http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4188232,00.html
Israel should learn from the Boers
It was no coincidence that Israel was one of apartheid South
Africa's few friends. In both societies, fear fed racial bigotry
Liz McGregor
Guardian
Thursday May 17, 2001
In the old days in apartheid South Africa, one heard a British accent
- or indeed a French or German one - with a sinking heart. It
invariably meant that yet another racist loser had arrived to bolster
the cause of white supremacy.
By the 70s, the horrors of apartheid were so widely known one assumed
that anyone who chose to settle in South Africa was comfortable with
the idea that black people were thrown off their land and denied
skilled jobs to give whites privileged access.
Immigration to South Africa worked contrary to the normal rules
whereby host states can cream off the brightest and best from other
countries and immigrants struggle against intense competition - and,
not infrequently, prejudice - to make a place for themselves in their
adopted countries. If you couldn't cope with the competition at home,
South Africa offered a warm welcome and sheltered employment - as long
as you were white. This did no favours to the gene pool and skewed the
society further against the forces of reform.
In Palestine today, the words of war uttered in strong South African
and American accents by Jewish settlers during the past turbulent
months speak of a similar scenario. The law of return requires Israel
to accept any Jewish person, regardless of their ethics or ability. As
well as immigrants of talent and principle this must include bigots
and losers. The settlements in particular attract fanatics: the nobody
from New Jersey who acquires an heroic new role in a narrative that
puts him at the forefront of a biblical struggle.
Israel and the old South Africa illustrate the dangers of the state
based on ethnicity, where there is the notion of a particular ethnic
group which prospers at the expense of the perceived lesser races.
Apartheid South Africa was, like modern Israel, born of a strong sense
of religious destiny and experience of persecution. Afrikaners
believed they were God's chosen people and saw the success of the
Great Trek away from British rule in the Cape as a sign of God's
favour. Their displacement of other tribes in pursuit of their destiny
was, they believed, sanctified by God. Their subsequent suffering in
the Boer war concentration camps instilled a deep sense of victimhood.
Their fundamentalism in the end rendered them fatally inflexible.
Some 20 years ago, fresh from my protest-torn campus in South Africa,
I spent a couple of months on a kibbutz. Even then I found the
similarities too close for comfort. The racial hierarchy - Ashkenazi
Jews, then Sephardic Jews followed way, way down by Arabs - was
disconcertingly familiar. As was the Israeli demonisation of Arabs:
lazy, unmotivated, lacking ambition, which was exactly what whites
said of blacks to rationalise their discriminatory policies.
In both countries, subordinate races were dispossessed of their land
and crowded into marginal, drought-stricken ghettoes; their movement
was restricted; access to education and skilled jobs limited so that
they inevitably sank into a pool of low-wage labour. In both
societies, bans on inter-marriage and daily lives segregated by race
did little to dispel the fear and ignorance that feeds racial bigotry.
Obviously the differences between the two countries are also huge: the
persecution of Jews that led to the founding of modern Israel makes
the Afrikaners' wounds look like a scratch. Unlike apartheid South
Africa, Israel gets the good as well as the bad. They can draw on the
best and brightest from the US - or South Africa or Britain - as well
as the worst. South Africa's international isolation and repressive,
Calvinist government resulted in an increasingly stagnant society -
quite unlike vibrant, democratic Israel. But the similarities are too
strong to go unremarked. In South Africa, white lives counted; blacks
didn't. The odd white soldier who died putting down black rebellion
was mourned as a hero. He was given a state funeral, his life
celebrated, the media carried endless interviews with grieving
relatives. The black victims - or "terrorists" - were recorded, if at
all, in nameless lists. In mainstream Israel these past months, the
Palestinian dead have scarcely registered beside the far smaller
number of Israeli fatalities. Photographs and biographical details of
the two Israeli boys stoned to death last week, for instance, were
broadcast around the world. Most Palestinian fatalities remain
nameless and faceless.
It is not coincidental that Israel was one of apartheid South Africa's
few friends. The two cooperated extensively militarily, not least in
the development of nuclear weapons. This comradeship was partly born
of a shared sense of vulnerability: both saw themselves as minorities
under threat of annihilation from hostile neighbours. In South Africa,
it was the swart gevaar or black peril: the African hordes who would
sweep all Christian whites into the sea if given half a chance. In
Israel's case, many in the Arab world are thought to resent its very
existence. Both depended heavily on superpower indulgence. It is no
coincidence that FW de Klerk started talking to the ANC around the
same time that the end of the cold war dispensed with the need for
dodgy allies in strategically important parts of the world.
In South Africa everything has changed. Israelis might look at what
has happened to whites there and take heart. They might have lost
political power but they still control the economy and they live as
well as ever, still largely remote from the black majority. They have
lost their pariah status and no longer live under a state of siege.
Despite the inevitable teething problems, the transition from a
racially discrete group living off and in fear of another has been
remarkably pain-free.
But, above all, they no longer live in fear of approaching Armageddon.
They have a future.
