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Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy
Memories enshrined: the entrance to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Gard Karlsen
ON A COLD NIGHT IN Johannesburg last year, a bus pulled up outside the American consulate. It was the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in the Middle East-June being a winter month in South Africa-and several dozen activists planned to mark the occasion by protesting U.S. support for "Apartheid Israel." The protest was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Committee and most of the demonstrators were South African Muslims.[1] Among their number, however, were black South Africans who shared the organizers' hostility to Israel.
Or so it seemed. A reporter discovered that some of the black demonstrators "were not pro-Palestinian activists, but homeless people bused in from the surrounding townships," he told Ha'aretz. "[M]ost of them refused to protest, opting to sit on the warm bus. The organizers refused to allow it. When I asked one black 'protester' if he was for Palestine, he replied: ‘I am for nobody.'" The organizers soon ejected the reporter. [2]
Like the ‘protester' on the bus, most South Africans feel indifferent towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2007. Of those with clear opinions on the matter, the majority sympathized more with Israel: 28 per cent of South Africans overall sided with Israel compared to only 19 per cent with the Palestinians. [3]
Nevertheless, South Africa has increasingly become the flash point of virulently anti-Israel demonstrations. Many of the country's leaders routinely compare the State of Israel to the apartheid regime that governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994 and imposed an oppressive system of segregation and discrimination on grounds of race. "End Israeli Apartheid" rallies are usually organized by radical Muslim organizations, but some black South Africans have also entered the fray.
Comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa were once a fringe phenomenon. Since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, however, they have become a staple of anti-Israel propaganda. The publication of Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid [4] in 2006 gave the analogy new legitimacy-though, oddly, the word "apartheid" only appears three times in the former US President's text.
In South Africa itself, the analogy was something of a novelty when it emerged in August 2001, at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban (although it has been common currency on the extreme left for more than thirty years now and was a standard trope of Soviet-sponsored "anti-Zionism"). The NGO forum at the conference adopted a declaration that defined Israel as a "racist, apartheid state." [5] The document was rejected by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, but the analogy remained when the delegates departed. [6]
However potent the Israel-apartheid analogy, few of those who directly suffered from apartheid have bought into it
Senior members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) began using the analogy to attack Israel and pro-Israel South African Jews. Ronnie Kasrils, a cabinet minister and communist stalwart, supported the comparison and relied on his "Jewish descent" (as he termed it) to lend credence to the claim. Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Archbishop Desmond Tutu also endorsed the analogy and began traveling the world encouraging people to isolate Israel much as they had apartheid South Africa.
Proponents of the analogy used it to appeal to black South Africans, drawing links between Palestinian suffering and their own. But most black South Africans dismiss the analogy. Outside the small Muslim community (1.5 percent of the population),[7] anti-Israel sentiment is largely an elite phenomenon. However potent the Israel-apartheid analogy, few of those who suffered from apartheid directly have bought into it.
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