The connection between Israel and apartheid South Africa has been repeated and disputed since October last year, but this is not new argues Graham Harrison. The comparison of Israel to apartheid was debated in the 1970s over a denunciation of Israel’s removals, settlements, walls and border-posts crisscrossing the occupied territories. Harrison teases out some of the similarities, and important differences, in the relationship between two states, and two chosen people.
By Graham Harrison
‘In Israel, economic goals arise naturally from the general goal of the survival of the state.’ Israeli General Director of the Ministry of Finance, 1985.
‘Israel and South Africa have a common lot. Both are engaged in a struggle for existence.’ South African newspaper Die Burger, 1968.
The association of Israel with apartheid South Africa has become prominent and contested since October last year, but it is not new. The likening of Israel to apartheid emerged in the 1970s through a condemnation of the Israeli state’s geopolitics expulsion, settlement, and later walls and checkpoints in the occupied territories.
The day-to-day lives of Palestinians in these walled and fenced zones is one of coercive control of movement and routine humiliation and frustration: the geopolitics of the ‘separation barrier, Israel’s apartheid wall’. This is China Mieville’s phrase, evoking especially the ‘high apartheid’ of Hendrick Verwoerd. After the incremental ratcheting up of racist legislation, Verwoerd sought to systematise and consolidate a totalising legislative project of racial dominance: Bantustans scattered on the peripheries of cities, mines, and commercial farms; the coerced expatriation of black South Africans; the massive and routine deployment of the police and army to arrest, shoot, and expel black Africans; the complete segregation of public services and amenities; the banning of black African political organisations; the mass criminalisation of black South Africans in cities without a pass and a baas (white employer).
The analogy is clear enough: between two highly-securitised states endeavouring to create facts on the ground through a military-administrative project that seems both absurd and abysmal in equal measure. Projects to create ethno-racialised denizens, pushed into quasi-states (recall that the Bantustans were given their own flags and governments under the rubric that they would progress towards nationhood), and subjected to heavy restrictions on their movements.
But, beyond this ethnic and de-nationalising cantonment, considerable debate exists concerning the degree of conceptual stretch that the apartheid analogy allows. Much of this questioning is important, interesting and adds nuance. For example, Israel has never had a ‘labour reserve’ economy in the way South Africa did (although a version of this did exist in the 1950s up to 1967). Nor is Gaza a version of a Bantustan, although it has hardly enjoyed anything like juridical statehood. And—although there is plenty of evidence of general social prejudice and some hard constitutional differentiations lurking behind its procedural democracy—there are Arab Israelis who have full formal citizenship rights in Israel, which no black, ‘coloured’, or Asian South Africans did until the mid 1980s (and even then in a highly restricted and qualified way, and not for black South Africans).
All of which is to say that analogies are not similes. There is little point in saying country A is like country B; but there are possible insights from exploring how there is something in a facet of country A’s politics that help us understand country B’s politics. Analogous thinking seeks out the ‘independent variable’, the phenomenon that connects facets of one political economy to another. As such, analogous thinking is partly about exploring degrees of similarity but also revealing generic features, features that might have salience in both cases and beyond.
The visceral politics of a chosen people
It was apartheid South Africa that gave the newly-formed Israel its first premier-level diplomatic visit. In 1953, Magnus Malan visited Israel. At first blush, this seems remarkable. South African politics had betrayed a long-standing antisemitism. But, the official narrative that the visit expressed was that the Israeli and South African governments had something primordially important in common: they were both states forged through righteous struggle in pursuit of a home for a chosen people. This idea was at the heart of the apartheid project as it was realised after 1948 with the victory of the National Party. It relied on the construction of a discourse in which the Afrikaaner had endured the oppressions of other peoples (black and English), had the will of God on their side, and had come to achieve sovereignty through their own tenacity.
There is something of the Ulster experience here; something in Taiwan’s post-1948 exile government; perhaps also Rwanda’s post-genocide ‘return’ government that took power after marching from Uganda. In each case, statehood was closely connected to the wielding of power by an ‘immigrant’ elite that faced a territory with which it was only partially familiar. The chosen/authentic/destined elite sees in the sovereignty it has won an existentialism value: without the state, we are nothing; removed from power, we will be erased. Apartheid South Africa, Israel, and to some degree the others briefly mentioned have all displayed considerable and tenacious authoritarianism as a result of this analogous historical experience.
Capitalism, modernity, and the siege state
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both Israel and South Africa posted strong statistics in terms of economic growth, industrialisation and sectoral change, and productivity. Each also forged tight mutualities between states, corporately-organised labour, and capital. The state developed institutions to ‘lock in’ a political dispensation of support for capital that was realised through strategic subsidies and investment in infrastructure. Both made strong investments in their military-industrial complexes. Both achieved all of this through an ethno-national bonding that derived from its immigrant/siege sociology. Each developed a perception that capitalist transformation was not primarily a ‘good thing’ in itself but rather a difficult, violent, but necessary project to secure sovereignty in what was perceived as (to use the apartheid phrase) total onslaught. This gave each country a ‘crony capitalist’ or corporatist character Israel had its Histradut and South Africa its Broederbond), but one disciplined by the imperatives of ‘national security’. And both projects excluded, repressed, and (in South Africa’s case) exploited those who were racialised out of the benefits that modernisation had to offer.
No less importantly, both Israel and South Africa forged their authoritarian capitalist transformations through agrarian change that was, in essence, characterised by two interlinked processes: dispossession and heavy state support. Incumbent indigenous landowners, tenants, and peasants were removed from the land (through force of arms if necessary), and settler farmers would receive subsidies, infrastructural investment, and the more or less visible backing of the states instruments of coercion. Both countries invested heavily in irrigation, state marketing boards, and support for the introduction of new production technologies. Rural space, remade through settlement, consolidated through capitalist transformation.
Apartheid and the disenchantment of the West
The successful modernising drive in these two countries reveals in stark form a deep and pervasive equivocation in Western power and the flattering visions produces of its own dominance. This derives from the manifestation in each case of something attractive and something repellent. The modern cities, investment zones, tourism, and infrastructure seduce whilst the expulsions, violence, and racism undermine the liberal creed of human rights that broadly holds a global Western identity together. This agonism is nicely encapsulated in Stephen Gelb’s terms for the political economy of apartheid: racial Fordism. Something that resonates with the American experience of modernity—the suburb, the male industrial worker and family, the consumer society. And, a dissonance in its constitutionalised racial order. A similar agonism is explored in Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel: its image of modernity presented in its military and its cities, juxtaposed with the historic fact that all of this is predicated on the expulsion of at least 700,000 Arab Palestinians and an ongoing war of attrition against Arabs in the occupied territories.
Both apartheid South African and Israel sought to operationalise the internal tensions of liberalism as a Western global ideology by presenting a modern image of their governance, obscuring their systemic human rights abuses and, when the latter became visible and contentious, articulating them through a frame of reference that might be called civilisational.
Both countries excused their violence by contextualising it in relation to a barbaric hinterland. The apartheid catch-all term for this was swart gevaar—black peril. Apartheid was presented as an ‘outpost’ of Western modernity in a ‘tribal’ and turbulent region. Israel presented itself in the same way: a Western outpost in a volatile Arab middle-east. Each tested Western (and especially American) global liberal visions. They asked of the West: realistically, what is the priority in your values? In Israel’s case up to the present, and in South Africa’s case up to the mid 1980s when things started to change, the priority was the geopolitical combination of strategic allies and capitalist modernisation over the brutalised bodies of black Africans and Palestinians. In the words of American Chester Crocker’s (Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) book title, South Africa existed in a ‘rough neighbourhood’. This trope produces a folksy metaphor that expresses very well a kind of global liberalism that will allocate human rights to a second order priority when the rights of capital and visions of security are threatened.
Israel parallax: the state that missed the post-Cold War liberal transition
Given a little distance from the polemics about the use of the term ‘apartheid Israel’, we can see that the political analogies are quite salient, even if they do not produce some kind of strict comparative correspondence. They both reveal something about the particular historical experience of both countries: the metaphysics of a chosen people wielding state power over territories with estranged indigenous populations over which they seek dominance. The drive to capitalist modernity that the combination of insecurity and economic transformation forges. They also betray an agonism in American global liberalism: its ‘organised hypocrisy’ concerning the declared unconditional and universal value of human rights and the commonplace downgrading of this value to an ancillary status after the rights of capital and state security.
In the present-day, in this analogy, Israel seems strangely prehistoric. South Africa is no longer an apartheid state and it managed its transition very well, all things considered. Both Northern Ireland and Taiwan, for that matter, have also de-escalated from the peculiar intensity of minority-siege-modernity politics. There is much to criticise in all of these cases but, in a more fundamental sense, the nature of political change is remarkable.
In the present-day, South Africa is not Israel’s analogue. South Africa has moved on. Its most likely analogue is perhaps Rwanda. Both still act within the bandwidth set by the origins of their establishing sovereignty: the militarism, military incursions beyond their frontiers, Romantic-religious discourses of destiny (in Rwanda an often Pentecostal Protestantism that was nurtured in exile and contrasted strongly with the ‘genocide adjacent’ Catholic church), the desire to modernise as a means to secure statehood, and the political differentiations between one ethno-national group and others. On and off, Benjamin Netanyahu has served as Prime Minister since 1996; Paul Kagame has served as Vice President and then President of Rwanda since 1994.
If we allow some stretched analogical speculation, we might argue that Israel is, in a sense, a country out of step with political time. It eschewed the peacemaking endeavours of the post-Cold War moment of liberal optimism, intensified its military-tech securitisation, moved into an increasingly conservative politics of nationhood and failed in even the most rudimentary way to identify a way out through the prevailing models of liberal transitology that characterised the 1990s. Our American Israel is now rivalled by Israelism, a documentary in which one can see the guilt and horror of those Americans who saw in Israel a spiritually-resonant manifestation of liberal modernity, went to live, work, and fight there, only to find routine rights violations and a deep prejudice amongst the IDF. For all of its modern accoutrements, Israel resembles a state in chronic condition: unable to move beyond the vexed conditions of its origins as a nation.
Graham Harrison teaches political economy at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University and is on the editorial board of ROAPE. His recent book Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism is published by Oxford University Press.
Featured Photograph: The Hawara checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, Palestine (12 June 2006).
