pragnificent:

maarnayeri:

ideologicalmonstrosity:

I’ve always had a problem with the comparison of Palestine to South Africa. Not that what’s happening in Israel isn’t apartheid, but it is an apartheid that doesn’t look anything like South Africa’s apartheid, and that needs to be acknowledged. 

Here’s my reason for disliking the comparison: Israel’s occupation of Palestine is much, much worse than White South Africa’s colonization of Black South Africans was. 

South Africa operated according to a colonialist logic. Israel operates according to a genocidal logic. 

White South Africa had an investment in the perpetuation of the Bantustans, the cordoned off slums in which Black South Africans were relegated to. Black labor sustained the Apartheid state — it was a source of steady, cheap labour that served as the lynchpin for the South African economy. That meant that Whites at least had an incentive to keep Black South Africans alive. Subjugated, imprisoned — but alive. 

Israel has no similar investment in Palestinian lives. 

Since 1993, since the fall of the Soviet Union, millions of Russian Jews have emigrated to Israel, providing the cheap labor the Israeli economy required to function — rendering the Palestinians, who had previously constituted Israel’s working class, utterly irrelevant to the state of Israel. Palestinians, for more than 20 years, have been a surplus population; nothing more than a nuisance to Israel and its economy. 

The grand project to wall in the Palestinians started around the same time as Palestinian labor lost its position in the Israeli economy. (The Israelis, of course, claim that the wall project started in response to terrorism. This is nonsense. Palestinian terrorism is the strawman trotted out each time Israel needs a villain to throw darts at. Their true motivation is political and economic.) Palestinian life turned from a hard but tolerable existence in slum-like conditions, to living in an open air prison. Things have only gotten harder, with each successive embargo, with each encroachment of Israeli settlers and their accompanying military apparatus on Occupied land. 

Israel is squeezing Palestine to death. What happened a few months ago in Palestine, Operation Protective Edge, as the Israelis are calling it, will happen again, and again, and again. Liberals are mistaken when they mourn the wars of the region, hoping beyond hope for diplomacy, praying for peace, pleading with “each side” to lay down its arms and embrace each other. What they fail to recognize is that a state founded on settler-colonialist logic is inherently primed to replace indigenous cultures and peoples with transplanted ones. There is no “normal” to return to, there is no baseline of peace that we can bounce back to when “tensions” die down. How things are is how they are meant to be. 

This is the Israeli strategy: Force Palestinians to leave their homeland, and kill the ones who choose to stay. 

Never forget that. 

"and that needs to be acknowledged"

Who the fuck are you? What is it with this website and its uncanny ability to attract the most pompous navel gazers who actually think a point that has been rehashed to death is fresh and profound when they turn it into a flaccid text post? Do you honestly believe you’re the first person to realize that.. *gasp* two oppressions that operate(d) on a different axis, socioeconomic history and biopolitical metrics, didn’t actually have the same trajectory? Are you joking? You can’t seriously be that invested in your pseudo intellectualism. Are you also that student who flails your arm violently when a professor asks a rhetorical question that everyone else in the lecture hall knew didn’t need an answer?

You don’t seem to understand (or perhaps you just don’t care) that both Palestinians and South Africans have commented on the parallels between their own experiences under settler colonialism and that in itself is denying autonomy and analytic agency to colonized subjects, which ironically is one of the most consistent tactics in the trajectory of colonialism.

One of the primary reasons (which seems to be lost on you, so I’ll iterate) that Palestinians and solidarity activists relay the parallels with South Africa is because its one of the main instances in which the colonized achieved their immediate liberation through economic pressure and boycott. When you insist that the two cannot be paralleled, what you’re telling activists for Palestine is that they don’t have hope with BDS because things are so much worse (which is still an illegitimate and very much contestable point). Does that sound like an honest and thorough political objective?

Aside from the clear apathy you feel towards settler colonialism in South Africa, your points about Palestine are also historically inaccurate. The idea that Palestinian labor isn’t exploited or a significant part of the current working class structure is only a conceivable idea if you’re solely focusing on Gaza and not the West Bank or what is now Israel. (x) (x) Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem account for a large percentage of textile and factory workers. So much of the internal Sodastream controversy stems from putting working class Palestinians in morally precarious situations by giving them either the option to eat and work in an exploitative setting or refuse to engage with a company that profits from settlements, but have even more limited work options. (x) Just to add on, primary exploitation of low level “Jewish labor” (for a lack of better terminology) did not start after the fall of the Soviet with Russian Jews. That quota has been filled since the 50’s by Mizrahi/MENA Jews. Excerpt below.

The Mizrahim who arrived in Israel landed in corrugated iron transit camps where Israeli officials attempted to strip them of their “Arabness” by getting rid of their “unpronounceable” Arab names and replacing them with good “Jewish” names.Most ended up in agricultural work, 10-12 hours a day in conditions of disease and squalor. Their high death rate was explained by one Zionist official as a “common and natural thing”. 

[..]

Today Mizrahim constitute around 50% of the Israeli population. Palestinian Arabs make up another 20%, so the total non-European population is about 70%. This rises to 90% with the inclusion of Palestinians from the occupied territories, making clear the colonial nature of Israel.

Mizrahim and Palestinian Arabs make up the vast majority of the Israeli working class, concentrated in lower paid sectors and largely ignored by the official trade union movement, the Histadrut. (x)

You’re basically asserting that one, working class Palestinians accounted for much of labor exploitation in Israel prior to the 80’s (which is wrong) and that they don’t account for much of low level labor currently (which is also wrong).

Here’s an excerpt from a report done on Israel and labor exploitation. “However, the hundreds of thousands of Russian and other Eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent still did not provide enough labor [..] employers began to look elsewhere, particularly from Thailand. [..] Between 1994-2000, following the start of the Oslo peace process, there were periods of relative calm in the region. There was also a considerable need for labor in Israel. [..] employers began to increasingly began to employ migrant workers, in addition to the Palestinians they employed (x).

Let’s not forget those thousands of non-Jewish migrant workers, mainly from South East Asia who are mistreated and subject to cruel treatment in Israel today and should be factored in when discussing labor exploitation. (x)

To be quite frank, your reasons for disliking the Palestine/South Africa comparison are not only irrelevant, baseless and completely besides the point, they’re pretty fucking gross too. Your ultimate qualm boils down to “Black Africans weren’t being blown off the face of the Earth and AT LEAST we have that”. Dress it up in whatever academic jargon you wish, but your entire post stems from the fundamentally flawed perspective is we should be grateful that colonialism turn into an all out genocide, the specific way that Palestinians are experiencing genocide.Except colonialism by its very aims and goals is genocide. Don’t mistake yourself. Black South Africans did endure genocide. Colonialism turns a full functioning community into an ugly configuration of hierarchy, oppression and making pariahs and ghosts of people and societies on their own land. Their cultural practices were barred and socially unacceptable. Many South Africans were forced to integrate with their colonizers to allow their children access into institutions and occupations that they themselves had no chance at.

By your own logic, we can also deduce that Palestinians are comparatively fortunate compared to Indigneous communities in North America because AT LEAST the vast majority of them weren’t instantly killed and AT LEAST they were turned into a forced diaspora of refugees all over the Levant, South America and beyond. So we can end that comparison too, yes? Completely ignore the solidarity, political strategizing forged between these two communities because of them. And while we’re at it, let’s nip the Jim Crow/Apartheid Wall comparisons because AT least Palestinians know their historical roots lie in Palestine, whereas Black Americans don’t. AT LEAST they weren’t trafficked for 400 hundred years. hell, Zionism hasn’t even been a concept with material impacts for 400 years. AT LEAST they weren’t shipped for six months to a full year at a time in the most heinous and unsanitary conditions possible.

How much longer do I compare what Palestinians haven’t been through before it actually disappears the very real urgency of what Palestinians do go through and how it plays into their struggle/resistance everyday? How much longer until I don’t see posts like this that treat oppression and suffering of people into a quantifiable olympic, instead of insisting upon treating the conditioning of millions into a contest of theory? This is such poor and counterproductive praxis on numerous grounds and I’m hard pressed to believe that anyone who genuinely champions for justice would make such crass and vile comparisons like this.

^^^