Israel needs to be isolated in exactly the same way as apartheid South Africa
Learning from South Africa
Savera Kalideen and Haidar Eid, The Electronic Intifada, 2 October 2008
Israeli border police officers mounted on horseback stand guard near Palestinian women waiting to cross the Qalandiya checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Ramallah on their way to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, 26 September. (Rami Swidan/MaanImages)
The strategic value of international solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, refugees in the Diaspora and Palestinians in Israel raises some fundamental questions. The most immediate and urgent are: what the nature of international solidarity should be and how it can best support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination?
International solidarity needs, first and foremost, to address the ways in which colonial Zionism has followed and continues to follow the Bantustanization policy of apartheid South Africa. There is also an imperative to address the severe damage that the Oslo Accords have caused to the Palestinian struggle, given the degree of confusion that these accords have created in the international arena.
A historical analysis of the current Palestinian quagmire cannot separate apartheid and Zionism from colonialism. As Samir Amin argues very persuasively in Unequal Development, in 19th century South Africa, central capitalism and colonialists forcefully dispossessed rural African communities to satisfy their need for a large proletariat to exploit the country's great mineral wealth. The indigenous people were driven into barren regions which left them with no alternative but to become cheap labor for European mines and farms, and later, rising South African industry. This initial dispossession slowly transformed a vibrant and dynamic society into mere labor reserves, with a gradual loss of independence, and, ultimately, to the creation of apartheid and Bantustans.
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Savera Kalideen and Haidar Eid, The Electronic Intifada, 2 October 2008
Israeli border police officers mounted on horseback stand guard near Palestinian women waiting to cross the Qalandiya checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Ramallah on their way to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, 26 September. (Rami Swidan/MaanImages)
The strategic value of international solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, refugees in the Diaspora and Palestinians in Israel raises some fundamental questions. The most immediate and urgent are: what the nature of international solidarity should be and how it can best support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination?
International solidarity needs, first and foremost, to address the ways in which colonial Zionism has followed and continues to follow the Bantustanization policy of apartheid South Africa. There is also an imperative to address the severe damage that the Oslo Accords have caused to the Palestinian struggle, given the degree of confusion that these accords have created in the international arena.
A historical analysis of the current Palestinian quagmire cannot separate apartheid and Zionism from colonialism. As Samir Amin argues very persuasively in Unequal Development, in 19th century South Africa, central capitalism and colonialists forcefully dispossessed rural African communities to satisfy their need for a large proletariat to exploit the country's great mineral wealth. The indigenous people were driven into barren regions which left them with no alternative but to become cheap labor for European mines and farms, and later, rising South African industry. This initial dispossession slowly transformed a vibrant and dynamic society into mere labor reserves, with a gradual loss of independence, and, ultimately, to the creation of apartheid and Bantustans.
--MORE--