On 7 october 2023 I was sitting in a Johannesburg Airbnb, listening with horror to early reports of the Hamas invasion. My horror was not only in response to the immediate loss of life; like everyone else, I wondered what untold atrocities would now befall Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, already devastated by years of Israeli military bombardment. Was this the opening that the Israeli state had been waiting for? I never imagined that the conflict would still be raging, let alone thrusting towards a wider regional war. Previous clashes had ended within weeks, due to Israel’s military superiority. This time was different. The urban terrain, the resilience of Hamas and the people of Gaza, the balance of forces in the region and new warfare technologies posed distinct challenges for the Israeli Defence Forces, who were now fighting on multiple fronts with more ambitious goals than just recovering the hostages: destroying Hamas and then Hezbollah, controlling Southern Lebanon—in addition to making life unbearable for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It was the continuation of the Nakba—an uncivil war of land expropriation.
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In those early days, watching with mounting anxiety the indiscriminate bombing of a defenceless population, I wondered why such an eruption of violence had not occurred in apartheid South Africa. Many had anticipated a similar Armageddon. The States of Emergency between 1984 and 1994 saw the militarization of townships, death squads, chemical warfare, assassinations, torture and detention without trial. During this period, an estimated 20,000 were killed in South Africa, the vast majority black; another 1.5 million died in South Africa’s ‘destabilization’ of neighbouring countries. How, after ten years of civil war, did this culminate in a negotiated settlement, the dismantling of the major planks of the apartheid order, and the first elections based on majority rule? Why does such an outcome—with all its problems—seem so remote when we turn to the plight of the Palestinians and the spiralling violence, internal and external, of the Israeli state? How was it that the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 intensified confrontations rather than making progress towards a two-state solution? Why did Israel abandon the Abraham Accords, which outlined collaboration with Arab states, preferring the disproportionate massacre of Palestinians after Hamas’s incursion?
There are many possible answers to these questions but let me prefigure my own. Here I will situate the multiple dimensions of these two conflicts within the framework of ‘settler colonialism’, distinguishing between a type based on land expropriation and one based on labour exploitation. These two types of settler colonialism are intimately connected with the history of both countries, but in South Africa there was a move from the primacy of land expropriation to the primacy of labour exploitation while in the Palestinian case, the movement was the reverse. My argument is that land expropriation tends towards an irreconcilable conflict whereas labour exploitation can lead to class compromise, allowing for the possibility of reform.
To paraphrase Marx, these economic forms are the real foundations from which arise historically specific superstructures, through which settlers and natives become conscious of their conflict and fight it out. Accordingly, what follows has four parts: the first is a methodological-theoretical introduction setting up the second, a brief comparative history of the two lands. This provides context for the third, an examination of the present balance of forces, at national, regional and international levels. I end by turning to the United States, before offering speculative remarks about the future.
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The questions above indicate the need for a comparative history—tracking parallel processes in the two countries and their divergent outcomes. Comparison helps to delineate the salient issues driving each case and thus alternative roads forward. To compare, however, we need a common framework. How often have I heard colleagues baulk at comparisons involving Israel or South Africa, let alone direct contrasts between them, claiming that you cannot compare apples and bananas. Yes, you can! Indeed, that is the art of sociology—to perform the magic trick of turning apples and bananas into pineapples.
One term commonly deployed when the two countries are considered together is ‘apartheid’. Here, however, the term often loses its specificity. It gets reduced to a broad definition such as ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group’.footnote1 Calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is a way to condemn it as a racist society. But the concept has also informed the strategy of the Israeli ruling class, who have used it to rationalize their domination; while for their part, the Afrikaner right wing envied the repressive policies of the Israeli state. In each case the term is employed to demonstrate or imagine convergences. I prefer to restrict ‘apartheid’ to South Africa and instead adopt the shared category of ‘settler colonialism’, establishing the similarities between South Africa and Israel in order to understand their differences. In other words, I seek differences within similarities rather than similarities within differences.
By ‘settler colonialism’ I refer to an invasion of a foreign land, supported from an imperial centre, by settlers who permanently subjugate an indigenous people. In South Africa, this began with the Dutch East India Company in the middle of the seventeenth century; in Palestine, with the immigration of Jews at the end of the nineteenth. In both cases the settlers fought wars on two fronts—against both the indigenous population and British imperialism—before they succeeded in establishing their racially exclusive states. Unlike ‘franchise’ colonies of resource extraction, the settlers were firmly rooted with nowhere else to go. European Jews were fleeing their own persecution in the pogroms and then the Holocaust; Afrikaners had lost contact with their European ancestors.
Here are prima facie cases of settler colonialism. From the standpoint of the settler, however, the concept is often rejected as an anathema, implying an unjustifiable form of domination. Zionism, for example, claims that Palestine is the Jewish ancestral home, defined in biblical scriptures. The land of Palestine was waiting for the chosen people to return: ‘A land without people for a people without land.’ It was not colonialism because there were no colonized—Palestinians did not exist, or if they did, they did not belong. The Jewish people are the original natives, not settlers. This perspective overlooks the presence of nearly half a million Palestinians before Jewish immigration at the end of the nineteenth century, living peacefully alongside 25,000 Arab Jews, who comprised roughly 5 per cent of the population. The claim is also made that the settler-colonial concept does not apply because there was no metropolitan country supporting the Jewish presence. Yet this sidelines the role of the World Zionist Organization, acting through the Jewish National Fund, which solicited support from multiple Western countries to purchase land. Finally, the argument is made that the genocidal experience of the Jewish people makes them unique; they cannot be contained by any comparative classification.
Settler colonialism never assumed the same charged meaning in South Africa. Certainly, the Afrikaners saw themselves as a chosen people, but by the twentieth century they defined themselves as ‘native’ South Africans in contrast to the British settlers. The South African Communist Party came closest to defining apartheid in settler-colonialist terms with its ‘colonialism of a special type’, in which the colonizing power was no longer a distant metropole but contained within the colony itself. There have been debates, too, about the importance of class, as opposed to race, and whether the ‘function’ of apartheid was the production of cheap labour power or the externalization of conflict.
Although Palestinian scholars have used the term to analyse their own situation since the 1960s, comparative study of settler colonialism is of relatively recent provenance, developing only in the last twenty years. One pioneer, Patrick Wolfe, has argued that ‘territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific irreducible element’. He draws the conclusion that it has an inherent tendency to ‘eliminate’ the indigenous population, whether through genocide, assimilation, socialization, detribalization or other means.footnote2 This may fit Wolfe’s favoured cases of Australia, Canada and the us—and, indeed, Palestine. But it is more problematic with a settler colony like Algeria, where the settlers left. Equally, it does not help us understand the history of South Africa, where settlers, rather than eliminating the ‘natives’, depended upon them for cheap labour. A more comprehensive theory of settler colonialism requires us to take into account the different dynamics of land expropriation and labour exploitation. This means examining both exclusive territoriality and proletarianized labour.
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Settler colonialism in South Africa began in the 1650s when the Dutch East India Company established an outpost of the Dutch Empire in the southern tip of Africa—a base to serve and refuel ships going to Asia. The settlement took root, subjugating the Khoisan people, wiping out the aboriginal San people, taking slaves and expanding into the hinterland. The British began to colonize the Cape from 1806, with the aim of securing the route to India. The Afrikaner settlers were pushed out by the British and trekked north, fighting against different ethnic groups and creating their own republics. This land expropriation continued until the discovery of diamonds and then gold towards the end of the nineteenth century.
As the scale of mining increased, it relied on cheap African labour and expensive imported white labour. The transition from land expropriation to labour exploitation was secured through the fierce Boer Wars (1899–1902) which the Afrikaner settlers lost to the better-armed and more numerous British forces. This was followed by the creation of a unified territory, the Union of South Africa, in 1910. Thereafter, land expropriation was designed to force Africans to enter employment in the mines as migrant labourers. The 1913 Natives Land Act confined Africans to 8 per cent of the land. The trajectory of twentieth-century South Africa was defined by the expansion of mining and then manufacturing—from the 1922 Rand Revolt in which white workers called on ‘workers of the world’ to ‘unite and fight for a white South Africa’, to the 1946 black mine workers’ strike that reflected the growing strength of the black proletariat.
In 1948 the Herenigde Nasionale Party was elected, based on an almost exclusively white franchise, and set about establishing the Apartheid order which limited the social and geographical mobility of the black population to serve settler interests—both Afrikaner farmers and British capital—in the reproduction of cheap black labour.
During the 1950s the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party organized boycotts, strikes, stay-aways and protests against pass laws, leading in turn to further repression. The 1960 Sharpeville massacre of at least 69 protesters was followed by the banning of African political organizations, forcing them underground or into exile. The Apartheid state appeared to have successfully rationalized racial domination, until the unanticipated outbreak of the 1973 Durban strikes and then the 1976 Soweto protest against Bantu education. These challenges to Apartheid led to the expanding struggles of the 1980s and a state of civil war. The white regime began lifting some of the urban residence regulations and recognizing black trade unions, but these reforms only fuelled the struggle. Yet the civil war also led to tentative moves towards peace talks between the anc and the Afrikaner government, and eventually to a negotiated transition.
Why was this possible in South Africa and not in Israel? Capital’s dependence upon labour gives labour leverage, or structural power—but only if it also has associational or organizational power. Settler colonialism of the labour-exploitation type tends to generate working-class associational power in reaction to the indignity of racial subjugation. More generally, capitalism is a unique mode of production that not only hands structural power to the subordinate class but also creates the potential for concessions, so long as they don’t touch property relations or profit. Whether this potential for class compromise is actually realized depends on the specific superstructures that shape the history of struggle.
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So why is there no negotiated compromise in Israel? Settler colonialism began in this instance at the end of the nineteenth century when Jews fled the Imperial pogroms in Russia—most going to Western Europe and the us, but a few to Palestine. The World Zionist Organization created the Jewish National Fund to purchase land, often from absentee Arab landlords. But, as Gershon Shafir has shown, the key issue was the division of labour.footnote3 At first, Jewish plantation owners were inclined to employ cheap Palestinian labour, but this did not solve the problem of employing Jewish immigrants. They then created a tiered labour market, similar to the one in South Africa, comprising high-priced Jewish labour and low-priced Palestinian labour. But Jewish labour could not compete with Palestinians, who were skilled in agricultural work and had an independent subsistence existence. The upshot was the expulsion of Palestinians and the exclusive employment of Jewish labour, often in cooperative forms like the kibbutzim, and the foundation of the Histadrut, the Jewish labour organization which would form the institutional basis of the Israeli state.
This resolution of the split labour market began under the Ottoman Empire and was allowed to continue by the British, under the League of Nations Mandate assigned in 1920. The British occupation authorities faced successive Palestinian anti-colonial rebellions, culminating in the Great Revolt of 1936–39. Stimulated by the flood of refugees from fascist Europe, this was quashed by the British, aided by Jewish militia. In 1948 the British handed the Palestine problem to the newly formed United Nations, which backed a partition favouring the Jewish settlers. The Jews made up 28 per cent of the population of Palestine and held 7 per cent of the land; the un partition granted them 56 per cent of the land. The Palestinians rejected the very idea of partition since, in their view, this was their land, and a three-way war ensued. The Zionists proclaimed a liberation struggle against the British but they also conducted a covert war against the Palestinians—the Nakba—in which the future idf pursued a ruthless ‘ethnic cleansing’, taking control of 77 per cent of the land and expelling 750,000 Palestinians, 60 per cent of the population. The newly created State of Israel was 80 per cent Jewish and 20 per cent Palestinian. Just as the Boer War marked the ascendanceof the British Empire and labour exploitation, so the civil war in Palestine saw the retreat of the British and the creation of a state based on land expropriation.
Dominated by the Histadrut and the Labour Party, the Israeli state developed a settler social democracy based on an exclusionary labour policy. Palestinians within Israel were subject to military rule. Those in Gaza were under Egyptian administration, while those in East Jerusalem and what we now call the West Bank were under Jordan. Rising tensions between the Arab states and Israel exploded in the 1956 Suez Crisis and then the 1967 Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, at the end of which Israel controlled the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the whole of the Egyptian Sinai—the so-called Occupied Territories. This continuation of Israeli land conquest also created cheap labour for the Israeli economy. The Occupied Territories served a similar function to the Bantustans in South Africa, only the former were de facto incorporated into Israel while the latter were given a pseudo-autonomy within South Africa.
Just as the anc was banned and went underground following the Sharpeville massacre, so too the leadership of the plo was forced into exile, chased from Jordan to Lebanon to Tunis. The spontaneous rebellions in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s were matched in Israel by the First Intifada, which began in 1987 and lasted until 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed. The outcome was a mockery of self-government, in which the Palestinian Authority was subcontracted by the Israeli state to suppress Palestinian resistance. Mounting frustrations led to the Second Intifada (2000–05) that targeted civilian populations within Israel. The Israeli state responded with restrictions on movement from the Occupied Territories, thereby cutting off the flow of Palestinian labour. The West Bank was divided into zones to facilitate the illegal expansion of settler communities while Gaza was turned into an open prison, patrolled and blockaded by the idf. This brings us to October 7.
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This context allows us to offer tentative explanations for the divergence of the two settler colonialisms—negotiated settlement in the one case and relentless expansionism in the other. First, economic foundations. The dependence of South African capital on the black working class gave the latter structural power, while the racialized struggles against apartheid promoted its associational power. The reforms of the 1980s, designed to create a class of urban insiders and institutionalize conflict through the recognition of black trade unions, only intensified the spiralling protests and state repression. As the situation got out of control, business interests instigated secret negotiations with anc leader Nelson Mandela while he was still imprisoned on Robben Island. By contrast, the Israeli state’s declining dependence on Palestinian labour undermined the latter’s structural power while its fragmentation—the result of expulsion—limited its associational power. Meanwhile, Arafat was desperate for some agreement with Israel to legitimize his leadership. The result was the Oslo Accords—more capitulation than negotiation.
Second, politics. The two settler nationalisms, Afrikaner and Zionist, were both forged against British imperialism, yet they moved in opposite directions. When the Afrikaners came to power in 1948, they implemented the policy of the Bantustans to externalize African resistance but also secure cheap labour for agriculture and mining. However, a growing ‘liberal’ branch of Afrikaner nationalism—the so-called verligtes—began to use the state to advance its own capitalist projects and came to have an interest in a negotiated transition. By contrast, Zionism moved in the opposite direction, as the conservative and religious Likud party grew in strength. It was supported by Mizrahi (Arab) Jews—a growing subcaste who had themselves suffered from oppressive domination by the Ashkenazi or European Jews. In short, as the Afrikaners became more liberal and open-minded, the Zionists became more reactionary and uncompromising. Moreover, while in South Africa the tripartite alliance of the anc, Communist Party and Trade Union Federation formed a unified anti-apartheid front, the Palestinian opposition to the Israeli state was divided by the very different conditions they faced and their entanglement in the politics of their host countries.
Regionally, South Africa found itself surrounded by hostile countries, especially after 1974 when Mozambique and Angola achieved independence. Along with Southern Rhodesia, South Africa was the last colony in the subcontinent. It advanced its interests through an ‘outward-looking policy’ based on economic strength. This was short-lived as frontline states supported the anti-apartheid movement, hosting training camps for the armed struggle. In response, the apartheid state fomented civil war in Angola and Mozambique. Similarly, Israel attacked Arab states that supported the plo or Hamas, especially Lebanon, participating in its civil war (1975–1990) and later invading in 2006. After October 7, Israel was quick to give up collaboration with Arab states in favour of indiscriminate bombing intended to crush Hamas and Hezbollah, but also to expand the territory of Israel into Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
The contrast in the international sphere was just as stark. Growing protests outside South Africa mirrored those within South Africa. Commonwealth countries sponsored a committee to foster negotiations, while demonstrations in many countries demanded the un-banning of the anc and the freeing of Mandela. Neither the Palestinian movement nor international calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions had the same breadth of support as the anti-apartheid movement, while Afrikaner nationalism never had the global influence of Zionism. Afrikaner nationalism appeared parochial and antiquated next to the Western orientation of secular Zionism; it lacked the moral authority of representing Holocaust victims; and it never developed any equivalent of the Israel lobby and aipac.
The balance of international forces also shifted with the fall of the Soviet Union, which could no longer be used to discredit the anc. In fact, the anc had already moved away from more radical interpretations of its Freedom Charter. The collapse of communism also made armed conflict less feasible for the anc as Soviet military support evaporated. As for the Palestinian movement, it, too, lost the moral and military support of the Soviet Union, further intensifying its international isolation and internal divisions.
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Finally, we come to Israel’s bond with the United States. Certainly, the us has been the linchpin of Israeli aggression, but the White House has not acted alone in backing Israeli expansion in the Middle East. The contrast with us–South Africa relations is vivid. In 1986 the us Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over the veto of President Reagan, imposing sanctions on South Africa. Congress did not act in a vacuum. It was responding to the growing momentum of the anti-apartheid campaign across the world. In the eyes of Congress, from one day to the next, the anc had moved from a terrorist organization to a liberation movement. The Palestinians have never received such acclaim; Congress never greeted Arafat as it did Netanyahu and Mandela.
Contrast us sanctions against South Africa with Congress’s unconditional support for the Israeli state. In the last year, the us has transferred $18 billion in military hardware to Israel, and since its founding Israel has received over $300 billion in economic and military assistance, far more than any other country. Why? One reason is us economic and political interests in the Middle East’s oil and gas, including the unexplored reserves off the coast of Gaza. In addition, the Israeli economy is an extension of the us military-industrial complex and a laboratory for its latest weaponry. But does Israel also represent for us leaders a racialized project, a Western outpost in a sea of ‘Oriental infidels’? Does the us state identify Israel with its own project of settler colonialism? Does the existence of Israel constitute a form of reparations for the Holocaust? Or is it rather a convenient resolution of the Jewish Question, a latent antisemitism perpetuated at the cost of Palestinians?
The Israel lobby in the us is obviously crucial in creating cultural imperialism. aipac, which claims to represent 5 million pro-Israeli Americans and is supported by Zionist billionaires, funds elections of supportive Congressional delegates, conducts campaigns against pro-Palestinian candidates and puts pressure on any institution or individual that encourages pro-Palestinian perspectives. In addition, there are tens of millions of Christian Zionists, who believe in the return of Jews to Israel as the harbinger of the return of Christ. They often have stronger Zionist views than American Jews themselves.
Over the last year the Israeli government has put this ironclad American support to the test—and the us has passed with flying colours. We saw Trump and Harris competing in their claims to be Israel’s greatest friend. There’s no knowing what Trump will do, but his track record suggests he will go out of his way to advance Israel’s interests. In his first term, he formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, pronounced the settlements in the West Bank legal, closed the Palestinian Diplomatic Mission in Washington, shielded Israel from the icc and has since called on Israel to ‘finish the job’ in Gaza. With the rise of Likud and a biblical Zionism, rooted in the increasing preponderance of Mizrahi Jews and new immigrants, and with the exodus of liberal, professional European Jews, messianism has taken hold of the Israeli government, which is trying to drag the us into a war against Iran—a war in which the us has little interest. Even a second Trump administration might pause its support for Israel’s messianic war. We shouldn’t forget that the us has pulled the plug on previous engagements—Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—when they saw the writing on the wall.
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To return to the original question: why the divergence between these two settler colonialisms? I have argued that the underlying difference is between a settler colonialism built on labour exploitation—a relation of inclusion based on interdependence, conducive to compromise—and one built on land expropriation: a relation of exclusion based on irreconcilable conflict. But these are only potentialities which, in combination with the balance of military forces, set the terrain for political and ideological struggles, which have international as well as national determinations and repercussions.
In South Africa, the unravelling of apartheid and turn to majority rule—decolonization, if you will—was no panacea. Labour exploitation did not disappear along with apartheid but actually intensified. As Marx wrote in On the Jewish Question, political emancipation may be important in its own right but it has no necessary connection to human emancipation. The transition in South Africa has been led by the anc, pulled by international partners in the direction of neoliberalism, resulting in a new national bourgeoisie and dragging in its train the Trade Union Federation and the Communist Party. The negotiations offered political and economic concessions, but these did not touch profit and the relations of production. There has been little challenge to labour exploitation in South Africa, nor a reshaping of land expropriation. The possibility of a transition to socialism is more or less off the table.
If a negotiated transition has its limits, it nonetheless offers more hope than the escalating domination of the Israeli state, driven by Zionist expansionism in pursuit of a Greater Israel. Bombed to the point of extermination, divided in all but their persistent identity, Palestinians have refused to accept defeat—a miracle in and of itself. So long as the us continues to pour in military support, the situation is one of catastrophic equilibrium. The expansion of the settler state might only be restrained by the military itself—a political coup that might hold in check the messianic extension of war. Even though land expropriation does not lead to the politics of compromise, is there any way that the current war could give way to a South African trajectory? Can Palestinians make themselves indispensable to Israeli society?
The forms of domination vary in the different Israeli-occupied territories. Palestinians within the Green Line, even though they are only 20 per cent of the population, are concentrated in certain sectors, such as construction and health services. During the Unity Intifada of 2021, a general strike revealed the solidarity between Palestinians embedded in very different political relations. Devastating Zionist oppression has called forth an associational power that develops its own leverage through disruption, especially when the oppressed feel they have nothing to lose.
If there is any glimmer of light in today’s situation, it is that the voices of Palestinians are finally ringing across the world. Wherever we are, transmitted through our phones we can see images of the inhumane brutality of the idf and the racist utterances of the Israeli governing class. There has been an outpouring of sympathy, outrage and grief for Palestinians. If, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the South African liberation movement represented the worldwide struggle against colonialism, today Palestinians represent and concentrate the global struggle against imperial rule. It is no accident that it was South Africa which brought the charge of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice—thereby passing the symbolic baton of global resistance to the Palestinians. In their struggle for freedom at unimaginable cost, the Palestinians may not only save themselves but in the process inspire others in their struggles. As W. E. B. Du Bois said in connection with John Brown’s desperate, aborted attempt to overthrow slavery in the us, the heavy cost of liberation is less than the price of continued repression.
13 November 2024