Daily Times

So finally, it happened. One of the leading organizations has survived the deep concussion spanning over seven decades to come alive suddenly. Amnesty International, the biggest non-government human rights organisation, has concluded that the state of Israel is committing crimes of apartheid against humanity. A step in the right direction, but too little, and too late.

Despite the laudability of its stand, Amnesty International has refused to comment upon the Israeli occupation of Palestine citing that being an apolitical organisation, its concern is limited to the human rights situations only as if human rights are apolitical abstractions, their violation happens in a void and can be dealt in isolation. “What is apolitical is political,” for every act of human being emanates from economics, which is politics. One can commiserate with human rights organisations for their limitations, almost all of them are the products of the cold war era and were created to decry the Soviet economic system where economic rights were preferred over the bourgeois liberal rights.

Amnesty has been lauded by the US and “international community” for condemning the People’s Republic of China on its human rights violations in Xinjiang province, largely a brainchild of Adrian Zens-a man allegedly backed by Soros’ Endowment of Democracy, who is neither familiar with Mandarin nor with the Turkic language spoken in Xinjiang. China’s human rights record may not be envious, but those who have killed hundreds and thousands of Muslims from Iraq to Syria and Libya to Afghanistan have no right to feel poetic convulsion in their entrails for the Muslims of Xinjiang.

What has changed in the last few months that has stirred the conscience of B’Taslem, Human Right Watch and now the Amnesty International to condemn the state of Israel, a settler-colonial state for its barbaric, grisly, and inhuman conduct perpetrated against the native population of Palestine from the last seven decades? Is it a wind of change blowing across the world? If it is so, does it allude to the beginning of a conflict among the imperialist powers, the inter and intra-capitalists’ rivalry described by Lenin or is it the outcome of ascending consciousness of the people of the world including the imperialist countries?

The bourgeois organisations neither wake up to the shrieks of the oppressed nor respond to the gravity and banality of the oppression perpetrated by the oppressor, but when such a rare phenomenon unfolds itself, it becomes a matter of immediate reflection, a signal that something is amiss. For the Palestinians, the authenticity of the report will not change anything, because “history” Marcuse says, “corrects its judgement too late. It does not help the victims and does not absolve their executioners.” “No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism,” Adorno says, “but there is one that leads from slingshot to megaton bomb,” and in the name of clash of civilizations, the leaders of the “civilised world” have proved it.

“The word apartheid” for Nancy Clark & William Worger, “was coined in the mid-1930s and was first used as a way of expressing the importance of Afrikaners maintaining a cultural identity separate from that of English-speaking Europeans in South Africa.” After the second world war, the word apartheid took new connotations. Afrikaner politicians, the melange of Dutch, French and German colonists, denounced the British imperialism for taking South Africa to war. Fearful of the British capitalists and the black majority demanding equal rights in 1948, Afrikaners imposed the policy of segregation and domination upon the natives. Backed by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel the regime found its legitimacy. The black majority was displaced and was forced to live in abject poverty away from the whites in Bantustans comprising several small, fragmented areas each separated from the other by several hundred kilometres, interspersed with white farmlands. They could enter the towns as cheap labourers only if they had work permits. The Bantustans declared independent were controlled by the white regime. West Bank in Palestine fits the description of a Bantustan, but Gaza under permanent Israeli siege is even worse.

Every settler-colonial society practices apartheid to stay afloat. The infamous “trail of tear” in the US, the massacre of Aborigines in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel and the coercive rule of white Afrikaners in South Africa all are the offshoots of the same tree called colonization. To give justification to its occupation, every settler colonial state dehumanizes the natives as savages, Israel has stereotyped the Palestinians as barbarians and terrorists, and once an individual or a country is labelled as terrorist west is likely to do anything to liquidate the “culprit.”

The apartheid perpetrated by white South Africa and Israel are different in many ways, but in essence, both are identical. The South African economy was largely dependent on cheap black labour, exploited to the hilt. Israel has no such qualms; it has pushed the Palestinians out of the production process into the ghettoes. Palestine has become a laboratory; Israel experiments the latest and lethal ammunitions upon the Palestinians before selling them to the other countries as tried and tested weapons. Dependent on cheap labour South African regime was in no position to do that. The ruling class of South Africa was economically homogenous, while the ruling class of Israel is polarized both economically and socially. Israel, being the most unequal society in the world is facing the disquiet of its own people, the Mizrachi, the Sephardi, the Russian Jews, and Druze standing on the lower rung of the economic ladder are demanding social and economic equality. They can only be kept on the leash by showing them the other, the terrorist Palestinians wanting to destroy Israel.

Besides, the threat of demographic change does not allow Israel to assimilate the African migrants. The majority is thrown into the ghettos in the poorest areas of south Tel Aviv, described as “concentration camps” by Reuven Rivlin, the former speaker of the Knesset. Along with ammunition, Israel has successfully exported its apartheid policy to the eastern Europeans to practice against the refugees and to the fascist Indian government, the latter is practising it against the Muslims of India. This makes Israeli apartheid more hideous and grislier.

Undaunted by the world’s opinion, Israel will continue to practice apartheid. As long as the US stayed behind, the white South African minority government continued to practice apartheid, finally when South African mercenaries were defeated by the Cubans and the freedom fighters of Marxist MPLA, the apartheid regime left Angola, Namibia, and ultimately South Africa. Regan continued to support the regime till its last breath, but the economy collapsed. The internal insurgency led by African National Congress and the Communist party made the survival of a handful of white plunderers impossible. Before the revolutionary impulse could free the people, the whites invited Mandela for dialogue and won back what they lost during the struggle.

Despite the criminal barter of Palestine by the impotent Arab monarchs and tinpot dictators the Palestinians are waging their struggle with bare hands and the sympathies of the people of those countries are behind them. The remarkable contribution of revisionist Israeli historians such as Ilan Pappe, Lenni Brenner, Finkelstein, Shlomo Sand, the journalists Max Blumenthal, Gideon Levy, Amara Hess, and “Jewish Voice for Peace,” an American Jewish organisation that have nudged the conscience of the world in slumber to wake up and feel the plight of Palestinians, has remained instrumental in shaking the Amnesty. To isolate Israel, the BDS movement is proving to be a weapon in the hands of non-conformists. The aura of Anti-Semitism is losing its impact, used frequently it is turning into a bit of mockery.

When the world is changing, the liberals in Pakistan are opting to support Zionism. It reminds me of a poem, “Vietnam is burning,” by Habib Jalib, written during the Vietnam war. He wrote, “In my country, we too have in-laws of Johnson/ their blood is white though their skin is black/ my countrymen save your country from these people/if you have some shame left in you/ Vietnam is burning,” so is Palestine.

The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com.