Shadee Elmasry – The REASONS Why Israel Is An Apartheid State

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.