Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 08:56:41 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: Israel Should Learn from the Boers                    


     
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
                                    
By  Liz McGregor
 
(Guardian - 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.

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