Shadee Elmasry – The REASONS Why Israel Is An Apartheid State
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the history and legal definition of the legal definition of an away state in South Africa, which is based on the history of South Africa and is a legal definition. They also touch on accusations of black pride against Israeli citizens and accusations of systemic oppression against indigenous Jewish groups. The conflict between two cultures is described as a religious conflict that involves the loss of control over the entire population and the loss of control over the whole population. The speakers mention the use of "oppression" in relation to targeted groups and the need for people to refer to certain groups in their language.
AI: Summary ©
Yeah, so apartheid is actually a Afrikaans word. Afrikaans was like
a language that the Dutch who colonized South Africa kind of
developed, it's very close to modern Dutch. But apartheid
literally just means apartness. And it was a legal doctrine that
was made in southern Africa to allow the white minority to kind
of dominate the kind of black majority.
And I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the role of
Muslims in the South African anti apartheid struggle. And the role
of Muslims in the struggle is very interesting, because Muslims made
up 1% of the population. But when democracy happened in South
Africa, in in 1993, the Muslims made up 16% of the first
parliament. So they're 1% of the population, but 16%, the first
parliament, so Muslims were very, very much involved in the
struggle, people like Ibrahim or school, people like the late
Sheikh, Cyril Hendricks, who studied under Mohammed ibn Allah
al Maliki, a lot of these sorts of people.
So when we say Israel is an apartheid state today, we're
basically saying one of two things. One is we're saying that
Israel is like apartheid South Africa. And the second thing that
we're saying is that Israel fits a legal definition. So after
apartheid ended in South Africa, in 1998, the Rome Statute was kind
of passed was defined apartheid as a crime against humanity. And they
say that, and what's interesting about the Rome Statute is it
doesn't include a single reference to South Africa. It has one
reference to Southern Africa. But it says apartheid is a legal
definition. It's not about being like South Africa. But it's about
fitting these kinds of guidelines. And Human Rights Watch released a
report called beyond the threshold, where they said many
years ago, I think, around 2020, that Israel has met this
threshold. And the three kind of main kind of guideline for being
an apartheid state is first that they have intent to maintain
racial * of one racial group over another, which for even
those who don't know anything about what Israel is doing, they
don't know the specifics of the occupation, all that it's not very
complicated to say that Israel intends to have one racial group
dominate and the other racial group not to dominate. If we look
at like the West Bank, Israeli settlers live there as full
citizens, they are encouraged by the state to live in this place,
which is a violation of international law. Palestinians
live there without statehood. And they are actively kind of they
have every incentive to leave. So there's an incentive for Jews to
live in a specific place, and for indigenous Palestinians to not
live in that place. So that first guideline is kind of very easily
met. The other one is systematic oppression of one racial group
over the other, which is also very clear, if we look at what's
happening in Gaza. Today, we see how even Israelis are treated in
the West Bank in Israel proper, like that's very clear. And then
the third is one or more inhumane acts carried out on a widespread
or like systemic scale. So by a legal definition, Israel fits the
standards of apartheid very easily. And this has been said, by
Human Rights Watch by Amnesty International,
by the Israeli human rights group, but Salem. So that's apartheid is
a legal definition.
Can you tell me I'm curious, any other states fit the bill?
So this is interesting. Yeah. There have been accusations. I
remember one time, Cornel West was asked about this, because they
said, Oh, you know, this Palestinian intellectual, did a
PhD at a Israeli University. So therefore, Israel is not an
apartheid state. And Cornel West said, well, W EB DuBois. He did a
PhD at Harvard in apartheid America. So you can say that other
states had systems of apartheid, a lot of South Africans have also
leveled the accusation against India, because they say because of
the Hindu nationalism, and all this sort of stuff, India also has
a system of apartheid against Wilson's? Well,
I would say that India doesn't have to try to fit the first bill,
of making sure that one
group dominates over the other because their numbers are already
way imbalanced in Hindus, to Muslims already. So but the other
two, I guess you could say is, is there a systematic or systemic
oppression of Muslims? Is it in the law? Or is it some unwritten
rule?
That's where it becomes difficult in terms of like on a kind of NGOs
and legal organizations and stuff. The charge has been leveled
against Israel. But I don't think there's any other state that with
the same firmness has been accused of being an apartheid state. And
even if you look at the way South Africans view Israel, South
Africans have kind of this special kind of solidarity with like the
Palestinians like Desmond Tutu, went to Israel. He said, I go
there, I see the checkpoints. I see these systems, and it's a
mirror image of what I envisioned under apartheid.
Yeah, and it's actually interesting before the 90s,
apartheid was not a bad word. And the prime minister of South Africa
and of apartheid South Africa in the 1950s, he wrote actually a
book, there's a book called The secret alliance. And it talks
about the Israeli and kind of South African kind of alliance.
And the prime minister of South Africa actually once said, that
Israel, like South Africa is an apartheid state. But he didn't
mean it in the way we meant it today. For them, apartheid was a
thing of pride. Similarly, the way people talk about Zionism today,
right, like Zionism is not, Zionism is kind of becoming a bad
word. But an Israeli will say, We're proudly Zionist. So that
that was how they use the word apartheid. All right, let's turn
to Muhammad.
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think on that last point about the, you
know, specifically targeted against Muslims. I think one of
the things, one things that we should keep in mind is sometimes
what,
what oppressors do is that they find another term to refer to a
group of people. And that term encompasses that group of people.
But it's, that allows them basically to,
to speak about it in a way that may be more palatable, palatable
to the rest of us. So instead of referring to a particular
religious group, you refer to them based on their national identity.
instead of referring to a particular ethnic group, you refer
to them based on their national identity. And because we have this
conflation of the nation and the states, and especially in the
modern world, we tend to look at that and think of that as being
more fair somehow, and perhaps more justified because it's a
conflict between two nations. And we think of that as being a common
feature of our experience in modern period, as opposed to being
a conflict between an oppressor and between a particular ethnic
group that is being wiped out, or a particular religious group
that's been wiped up.
And so I think that's, that's one of the things that it's really,
really important for us to kind of keep in the back of our minds. So
sometimes the way that you hear you hear, and this happens in the
media very, very often.
And it's really unfortunate is that the message that you're
getting is a message that's disseminated by those parties that
are interested parties. So in the case of what we're hearing from,
from Palestine right now, you're getting information that's
disseminated by the IDF, you're getting information is
disseminated by specific groups that have an interested stake in
what's happening right now. And so you have to ask the question, are
those interested parties? Are they supporting a more powerful, more
dominant power? Or are they supporting those people that are
weaker, and those people who are who are more susceptible to being
taken advantage of, and that's very, very easy to do. So it's
quite easy to look at this conflict. And a lot of people do
look at this conflict as being a religious conflict. But there are
a lot of Palestinian Christians and in fact, if you look at in
like our recent history, the two most dominant figures in speaking
out against what happens in in Palestine specifically from
academia happens to be a Jew and a Christian. Noam Chomsky was Jewish
and, and Edward sides was Christian, which tells you that
this conflict isn't a religious conflict. It's a conflict that
goes deeper than that.