The South African solution will not work in Palestine Mondoweiss – Mondoweiss
Posted By admin on August 30, 2022
ANTI-COLONIAL RESISTANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA AND ISRAEL/PALESTINEIdentity, Nationalism, and Raceby Ran Greenstein244 pps. Routledge $128
Human rights organizations Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and BTselem have determined Israels rule of Palestinians meets the criteria for the internationally-designated crime of apartheid, a crime against humanity named after the system of laws that enshrined white-minority rule in South Africa between 1948 and 1994.
A new book by South African-Israeli sociologist Ran Greenstein, Anti-Colonial Resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine, is a natural source for the similarities and differences that exist between the human rights struggles of Israel/Palestine and South Africa.
Greenstein has previously in his career addressed the history of both the victory for majority rule in South Africa, and the history of anti-colonial resistance in Palestine, including a previous book from 2014, which traces, the small democratic movements overtaken by the momentum of Jewish nation-state nationalism (and the oppression that it required), from the onset of the Zionist project onward.
The purpose of this new book is to observe the differences and similarities in these particular versions of both colonialism and resistance.
One might think these could lead to envisioning how Israel/Palestine could experience a similar transition from an oppressive ethnonational state to democracy, as South Africa did. Yet Greensteins argument is slightly more sobering, concluding that Palestinians do not now have the traction to force a South African solution leading to a peaceful agreement modeled after the framework of majority rule with protections for minorities.
Greenstein explains his reasoning in his concluding chapters (after first taking us through a review of the histories of resistance in South Africa and Palestine). Here, Greenstein critiques the usefulness of settler colonialism as a label and an analytical category when applied to both South Africa and Palestine:
Its strongest point is also its weakest: it is applicable to a great diversity of conditions.
It can be applied to societies in which settlers overwhelmed the indigenous population to the point that it became negligible, no more that 23% of the population in the United States of America (USA), Canada, and Australia [and can be applied to places like] Kenya, Rhodesia, Algeria, Mozambique, and South Africa [where] indigenous people remained the bulk of the population and the main source of labour power.
Greenstein notes that Palestinians are demographically divided into four main groups citizens of Israel, residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, neighboring refugees, and the worldwide diaspora of Palestinians all with different priorities and ranges of activity.
In contrast to white South Africa, which was absolutely dependent on the labor of non-whites, Israel needs nothing from Palestinians except that they mostly leave and never return.
Even with the existence of solidarity between those groups, Greenstein argues that the record shows an inability on the part of these disparate communities to seriously threaten the continuation of the Zionist state and its dedication to Jewish control.
In contrast to white South Africa, which was absolutely dependent on the labor of non-whites, Israel needs nothing from Palestinians except that they mostly leave and never return. Labor from the West Bank (and previously, from Gaza) is useful but not essential.
Greenstein asserts that in the South African case, external boycott pressure against apartheid supplemented the robust power of years of organizing the African and colored workforce, together with a broad civil resistance movement led by the African National Congress.
He says that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign abroad, though admirable and worthwhile, cannot augment missing Palestinian power, and nor can it exert pressure on the Israeli regime on its own.
The Israel/Palestine system meets the definition of apartheid in international law but presents different challenges for the campaign against it than was the case for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The most important of these is the challenge of effecting change from within when the bulk of the forces seeking such change are located without, both physically and conceptually.
In Greensteins opinion, expecting the same results as boycotts of white-ruled South Africa ends up ignoring the most important part of South Africas anti-apartheid strategy: the internal mass struggle to undermine and transform the political system from within.
Greenstein points out that throughout its history, white supremacy in South Africa was a means to ensure white prosperity, using black labour as its foundation. Apartheid was just an institutionalized continuation of that history, and a means of entrenching white domination.
In contrast, Zionist colonization was of the land, not the people.Hebrew labor and the Conquest of the Land were the main slogans during the era of the pre-1948 Yishuv.
Zionist projects meant armed Zionist settlements with Jewish-only workers, Jewish-only enterprises, Jewish-only commercial channels, and Jewish-only land purchases by the Jewish National Fund (ever since 1901) for the Jewish people, all of this being in service of creating a self-sufficient Jewish society that could operate independently of the indigenous Palestinian population, even before the Nakba.
Land bought by the Zionist organization meant tenant farmers were removed. This confirmed the meaning of Zionist immigration to Arabs as dislocation and beggary in their own country, as properties were turned to enterprises, intentionally to the exclusive benefit of Jews.
Understanding the nature of Jewish settlement organized by Zionist organizations makes clear why developing pressure for a resolution by mutual accommodation is elusive, as Zionist doctrines only value Jewish hegemony, as isolated as possible from Arabs, despite PR flim-flam.
Greenstein analyzes the difference as follows:
Israel/Palestine has experienced a different trajectory, producing two distinct ethno-national groups competing over territory and resources, without entering into relations of inter-dependence as was the case in South AfricaPolitical domination was primarily a means to an economic end in South Africa and an end in itself in Israel/Palestine.
There is one function that the population of the West Bank and Gaza serve for Israels biggest new industry world-wide arms and security technology sales. Jeff Halper describes the Palestinians residing there as the test bed for new product development.
The power of Israel to use, at will, a matrix of high-tech surveillance and targeted assasination, is refined and developed when it is used against Palestinian resistance, sumud, and bare human determination, as Mariam Barghouti has reported in her profile of Ibrahim Nabulsi, the lion of Nablus.
Greenstein diagrams the power relations in South Africa and Palestine in the twentieth century that reduced Palestinian resistance to individual martyrs with personal weapons against a technologically modern army, and to various militias that can fire low-grade rockets.
With much of its population exiled from Israel proper in 1947-48, the Palestinian resistance/liberation movement needed to organize in neighboring Arab states. This made the Palestinian resistance beholden to inconstant external allies that Israel had the resources to threaten or co-opt. He wonders if the movement would have done better to have had no support or at least have done no worse.
Outside support ultimately hobbled developing a unified Palestinian-centered front and goals, alternating between Palestinian, pan-Arab nationalist, religious-affiliated, international Communist, and big power politics imperatives.
Fatally, what joint Jewish-Arab organizing that does exist is not a mass movement. Greenstein points out that 100 years ofZionist work forced a rigid Jewish/non-Jewish binary in Palestine, forestalling significant alliances based on other shared interests and identities across that chasm.
A unifying set of articulated goals was one of the strengths of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. When the time came for negotiations there was an agreed set that could be forcefully demanded, with thought-through features of universal respect of rights that enabled white acceptance.
The ANC could offer both the credible threat of making apartheid governance impossible using labor actions and mass mobilizations and credible plans for a multi-racial democracy.
The basic thrust of Greensteins thesis is that something will have to change to end Israeli ethnonationalist domination from the river to the sea. This conclusion is not bright and hopeful. The nationalisms of Palestine and Zionist Israel have no overlap that can lead to foreseeing a South African-style negotiated resolution based on a shared identity between dominator and subjugated.
This conclusion has political implications. The project of Israeli settlement beyond the 1949 armistice lines means the time of the internationally-favored two-state solution is over. In fact, it was never really a serious Israeli goal to begin with.
The now many human rights reports that have found Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid have also highlighted how the pressing need for Palestinian freedom and political rights is a direct mirror of the imperative for freedom that animated the anti-apartheid movement int South Africa, including the need to equitably share resources, but without any obvious road to that goal except through bloody cataclysm.
It may seem that Greenstein is indulging in an academic exercise by comparing what South Africa was able to achieve to the struggle of Palestine. But without intoxicating rhetoric and cheer leading, he ventures his consideration of Palestines struggle against its own versions of apartheid and settler colonialism, and whether any common interests can cross the rigid Zionist distinction of Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian.
This book is no polemic; it does not aim to argue that the partition in 1947 was wrong, or that the Nakba was a historic crime, or that the occupation is a continuation of that Zionist original sin. Those are all given.
Justice must be accompanied by the exercise of effective pressure in order to realize it. The question then becomes: by what forces?
Rather, the assumption and implicit exploration of the book is that proving the justice of the Palestinian cause will do nothing alone. Justice must be accompanied by the exercise of effective pressure in order to realize it. The question then becomes: by what forces?
One may very well ask at this point what relevance South Africa holds for the future of Palestine? Does Greensteins survey of organizing strategies in both countries matter?
For this author, it seems that the example of South Africa is relevant because it is a case of brutal repression based on race. Concerted pressure and negotiation created a new country based on shared citizenship with multiple identities.
Its worth at least a look at how that happened, considering the suffering built into the alternatives for Israel/Palestine an ugly situation of brutal repression based on ethnicity, and a constant train of martyrs.
This movement needs a newsroom that can cover all of Palestine and the global Palestinian freedom movement.
The Israeli government and its economic, cultural, and political backers here in the U.S. have made a decades-long investment in silencing and delegitimizing Palestinian voices.
Were building a powerful challenge to those mainstream norms, and proving that listening to Palestinians is essential for moving the needle.
Become a donor today and support our critical work.
Read the rest here:
The South African solution will not work in Palestine Mondoweiss - Mondoweiss
- Ohio senators blast Norfolk Southern for train derailment - March 10th, 2023
- East Palestine train derailment site workers are getting sick, union ... - March 2nd, 2023
- East Palestine derailment: Timeline of key events in toxic train ... - March 2nd, 2023
- Palestinian territories - Wikipedia - March 2nd, 2023
- Heres the real reason the EPA doesnt want to test for toxins in East ... - March 2nd, 2023
- What is Palestine and who are Palestinians? | The US Sun - March 2nd, 2023
- Departments | Palestine, TX - March 2nd, 2023
- Palestine - History | Britannica - March 2nd, 2023
- United Nations in Palestine - March 2nd, 2023
- Ohio train derailment update: Waste from East Palestine to be shipped to Grafton - WKYC.com - March 2nd, 2023
- SNLs Trump Rants About Rihanna and Gay Buttigieg in East Palestine - Rolling Stone - March 2nd, 2023
- Ohio train derailment prompts water utility across state lines to take ... - February 17th, 2023
- East Palestine train derailment updates: Chemical plume moves toward ... - February 17th, 2023
- There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than ... - February 17th, 2023
- Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment - February 17th, 2023
- Ohio train derailment fact check: What's true and what's false? - USA TODAY - February 17th, 2023
- Ohio: After a train derailment, residents are living the plot of a movie they helped make - CNN - February 13th, 2023
- More chemicals found in East Palestine after train derailment as students return to school, and more: 3News Daily with Stephanie Haney - WKYC.com - February 13th, 2023
- UN seeks ICJ opinion on Israels illegal occupation of Palestine - Al Jazeera English - December 31st, 2022
- Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory illegal: UN rights commission - UN News - October 21st, 2022
- Is Palestine on the brink of a full-scale revolt? - The Electronic Intifada - October 17th, 2022
- Slaughter of the Innocents: Iran, Palestine, and Hypocrisy of 'Western' Media - Palestine Chronicle - October 17th, 2022
- From the River to the Sea: Join the Palestinian March for Return and Liberation - Palestine Chronicle - October 17th, 2022
- Letters To Barack Obama Short And Long , And Of United States Destruction Of The Palestinian People - Countercurrents.org - October 17th, 2022
- Man seeking Royal Ulster Rifles apology after civilians 'forced to drive over landmine' in Palestine - Belfast Telegraph - October 17th, 2022
- East Palestine record-holding runner named Student Athlete of Week - WKBN.com - October 17th, 2022
- The Arab world has failed Palestine, leaving it in limbo - Middle East Monitor - September 2nd, 2022
- Japan contributes US$ 1.5 million in food assistance for Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip - occupied Palestinian territory - ReliefWeb - September 2nd, 2022
- For anyone with Palestinian roots like me, Netflixs sitcom Mo is groundbreaking TV - The Guardian - September 2nd, 2022
- Palestine man indicted in San Antonio smuggling incident to continue to be held without bond - KETK | FOX51 | EastTexasMatters.com - September 2nd, 2022
- Diplomatic Missions In Solidarity With Palestinian NGOs Active Accomplices Of Israels Apartheid - Countercurrents.org - September 2nd, 2022
- Heatwave In Israel, Palestine: Residents Hit The Streets To Beat The Heat - Outlook India - August 30th, 2022
- Palestine bride in her wedding dress arrested by Israel police - Middle East Monitor - August 30th, 2022
- A Message to Canadian Leaders: There's No Room for Vanity in the Struggle for Palestinian Justice - Palestine Chronicle - August 30th, 2022
- Palestine Muay Thai fighter wins the Victory Road Championships - Middle East Monitor - August 30th, 2022
- Progressive candidate Maxwell Frost hit by pro-Palestinian group, accused of shifting stance on Israel - Fox News - August 30th, 2022
- Palestine wants to step up brotherhood ties, in Merdeka message - The Star Online - August 30th, 2022
- Israeli suppression of Palestinian rights organizations 'illegal and unacceptable' - UN News - August 27th, 2022
- Maxwell Frost abandoned Palestine on his way to Democratic primary victory - Mondoweiss - August 27th, 2022
- Palestine exposes the limits of free-speech and the morally bankrupt 'cancel culture' - Middle East Monitor - August 27th, 2022
- Can a Jew cook Palestinian food without getting all political? J. - The Jewish News of Northern California - August 27th, 2022
- Palestinian Family Forced to Self-Demolish Their House in East Jerusalem - Palestine Chronicle - August 27th, 2022
- India advocates resumption of peace talks between Israel and Palestine - Business Standard - August 27th, 2022
- An overgrown forest in Kansas City's Palestine East could be turned into a community resource - KCUR - August 27th, 2022
- The Palestinian Authority celebrates the Hebron murderers - JNS.org - August 16th, 2022
- I Studied With a Palestinian Terrorist Organization. This Is What I Learned. - Truthout - August 16th, 2022
- Islamic Jihad one of the most effective resistance groups in Palestine: speaker - Tehran Times - August 16th, 2022
- Students for Justice of Palestine: What do they stand for? - UTSA The Paisano - August 1st, 2022
- Chess Olympiad 2022: Meet Randa Sedar of Palestine - the youngest participant in the competition - myKhel - August 1st, 2022
- Washington is the Problem, Not the Solution: Why Mahmoud Abbas is Seeking New 'Powerful' Sponsors - Palestine Chronicle - August 1st, 2022
- UN Palestine relief agency forced to cut doctor visits to three minutes amid UK budget cuts - iNews - July 31st, 2022
- Palestinian Authority arrest campaign one of the worst in years - Al Jazeera English - July 31st, 2022
- Enough Is Enough: Palestine Accused Of Systematic Torture Before The International Criminal Court - Daily Caller - July 31st, 2022
- The Hundred Year War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 - Palestine Chronicle - July 31st, 2022
- History Of Palestine And Israel Conflict And Where They Stand Now - Postoast - July 31st, 2022
- We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh - The Irish Times - July 31st, 2022
- Two Palestinian Christians, and a visit with one of the most interesting of Latter-day Saint historians - Patheos - July 31st, 2022
- Israel-Palestine: Reversing 'negative trends' essential, Security Council hears - UN News - July 27th, 2022
- Manzanar To Palestine: Legacy Of Internment And Ethnic-Cleansing OpEd - Eurasia Review - July 27th, 2022
- Constricting Palestinian Human Rights and the Right to Health: Israeli Apartheid Policies - Palestine Chronicle - July 27th, 2022
- Security Council briefing on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question (as delivered by Deputy Special Coordinator Lynn... - July 27th, 2022
- Why Are Cori Bush's Ties to Palestinian Activist Who Tweeted About 'Burning Israelis Alive' Generating Zero Media Coverage? - Algemeiner - July 27th, 2022
- Joe Biden greeted by protests during brief visit to Palestine - The Guardian US - July 18th, 2022
- Explained: The Israel-Palestine Conflict, The Two State Solution, And Why It Has Failed So Far - Outlook India - July 18th, 2022
- U.S. is planning to build embassy new embassy in Jerusalem. Palestinian families say the area is stolen land. - NBC News - July 18th, 2022
- Dumbarton-based nurse on helping cancer patients in Palestine - The Sunday Post - July 18th, 2022
- Palestine Youth Orchestra to give 'Peace Concert' in Turkey | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah - July 18th, 2022
- UNRWA reviews and responds to allegations concerning Agency educational materials - occupied Palestinian territory - ReliefWeb - July 18th, 2022
- Five US presidents have visited Palestine with zero benefits - Middle East Monitor - July 14th, 2022
- France-Palestine/Salah Hammouri: Judicial investigation opened targeting NSO group - FIDH - July 14th, 2022
- With Love, from Kalamazoo to Palestine bringing Palestinian culture to Bronson Park - MLive.com - July 14th, 2022
- ASIA/HOLY LAND - Palestinian President Abbas calls Pope Francis on the eve of Biden's trip to the Middle East - Agenzia Fides - July 14th, 2022
- Two charged and two cleared over infamous 'Convoy For Palestine' - Jewish News - July 14th, 2022
- Palestine - Wiktionary - July 10th, 2022
- Palestine Celebrates Eid Al-Adha with Sacrifice, Prayer and Family Time ... - July 10th, 2022
- The PA is facilitating the exploitation of Palestine - Middle East Monitor - July 10th, 2022
- AIPAC is leading efforts to dismantle UN inquiry on Palestine - The Real News Network - July 10th, 2022
- Palestinian Woman Tamam Abou Hamidan from Gaza Becomes Mayor in Sweden - The Islamic Information - July 10th, 2022
- Occupying Habits. Everyday Media as Warfare in Israel-Palestine - Informed Comment - July 10th, 2022
- PM Lapid approves closure of Israeli embassy in Eritrea after ambassador blocked - Press TV - July 10th, 2022
Comments