User:-Mona-/Apartheid

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Apartheid (from Afrikaans "apart" = separate and the substantivizing suffix "-heid" roughly equivalent with "-ness", hence "separateness") was the codified system of racial segregation founded on principles of white supremacy that was in effect in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

The term has in recent years been used to describe situations outside of the South African context, notably by opponents of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.

Its nature

Sign declaring a South African beach for use by white persons only. Photographed in June 1985.

While similar in spirit to laws that limited the rights of African-Americans until the passing of the Civil Rights Act, apartheid encompassed a far stricter set of rules; it denied non-whites any sort of participation in the democratic process, limited where people could work and live, and went so far as to prohibit sexual liaisons across racial lines. Essentially antebellum America without the slavery.

Official South African government policy during this time was to racially classify the South African population into four groups: whites, "coloured" (i.e. those of mixed ancestry), Indian, and "Bantu" (a Bantu language word meaning "people," but in apartheid parlance meaning all blacks). Only whites were allowed participation in South Africa's government, and the four groups were assigned separate neighbourhoods, beaches (and guess whose beaches got the shark nets), and so on. People had to have special permission or passes to enter areas assigned to another racial group, i.e. to work there.

As blacks made up 3/4 of South Africa's population, starting in 1951 the government set aside Bantustans, or black homelands. Black people were then granted "citizenship" in their respective Bantustans, and their South African citizenship was revoked, as a way of codifying their lack of voting rights in South Africa. Indians and "coloured" were not assigned any homelands at all. Starting in the 1970s South Africa embarked on a policy which would grant national independence to the Bantustans, leaving the rest of South Africa sans the Bantustans for whites, who were only 10% of the population. They only got as far as declaring four of the Bantustans independent nations, none of which received any international recognition as such, before international pressure and tensions between the South African government and the four independent Bantustans (South Africa kept invading them to restore "order" after their governments had the nerve to actually act as independent nations instead of merely puppet governments) convinced them they really didn't want to continue to go down that route.

During most of the apartheid era, South Africa's neighbors included countries friendly to their apartheid policies such as Mozambique (then a colony of the right-wing Portugese regime), Rhodesia (also ruled by a white minority government), and South-West Africa (a protectorate of South Africa, now Namibia). However, by 1980 both Mozambique and Zimbabwe were independent, followed by Namibia in 1990, and South Africa found itself increasingly isolated and fighting its neighbors, now ruled by post-colonial (in many cases Communist) governments. International pressure to end apartheid became a major issue in the 1980s.

Jerry Falwell's good Christian response to apartheid, in 1985, was to declare Desmond Tutu a "phony," denounce the U.S. Congress's move to enact economic sanctions against South Africa, and encourage people to buy South African Krugerrand coins. This was in keeping with his earlier denunciations of the US Civil Rights movement (starting in the 1950s) and more liberal clergy who supported it (like many others, he did a quick about-face and recalled the newsletters in which he made these statements after the wind had firmly blown the other direction).

Apartheid ended in 1994 thanks in large part to black leaders like Tutu and Nelson Mandela, as well as President F.W. de Klerk realising that the whole situation was untenable. Although of somewhat less significance to the anti-apartheid movement a few white South Africans also condemned apartheid, and a few, such as Manfred Mann, left the country as a result of their disgust.

The fact that Apartheid ended at the time it did is no coincidence. The Apartheid regime got caught up in the cold war and one of the first "white" allies of the ANC in their political struggle was the South African Communist Party, and hence several Western leaders feared that the Apartheid's collapse would result in a communist South Africa, just like the independence or majority rule in Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique had resulted in regimes mostly friendly to the Soviets. This also explains how P.W. Botha (who stepped down in 1989) was a hard line Apartheid supporter early in his reign yet enacted some token reforms later on, mostly due to the sanctions hurting the country. When after P.W. Botha suffered a stroke, de Klerk took over, he almost immediately started negotiations with Mandela about his release from prison and free elections. Curiously enough there was a whites only referendum in 1992 on whether to end Apartheid. The referendum was handily won by the reformist faction led by de Klerk and by 1994 Mandela was President with de Klerk as Vice President.

Canadian self-congratulation moment

One of Canada's first big moments as an independent actor on the international stage took place in 1960, when it played a determining role in ousting South Africa from the Commonwealth after the Sharpeville massacre, over the objections of the Aussies (this was at the tail end of the White Australia policy era), the Kiwis and the Brits (who themselves were having serious troubles adapting to an influx of Black folks).

This was a huge foreign policy coup for Canada, helping to establish it as a middle power that could act independently of Britain (and maybe the U.S.) It was also a stopped clock moment for the Conservative Party of Canada.

A second coup, and a second broken clock for the Tories, came in the 1980s, when Brian Mulroney, Canada's second-worst Prime Minister (the worst being Stephen Harper) was a constant thorn in the side of both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher over apartheid policy.

Apartheid and the American right

Many prominent conservative and religious right figures supported the apartheid regime to varying degrees, including Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Jesse Helms, Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, P-Rob, and Grover Norquist. A few others on the right, most notably Newt Gingrich, got on their colleagues for this atrocious lapse in judgment.

Apartheid apologism persists in the American far right to this day, typically based on an argument that it was a just measure to protect the white minority from being overrun by the black majority. One fringe right group, Youth for Western Civilization, claimed that apartheid helped prevent homosexuality and moral decay. Because, you know, seeing black people makes you gay.

Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories

Israel's system of separation between the Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank which entails occupation to protect its settlement-building through confiscation of Arab land, as well as the occupation of the Gaza Strip, has been labeled as an example of modern apartheid by Archbishop Desmond Tutu , ex-Israeli attorney general Michael Ben-Yair , former president Jimmy Carter, and the head of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The West Bank

Arabs in the area live under military rule and law, while settlers live under Israeli civil law, despite both residing in the same area of land. Arabs are also segregated from the Israeli settlements.

Palestinian Arabs are prevented from using certain Israeli-only and settler-only roads, are severely restricted in their freedom of movement through military checkpoints, must ride separate public transportation from that used by settlers, have unequal water allocation compared to Israelis and settlers, need permits to enter certain areas of their territory (military zones), are ocassionally pulled from public areas (i.e. pools) for the benefit of the settlers and are under threat of eviction because of discriminatory allocation of permits which impedes their development of buildings (which can include hospitals and schools alike). As B'tselem concludes in its 2002 report Land Grab:

The fundamental truth is that the growth of these settlements is fueled not only by neutral forces of supply and demand, but primarily by a sophisticated governmental system designed to encourage Israeli citizens to live in the settlements. In essence, the process of assimilation blurs the fact that the settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories has created a system of legally sanctioned separation based on discrimination that has, perhaps, no parallel anywhere in the world since the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The Palestinian Authority, who exercise control over areas A and B that resemble enclaves, function as a kind of Bantustan government reliant on Israel to suppress political resistance similar to the governments of Transkei and KwaZulu. "One of the meanings of Oslo," former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote, "was that the PLO was . . . Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the first intifada and cutting short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence."

Gaza

Gaza could also be said to be a Bantustan in terms of the blockade's restrictions which harm the economy and political autonomy of the Palestinians living there. Gaza has been under an Israeli land, sea and air blockade since 2007, which has reduced Gaza's GDP by 50%. Nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza are ‘locked in’, denied access to the rest of occupied Palestinian territory as well as the greater, outside world. Indeed, they are barred from leaving Gaza even to attend their own wedding. Less than 1% of construction materials required to rebuild houses destroyed and damaged during Israel's bombardment of Gaza in the summer of 2014 have been allowed to enter.

Why many call it apartheid

Israeli de facto control of Palestinian lands share the same spirit of exclusion, appropriation and marginalization with South Africa's defunct apartheid regime; a smaller ethnic group rules over a larger ethnic group across a variety of factors, a rule enforced with a military occupation designed to protect this institutionalized system of domination. Even within Israel the fear is found that the country has become an illiberal democracy, or an ethnocracy.

In October of 2015, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented his policy views to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and stated about the occupied territories: "Israel “must control the entire area for the foreseeable future.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz editorialized that Netanyahu had:

“”acknowledged Israel’s total domination over the territories, discarding the dual pretense of a “temporary war-like situation,” which the state has regularly presented to the High Court of Justice for decades, and the pretense of a Palestinian Authority supposedly enjoying autonomy in managing Palestinian affairs, as Israel likes to present things.

The regime described in Netanyahu’s vision has a name – it’s called apartheid. There is no other term for two populations living in the same area, one with political rights and the other under perennial military occupation. Notably, in a recently discovered 1976 interview, Israel's soon-to-be prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, declared the then-nascent (now robust and entrenched) West Bank settlement movement “comparable to a cancer,” and warned that Israel would become an “apartheid” state if it annexed the West Bank’s Arab population. Netanyahu's words and policies would seem to have realized Rabin's worries.

But there are some differences between South African apartheid and the oppression of the Palestinians. For example, South Africa relied on black workers to sustain its economy. Israel, on the other hand, thanks to globalization does not necessarily need Palestinian workers in great numbers as they can rely on foreign nationals.

South African views

South Africans who lived under apartheid are somehwat divided about comparing their former oppression with that of the Palestinians, but the African National Congress strongly advocates that Israel is an apartheid state and supports the Boycott and Divestment and Sanctions (of Israel) movement. To that end, it hosts events for the annual "Israeli Apartheid Week," stating:

For South Africans and our liberation, people of the world mobilized in their hundreds of thousands – if not millions – during the 1980s: they held protests, rallies, concerts, free Mandela events, lectures, film screenings and a host of other events and campaigns to raise awareness of Apartheid South Africa’s racist policies and to build support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Apartheid SA. Today we have the opportunity to “give-back” by joining the international movement in solidarity with the indigenous Palestinian people (and their progressive Israeli allies) who are struggling against Israeli Apartheid – participating in Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is one such form of solidarity.

Nelson Mandela supported the two-state solution and declared that "we identify with the PLO because, just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right to self-determination." Mandela, at an the International Day of Solidarity for the Palestinians in 1997, said that "our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians".

According to Ronnie Kasrils, a Jewish minister of South Africa during Mandela's presidency, the Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza suffer from methods of control that are far worse than the ones that were used in South Africa. On the other hand, Rev. Dr. Kenneth Meshoe, another South African Member of Parliament and part of a Christian fundamentalist political party, eschews a comparison between South Africa and Palestine, arguing that

“”[a]s a black South African who lived under apartheid, this system was implemented in South Africa to subjugate people of color and deny them a variety of their rights. In my view, Israel cannot be compared to apartheid in South Africa. Those who make the accusation expose their ignorance of what apartheid really is."

See also

• Jim Crow laws

External links

• BBC's archive of South African apartheid
• Apartheid's Useful Idiots, The Atlantic (Here's a few more: Nixon, Kissinger, Thatcher, Cheney, Buckley, Swaggart, Robertson, Helms, Inhofe, Buchanan, Norquist, Abramoff, and the Heritage Foundation.)
• District 9, Hollywood sci-fi's take on the townships.