Africa, closes the book by examining what the future may hold. Israel's special type of apartheid, he concludes, is becoming increasingly “unstable” due to its internal contradictions and external pressure. He points to the growing Palestinian minority within Israel, the ability of its political representatives to unite around a joint list of election candidates, and its democratic vision of a “state of all its citizens.” Israel's de facto annexation of the West Bank contradicts its goal of a Jewish demographic majority and further erodes its international support, he notes. Greenstein embraces a bi-national solution that he says is likely to come in stages rather than all at once. There is a rich accumulation of material and ideas presented in the 10 essays that make up this book. Yet, as valuable as the book is, it points to the pressing need for additional historical and analytical accounts of why Israeli apartheid continues to elude accountability. The writer is an activist with the Occupation-Free Portland Campaign.
