Ethnic Hegemony, Negotiations and Transitions to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on South Africa and Israel

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By Subithra Moodley-Moore University of Stellenbosch

Published in African Security Review Vol 7 No 5, 1998

Among multi-ethnic states, Israel and South Africa were subjected to pariah status by the international community due to their intractable political stances vis-à-vis their subordinate groups.¹ This pariah status was due to the fact that both Palestinians and blacks held the moral high ground in world opinion and were seen as being oppressed and excluded on the grounds of ethnicity. However, despite the fact that both countries provided great moral and political challenges for conflict resolution, it has long been taboo in the West to compare them. Nothing has so rankled Israeli Jews or Jews in the diaspora as the comparison of Israel with South Africa. Due to both ideological bias and political convenience, the Western academic world, while passionately condemning apartheid, refused to extend the same critical evaluation to Israel. Any analogy with South Africa was seen to delegitimise the Jewish state and destroy the assertion that Israel was unique. Israel’s powerful international supporters, especially those in the United States, needed to believe in the uniqueness of the Jewish state’s existence, otherwise the financial base of its support could not be justified.

Admittedly, there are major differences between the two countries, among others, different demographic realities, differing degrees of dependence on and exploitation of indigenous labour and different founding ideologies. These will be elucidated before expanding on the similarities.

In all ethnically stratified societies, demographic trends are of great importance since they affect the relative political strengths of different ethnic groups in obvious ways. Perhaps the most important difference between the two states was the demographic status of the dominant group that controlled the state. In Israel, Jews are the majority, constituting more than 85 per cent of the population. Even including the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, Jews still had a majority of nearly sixty per cent. In South Africa, whites and, more so Afrikaners, were a small and dwindling minority.

This difference had a seemingly paradoxical effect. Israel enfranchised the fifteen per cent Israeli Arabs into a more credible facsimile of a parliamentary democracy than South Africa was ever willing to concede to its black population. On the other hand, South Africa seemed, if not liberal, at least pragmatically more flexible (compared to Israel) in its willingness to partition territory in order to maintain an area of white supremacy where blacks would be politically, but not economically or residentially, excluded.

The options available to both South Africa and Israel were either to have the enemies within or outside of the state boundaries. South Africa initially chose to try to externalise die swart gevaar (the black threat)as far as possible, starting from a more drastically unfavourable demographic ratio. In a sense, Israel started experiencing a ‘Bantustan’ dilemma in reverse. Because Israel could not hope to ‘Bantustanise’ the West Bank and Gaza, it felt it had to annex it, but annexation meant ruling indefinitely over a hostile colonised population. Subsequently, Israel’s solution was to defeat democracy by denying democracy.

A related difference that affected the respective policies towards the subordinate groups was the degree of dependence on Arab and black labour. Initially, the goal of Zionism was not to exploit the Palestinian population but to ‘replace’ it. This distinction was not as sharp as it first appeared, and became increasingly blurred.² The Israeli economy soon became dependent on Arab labour, both to fill the positions for unskilled labour and the low paid jobs rejected by Jewish workers, as well as to provide upward mobility for the less privileged Oriental Jews (Sephardim).³

The Israeli social structure today resembles an advanced capitalist society highly dependent on migrant Arab labour. Despite the attempts by Jewish leaders throughout the ideological heydays of Zionism to purge foreign labour from Israel, the notion of ‘avoda shehora’ (black work) became synonymous with Arab work, reflecting a systematic policy of state labour control and inherent racism on the part of the Israeli state.

In contrast, labour exploitation in South Africa was the hallmark of conquest from the arrival of the first white settlers in 1652. Black labour was indispensable in critical areas of the economy during apartheid. One of the central issues in South Africa was raising the affluence and protecting the prosperity of the ruling group. To this end, the government pragmatically rearranged the logistics of domination and labour control in order to fill serious personnel shortages.

The different demographic ratios in Israel and South Africa shaped the respective policies towards subordinate groups and the degree of dependence on Arab and black labour. Part of the Verwoerdian vision of apartheid was the idea of exclusion through partition. Conversely, the post-1967 undoing of partition through military conquest in Israel, created a quasi-colonial economy in which increasing numbers of Palestinians were integrated as an exploited underclass.

A third major difference concerns the founding ideology. The ‘historical specificity’ of Zionism appeared to render it a unique ethnic, separatist and national movement, rather than a classic colonial endeavour. To most Israeli social scientists, Zionism represented a Jewish liberation movement. Jewish settlers came, i.e. ‘returned’, to a land to which they allegedly had historical-national ties, even though they only assumed formal control of the land after the proclamation of the state in 1948. The depiction of Israel as a colonial state was categorically rejected. At most, some would concede to Zionist colonisation: "the Zionists came, not to dominate the inhabitants of Palestine, but to control sufficient land to facilitate the creation of an independent Jewish society."⁴

There was no comparable preconceived and elaborate ideology which supported Dutch colonisation in South Africa. The South African state traced its roots to a commercial endeavour on the part of one of the world’s first great multinational corporations — the Dutch East India Company. The company had established an outpost in the Cape as an easily accessible and defensible refreshment station for its passing ships. A little more than a century later these initial objectives were superseded by a number of structural changes in a way no one had foreseen in 1652. The original small outpost had grown into an unwieldy colony of Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers, who expropriated land from the local inhabitants through unequal exchange, chicanery and force.

In contrast to political Zionism, Afrikaner nationalism and ideology developed, not only in response to the challenge of the indigenous elements, but also to British attempts to acculturate them out of existence as a separate ethnic group. It would be misleading, however, to overlook the influence that the colonial era left on Zionism. Zionism inherited the colonial spirit of superiority, paternalism and civilising mission which Europeans had traditionally held towards Asians and Africans.⁵ The roots of Zionism were overwhelmingly European in origin and inspiration. Historically Zionism represented the last wave of European overseas colonisation.

Under apartheid, white skin became conterminous with Christianity, power and privilege. South Africa was clearly racist, in the sense of fostering social and legal discrimination based on physical traits, such as skin colour and descent. In the case of Israel, despite a 1975 resolution by the United Nations branding Zionism as racism, exclusion was in reality not based on physical or phenotypic traits. For inclusion, the definition of who was Jewish was one of biological descent in the mother’s line. Israel and South Africa used different criteria to establish discrimination, though many of the actual practices and attitudes were markedly similar.

Claims to indigenous status, however, are beside the point in analysing political systems. They have been manipulated to establish the legitimacy of ethnocratic regimes. But there is no logical linkage between these claims and the objective characteristics of these regimes as systems of political domination and economic exploitation. These relations of structurally and legally entrenched inequality, domination and exploitation, based on ethnic or racial membership, defined the colonial nature of the South African and Israeli states, not the nativity or ‘foreignness’ of their ruling groups to the territory they dominated. The similarities between the two states will be examined below.

The superficial picture of both countries presented in the late 1980s by the mass media was strikingly similar: stone-throwing, tyre-burning, street barricades, consumer boycotts, school and university closures, press censorship, victimisation of ringleaders, states of emergency, attacks on so-called ‘collaborators’, unwillingness to recognise or negotiate with ‘terrorists’, hostile neighbours, and a growing right-wing trend in political elections.

Notwithstanding the above differences, the historical parallels between the two countries have been striking. Both were products of classical 19th century European nationalist movements. Both inherited an internal colonial empire at the same historic moment when they established themselves as nations, coincidentally in 1948. Both were considered as strategic assets for the British empire. Both adopted a pro-American foreign policy. Finally, both had similar economic institutions with highly oligopolistic market structures, heavy government involvement and rigid labour market segmentation along racial or ethnic lines.

The legitimising ideology of the Zionist and apartheid states was fundamentally similar. Both saw themselves as the ‘chosen people’. Like the Israelis, Afrikaners came to refer to themselves in the 20th century as the ‘chosen people’ and their country as the ‘promised land’.⁶ Zionists argued that Jews should be viewed as having eternal and exclusive title to the land of Israel, a title conferred by God to Abraham and his seed as stated in Genesis 12. This biblical history notwithstanding, political Zionism was a 19th century colonial movement with the goal of finding an exclusive Jewish state. For more secular members of the dominant groups, there was a non-religious version of this nationalist ideology: the land was theirs by right of occupation and conquest; they are a nation surrounded by enemies and they have to do whatever it takes to preserve their identity and defend themselves.

It is difficult to place Zionism within any single ideological construct. The central impulse for Zionism was Judaism, and Judaism is a ‘covenant’ religion. The covenant changed from age to age, but a contract between ‘the people’ and God was always in the central position.⁷ The idea of ‘chosenness’ has always been an important element of Judaism for it is not a universal religion, as is Christianity or Islam, but a national one, and is tied to a ‘land’. Since its inception, Zionism aimed to establish a Jewish homeland in which Jews would exercise their right to self-determination as a people.

It was only the rise of European nationalism during the second half of the 19th century that provided the ideological thrust for political Zionism. Liberalism and nationalism then combined to create the beginnings of a new Jewish self-awareness. Political Zionism substituted the traditional Orthodox religious self-identity with the secular self-identity of the Jews as a nation.⁸ This modernised version of the original Zionist mystique, stripped of its initial religious content and remoulded in the spirit of contemporary nationalism, became what is now called political Zionism. The sanctity attached to the Jewish people in the religious sense is transferred to the Jewish people in the ethnic sense and correspondingly to their history, their land, and their state.

Both countries imposed a distinction in identity between the ‘in-group’ and the ‘other’ population under its control. Both governments officially labelled individuals by race, religion and/or ethnicity and entrenched these ascriptive descriptions both within the law and the administrative apparatus. State symbols and institutions reflected this ethnic hierarchy, and expressed the symbols and aspirations of the dominant group only. Laws reinforced religious preferences and racial privileges and so served the function of legally excluding virtually all members of the subordinate groups from full civic participation. Arabs in Israel were Israeli citizens with equal voting rights. But common citizenship did not imply equal rights for Arabs. Three fundamental laws defined the state preference for Jews over Arabs:

The Law of Return, enacted in 1950, incorporated the fundamental ideology of Zionism: all Jews had the inalienable right to immigrate to Israel. The official exclusion of Palestinians in exile followed from the sectarian nature of Israel as a Jewish state. The state perceived of itself as the ‘ingatherer’ of all Jews in the diaspora, but the immigration of Arabs was prohibited.



The Law of Nationality (1952) gave all persons who are accorded ‘Jewish nationality’ in the Law of Return the right to claim "Israeli nationality by return" automatically upon immigration, without formal procedures.



The World Zionist Organisation/Jewish Agency (Status) Law (1952) implicitly imposed legal, economic, political and social discrimination against Arabs by delegating a wide range of national services to Zionist institutions which were exclusively for Jews only.

There is a crucial distinction between the 750 000 Israeli Arabs who remained after the State of Israel was created in 1948 and were granted Israeli citizenship and voting rights, and the more than 1,6 million disenfranchised Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who were under Israeli military rule between 1967 and the handover in 1995 to the Palestinian Authority headed by Arafat. Despite citizenship, Israeli Arabs belong to an ethnic democracy in which, at best, they were partial citizens. In the Occupied Territories, the case for the Herrenvolk categorisation is much clearer. It can be argued that the Palestinians did not have the vote because they were not a part of Israel. However, de facto annexation did occur as Israel used the Territories as a captive labour pool for building and agricultural work in Israel, and as a consumer market for Israeli goods. The West Bank also provided two other indispensable resources: land and water.

The Occupied Territories were the bitter fruit of the 1967 war harvested by Israel. No other policy of the Israeli government has been as potentially subversive and so threatened to undermine Israel’s democratic values. The ideological debate within Israel over the incorporation of the West Bank (with the threat of an Arab majority within one or two generations) has expressed the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Zionism: a Jewish state and a democratic state. If Israel were to absorb the 1,6 million Palestinians as citizens, Israel would no longer remain Jewish. If Israel continues to deny Palestinians their political rights, it would betray its democratic political ideals. This was the dilemma that annexation posed for Israel.

The character of both Israel and South Africa was determined by the processes employed in acquiring, occupying and maintaining control of the land, whether through purchase, force, legal enactment or judicial interpretation. Israel took systematic steps to strengthen land acquisition through absentee laws and expropriation. The Jewish National Fund was created to purchase land and lease it to Jews only, resulting in the Israeli state and the Jewish Fund owning 92 per cent of land by 1990. Similarly, through the Natives Land Acts of 1916 and 1936, 87 per cent of the land in South Africa was reserved for the exclusive use of whites.

It is not only a matter of land ownership: social separation was pervasive in both societies. By law, Arabs had separate schools, mass media, departments in government offices, and residential areas. Ninety per cent of Israeli Arabs live in three areas: the Galilee, Little Triangle and the Negev, and the remaining ten per cent live in mixed towns but separate neighbourhoods. Mixed marriages and friendships are rare.⁹

Similar to the exclusion of Arabs to immigrate under the Law of Return, in South Africa, only whites could de facto receive permission to immigrate, apart from temporary foreign migrant workers. In the case of South Africa, white status could not be acquired. The Population Registration Act of 1950 cited community acceptance as the basis of assigning racial classification. In 1962, the criterion was changed to include appearance, and in 1967, descent was given new emphasis in designating racial category. People were forced to be a member of a specific racial category, which were all given permanence through the application of the Population Registration Act of 1950.

Most democratic states that are ethnically or racially divided can be classified into one of two distinct types: majoritarian and consociational. In the majoritarian type, as exemplified by the United States, ethnicity is privatised. The state conducts nationbuilding which forges a common language, identity and nationalism. It provides conditions for acculturation and assimilation, but lets the ethnic groups retain or drop their subcultures. The cornerstone of society is the individual based on merit.

In consociational democracies, ethnicity is accepted as a principle for the organisation of the state. Ethnic groups are officially recognised and granted certain rights. Ethnicity is thus institutionalised and each group has its own élite and the state is run by an élite cartel which is engaged in politics of accommodation and compromise, e.g. Switzerland and Belgium. Majoritarian and consociational democracies have a set of democratic institutions and an ethnically neutral state in common. But is it possible to have a democracy in a plural society in which the state sides with one of the constituent groups? Writing in the South African context, Van den Berghe offered the concept of ‘Herrenvolk democracy’;¹⁰ Greenberg offers the term the ‘ethnic state’¹¹ and Smooha the ‘ethnic democracy’.¹²

Herrenvolk democracies are qualitatively distinct from all other regimes, because they possess a powerful polarising dynamic which is rooted in their very nature. Gunnar Myrdal¹³ recognised the American dilemma as, indeed, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and others had before him: How could a country exist being half free and half enslaved? The answer was by not recognising the common humanity between masters and slaves. A democratic regime confined to the dominant group must dehumanise the rest of the population, because only by doing so can it justify permanent denial of rights and exclusion from privilege in its own eyes.

Ethnic democracies are thus extreme cases of ‘plural societies’: societies deeply divided into ethnic, linguistic, religious or racial segments that coexist within a common economy and polity, but do not intermingle. In Israel and South Africa, where the ruling groups adhered to an ethos of liberty, equality and fraternity, they must restrict the boundary of human decency to the dominant group or else live in constant conflict with themselves. A double standard operated. Both South Africa and Israel developed an amazingly similar arsenal of legal and extralegal avoidance mechanisms in order to preserve their extraordinary political hybrid — a parliamentary democracy for themselves and a colonial tyranny for blacks and Palestinians.

Unlike plural societies with power-sharing arrangements between different segments of the population, Israel and apartheid South Africa represented ethnic states. The raison d’être of the ethnic state is the preservation of the dominant group’s hegemony. Political identity is defined in terms of the distinctive attributes of the dominant group. This unavoidably creates a separate and necessarily inferior social and political status for subordinate groups who are also citizens of the same state. Apartheid South Africa was a white state and Israel is a Jewish state. The need for an analytical category to encompass such states is well demonstrated by the inadequacy of the other conventional political labels. In both countries, laws drawn in ethnic terms regulated all aspects of life from labour mobility to differential expenditures on health, education and welfare. The result is unequal life chances for the dominant and subordinate.

In neither country did the subordinate groups share a consensus with the values of the dominant group. The Parsonian prerequisites for social order such as ‘unifying symbols’ and ‘a common belief system’ — for example, common historical roots, rituals, holidays, national anthem, flag, and the interpretation of historical claims in school texts — were entirely absent.¹⁴ Both Israel and South Africa, as ethnic states, encountered the dilemma of how to govern without consensus. Despite numerous policies which adversely affected their respective subordinate groups, both countries had managed to maintain relative stability and order. Until the 1976 Soweto uprising and the Intifadah of 1988, there was no sustained political action on any significant level which posed a threat to Zionist or Afrikaner hegemony. Both countries were able to exact compliance without consent. As beleaguered ethnic states, both countries operated rationally within a framework of domination to protect the collective interest of the dominant group.

As beleaguered ‘settler states’, demographically outnumbered by indigenous and surrounding populations, both converged on similar political solutions, developing as ‘ethnic democracies’. In both cases, political power was monopolised by a self-defined ethnic group which legally and categorically excluded all other groups from equal participation, while at the same time trying to rule itself through the institutions of a parliamentary democracy with free multiparty elections and an independent judiciary with respect for the rule of law. The economic development in both countries was shaped by a war economy with frequent armed conflicts, large military and internal security budgets and major weapon development programmes.

In both countries, the dominant groups were split into two main ethnic groups. In Israel, the Jews were split between Ashkenazi and Sephardi (Oriental) communities. This ethnic cleavage is quite salient, although it is moderated by the external threat of the Arabs. In South Africa, the whites were split between the Afrikaners and the English. Tensions between English and Afrikaners have always been kept within clearly defined bounds, in the realisation that common white interests far outweighed cultural animosities. Their disagreements were primarily tactical. Both countries operated within a structure of survival politics which was characterised by the pervasive militarisation of all aspects of life, the need to develop security consciousness and a siege mentality.

Apartheid was affirmative action for Afrikaners in South Africa, just as the Jewish Labour Movement was protectionist for Jews. This goal of Jewish colonisation was the conquest of labour, i.e. the replacement of Arabs by Jewish workers on Jewish-owned farms. Early Jewish colonisation had a conscious policy not to exploit Arab labour, but to exclude it. But many special features of Labour Zionist colonisation were not a result of its purportedly non-colonial state, but merely policies aimed at compensating the worker settler immigrants for the adverse conditions prevailing in the land and labour markets of Palestine. For example, Jewish housewives were asked to boycott Arab products in the pre-state days.

Israeli Jews and Afrikaners, within their circumscribed polities, were both governing without consensus. Unjust societies, however, are not necessarily unstable ones, lacking legitimacy merely increased the costs. Providing the subordinate groups were rewarded through economic incentives, submission was seen to be attainable. In both countries, a common political strategy was the co-optation of the élite, albeit limited with a highly questionable success rate. In both states, the ruling ethnic group deliberately and systematically created political institutions intended to ensure an effective monopoly for whites and Jews into the indefinite future. Even the token power-sharing in both societies did not invalidate this statement. In South Africa, there was never effective power-sharing, not even in the creation of powerless and segregated coloured and Indian Parliaments in 1983. In comparison, Israel superficially seemed more liberal, in that Arabs who stayed in pre-1967 Israel were granted an unqualified right to vote and to have Arab representation in the Knesset.

The governments viewed the subordinates as enemies of the state. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Israel, were respectively banned and their meetings outlawed. In both countries, the subordinate groups were also excluded from military service. Israeli Arabs were barred from all areas of employment which purported to deal with ‘security’ issues. ‘National security’ was continually evoked as the highest priority and served conveniently to veil discriminatory policies against them. Israeli Arabs were easy and automatic targets for distrust, scrutiny and restrictions.¹⁵

Both Israel and South Africa did everything in their power to use religion or language to create, foster and magnify division among the Palestinians and the blacks. This was done in South Africa by the creation of separate Bantustans and schools for the different black language groups. In Israel, the state ascribed different statuses to Muslim, Druze and Christian Arabs based on presumed loyalty or disloyalty to the state. For example, the Druze were considered to be ‘non-Arab’ and their traditional leaders were co-opted. Druze youth were allowed to enter the military service, an option that was closed to Israeli Arabs.

State-sponsored discrimination was particularly glaring in four key domains that will be examined briefly in sequence: enforcement of endogamy, residential segregation, school segregation, and social security and services. Turning first to endogamy, as stated earlier, Israel denied the possibility of civil marriages and thereby forced religious communities to marry within themselves. In South Africa, it took the form of the Immorality Act of 1927 and 1950 and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1951 (which were repealed in 1985).

Residential segregation, with its accompanying discrimination in employment and education, was probably the linchpin of Herrenvolk control in both Israel and South Africa. In both countries, nearly all residential areas were either white/Jewish or black/Arab, although South Africa had an elaborate division of white, African, Asian and coloured residential areas.

Both societies ran a nearly completely segregated educational system, and explicitly rejected any notion of equality between the segregated systems. Israeli Arabs suffered under glaring educational inequalities of funding, quality of buildings, expenditure per pupil and teacher qualifications as compared to Jews. In South Africa, the education system was divided into the four groups and further divided into the different language groups, with similar glaring funding inequalities.

In both societies, the state was a gigantic sponsor of public housing, all of which were ethnically/racially segregated. In both societies, the state was a massive source of inequality in the provision of public utilities, sewage, water, roads, etc. between areas occupied by the dominant and subordinate groups.

The economic principles of an ethnic state were in flagrant conflict with the dictates of economic efficiency in both Israel and South Africa. Both states advocated the primacy of politics over economics, which entailed enormous state presence. Both states were essentially modern, ‘first world’, welfare states in the provision of pensions and disability benefits as far as the dominant groups were concerned, but colonial regimes for the others. However, in both countries, the propaganda machinery boasted that their non-assimilated subordinates were substantially better off economically than their counterparts outside their borders.

Thus far, the concepts of ethnic democracy and Herrenvolk democracy have been used interchangeably to explain the many political points of convergence between two superficially different societies with quite distinct histories, cultures, demographic ratios and geographical settings. In both countries, self-defined ethnic groups subordinated all other groups while ruling themselves in parliamentary democratic fashion.

It can be said that, as ‘ethnic states’, Israel and apartheid South Africa shared the following characteristics:

The state was controlled by a closed group in which membership was ascribed by biological descent, whether ethnically or racially defined.



Both shared a history of military conquest facilitated by technological superiority in armaments.



Economic, political and social discrimination was legally entrenched and supported by state coercion.



All forms of interaction between the ethnic groups were defined and circumscribed by law.



A culture and language were retained (Afrikaans was created and Hebrew was revived), distinct from the traditions of the region it dominates, irrespective of their length of residence in those parts.

It has been emphasised that, for the rulers, democracy tended to aggravate the nature of tyranny for the ruled. The democratic features of Israel and South Africa were usually adduced in mitigation of their more obviously repressive components. This, it is suggested, is both naive and mistaken. Ethnic democracies generate inherently unique and intractable forms of group conflict. By making exclusive claims to a territory, and basing these claims ultimately on biological descent, physical occupation and political domination, Herrenvolk democracies produce a dynamic of polarisation which operates to prevent both compromise and reconciliation. Recognition of each other means that one of the "most severe motives in battle" is missing: "survival."¹⁶

Ethnic hegemony, however, did entail certain costs, both material and psychological. In the case of Israel, the loss of moral credit stood out most clearly. Once considered the ‘conscience of mankind’, Israel’s pretentions to moral superiority have been stripped and its image ranked among the ruthless polities in the world. South Africa, by formally implementing apartheid as a state policy, never enjoyed anything approaching the moral credibility of Israel and, as such, was the target of international boycotts and sanctions.

Having established the similarities between Israel and apartheid South Africa, the factors which led to negotiations need to be highlighted.

What were the major factors, internal, regional and international, which made it appropriate for decision-makers in both countries to recognise the legitimacy of and enter into negotiations with their longtime internal enemies — the ANC and PLO?

The South African state could easily have mobilised the necessary power to perpetuate the status quo but, by the late 1980s, regional, internal and international factors contributed to the gradual debilitation of the state. In the case of Israel, after five wars and incalculable bitterness, the September 1993 handshake of Rabin and Arafat on the lawn of the White House in Washington can only be described as an historic breakthrough. At last, the PLO recognised the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security and the government of Israel had decided to recognise the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.

South Africa had every reason to be confident in the 1960s. It was in the company of other white minority regimes, such as Rhodesia, Portuguese-ruled Angola and Mozambique, and South West Africa was still in its hands. This complacent scenario was shattered in the 1970s. The 1974 coup d‘état in Lisbon forced Portugal to withdraw its colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique. This was soon followed by the liberation of Rhodesia which led to the independence of Zimbabwe. In South West Africa, South West African Peoples’ Organisation (SWAPO) increased its guerrilla attacks against the state. The events were of catalytic importance and changed the whole directional influence of public affairs. In particular, the independence of Angola and Mozambique forced South Africans to rethink their strategies. South Africa feared the changing political scene in Southern Africa, hence its destabilisation tactics of neighbouring states.

Israel had engaged in a full-scale invasion of Lebanon which was intended to break the power of the PLO. This led to an unprecedented internal crisis of morale within Israel and the growth of the Peace Now movement. Young Jewish soldiers had to get psychological counselling because many of them were asked to break the arms of stone throwers (similar to the situation of young white soldiers in the townships — called to fight a civil war). Israel was also aware of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and it would have to reckon with this influencing the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. After the peace treaties with Egypt and later with Jordan, it became clear even to the Arab counterparts that their economies were not entirely separate and they would only get US trade, investment and technology if they made peace with Israel.

The 1976 Soweto riots provided the impetus which set South Africa on a downward spiral. It was the first major event after the 1960 shooting at Sharpeville which, yet again, drew the world’s attention to the brutality of the South African apartheid system. Ostensibly protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction as opposed to the preferred ‘bread and butter’ English language, it acted as a catalyst for other more deep-seated grievances. Thus it became impossible for the Botha administration to continue with its old policy indefinitely. The question posed by politicians changed from whether to include blacks, to how to include them.

In Israel, the Intifadah broke out a decade later in December 1987. Explanations focused on possible influences, like the successful hang-glider penetration of Israel’s northern border a month before in November 1987, which punctured the myth of Israeli invincibility, and the incident in the Gaza Strip when an Israeli truck driver allegedly swung his vehicle directly into the path of a van loaded with Palestinian labourers returning from work in Israel, killing four. This incident sparked demonstrations in Jabalaya refugee camp on 9 December which spread in diverse forms and varying intensity to other areas of the Gaza and soon thereafter to the West Bank.¹⁷

A deeper explanation for the uprising was the stalemate that characterised the mid-1980s. The sense was that nothing was moving on their behalf — instead, all they could see was the relentless expansion of Israeli settlements linked with the expropriation of land. Symbolised perhaps most by stone-throwing youngsters, the Intifadah brought the Palestinians and their plight to the fore, in the media, onto the international community agenda, and onto the Israeli agenda. Israel’s failure to re-establish law and order in the territories and the moral dilemmas associated with this, were additional and important thrusts to negotiate on the Israeli side. The effects of the Intifadah raised the cost of military occupation and thus convinced the occupiers to review its policies. For many Israelis, it confirmed that there were too many Arabs to be contained. Together with the Occupied Territories, Arabs accounted for forty per cent of the population.

The Intifadah began a new phase in the development of Palestinian nationalism. It shifted the focus of attention and the centre of decision-making from leaders in the diaspora — Arafat and the PLO — to the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza. It represented a new generation and a new leadership cadre — younger unknown Palestinians — as opposed to the high profile political élite and traditional notables. The uprising put pressure on parties in the Arab Israeli conflict to reopen the question of the Palestinian state.

The security élite came to the realisation that the Israeli security apparatuses could not subdue the Palestinian Intifadah or obliterate the national aspirations that started it. The Intifadah did not defeat Israel militarily or cripple its economy, but it spurred Israeli leaders onto new directions. In both cases, the ongoing civil wars exacted a heavy psychological toll.

Paradoxically, Botha’s reform policy and his famous Rubicon speech unleashed the most furious and sustained black uprising in South Africa’s history. Domestic resistance took on new proportions. The growing strength of the mass democratic movement challenged the stability and legitimacy of the state. As De Tocqueville has astutely observed in another context, the most perilous moment for a bad government was when it sought to mend its ways.

A very important change in the leadership of South Africa provided a window of opportunity for transformation in 1989. Botha had a stroke and was succeeded by F W de Klerk who ushered in a new era of Afrikaner leadership. For the first time it was publicly acknowledged that apartheid was a ‘political mistake’. De Klerk renewed the relationship with the exiled ANC, which his predecessor had started, culminating in the release of eight high profile political prisoners. By unbanning the ANC and releasing Mandela from prison in 1990, the group’s legitimacy was restored. After the State of Emergency was lifted, the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) also emerged.

The Oslo Accord of 1993 led to agreements between Israel and the PLO for mutual recognition and plans for Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho. What is notable about this agreement is that it was the first official recognition by Israel of the PLO as an organisation which all previous Israeli governments had labelled as ‘terrorist’, had shunned and had banned its activities in the Occupied Territories. This was tantamount to Israeli recognition of Palestinian political identity. It constituted the first steps in a process of peacemaking between enemies who have long de-legitimised each other and their respective histories. This de-escalated more than a century of conflict by reversing its confrontational dynamic.

Many Palestinians were disenchanted with the moderate tactics of The Unified Leadership of the Uprising (an underground organisation representing Fatah, Popular Front, Democratic Popular Front and the Palestinian communists). This resulted in an increasing number of restless inhabitants in the territories who turned to the fundamentalists for direction and solace. Consequently, Palestinian sympathy towards Hamas was enhanced in 1992. Although the Israeli government deported about 400 Palestinians to Lebanon, this resulted in a reconciliation between the PLO leadership and Hamas. Secondly, there was an outbreak of vigilantism in which small bands of youth took the law into their own hands in seeking to punish traitors or collaborators, among Palestinians suspected of being informers for or agents of Israeli intelligence. In South Africa, too, there was a clear generational difference between the youth who were not prepared to wait for incremental changes or to work ‘within the system’. Anyone who was remotely seen to be collaborators were punished by ‘kangaroo courts’ and by ‘necklacing’.

As late as the early 1990s, there was still a fight to retain white hegemony. Like the Israelis, Afrikaners were not united on the issue of reform. Sanctions led to the isolation of South Africa. Many South Africans were tired of the economic and cultural ostracisation. They were ready to improve their international image. Financial sanctions led to the continuous deterioration of the economy (South Africa’s bankruptcy in 1985 and the loan moratorium shut down the economy). Uncertainty about the future led to the cessation of investment and a period of negative growth.

In Israel, economic conditions deteriorated and unemployment increased in the Occupied Territories. The economic élite supported change. The creation of export-oriented high technology sectors have grown considerably and have led to the development of Israeli professional and middle classes. These strata felt confident to compete in the open market, both domestically and internationally. They no longer required protection. This new élite have been the champions of economic liberalisation and also of integration of Israel’s economy with the world (and regional markets). As long as Israeli Palestinian conflicts destabilised the region, Israel was boycotted by multi-national corporations (MNCs) and remained outside the international investment circuit. Peacemaking was the Israeli way of gaining security, as well as access to a more global economy. As is amply demonstrated by historical experience, economic liberalisation, as long as it occurs under conditions of relative prosperity, is best served by parallel political liberalisation. In the Israeli context, this would require not only peace with the Palestinians, but universalisation of the citizenship structure as well, in order to reduce ethnic discontinuities which interfere with the smooth operation of the markets. The settlement ethos became anachronistic and was viewed as an obstacle to this strata’s economic and political interests. Consequently, a more liberal discourse was ascendant which questioned the wisdom of expansion of settlements in the Territories.

The 1980s ushered in a global movement towards democracy. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the coup in the Soviet Union, and the pro-democracy movement in China led to international pressure from the media and foreign journalists. All supported the thrust towards a ‘democratic movement’ by the early 1990s.

The combination of international sanctions and international involvement in South Africa isolated the country. The growing military budget and sanctions contributed to the deep recession. Unemployment skyrocketed and this raised the resistance of blacks without work. Foreign investment pulled out. The growing international isolation (sanctions, disinvestment, and lack of foreign capital) and instability due to repression and violence contributed to the negotiated settlement.

Similarly in Israel, the Bush and Baker team was able to put intense pressure on the Shamir government in 1991-2 by threatening to veto US$10 billion in loan guarantees which were desperately needed to settle Jewish immigrants from Russia. This unprecedented pressure by the US on its client state reflected American dissatisfaction with the pace of post-Cold War reform in Israel.

Shimon Peres had outlined some of the imperatives for peace.¹⁸ Israel was suffering economically because of the political situation. Israel spends fifteen per cent of its gross national product on defence, compared with one per cent in Japan and seven per cent in the US. Israel is paying a heavy price for the economic boycott ($2-$3 billion per year). Although willingly undertaken, it is also paying enormous costs for the unique task of absorbing the current flow of immigrants to Israel.

The end of the Cold War had a powerful effect. It was factored into both sides of the equation about the balance of forces with its end intensifying uncertainty about the future. It was the power shift in international relations that conclusively introduced an era of negotiations and democracy in South Africa. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ANC lost its socialist platform and financial support. With the end of the Cold War, the South African government could no longer justify its motives for the banning and imprisonment of the so-called ‘communist-influenced’ parties. Neither could it justify its continuing military involvement and ‘total onslaught’ strategy on its borders, by claiming that the new governments of Southern Africa were supported by the communists.

The collapse of communism and the fall of Soviet Union took away the raison d’être of the ‘total onslaught’ mentality in South Africa. Similarly, Israel entered a post-Zionist era where the traditional values of the colonial society — especially settlements and long term military service, but perhaps immigration as well — are likely to be seen as an unnecessary burden for individuals in a society no more under the threat of war.

In South Africa, there was growing pressure from outside to end apartheid, free the political prisoners and negotiate their future together. The internationalisation of the regional conflict and the sanctions of stronger global forces heightened the need for compromise. Accommodation became not only advantageous, but imperative.

Both countries had pressures from the political right and left. Botha and De Klerk felt that they should deal with Mandela, since he was a moderate with integrity. Similarly, the Rabin/Peres government recognised that it ought to settle for Arafat or else face someone more radical. Right-wing opposition in Israel is significantly more important than in South Africa, where Rabin’s Labour government did not hold a majority. Rabin was the first Israeli Prime Minister to acknowledge that they needed to deal with the PLO.

During the years of the Intifadah, all members of the governing coalition, including Rabin and Peres (who later changed their minds), and Shamir and Sharon, equally shared in the delusion that a democracy could crush a national uprising against colonial rule by stone-throwing youths by force alone. It became clear that it could not be done; neither by ‘breaking the bones’ of stone-throwing youth as Rabin proposed, nor by the expulsion or detaining in military prisons of hundreds of militants.

Peres was astute in recognising that, as secular politicians, both he and Arafat were on common ground. Both feared religious fundamentalism. Peres could count on Arafat as Chairman of the Palestinian Authority to police the West Bank. Both Peres and Netanyahu judged Arafat alike with one major exception: Peres thought that Palestinians would be the victims, while Netanyahu thought that Israeli Jews would be the victims.

For Mandela, the only viable route to peace in South Africa was a settlement that reconciled the fears of those in the system with the legitimate demands of the liberation struggle.

Why was Arafat, who was boldly intransigent in the past, ready to deal? He had backed the wrong horse in the Gulf War and alienated his benefactors among the Arab oil states. What really opened up substantive dialogue was the unforeseen events of 1990-91, which were only tangentially related to the Arab Israeli conflict. Firstly, the international crisis that was provoked by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, led to an American-led coalition of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. Responding to Palestinian anger that the West had acted swiftly to oppose Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, but had done little to end Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Arafat proclaimed solidarity with Saddam Hussein. This proved to be a tactical mistake. After Iraq’s defeat, Arafat lost his financial backing from the Gulf states which had been so crucial to the PLO’s finances.¹⁹ Hence economically weakened, he appeared at the negotiation with cap in hand. Furthermore, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the major backer for Syria, the one Arab country which still made any pretence of confronting Israel.

The PLO was already battered and suffering from a lack of unity. Its leadership was struggling to survive in forced exile and in the throes of financial starvation, which was dangerously threatening its existence. It was this mood that prepared the much needed platform for Arafat’s initiative for peace.

Negotiations are the recognition, prima facie, of at least one common goal necessary to reach an agreement.²⁰ In South Africa, the common goal was the recognition of interdependence. The South African conflict moved from a zero-sum to positive sum perception, as the balance of power between the dominant white minority and the increasingly empowered black majority reached a level of approximate parity.²¹

After the mutual recognition of a stalemate in which the state could not suppress the resistance and the opposition realised that the state could not be crushed, F W de Klerk recognised that, "[they] have not waited until the position of power dominance turned against [them]. The initiative is in [their] hands. [They] have the means to ensure that the process develops peacefully and in an orderly way.^"22

Another set of factors concerns domestic transformations catalysed by global processes. Over the years, Israel’s economic development was funded in large part by externally generated resources. This weakened the state’s and the Histadrut’s control of the economy in favour of private business interests. This led to a greater role being played by market forces and the opening up of financial markets. Substantial privatisation, the institution of a stable exchange rate, the reduction of capital subsidies, increasing government resistance to bailouts, cuts in the defence budget, and a growing budget deficit soon followed.

For many years, some countries in the Middle East thrived on global conflict. Because there was a Cold War and a global conflict, countries acquired arms, financial aid and political support for one side or the other. With the conflict now over, the world was reorganising itself, not on the old lines of military confrontation, but on new ones based in economic logic: not as nations, but as markets in which countries compete daily in creative invention and commercial relations.²³

The Palestinians had long been susceptible to follow the path of fundamentalism, not solely that which is driven by religion, but as a protest against a given situation. When the reasons for both protest and fundamentalism are considered, both are basically the poverty, destitution, and the hopelessness of the people. It is in this context that the rise of the fundamentalist group Hamas must be understood. It poses as the divine alternative for the crushed and desperate Palestinians and has tremendous appeal for some segments of Palestinian society.

In addition to the potential cost of the arms race for Israel, the potential dangers of another war, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, there is also the possibility of nuclear proliferation. The potential effect of the Gulf War on Israel is not to be underestimated. Neither should one overlook the consequences of another Middle East war if a settlement with Syria cannot be reached.

How does one account for the divergent political outcomes? In South Africa, the political balance favoured the subordinate black majority, while in Israel, the political balance favoured the dominant Jewish majority. South African blacks and whites have chosen to live together in a unitary multiracial democratic state, whereas in Israel, more specifically in Gaza and Jericho, Palestinians and Jews are in the midst of an acrimonious ‘divorce’. The Palestinians want an autonomous Palestinian state. As an important spokeswoman for the negotiations, Hanan Ashrawi pointed out that the Palestinian leadership has "adopted apartheid willingly", working for parity on a two-state basis. The Jews and Palestinians have opted for incremental partition rather than a shared bi-national state. The spectre of bi-nationalism is abhorrent to most Israeli Jews because it would transform the nature of the Jewish state.

Security issues are paramount in the Israeli negotiation process. Arab states still view Israel as a threat and vice versa. The majority of Israelis are primarily concerned with security. They will attempt to transform the country’s policies to attain peace with their neighbours. Thus, in Israel "peace will be security."²⁴ No such real security threats entered into the negotiation process for South Africa. The result is that, whereas the negotiation in South Africa was primarily an ‘internal process’, external actors had to be taken into account in Israel. Egypt, Syria and Jordan had to be courted in the process. The US also played a more high profile role as facilitator in the Israeli Palestinian peace process, whereas US involvement in South Africa was more indirect.

Why did the National Party choose to negotiate? Why did Israel move so slowly, resulting in the current stalemate? Is it because neither side could defeat the other, but that each could prevent the other from ruling alone legitimately? It has been suggested that conflicts are only settled when they are ‘ripe’.²⁵ A term that is often bandied about in the negotiation process is ‘ripeness’. It is a helpful concept, as it defines the broad contextual relationship between adversaries on the verge of moving into the phases of pre-negotiation and negotiation. It refers to the point at which two or more adversaries are ready to move from conflicting behaviour to non-conflicting modes of behaviour. The concept, however, also involves some problems and dangers. Firstly, it is often tautological. Successful negotiations are seen as proof that the initiative was taken at the ‘ripe’ moment. Secondly, there is a danger that potential mediators may describe a situation as ‘unripe’ in order to avoid becoming involved in a process with uncertain results.

In order to enter into negotiations, parties must come to an understanding about the costs and risks involved in an agreement on their conflict. One of the major issues concerning cost and risk is the mutual recognition that negotiation does not mean destruction and surrender, for example, as seen in the preparations for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and the South African government and the ANC.²⁶ A perception of ‘ripeness’ arises when there is a sense of looming catastrophe, a hurting stalemate or inexorable pressure by a third party. In South Africa, there was the fear of economic and political paralysis, a stalemate that would hurt most, and strong US pressure against a minority veto. Israel did not have any of these.²⁷ The ANC could keep up the pressure by strikes and mass action, forcing the National Party to move towards change. In contrast, the PLO was weak, defeated and incapable of mobilising in any way that could strengthen the negotiations on its behalf.

Both crises led to ungovernability and raised the costs of maintaining the status quo. The major difference in the outcomes in both countries, thus far, may be attributed to the fact that, in South Africa, the conflict was about power and privilege which could be negotiated, whereas in Israel, it is based on intractable religious beliefs which cannot easily be abandoned regardless of whether it is considered dysfunctional or not. The single ‘non-negotiable’ in the Israeli case is the contradictory goals of a Jewish state and a democratic state. This is based on an historic claim to ‘the land’ according to Zionist ideological considerations, that is characterised by an ideological zeal and the self-righteousness of a religious or secular Zionism. Palestinians cannot be equal members in a democratic Jewish state. As a result, the sole solution for Israel is partition.

In South Africa, there was very little ideological cement to defend ethnic privilege. It is difficult to uphold racial affluence or the protection of a lifestyle as an ideological justification to perpetuate the status quo. élite negotiation was possible because blacks wanted to share in the spoils of capitalism. Given the authoritarian nature of the structure of the National Party, whites under De Klerk accepted a system of majority rule. This permitted the ANC to sell it to blacks as liberation. In addition, blacks and whites in South Africa operate within an integrated economy and are interdependent. Partition was therefore never a viable option.

Religion is an absolute value. Religiously perceived conflicts are not subject to compromise. As a result, Israel is now on the same road which Afrikaners have at last abandoned. Frequent references to cutting off surplus labour, constructing border industries and introducing rapid transit between different parts of Palestinian territories are uncanny reminders of the old South African regime. Israel has to examine the quality of its own survival and the people with whom it became entangled in 1967. Even though the obstacles appear formidable, hopes for peace rest on the assumption that the Palestinians can acquire a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza.

There is one group of Israelis who are still excluded from a sense of peoplehood. These are the Israeli Arabs. These forgotten Palestinians (one in five Israeli is either a Muslim or a Christian Arab) enjoy full political rights, but are made to feel like an unwanted presence on the margins of a confessional state. Will the Jewish state be able to accommodate the needs and aspirations of an Arab minority within Israel? Only time will tell.