Summary
The comparison case at the centre of Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir: Chaim Arlosoroff’s 1927 essay took “the territory of the state of South Africa, and the labor question there” as “almost the only instance with sufficient similarity in objective conditions and problems” to Palestine, and Gershon Shafir’s preface framed Zionism’s partition turn as a diversion from “the South African path” (Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir, PDF p.6, p.14 / printed p.14, p.22).
Details
- Arlosoroff’s figures, as Lockman reports them: in 1922 some 1.5 million people of European origin and some 5.5 million non-Europeans, of whom 97% were African or of mixed race; native workers vastly outnumbered European-origin workers in agriculture, manufacturing and gold mining, while the latter dominated or monopolised the skilled trades, semi-skilled jobs and supervisory positions and received much higher wages (PDF p.14).
- To maintain white workers’ privilege, South Africa barred further immigration from Asia and, beginning with the 1911 Mines and Works Act (the ‘Color Bar Act’), reserved broad categories of jobs for white workers; the National-Labor coalition government of 1924, formed in reaction to the bloody suppression of the ‘Rand Rebellion’ by white mine workers, adopted the ‘civilised labor policy’ — union recognition, ‘European’-standard minimum wages and conditions, a strengthened colour bar — which, together with ‘native reserves’ and movement controls, laid the basis for what after 1948 became the full-blown apartheid system (PDF p.14-15).
- Arlosoroff held the morality of these measures was not the issue — “It does not matter whether we reject this policy […] or justify it” — and that Jews in Palestine faced the same basic labour-market situation but could not pursue exclusion through legislation and state regulation (PDF p.15-16).
- Lockman’s closing contrast: by the late 1980s apartheid South Africa faced growing political, economic and moral isolation, while Israel has had massive and virtually unwavering United States support since the mid-1960s; and Israel’s post-1967 system has moved toward something resembling the apartheid model of separation, minority rule and herrenvolk democracy, though without South Africa’s massive dependence on indigenous labour (PDF p.26-27, note 28).
Related pages
Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir, Chaim Arlosoroff, Gershon Shafir, Apartheid