by FRANCESCO AMORUSO & ENDIKA RODRIGUEZ-MARTIN
IMAGE/Amazon
A review of Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. Edited by Ilan Pappé. Zed Books (2015)
If the reader is searching for a thorough academic comparative work on Israel and South Africa, or a guide to help conceptualise their activist commitment to the Palestinian cause of freedom and self-determination, they will find this book a compelling read. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid explores the apartheid analogy in a way never done before, with the aim to systematise the comparison. The book follows on the heels of a significant tradition of comparisons between the two case studies and establishes once and for all its validity within academia. This is achieved in part thanks to the editor’s choice of asking each contributor to reflect on the general terms of the comparison, and to its corollary – a thorough critique and demystification of most arguments used against the analogy. While virtually closing the debate on the legitimacy of discussions about Israel’s systematic discrimination and oppression of native Palestinians as a form of apartheid, the contributors to this volume open up new avenues and suggest original angles through which to approach the question of comparison. Such is the case of Anthony Löwstedt’s (191-238) chapter on honour killings in Palestine and witch burning in South Africa as phenomena exacerbated by the ‘logic of elimination’ that underpins settler colonial projects, amongst which we find the two locales under comparative scrutiny (1).
As Pappé (1-22) recognises in his introduction, the book deals with a number of thorny issues, such as defining the boundaries of the apartheid analogy, namely if it applies to all the territories controlled by the State of Israel or only those captured following the 1967 war. Further it analyses the relevance of this academic endeavour for moving forward the current impasse and imagining novel paths for decolonising Palestine/Israel. While some chapters focus on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, there is consensus amongst the contributors that the seeds of Israeli apartheid are to be found in the Zionist ideology (Jewish nationalism) and in its application in the project of settlement in Palestine (settler colonialism). It follows that no just solution can be envisaged without deeply rethinking the ethno-exclusivist roosts of the Jewish state. It is disappointing that none of the chapter offers a thorough comparison between the boycott movement against the South African apartheid state, and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. This shortcoming, despite making a limited presence in some of the chapters, made the political impact of this book appreciably less powerful. Hopefully we will see a correction to this academic blind spot in the near future.
With the first and final two chapters, written by anti-apartheid activist and former minister in post-apartheid South Africa Ronnie Kasrilis (23-42), and the South African sociologist Ran Greenstein (325-362) respectively, the reader can appreciate the general themes of the comparison and their relevance in advancing the current debate on Palestine/Israel. Kasrilis inscribes apartheid as a political and institutional structure within the historical trajectories of Zionism and white South-African ethno-nationalism. Within this analysis he shows the many similarities between Zionism and what the South African Communist Party referred to as ‘Colonialism of a Special Type.’ The historical comparison, which encompasses both the two settler colonial projects and the narratives employed by both settler communities to justify the dispossession of indigenous people, confers historical contextualisation and justification to most of the arguments put forward throughout the following chapters. This is especially notable with regard to separation as a necessity for settler projects lacking demographic advantage and to the politically difficult issue of international support to brutal settler colonial regimes (notably from other settler states). More specific terms of the comparison are then summarised by Greenstein, who points out the relevance of setting the geographical boundaries of the apartheid analogy. Whether we consider apartheid as applicable to ‘Israel proper,’ to ‘Greater Israel,’ or ‘Greater Palestine’ (the space occupied by all fragments of Palestinian society, including the refugees) carries important consequences on the nature of the comparison. As Greenstein highlights, it is fundamental to examine both similarities and differences of the two apartheid regimes in order for lessons about decolonisation to be learnt from the case of South Africa and translated into political action in the Palestinian/Israeli context.
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