Summary
Sayegh’s comparison term: the Zionist settler-state practices apartheid in Palestine against the Arabs who remained after 1948, learning from and at times surpassing the white settler-states of Asia and Africa, with the difference that the Afrikaner apostles of apartheid in South Africa proclaim their sin while the Zionist practitioners protest their innocence.
Details
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In its practice of racial discrimination against the vestiges of Palestinian Arabs, the Zionist settler-state has learned all the lessons the discriminatory regimes of white settler-states in Asia and Africa can teach, and proved an ardent and apt pupil, not incapable of surpassing its teachers (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.217).
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The remnants of Palestine’s Arabs living in the settler-state since 1948 have their own Bantustans, native reserves and ghettoes, under the euphemistic name security zones given by the Zionist authorities (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.217).
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Sayegh’s wider contrast sets Palestine apart even from South Africa and Rhodesia: nowhere had European race-supremacism expressed itself in so passionate a zeal for thoroughgoing racial exclusiveness and for the physical expulsion of native populations (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.11 / printed p.216).
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In Pappe: the Zionist enclave’s siege mentality is compared to the white settlers in South Africa during the heyday of Apartheid rule, whose aspiration to maintain a racially pure, white enclave held out only for a brief historical moment before collapsing (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.291). Pappe writes that apartheid is particularly popular among Mizrahi Jews, today the Fortress’s most vociferous supporters (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.293-294), and in the Epilogue calls the Wall Israel is constructing the apartheid wall (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.298). See Fortress Israel.
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Makdisi’s comparison is a single statute: a law similar to Israel’s 2003 law barring family unification with residents of the occupied territories had been passed in South Africa at the peak of apartheid in 1980 and had been summarily rejected by that country’s (white) supreme court as an inappropriate and illegal interference with black people’s right to marry and establish families; the Israeli law was extended in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 and formally endorsed by Israel’s High Court in May 2006 (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.167).
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Makdisi’s Gaza chapter quotes Henry Siegman calling sealed Gaza “the first in a series of Palestinian Bantustans” (PDF p.212).
Related pages
Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Racism, Racial Self-Segregation, Israel, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Bantustans