It has been just short of a month since I last posted on
this blog. During that time, the average number of visits per day to the blog,
as measured by Google, has roughly doubled – a rather humbling fact, I must
say. My time has been spent preparing my weekly lectures on Marx and dealing
with the depredations of Parkinson’s disease and the burdens of being the
primary caregiver to my wife, who is struggling bravely with the problems of
being 91 years old. Just in the past two days, I have learned of the deaths of
two old and good friends – Charles Parsons, my college classmate, graduate
apartment mate, colleague at Columbia, and lifelong friend, and William
Strickland, my colleague and friend from the Afro-American studies department
at the University of Massachusetts. Charles was 91 and Bill was 87. Since I am
now 90, their passing is a cautionary tale for me.
I decided to return today to make what might be considered a
terminological quibble, but one with some larger significance. A number of
people have described the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel as a form of
apartheid. This is a mistake. Let me
explain. “Apartheid” is an Afrikaner term to describe an elaborate and complex
system of racially-based oppression developed in South Africa by the whites.
The system, justified by some rather distressing phony philosophical arguments
derived from a misunderstanding of European philosophical doctrines of the
earlier 20th century, involved classifying the population of South
Africa into four major categories: Whites, Africans, Coulereds, and Asians. The aim of the system was simultaneously to
keep as much separation as was manageable of the four categories of people from
one another (hence apartheid, which is to say apartness or separation) while
also making it possible for the whites to exploit the labor of the nonwhites.
The Africans, descendent of the original inhabitants of the area, were needed
both for agricultural labor and for work in the mines. In addition, they were
used as domestic workers of all sorts. To keep them separate from the white
population, the Afrikaner government had several devices. The first was the
creation of 10 “homelands,” territories ostensibly represented as independent
states, one each for the 10 racial and linguistic groups that the Afrikaners
imagined the Africans to be divided into. The second was the creation of single-sex
hostels or residences where African mine workers lived for 11 months a year,
being permitted to make brief trips home to their families and the homelands. The
third was the townships, segregated communities outside major white cities
where people whose labor was needed in the cities would be forced to return
each evening. The best known of these, of course, was Soweto, a community whose
name is an acronym formed from the words “Southwest Township” and which is
located outside Johannesburg. In addition, there were so-called “informal
settlements,” which is to say collections of shacks scattered along roads and
elsewhere in the officially white parts of South Africa.
The goal of the system of apartheid was not to get rid of
the nonwhite population – that would have been an economic disaster for the
whites. Rather, the goal was to exploit their labor while keeping them
officially out of sight, as it were.
I may be wrong, but it is not my impression that the Israeli
policy toward the Palestinians is based on a desire to exploit their labor. I
think many Israelis would be quite happy if the Palestinians were simply to
disappear. In that way, their attitude toward the Palestinians is much closer
to the attitude of the European settlers toward Native Americans. By and large,
the European settlers sought to exterminate the Native Americans, and when they
could not quite accomplish that, to push them into reservations on land for
which the settlers did not have much use. Needing large amounts of labor to
develop the New World in ways that would make them money, the settlers first
brought a good many indentured servants from England, and then brought Africans
whom, over more than a century, they enslaved after revising the English Common
Law to permit such a status to exist.
I am not sure this makes a great deal of difference to the struggle now going on, but I do think there is something to be gained from being more accurate in the terms we use to describe the horror as we observe.
Carry on.