Back on October 14, I posted a diary where I expressed strong anti-war sentiments in response to the situation between Gaza and Israel. My anti-war stance is long-standing and I expressed it in those terms. Several people considered me well-meaning but suggested that I didn’t know enough to speak publicly about the conflict. Over the next month, nearly everything I consumed had to do with the conflict, both in a historical sense as well as what is going on at this very moment.
The YouTube algorithm suggested a documentary that first week. I passed it by a couple of times, but it kept showing up in my feed: Road to Apartheid by Journeyman Pictures.
I had read in passing, perhaps in a comment here at Daily Kos, about possible apartheid conditions in Gaza, but I hadn’t given it thought one way or the other. I was a neophyte when it came to not only this conflict but the conditions under which this long-running conflict has come to be shaped. I went into the documentary skeptical yet open to information.
Running approximately 95 minutes and narrated by Alice Walker, the documentary highlights several parallels between policies in Gaza and those of apartheid-era South Africa. It also speaks about conditions in the West Bank.
“Most people identify apartheid with the grotesque system of control that existed in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, in which the white minority ruled over the Black majority, stole their land, and deprived them of basic rights. It was a system reviled by the whole world, and it eventually crumbled under the combined pressure of internal resistance and international sanctions. Today, the word is back, and with it, too, is a growing global movement to end the Israeli form of apartheid.”
Several Daily Kos members have responded to descriptions of Israel having imposed a system of apartheid as inflammatory and offensive, but it is difficult to square that reaction with the facts on the ground as unveiled by this film. In the very first minutes, you see a splitscreen where the two systems are visually compared side-by-side, and it is a glimpse into the striking similarities of the restrictions that each system put into place to control their respective target populations. The only thing separating the systems now is time.
The term itself, apartheid, means ‘separateness’, a state of being apart. Yasmin Sooka of the South African Foundation for Human Rights, gave a brief description:
“It was about the fact that almost from birth your life was separated from people of other races. You’d have to stand if the bus was full. If you went to the beach, there were some beaches you could not walk on. Those were the sort of petty manifestations.
“But you had the real apartheid which, for me, was about the structural systems and policies of apartheid, the way in which land was taken away from people.”
Standing when the bus was full, restrictions on going to the beach—I’d heard of such restrictions before. Those were in the context of segregation here in the United States. Immediately my mind went to Rosa Parks. Immediately I recalled the violence of the Chicago race riots when a Black youth was killed for swimming at a local beach.
Jeff Halper of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions explained:
“We feel that the concept of apartheid is really crucial for understanding what’s happening here and where Israel is going, because it’s the only term that accurately defines the system that Israel is trying to develop. It isn’t just a policy. It’s not just discrimination. It’s the way the system is structured. It’s separation of populations in which one group permanently and institutionally dominates another group.”
“Afrikaaner history formed a sort of self-contained moral universe,” author Ali Abunimah said. “Whereas the rest of the world saw them as oppressors, as colonizers, as racists, they saw themselves … primarily as victims, settlers who were escaping religious persecution in Europe. They saw themselves as fighting for self-determination.”
Here, too, I heard echoes of the American system, and it was here that I realized that what I had before me was a prism through which I could view the history not only of South Africa and the Israel-Palestine conflict that the film was reporting but the history of my own country as well. This film gave me a new way of seeing.
Allister Sparks, journalist active during the apartheid era in South Africa, stated,
“The vision was to create a demographic white majority, at least of citizens, even though you were going to have the others in your midst. Their entire nationalistic existence was at stake. It was going to be swamped by the Black majority, so they evolved the concept of apartheid. Ultimately the driving force behind it all was to create white, Afrikaaner-led nation so that Afrikaanerdom could sustain its permanent existence as a national entity.”
This can be directly compared to the premise of separateness as instituted by the state of Israel, to create and command a demographic majority of its dominant group in order to maintain geographic power. In this way, the state of Israel is sustaining, by structural means, a nationalist project.
Abunimah elaborated:
“For [Afrikaaners], apartheid was about survival, about self-determination, about redemption, about preserving a way of life. You see a very similar pattern in Zionism. Despite that Palestinians experience it as a very aggressive colonizing movement that has dispossessed them, Israelis are capable of seeing themselves as victims, as survivors, of drawing on Jewish history in order to justify their status quo.
“It’s important to address that. It’s important to address them with empathy and to say, ‘I don’t accept what you do, but I understand what the motivation is,’ and to be able to talk about that.”
Describing the town of Hebron in the West Bank, Alice Walker narrates,
“Nowhere is the government separation principle shown so starkly as the city of Hebron, a city deep in the heart of the West Bank with a population of about 160,000 Palestinians. In the middle of Hebron, in Palestinian homes often vacated under severe pressure, live 600 Jewish settlers, cordoned off and protected by thousands of soldiers. Although neighbors, these two populations live under two separate and unequal sets of laws. Jewish settlers in the West Bank live under Israeli civil law, while Palestinians live under Israeli military law.”
Sooka recalled of apartheid South Africa:
“In South Africa, the architecture was amazing. First you give people an identity. Then, of course, you give people pass laws, so you define how they can move freely, and you construct blockages for the movement of people.”
Walker narrated:
“In 2008, there were 800 kilometers of Jewish-only roads in the West Bank, or, as the Israeli military prefers to call them, ‘sterile’ roads. Settlers are issued yellow license plates so that the military can distinguish them from Palestinian drivers.”
“Sterile” roads. This is the language of purity and contamination. It’s one of the starkest forms of us-versus-them methods of dividing, and here the division isn’t merely rhetorical or metaphorical. It cuts right through the landscape. It impedes people’s travel. And it certainly creates a lived distinction as to what persons can be considered clean—”sterile”—and which cannot.
Eddie Makue of South African Council of Churches relayed this about his travels:
“I have been able to visit Israel and Palestine on more than two occasions. And what I experienced there was such a crude reminder of our painful past in apartheid South Africa. We were largely controlled in the same way. The continuous checking at the roadblocks, and to see these young men and young women standing at the roadblock, having to perform the duties of a military junta: these parallels with Israel pained me severely while I was traveling through that lovely country.”
Walker narrated:
“Today, in occupied Palestine, Palestinians must carry IDs at all times that essentially dictate where they can live, work, and move. A complex system of movement restrictions requires special permits to enter certain areas. There are over six hundred manned checkpoints and physical roadblocks in the West Bank that restrict the freedom of movement of Palestinians. Only 36 of these separate Israel and the West Bank. The rest separate Palestinian towns from other Palestinian towns.”
Abunimah explained more detail:
“The settlements are linked by modern superhighways which are Jewish-only roads. Palestinians are not allowed to use them. And these superhighways criss-cross across Palestinian land, linking the settlements together and linking them with Israeli cities inside the 1948 borders.”
This, too, reminded me of the States, where the superhighway system of the 1950s saw the bulldozing of historical African-American neighborhoods. This was to make way for “progress,” frequently under the rubric of clearing out “blight.” Neighborhoods that had been thriving or at least steady and sustaining saw their ability to function torn in two, cleaved by roads or barriers that had never existed before.
Na’eem Jeenah, South African author and journalist, remarked:
“The separate roads that you find, the kind of settlement infrastructure that you find in the West Bank, for example, which in South Africa we didn’t dream that we’d have roads that would be only for whites.”
This is the situation that acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates encountered on his recent trip to the region. He recently spoke at a venue in New York (along with Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and Rashid Khalidi, professor and foremost expert on Palestinian history) and described his time there. He also sat down with Democracy Now! and gave an interview that I found remarkable for the directness in its truthtelling.
Coates cut right to the heart of the issue in his answer to the very first question posed him, what he learned from spending time there:
~ 3:05:
“I think what shocked me the most was, in any sort of opinion piece or reported piece, or whatever you want to call that I’ve read, about Israel and about the conflict with the Palestinians is a word that comes up all the time, and it is ‘complexity’. That, and its closely related adjective, ‘complicated’. And so, while I had my skepticisms and I had my suspicions—of the Israeli government, of the occupation—what I expected was that I would find a situation in which it was hard to discern right from wrong, it was hard to understand the morality at play, it was hard to understand the conflict. And perhaps the most shocking thing was, I immediately understood what was going on over there.”
He related an extended story about an interaction he had at one of the checkpoints, along one of those sterile roads:
~ 3:55:
“Probably the best example I can think of is the second day, when we went to Hebron, and the reality of the occupation became clear. We were driving out of East Jerusalem. I was with Palfest, and we were driving out of East Jerusalem into the West Bank. And you could see the settlements, and they would point out the settlements. And it suddenly dawned on me that I was in a region of the world where some people could vote and some people could not. And that was obviously very, very familiar to me.
“I got to Hebron, and we got out as a group of writers, and we were given a tour by a Palestinian guide. And we got to a certain street, and he said to us, ‘I can’t walk down this street. If you want to continue, you have to continue without me.’ And that was shocking to me.
“We walked down the street, and we came back, and there was a market area. Hebron is very, very poor. It wasn’t always very poor, but it’s very, very poor. Its market area has been shut down. But there are a few vendors there that I wanted to support. And I was walking to try to get to the vendor, and I was stopped at a checkpoint. Checkpoints all through the city—checkpoints obviously all through the West Bank. Your mobility is completely inhibited, and the mobility of the Palestinians is totally inhibited.
“And I was walking to the checkpoint, and an Israeli guard stepped out, probably about the age of my son, and he said to me, ‘What’s your religion, bro?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t, you know, I’m not really religious.’ And he said, ‘Come on. Stop messing around. What is your religion?’ I said, ‘I’m not playing. I’m not really religious.’ And it became clear to me that unless I professed my religion—and the right religion—I wasn’t going to be allowed to walk forward.
“So he said, ‘Okay, so what was your parents’ religion?’ I said, ‘Well, they weren’t that religious, either.’ He says, ‘What were your grandparents’ religion?’ I said, ‘My grandmother was a Christian.’ And then he allowed me to pass.
“And it became very, very clear to me what was going on in there. And I have to say, it was quite familiar. Again, I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited, where your voting rights are inhibited, where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.”
He summed up the experience:
“So the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph. D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African-American history.”
Watching this interview, even though I’d only seen Roadmap to Apartheid just two weeks earlier, it was clear that Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke for me. That was exactly the type of relating that I experienced when I saw those conditions. And that was just in film—Coates had a firsthand, bird’s-eye view of the situation. He was able to return and reveal the deep structural similarities of these two pernicious systems.
Asked about a contretemps involving the comedian Amy Schumer, which had drawn a response from Dr. Bernice King, Coates offered this broader response, which put his stance in perspective:
~ 21:51:
“Look, I think it’s very important to talk about the force of anti-semitism in history, indeed in American history, in fact. It’s a very, very, very real thing, and I don’t think you can understand the events of the moment without understanding that. And I think over the past few weeks, especially, much has been made about the historic alliance between Black folks and Jewish activists and Jewish folks and that sort of thing. And it’s a very, very real thing; it’s a very, very important thing. But I think, like any alliance, it is at its best when it grounds itself in moral principle. Not in a kind of gang truce, not in the kind of, ‘I had your back, so you’ll have mine.’
“A moral alliance that is transactional is actually in fact not a moral alliance. And we have always been at our best— You know, when I think about the Jewish civil rights workers who went South and put their bodies on the line for the civil rights movement, I’d like to think, and I think it’s true, that that was not a transactional arrangement. That was not an attempt to say, ‘Look, I’m doing this because I think you’ll have my back in the future.’ They did it because it was right. They did it based on principle.
“And so, I think some of the frustration that certain—certain—people feel, about the lack of African-American support for this war comes from this notion that we should have people’s back as they drop bombs to try to defend a segregationist, apartheid regime. We shouldn’t do that.”
I don’t know how else to explain it better than that. What is being asked of people who are intimately familiar with the Black American experience, to support “drop[ping] bombs to try to defend a segregationist, apartheid regime,” is too much.
That’s why the issue of whether the state of Israel is maintaining an apartheid system is not ancillary, it’s not peripheral, and it certainly isn’t incidental. It goes right to the heart of the matter of what it is that we’re supporting. How is it that we can be asked to justify the wholesale destruction of indigenous people—for what? For this? It is too much to ask, because for many Black Americans, the Palestinian experience is not beyond understanding.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s interview with Democracy Now!, November 2, 2023:
Roadmap to Apartheid, Journeyman Pictures (2012)
See also “How Israel automated occupation in Hebron” (The Listening Post, Al Jazeera English, May 6, 2023)
… and also “How Surveillance Tech Is Used to Suppress Palestinians Through Apartheid?” (Amnesty International, May 2, 2023)
All bolding in the essay is mine.