elisabeth jean wood, forging democracy from below (2000)

(xiii): "enduring insurgency" as principal reason for the political pacts that led to democracy

(xiv): in el salvador--

1. FMLN was constituted as an insurgent counter-elite by the sustained support of insurgent peasants
2. ongoing urest and reforms reshaped lite interests; meant that elite willing to take a change on electoral competition and its vagaries [precisely because there aren't vagaries, though, is what she shows makes them willing to gamble]

(xiv): in south africa--

1. mobilization brought into existence an insurgent counter-elite
2. a defection from the ruling alliance undermined continued support for apartheid; some elites were moved to press for fundamental political reform.
   

(5): important--the specific argument, then, centers on the fact that elites depended for their economic privileges on state-enforced procedures that were unlikely to be sustainable under democratic rule [but isn't it also the case that it's precisely when they discover that they can sustain their economic privileges despite political reform that they accede? i suppose one can make a point about changing economic interests in el salvador; but to accept the notion that only the 'dull compulsion' of the market is needed is problematic, i think. isn't there always a link to the State? are we talking about a real, qualitiative shift (which is implied throughout), or merely change in degrees of repression?]

(5-6): she sees two puzzles:

1. why did elites give up, after decades of opposition? [her answer is that democracy was "forged from below" by insurgent mobilization. but--key--this is not always what is doing work in her argument. a weaker version is that the transition to democracy would not have taken place without sustained popular mobilization (this, i mean, is not quite saying that it was "forged from below")]
2. why were these so amenable to negotiation? [these two processes (below) forged the structural and political (and economic?) bases of compromise. moreover, these civil wars were different precisely because the contending forces were economically interdependent--ok, but surely this is not limited to south africa and el salvador.]
   

(5-6): two features of this path

1. constitution of an insurgent counter-elite that was elite in the sense that it was a necessary party to reforms (but in SA, elite in the other sense too, no)
2. accumulating costs of the insurgency transformed the core interests of economic elites

(6-7, 8-9): definition of oligarchic societies--societies in which economic elites rely on extra-economic coercion of labor by the state for the realization of incomes superior to those possible under more liberal, market-based arrangements... directly-(1) coercive labor relations such as slavery, (2) coercive restrictions on mobility, (3) coercive practices in the workplace (but this is quite problematic; need to interrogate the three conditions, i'm not sure they make much sense. abandoning RSS' innovation of 'labor-intensity' (see FN, pg. 8), so now it's confused a la Moore. the vocabulary doesn't distinguish a qualitiative shift (a la feudalism/capitalism), but quantitative--does this mean, though, that the US was oligarchic when capitalists call in police to smash strikes?). this is meant to be the foundation of a pact between 'regime elites' and 'economic elites.'

(10): four forms of transition

1. democracy by occupation
2. moderate elements within authoritarianism
3. political mobilization by a cross-class alliance (philippines, nicaragua, czechoslovakia, african countries?)
4. sustained political mobilization from below by working-class actors (wait--does the distinction between 3 and 4 really stand? this would require you to stretch your claims about the ANC and the movement, certainly. but see below, pg. 11 and pg. 12)
   

(11): a danger in overstating contrasts? her argument is that the distinction between 3 and 4 is the coherence of the State apparatus--in 3, elements in the state and the upper stratum can be pulled away. in 4, regime elites are in a tight nexus with economic elites.

(12): argument that ANC/FMLN don't count as cross-class. ok, we need to think about this--especially in light of her later claims about their moderation. [how can we make systematic sense of their "selling out"?]

(14): key distinction, which she doesn't discuss properly: in El Salvador, the insurgency reshaped the 'political economy' of the situation, which in turn shaped elite interests (and this first link is not even that clear--it's migrant remittances in her reconstruction. but consult the later parts--part of this is that the insurgency prevented a counter-coup after 1979); in South Africa, sustained mobilization creates a climate of general uncertainty.

(15): she's clear in saying that only when the "terms of transition" suit elites do they continue. this contains the seeds of rage. where is her rage?

(15): also, geopolitics--rise of neoliberalism meaning that 'postconflict states' less threatening to elites.

(15-16): distinction between other transitions and this one which is driven from below--but this is emphatically not the case in her reconstruction of el salvador (their influence is indirect, at best!)

(19): key--not the "slow penetration" of commercial agriculture (RSS), but sustained insurgency (again, el salvador is not the latter the way she reconstructs it; looks more like the former)

PART ONE

chapter two, conservative modernization to civil war

(26): conservative modernization in El Salvador failed, from 1950s to 1970s (elites did not shift from labor-repressive export agriculture to manufacture--which is less dependent on the coercive apparatus of the State)

(28): land and labor was secured for coffee production by direct coercion, redefinition of property rights

(31): rebellion of Farabundo Marti in 1932--17,000 people slaughtered in retaliation. four legacies:

1. eradication of indigenous culture
2. forestalling of reformist initatives
3. consolidated labor-repressive, coercive economic system
   
4. fifty-year political arrangement that saw the military in direct control of the political system (even though there were municipal and legislative election in the 1960s, and there were presidentail elections--"the Army invariably ruled at the national level", through client parties)

(37): lack of an internal market; logic of export agriculture was obvious.

(43): discussion of reformist coups in '44, '60, '72, '79--until the last one, though, all these efforts came to nought.

(44): in the 1970s, you had stirrings of protest, partly through the Catholic church

(45-46): October 1979 coup; reforms in the early 1980s, including the expropriation of hundreds of elite properties in March 1980.

(51): key argument here is that the insurgency prevented a counter-coup, after the 1979 coup, which made possible the reforms that would otherwise have been annulled. this is the beginnings of something more sophisticated than i was caricaturing earlier, but still indirect.

chapter 3, the structural foundation of a pact

(52-53): two reasons for transition

1. elites no longer depended on repression, because now they relied on market forces--reshaping of their interests (partly fall of export-oriented agriculture; also, though discipline by urban unemployment, she's mentioning...)
   
2. war-induced transformation shifted influence toward fractions of elite that favored compromise.
   

(52-53): transformed in three ways:

1. elites were threatened by Army, CD, and US alliance of reformists
   
2. repression didn't seem to be working, and thus their economic basis was eroding.
   
3. remittances presented new opportunities for gains not tied to coffee
   

(55): dramatic decline of export agriculture, for four reasons (the reason this is not economic determinism, though, is because the insurgency is in the background, throughout--it is not just explained, for example, by the decline in coffee prices)

1. elite uncertainty
2. expropriation in 1980
3. nationalization of finance and export
4. resources transferred elsewhere
   

(62): question--we have to decide if focusing on the unintended effects of insurgency (elites were doing well, elsewhere) is the same as 'forging democracy from below'.

(67): critical--also, the evolution of ARENA; the fact that elites had reliable political representation allowed them to tolerate political reform. it is precisely, in other words, because they weren't afraid of politics. (71--in 1985, a shift away from D'Aubisson)

(73): also, and this is very important in South Africa, as well--neoliberalism means that the postconflict government will be hamstrung, anyway.

(75): ARENA builds a broad political base?

(76): key--"with the eclipse of labor-repressive agriculture as the core interest of economic elites, neither the political nor the economic compromises in the peace agreement... would pose a significant threat..." [so is it indirect? or direct, because the shift is explained by the insurgency? see 77, below]

(77): here, she foregrounds remittances. i think she doesn't quite commit. so confused!

chapter 4, negotiating a democratic transition

(79, 85, 88): in brief--for ARENA, political compromise; for FMLN, almost entire economic compromise, short of redistribution of land; political victory (though in hindsight, wow...). result: ARENA and the elites win! not win-win, hardly compromise.

(105): ARENA builds a strong party ("individual conservatism of campesinos"!). WTF.

PART TWO

chapter five, apartheid, conservative modernization...

(111): same story--conservative modernization could not answer the aspirations of non-whites without compromising the labor-repressive controls on which the elite relied. this paved the way for the emergence of a counter-elite

(113): a "liberal revolution"--political reform, economic status quo [= total sell-out?]

(114): labor-repressive institutions as a response to the problem of labor-supply

(115): "Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa", 1921/22!!!

(116): key example--Natives Land Act of 1913, transformation of peasants to farm laborers--clear example of role of extra-economic coercion (different narrative from Masondo's presentation)

(117): context of Apartheid, though, was "rapid urbanization"

(120): in sum, labor-repressive institutions were attempting to "balance" the competing demands for disciplined, urban and rural labor forces.

(122): Apartheid, though, could not wean the economy from its dependence on African labor [this is at the heart of the troubles--and, she will suggest, at the heart of the compromise]

(125-126): ANC's beginnings as a democratic party (founded in 1912). Radicalized in 1948, with Apartheid's implications for the African middle-class. SACP founded in 1921; works with the ANC starting in 1928.

(126): Mandela on the SACP

(127): the Freedom Charter, 1955

(126-127): account of the struggle in the 1940s and 1950s

(129): Sharpevillie 1960

(130): ANC exhausts non-violent civil disobedience in the anti-pass campaign around Sharpeville, founds Umkonto we Sizwe

(132): key--labor militance constitutes ANC as a counter-elite (graph on pg. 133--extraordinary peaking in the 1980s).

(135): Soweto 1976 (State responds with repression and reform)

(137): COSATU formed in 1985

(138): Union mobilization peaks in 1987 with 11% on strike (in UK in 1926, 14-15% were on strike; 10% participated in largest general strike after WWII in the US)

(139): COSATU moves toward ANC; adopts Freedom Charter in July 1987.

(140): in conclusion, two effects of sustained mobilization

1. ANC constituted as counter-elite (he writes about the lack of a black moderate leadership--though can't we think of 1990-1994 period, like this?)
2. business organizations were worried enough--they depended on labor--to push for reform.

(141-142): three reasons why the ANC emerges

1. Mandela
2. PAC was in shambles; ANC had resources
3. the appeal of a non-racial platform; universalism was a more powerful weapon than African nationalism

Chapter 6, Economic Elite Interests

(144): unlike El Salvador, where there was sectoral change during civil war--here elites were concerned about the effects on the investment climate.

(149): increasing capital intensity as a response to labor mobilization--this, she's arguing, has the effect of disincentivizing Apartheid. makes sense.

(153, 155): worry about capital outflows, disinvestment, starting in the early-mid 1970s

(159-161): dismissing the liberal argument, which has three requirements that she thinks don't hold. [she's not saying that some of this doesn't happen--the stuff about the profit rate and shortages of skilled labor--but her argument is that it happens too early to explain the time of transition]

1. shortage of skilled labor should have arisen earlier
2. shortage should have a negative impact on the profit rate
3. repairing this ought to have required democracy
   

chapter 7, from recalcitrance to compromise

(170): Business supports National Party in 1983 Referendum

(172): win-win!, from perspective of business. if business thinks its win-win, shouldn't you submit this to serious scrutiny!?

(179): splits within the National Party, into Conservative Party (particularly white labor?)

(182-183): three issues were on the table

1. political policy
2. economic policy
3. truth and reconciliation (and punishment!)

(185): extraordinary figures--between 1984 and 1989 5,500 died; between 1990 and 1993, 13,500 died. ("the tap" and mass action, during negotiations)

(186): Joe Slovo and the 'sunset clause'

(189190): critical--the ANC and economic concessions. sad, sad. (there doesn't seem to be space to see the 'politics-as-usual' in all of this)

(193): like in El Salvador--political victory, economic defeat means that the elites go home happy.

CONCLUSION

Chapter 8, The Insurgent Path

(198): the particular importance of economic interdependence in explaining all of this, as compared to other civil conflicts.

(199-201): important-- differences between El Salvador and South Africa

1. FMLN highly effective military capacity, leadership; ANC was militarily ineffective, and had less direct control of the social movement
2. in El Salvador, sectoral transformation of elite interests, owing to remittances; in South Africa, insurgency transformed elite economic interests not because of this, but because it undermined commitment to labor-repressive institutions (economic instability/political instability argument)

(200): spread of neoliberal ideology comforted elites.

(201): elites compromised only when they knew that they would do better, or at least no worse, in peacetime. scandalous!

(201): again, the trade-offs. politics for economics. boo.

(202): Poland--not the same 'threat' to the elites, she's arguing. they were looking forward to the transition. i think this is all dubious, but need a better sense of the history.

(203): Guatemala--three important differences:

1. weaker insurgency
2. civil war did not transform elite interests
3. fragile transition, because of lack of a hegemonic right-wing political party

(204): again, structural importance of economic interedpendence (israel is obvious thought, here)

(205): there is, though, the spectre of economic interdpendence becoming a normative claim. what happened to 'nothing to lose but chains'? the ANC didn't really need the white elite. they were forced to compromise, with them (working-class has everyday dependence; not politically, at moments of possible revolution). it's the other way (from perspective of capitalists) that dependence is obvious.

(206): again--"market institutions restrict post-conflict uncertainty"

Epilogue

(210-211): four (negative) legacies of this path

1. unequal distribution of wealth
2. social mobilization it requires
3. raised expectations of mobilized groups
4. a state that reflects past commitments

(211-212): the answer, though, as 'vibrant political competition'!?!? please! a pathological narrowing of the limits of the possible.

Veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle said last night that the restrictions endured by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories was in some respects worse than that imposed on the black majority under white rule in South Africa.

can soccer stop the violence?
"In November last year, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid. Globalization was supposed to be the tide to lift all boats, but the evidence in South Africa suggests that millions of boats are not merely missing the tide, they're in an entirely different ocean."
(...) "Construction--and corruption--is booming. But almost none of the building or the money can be accessed by the poor who live in shantytowns without proper water, sanitation or electricity." Housing prices in the twenty-first century have gone up 92 percent, while wages have risen a mere 8 percent. As slums are cleared, tensions will surely rise.

worlds apart: part 1
Perhaps the real question is how Israel came to be in the same league as apartheid South Africa, whether by mirroring laws and political strategies, or in the suffering caused. And how it is that the government of a people who suffered so much at the hands of discrimination and hatred came to secretly embrace a regime led by men who once stood on the docks of Cape Town and chanted: "Send back the Jews."
(...) As it is, Goldreich sees Israel as closer to the white regime he fought against and modern South Africa as providing the model. Israeli governments, he says, ultimately proved more interested in territory than peace, and along the way Zionism mutated. Goldreich speaks of the "bantustanism we see through a policy of occupation and separation", the "abhorrent" racism in Israeli society all the way up to cabinet ministers who advocate the forced removal of Arabs, and "the brutality and inhumanity of what is imposed on the people of the occupied territories of Palestine".
(...) The contrast between West and East Jerusalem is not as stark, but the disparities between Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods are underpinned by attitudes, policies and laws similar to those used against Johannesburg's black population. Most of Jerusalem's Jews never cross the "green line" - the international border that divided the city until 1967 - and many of those that do go only as far as the Wailing Wall to pray. If more Israelis were to travel deeper into the city they claim as their indivisible capital, they would encounter a different world from their own, a place where roads crumble, rubbish is left uncollected and entire Palestinian neighbourhoods are not connected to the sewage system.
(...) According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."
(...) "We had the old Group Areas Act in South Africa. East Jerusalem has territorial classification that has the same sort of consequences as race classification had in South Africa in respect of who you can marry, where you can live, where you can go to school or hospital." Palestinians in East Jerusalem, often the city of their birth, are not considered citizens but immigrants with "permanent resident" status, which, some have found, is anything but permanent. In the old South Africa, a large part of the black population was treated not as citizens of the cities and townships they were born into but of a distant homeland many had never visited. "Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."
(...) "Planning and urban policy, which normal cities view as this benign tool, was used as a powerful partisan tool to subordinate and control black people in Johannesburg and is still used that way against Palestinians in Jerusalem," says Scott Bollens, a University of California professor of urban planning who has studied divided cities across the globe, including Belfast, Berlin, Nicosia and Mostar. "In South Africa there was 'group areas' legislation, and then there was land use, planning tools and zoning that were used to reinforce and back up group areas. In Israel, they use a whole set of similar tools. They are very devious, in that planning is often viewed as this thing that is not part of politics. In Jerusalem, it's fundamental to their project of control, and Israeli planners and politicians have known that since day one. They've been very explicit in linking the planning tools with their political project."
(...) The authors of a 1992 book on Jerusalem, Separate and Unequal, laid bare the policy. The writers, two of whom were advisers to the city's mayors, said that Israeli policy since 1967 was "remorselessly" pursued with four objectives: to expand the Jewish population in the mainly Arab east of the city; to hinder growth of Arab neighbourhoods; to induce Arabs to leave; and to seal off Arab areas behind Jewish settlements.
(...) Of the 70 sq km of annexed Arab land around Jerusalem, the state expropriated more than one-third to build homes for Jews without constructing a single house for Palestinians on the confiscated land. The Jewish population of East Jerusalem had fled or been driven out in 1948. A gradual return after 1967 turned to a flood as the settlements ate into the east of the city. Today, the population of Jewish settlements in and close to East Jerusalem has grown to nearly two-thirds that of the Arab neighbourhoods.
(...) During the 1990s, about 12 times as many new homes were legally built in Jewish areas as in Arab ones. Denied permission to build new homes or expand existing ones, many Palestinians build anyway and risk a demolition order. Israel's former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, routinely defends the demolitions by arguing that any civilised society enforces planning regulations. But Israel is the only western society to deny construction permits to people on the grounds of race. Until 1992, so did South Africa.
(...) Israeli law also restricts where non-Jews may live. "Muslims and Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city on the grounds of "historic patterns of life of each community having its own quarter'," says Seidemann, in a phrase eerily reminiscent of apartheid's philosophy. "But that didn't prevent the Israeli government from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim quarter. The attitude is: what's mine is exclusively mine, but what's yours is mixed if we happen to target it."
(...) "What stands out for Jerusalem and Johannesburg is that it was and is such a prolonged use of planning in pursuit of a political objective," says Scott Bollens. "One distinction with South Africa is the racial identifiers and the racial rhetoric was so blatant, and it was so visible and it was so much part of apartheid South African language. But, despite the difference in rhetoric, the outcomes are very, very similar and the urban landscape Israel has created in the Jerusalem region is just as unequal, just as subjugating of the Palestinians as the 'group area' planning was in South Africa for the blacks."
(...) A former Jerusalem city councillor, Meir Margalit, says the process was flawed from the start because the steering committee of 31 people who put the plan together included only one Arab. "It is characteristic everywhere of colonial regimes which believe that the 'natives' are worthy neither of suitable representation nor of being masters of their own fate. The planning team apparently sets out from the assumption that, in any case, one is dealing with a Jewish city and therefore there is no reason to ask the opinion of anyone who does not belong to the Jewish people," he says.
(...) "This, in fact, is the strength of municipal racism. It is neither brutal nor openly visible, preferring to take cover behind apparently neutral formulations. Thus it is always carefully concealed behind consensus-oriented wording, hidden beneath a thick layer of cosmetic liberal language," he says. "This is how a unique term which does not exist in the professional literature was born in our country: 'grey racism'. This is not a racism stemming from hatred of the 'other', but a 'lite racism' rooted in a Zionist ideology which strove to be democratic but, in giving priority to Jewish interests, inevitably deprived others of their rights. When there is no equality, there is bound to be discrimination, and when all those discriminated against are of the same nationality, there is no alternative but to call it what it is - 'national discrimination' - which belongs to the same family as the infamous racial discrimination."
(...) According to the municipality's most recent annual figures, the council issued 1,695 building permits in the city in 2004. Of these, 116 went to Arab parts of East Jerusalem and, of those, 46 were to build new homes. The balance was for extensions to existing houses. In 2004, a total of 212,789 sq metres was built in all of Jerusalem; 7% was in Arab neighbourhoods. Several months ago, Israel's cabinet minister for Jerusalem, Haim Ramon, described the 33ft-high wall dissecting Arab neighbourhoods - which the government has insisted is purely a security measure with no political intent - as having the added advantage of making the city "more Jewish".
(...) Israel's one million Arab citizens are on a firmer footing. They can vote - the primary evidence, for many angered by the apartheid analogy, that Israel is not the old South Africa - at least, within Israel's recognised borders. But the Jewish state has long viewed its remaining Arab population with suspicion and hostility, and even as the enemy within, through the country's wars for survival against hostile neighbours and in the competition for land. Until 1966, Israeli Arabs lived under "military administration" which allowed detention without trial and subjected them to curfews, restrictions on jobs and where they could live, and required them to obtain passes to move around the country.
(...) Israeli governments reserved 93% of the land - often expropriated from Arabs without compensation - for Jews through state ownership, the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Lands Authority. In colonial and then apartheid South Africa, 87% of the land was reserved for whites. The Population Registration Act categorised South Africans according to an array of racial definitions, which, among other things, determined who would be permitted to live on the reserved land. Israel's Population Registry Act serves a similar purpose by distinguishing between nationality and citizenship. Arabs and Jews alike can be citizens, but each is assigned a separate "nationality" marked on identity cards (either spelled out or, more recently, in a numeric code), in effect determining where they are permitted to live, access to some government welfare programmes, and how they are likely to be treated by civil servants and policemen.
(...) In the 2002 budget, Israel's housing ministry spent about £14 per person in Arab communities compared with up to £1,500 per person in Jewish ones. The same year, the health ministry allocated just 1.6m shekels (£200,000) to Arab communities of its 277m-shekel (£35m) budget to develop healthcare facilities.
(...) Five per cent of civil servants are Arabs, and a high proportion of those are hired to deal with other Arabs. The foreign and finance ministries employ fewer than a dozen Arab Israelis between them, when their combined staff totals more than 1,700 Jews. Until recently, the Bank of Israel and the state electricity company did not hire a single Arab.
(...) Separate and unequal education systems were a central part of the apartheid regime's strategy to limit black children to a life in the mines, factories and fields. The disparities in Israel's education system are not nearly so great and the intent not so malign, but the gap is wide. The Israeli education ministry does not reveal its budget for each of the two systems, but 14 years ago a government report concluded that nearly twice as much money was allocated to each Jewish pupil as to each Arab child.
(...) Under Sharon's tenure as prime minister from 2001, new forms of discriminatory legislation were passed, including the now notorious Nationality and Entry into Israel Law, which bars Israelis who marry Palestinians from bringing their spouses to live in the country. The legislation applies solely to Palestinian husbands or wives. Hassan Jabareen, a lawyer and director general of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, challenged the law before the supreme court. He told the judges there was a parallel with a landmark case in 1980s South Africa - the Komani case - which successfully challenged the pass laws that broke up black families by preventing spouses from joining their husbands or wives in towns.

worlds apart: part 2
Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.
(...) Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.
(...) In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.
(...) Many South African Jews were soon reassured that, while there would be Nuremberg-style laws, they would not be the victims. The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel's struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism.
(...) Many Afrikaners saw the Nationalist party's election victory as liberation from bitterly hated British rule. British concentration camps in South Africa may not have matched the scale or intent of Hitler's war against the Jews, but the deaths of 25,000 women and children from disease and starvation were deeply rooted in Afrikaner nationalism, in the way the memory of the Holocaust is now central to Israel's perception of itself. The white regime said that the lesson was for Afrikaners to protect their interests or face destruction.
(...) "This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was 'a land without people for a people without land', so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest."
(...) For decades, the Zionist Federation and Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa honoured men such as Percy Yutar, who prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years). Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg's largest orthodox synagogue. Some Jewish leaders hailed him as a "credit to the community" and a symbol of the Jews' contribution to South Africa.
(...) Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit. Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness". Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
(...) Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners. "We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. "We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate." Alongside the state-owned factories turning out material for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.
(...) The biggest secret of all was the nuclear one. Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bombs. Israel was embarrassed enough about its close association with a political movement rooted in racial ideology to keep the military collaboration hidden. "All that I'm telling you was completely secret," says Liel. "The knowledge of it was extremely limited to a small number of people outside the security establishment. But it so happened that many of our prime ministers were part of it, so if you take people such as [Shimon] Peres or Rabin, certainly they knew about it because they were part of the security establishment. "At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating."
(...) By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts. "There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights," says Kasrils. "The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."
(...) Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.
(...) When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel's security establishment balked. "When we came to the crossroads in '86-'87, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, 'You're crazy, it's suicidal.' They were saying we wouldn't have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it's probably true," he says.
(...) The deputy director general of Israel's foreign ministry, Gideon Meir, says that while he had no detailed knowledge of Israel's relationship with the apartheid government, it was driven by a sole consideration. "Our main problem is security. There is no other country in the world whose very existence is being threatened. This is since the inception of the state of Israel to this very day. Everything is an outcome of the geopolitics of Israel."
(...) In 2004, Ronnie Kasrils visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effect of Israel's assault on the West Bank two years earlier in response to a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people. "This is much worse than apartheid," he said. "The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale."
(...) You might say that Israel and the old South Africa were caught out by history. The world of 1948 into which the Jewish state was born and the Afrikaners came to power cared little about the "dark peoples" who stood in the way of grand visions. Neither government was doing very much that others - including British colonists - had not done before them.
(...) Stepping into modern Israel, anyone who experienced the old South Africa would see few immediately visible comparisons. There are no signs segregating Jews and non-Jews. Yet, as in white South Africa then and now, there is a world of discrimination and oppression that most Israelis choose not to see. Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate and harass Palestinians at checkpoints and settlers paint hate-filled slogans on the walls of Arab houses in Hebron. The police stop citizens who appear to be Arabs on West Jerusalem streets to demand their identity cards as a matter of routine.
(...) Some Jewish communities refuse to allow Arabs in their midst on the grounds of cultural differences. One Jewish settlement mayor tried to require Arabs who entered to wear a tag that identified them as Palestinians. In the 1990s, rightwingers menaced shopkeepers into sacking Arab workers. Those who complied were given signs declaring their shops Arab-free. Sometimes the hatred is explained away as religious discrimination, but the chants at the football matches go "Death to Arabs" not "Death to Muslims".
(...) The eight-metre-high wall driven through Jerusalem is almost invisible to residents of the Jewish west of the city. Because of the geography, most of the city's Jews do not see the concrete mammoth dividing streets and families, and the demolished homes - just as most of South Africa's whites steered clear of the townships and were blind to what was being done in their name.
(...) Opinion polls show that large numbers of Israelis regard Arabs as "dirty", "primitive", as not valuing human life and as violent.
(...) But South African apartheid was more than just separation. "Apartheid was all about land," says John Dugard, the South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor. "Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied territories], particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank."
(...) "Yes, there are enormous parallels with apartheid, but the problem with making comparisons is it actually distracts from the Palestinian context," he says. "We have to look for another definition. What struck me is dispossession, colonial dispossession. Most colonial dispossession took place over centuries through settlers and forced removals. In South Africa, that was a 300-year process. Here, it's taken place in 50 years; 1948, 1967 and the present in terms of the heightened nature of militarism in the West Bank and Gaza leading to the wall, which I don't see as a wall of security but a wall of dispossession."
(...) Arnon Soffer has spent years advising the government on the "demographic threat" posed by the Arabs. The Haifa university geographer paints a bleak vision of how he sees the Gaza strip a generation after Israel's withdrawal. "When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day," he told the Jerusalem Post. "If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."

israel and south africa:
lsrael's ties with South Africa seem to be especially disturbing to many who follow Israel's international activities. Perhaps it is natural that Israel has been castigated more harshly for its arms sales to South Africa than for its sales to other countries: first, because there has been for a decade an arms embargo against South Africa; and second, because of the unsurpassed criminality of the white regime and the uses to which it puts the Israeli-supplied weapons.
(...) "The most powerful reason for Israeli willingness to bear the undesirable consequences of expanded and more open trade with South Africa may be her desire to acquire material necessary to manufacture nuclear weapons," wrote a military analyst in 1980.' To that must be added Israel's great desire to test the nuclear weapons it already had, and the attractions of South Africa's vast territory and proximity to even vaster uninhabited spaces-the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Then at the point in its nuclear development where it was fashioning sophisticated bombs (devices which use less nuclear material but have infinitely greater explosive force than the "primitive" bomb dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima), Israel would find it particularly helpful to observe the performance, explosive force and fallout of a detonated weapon.

a political economy of south african AIDS:
The larger problem, however, is not just that the cost of anti-retroviral drugs like AZT has hampered treatment. It is, I want to argue, that the class/race/gender character of South African health and social policy under conditions of a failing free-market (known here as "neo-liberal") economic strategy is inhibiting prevention.
(...) The US vice president conducted a "full-court press"--in the words of a rabid US State Department official bragging to Congress in a February 1999 report--against Mbeki to drop the "offending language" in the Medicines Act. The pressure included various punitive trade and aid measures. South Africa's crime was not only its 1997 law, but also advocacy of similar global provisions in the form of a mid-ranking health official's 1999 speech to the World Health Organisation. Not only did Gore directly assault South Africa's ability to conduct economic policy-making and cheapen vitally-needed medicines, he was now also attacking the newly-democratized government's freedom of speech in international fora! Two crucial reasons seemed to motivate Gore: the broad principle that US companies with intellectual property rights should not concede any exception to their product hegemony; and campaign contributions by major pharmaceutical firms.
(...) The poli-econ of AIDS points out the need for a yet more profound struggle against the underlying assumptions and characteristics of South African-- and international--capitalism.

who killed sajida khan?:
The Kyoto Protocol - meant to turn the corner on climate change - is thus also a suspect. In 1997 when the protocol was drafted, the United States government was (and remains) utterly irresponsible, so Bill Clinton and Al Gore insisted that even to consider signing on, a 'free market' had to be established in carbon credits. That would permit polluters in the North to purchase shares in 'Clean Development Mechanism' projects like Bisasar, instead of reducing their own greenhouse gases.
(...) Desai muses: 'Sometimes when lives are judged by visual victories, we see failures, and after all, the dump remains right outside Sajida's front door after her 14 year fight.''But on the other hand, if a life is judged by a legacy that endures and is built upon, hers is one of multiple larger victories: of a woman standing against male domination of nationalist politics, of knowledge about global capitalist ecology over amnesia, of ordinary people harnessing the most incredible forms of expertise so as to enter forums usually dominated by people with multiple degrees, and of a political ecology that is a politics of all the people.

the one clear solution:
Isn't it amazing that discussions of this sort could arise at a time when the Palestinians and their cause against the colonialist apartheid system in Palestine are in such a tragic plight? While the Palestinians are mired in turmoil and confusion, their friends in South Africa and elsewhere are in a quandary over whether to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians: Should they support Hamas or Fatah? Is it right to boycott Israel when the Palestinian leadership, itself, is busily normalising relations with the Israeli government? One can understand their predicament. However, they should bear in mind that in Palestine this "normalisation" is taking place before any deal has been struck and that whatever deals are in the works do not aim to alter the existing racist order.
(...) So what are friends of the Palestinian people supposed to do if they feel that racism and colonialism are universal moral questions and not foreign or domestic policy issues in this day and age? Here are Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the verge of producing some vague declaration of principles that will offer the Palestinians even less than what Barak proposed in Camp David II. There's a conference in the works that the Americans tentatively called a "meeting" (so as to spare the participants any embarrassment and so as to keep people from pinning too high expectations on what is essentially a PR gambit). But the contours of the outcome of that meeting have been clear for quite a while. They have been shaped by current balances of power. There will be no right of return for Palestinian refugees; East Jerusalem will not be the Palestinian capital; and there will be no dismantlement of all Israeli settlements and no return to pre-June 1967 borders. At the same time, the Zionist regime will remain fully intact and its inherent racism will become a domestic issue.

stop trying to 'save' africa:"Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled.
(...) Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."
(...) Why do the media frequently refer to African countries as having been "granted independence from their colonial masters," as opposed to having fought and shed blood for their freedom? Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?
(...) Last month the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.

making a "world-class" city for the world cup:
It is clear that in their desperate drive to produce "world class" cities, both the city and the province have decided that the easiest way to achieve this is by simply expelling the poor. However, organisations of the poor are arguing that a world-class city is one that cares for the poor and makes policy decisions in consultation with them.