Israel's apartheid at 60

Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations were designed as p.r. exercises to reinstate its victim status, but they failed miserably, starting with their keynote speakers.

Socialisr Worker, May 22, 2008 | Issue 672

SOUTH AFRICA'S white minority government was finally overthrown in 1993, after decades of Black popular and working-class resistance. That year, the Black majority democratically elected the African National Congress--previously derided as a "terrorist" organization by apartheid's imperial supporters, including the U.S.--to lead its government. Freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, having spent 27 years in a South African prison and reviled as an international terrorist, was reinvented in the Western press as an elder statesman.

Columnist: Sharon Smith

Sharon Smith is the author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States, a historical account of the American working-class movement, and Women and Socialism, a collection of essays on women’s oppression and the struggle against it. She is also on the board of Haymarket Books.

Now the apartheid state of Israel fears it will meet the same fate from its own oppressed, and growing, Palestinian population.

While Israel's proponents continue to rhetorically claim that the Zionist state is the only bulwark against another Holocaust, its leaders also continue to openly express its true identification with South Africa's racist regime. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked recently in the New York Times, "We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us." If international sanctions are imposed as they were against apartheid, "the state of Israel is finished."

Indeed, stripped of rhetoric, the parallels are striking. The state of Israel was enshrined as a sovereign state in 1948, the same year the white supremacist National Party came to power in South Africa. Both Zionism and apartheid had been decades in the making, with the backing of British imperialism. Both colonial projects were designed to violently disfranchise and subjugate the indigenous majority that occupied both countries.

Their methods, however, were different. While South Africa's white supremacists imposed minority rule over its vast African population, Israel intended to distinguish itself as the only "democracy" in the Middle East. This was accomplished by driving out Palestine's majority Arab population, thereby creating a Jewish majority.

In 1947, Jews owned just 6 percent of Palestinian land and made up just one-third of its population. In 1948, the UN nevertheless relegated Jewish control over 55 percent of Palestinian land, overruling Palestinian demands for a democratic state. But this was not enough for the Zionist project.

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