Israel, Apartheid, and a South African Jewish Dilemma (original) (raw)
Related papers
Book review, 'Apartheid Israel: the politics of an analogy' edited by Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs, Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books, 2015, 212 pp. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Vol. 17 , Iss. 4, 2016.
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Stellenbosch Theological Journal, 2023
Arguments that the State of Israel practices apartheid are contested by many. In recent years debates on the secular State of Israel's oppression of Palestinians gained prominence also in ecumenical circles. Several stark ecclesial differences prompted this review of Israel as an apartheid regime, and the implications for reformed theology. Christian Zionist beliefs fall short of living up to religious moral high ground because of uncritical support for a country with a scurrilous record for flagrant disregard of human rights. An understanding of ethnic cleansing, occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid as defined in international law, are crucial in examining the nature of Israel's regime. The task of reformed Christians-in churches, church bodies, theological schools and in public life-in response to ideologies and theologies of empire and exclusivity is to be united in acknowledging complicity in injustice and in fostering an ethos of honesty, inclusive dignity, equality, and compassion.
The State of Israel and the apartheid Regime of South Africa in Comparative Perspective
Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 2015
ABSTRACT With increasing frequency comparisons are being drawn between the situation of the Palestinian people both in the Occupied Territories and inside Israel with the system of Apartheid imposed on the indigenous peoples of South Africa by the Nationalist Government in 1948. The object of this essay is to explore the analogy and test its merits and shortcomings. The essay explores the legal structure of the Apartheid system and compares it to that of the state of Israel and the legal framework under which Palestinians live in the occupied territories. It concludes that whilst the term Apartheid might seem attractive and adequate for descriptive purposes rendering the plight of the Palestinians more familiar ultimately there is a gap between the appearance and reality of the two experiences.
Palestinian struggle, South Africans and Jewish Israelis
STJ | Stellenbosch Theological Journal
What role does religion play (or not play) in transnational activism in the context of prolonged violence? The narrow strip of land known as Palestine and Israel has special significance to three of the world’s largest faith traditions – Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The motivations of 21 South African and Jewish Israeli activists in support of the Palestinian struggle offer an inductive, contextual perspective on the interplay between differences in religiosity and shared aims and values in this context. These respondents to a case study in empirical ethics hold tensions of difference and yet navigate between religious and other existential orientations in their praxis of solidarity with the marginalised. The article discusses how and why the activists, despite their different convictions, share similar views of the positive and negative roles played by religion in the Palestinian struggle.
What's in the Apartheid Analogy? Palestine/Israel Refracted
Theory & Event, 2020
This article engages the analogy of Palestine/Israel to apartheid South Africa, and probes the political imaginary that contours this discussion while explicating the circumstances of its emergence. Accordingly, it contends that apartheid is not merely a system of institutionalized separation; rather, it organizes the facts and reality of separation(s) within a frame and against a background unity that effectively allows it to be perceived as such. To that end, the article explores four key factors that created background unity in apartheid South Africa: labor relations; political theology; role of language; and geo-political unit(y), and scrutinizes their political and experiential ramifications in Palestine/Israel.
From South Africa to Israel, the Three Pillars of Apartheid
Orient XXI, 2023
How does a South African and former anti-apartheid activist feel about visiting Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories? Classification of the population, freedom of choice of residence and movement, importance of security: based on the three central drivers of separation, Na'eem Jeenah considers Israeli apartheid to be worse than South Africa's.
Imprints of memories, shadows and silences: shaping the Jewish South African story
2009
This is a non-traditional thesis which comprises a work of fiction and a dissertation. The novel is set in South Africa and provides an account of events that took place among three families, Jewish, Coloured and Afrikaans, over three generations. The dissertation is constructed in three sections. The first section describes the settlement of South Africa’s Jewish community, its divergent responses to apartheid and how this is mirrored in its literary output. In the second section, the relationship between history and fiction since the advent of postmodernism is discussed, how there has been a demand for historical truthfulness through multiple points of view and how consequently there has been an upsurge in memories and memorials for those previously denigrated as the defeated or victims. Fiction has been re-valued because it is through the novel that these oncesubmerged stories are being told. The novel has the capacity to explore uncomfortable or silenced episodes in our history,...
'Negotiating Identity: Israel, Apartheid, and the United Nations, 1949-1952'
English Historical Review, 2017
Orthodox historiographies on Israel’s early policies in ‘black’ Africa and its relations with ‘white’ South Africa commonly, if disjointedly, assert that the state’s Jewish identity had played, in the early 1960s, a key role in Israel’s participation in the international ‘struggle against apartheid’. Revisiting this assertion, I examine Israel’s involvement in early United Nations debates on South Africa’s race policies. I trace the making of Israel’s position on South Africa’s treatment of persons of Indian origins in preparation for the 1950 General Assembly; present Israel’s voting praxis in that session; and demonstrate the persistence of both position and praxis in the 1952 Assembly session where apartheid first appeared on the UN agenda. Against the grain of existing accounts, I argue first that, on Africa, Israel’s multilateral diplomacy preceded its bilateral diplomacy; Israel’s encounter with Africa began not in the early 1960s but with its 1949 UN admission, compelling its envoys to vote and reflect on African and colonial questions, including apartheid. Secondly, I demonstrate that Israel approached apartheid with equivocation; at the UN, its diplomats devised and acted on a formula allowing them, in their words, ‘to have our cake and eat it’—even if, on the whole, Israel’s diplomatic praxis was far more progressive than that of Western states. Thirdly, I demonstrate how Jewish identity, constructed through the prism of Israel’s foundational ideology, affected such equivocation: it defined Israel’s dilemma on apartheid but, at the same time, also offered a route out of that conundrum. Finally, I illustrate that the elasticity of Jewish identity displayed by Israel’s envoys drew on sensibilities that were often formed in South Africa itself by their own previous encounters with racially-managed society and, later, with apartheid.
2019
In late 2017, JPR published a major study of attitudes towards Jews and Israel among the population of Great Britain, a project supported by the Community Security Trust and the Department for Communities and Local Government. We regard it as a groundbreaking piece of work - the first study conducted anywhere that empirically demonstrates a clear connection between extreme hostility towards Israel and more traditional forms of antipathy towards Jews. This report explores this connection yet further, focusing specifically on two particularly prevalent ideas that are often experienced by Jews as antisemitic: the contention that Israel is 'an apartheid state' and that it should be subjected to a boycott. In the first instance, the study finds that large proportions of people actually have no view at all on these ideas, either because they do not know anything about the issues, or because they are simply unsure of where they stand on them. This is particularly the case for young...
THE BEGINNING OF THE END A Comparison Between the Apartheid (South Africa Vs. Israeli Occupation)
IAEME PUBLICATION, 2024
This paper compares the systemic practices of apartheid South Africa and Israeli occupation. The authors leverage the perceived similarities between Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and apartheid-era South Africa to foster global empathy for Gaza and Palestine. By synthesising the deeply reviewed literature, a list of the different forms of institutionalized oppression and segregation from both historical and contemporary examples is set in a table. The authors then examine the mechanisms and the consequences of the apartheid practices on affected populations and the possibility of extending this to Gaza. The study aims to understand the time framework that such apartheid practices would bring more international solidarity and empathetic commitment towards ending the Israeli occupation. Therefore, this work is meant to resonate through creating new sustained waves of social justice that would help to inspire solidarity among the oppressed population of Palestine and stop possible spreading such regime into Gaza. It also heralds the beginning of the end of the occupation regime, taking an analogy of the apartheid in South Africa previously.