What John Dugard tells us about apartheid in South Africa and Israel/Palestine

Palestinian solidarity advocates know that April 27 was a red-letter day for the cause: the ugly “apartheid” label seems finally to have stuck fast to Israel, thanks to the 213-page report released that day by Human Rights Watch. It came soon after the blow struck in January by B’Tselem, when it declared that Israel is an apartheid state from sea to shining Jordan River. Together, the two reports brought to a conclusion decades of arguments and warnings in which the term was brandished as an epithet that allegedly – or might one day — describe the State of Israel. Apartheid Israel has now been declared an established fact.

The two groups’ finding should smooth the way for the International Criminal Court’s unprecedented investigation of Israel for war crimes, and crimes against humanity, including apartheid. Already, the finding helped set up a May report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace calling for a global pivot to reframe the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” into a question of how the international community can secure equal rights for Palestinians.

The advocates of human rights in Palestine have broken through. Hallelujah! Unless the opening is bolstered, however, its effect may be surprisingly limited. The denial, obfuscation, and special pleading that have long protected Israel from the truth may again cloud Americans’ perception of the moral disorder at the heart of Israel’s problem – apartheid.

The work of South African lawyer, jurist, and scholar John Dugard provides such a bolster by clarifying that Israel’s form of apartheid, while quite different in its details, is at least as harsh as the apartheid regime was in South Africa and occupied Southwest Africa (now Namibia). Dugard’s qualifications to examine the issue are exceptional. He led the legal opposition to apartheid in its birthplace and has spent much of the past 20 years in close study of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Most notably, he served as the U.N. Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories from 2001 to 2008. During that time, he officially concluded that Israel’s occupation policies amounted to apartheid.

The power of Dugard’s knowledge and comparative perspective were on display in April 2021, when he spoke at the Washington Report‘s “End Apartheid Conference” , just three days before the publication of HRW’s damning report. The phenomenon of Apartheid, and the challenges to end it in Palestine, are expertly laid out as well in his book, “Confronting Apartheid: A Personal History of South Africa, Namibia and Palestine.” 

In the book, we learn that Dugard he doesn’t use words casually or make accusations lightly, not just because he is a scholar, but because he saw too many worthy anti-apartheid colleagues imprisoned and/or banned for using language carelessly. In his early years as Special Rapporteur, he “studiously avoided … any suggestion that Israel might be practicing apartheid.” Even after his factual research forced him to see the apartheid nature of the case, he at first held off saying so because “to suggest that Israel was guilty of the reviled policy of apartheid would not be believed and would distract attention from … conciliatory recommendations” he was advancing.  Only in 2005 did he publicly characterize the occupation as a form of apartheid and, indeed, he was “savagely criticized by Israel [and] the United States.” He was comforted by a lesson his friend, the great opponent of apartheid Helen Suzman, had taught him — “be sure of your facts and be bold in your opinions.” In the event, he says, “my fact-finding was not seriously faulted.”

At the Washington Report’s End Apartheid Conference in April, Dugard said that in many ways “Israeli apartheid is much more severe than ever apartheid in South Africa was.” He endorsed Susan Abulhawa’s talk, during which she presented a mighty drum roll of laws and policies in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, all intended to “make life hell for Palestinians”. From the list Dugard pulled out two “much more severe” characteristics of Israel’s policies: the “successive attacks that Israel has launched against civilian targets in Gaza,” and the arbitrary demolitions of Palestinian homes.

Dugard’s top-line condemnation of Israel as “worse” than South Africa is obviously powerful ammunition for critics of Israel, but his importance may lie just as much in his exposition of the differences in the particular hell inflicted on black South Africans as compared to the hell to which Palestinians are subjected.

To take an example, many of Israel’s critics liken Israel’s segmenting of Palestinian communities in the West Bank to Apartheid South Africa’s relegation of its black citizens to “Bantustans,” but few of the critics are very familiar with how Bantustans worked.  An advocate who is informed by Dugard’s work can press the comparison more effectively.

As Dugard explains, the apartheid government devised 10 rural “homelands,” with every black person forcibly assigned to one of them and stripped of South African citizenship. Most important, they enabled the notorious Pass Laws, which only allowed blacks to leave their homeland areas if they had a permit, usually because they had a white employer. Blacks who left these “homeland” areas without a valid pass were flung into jail through what Dugard terms “a sausage-machine-like form of justice for blacks, who in almost every case were tried without legal representation and sentenced to … imprisonment of several weeks or months.” Then they were expelled from the urban area where they were employed or looking for employment.

As he investigated life on the West Bank in the early 2000s, with its ubiquitous checkpoints, random closures, the Wall, settlements, curfews, and “road apartheid” (unknown in South Africa), Dugard was reminded of the pass system’s interference with black freedom of movement. Over time, he could see the logic of apartheid driving policy in the very different circumstances of Palestine. The South African pass laws were draconian, but they were administered uniformly and transparently. In contrast, “the Israeli laws [are] administered in a humiliating and capricious manner” that constantly thwarts Palestinians’ mobility and heavily disrupts their daily lives, in effect, pinning them to small areas near their individual homes. The homelands policy was grotesque, he shows readers, but he concludes that Palestinians fare worse than black South Africans did, who were restricted to far larger, clearly designated homelands, in which they were generally left to themselves and on which the government actually spent substantial funds for schools, universities, hospitals, clinics, infrastructure, and industrial sites.

For all its vile character, the South African apartheid system was “completely transparent,” Dugard says in his book. “The government was open in its legislative measures to promote race discrimination and political repression. Everything was very clear on the statute book.” Israel’s system, on the other hand, is covert. For example, many Israeli apartheid laws are contained in “obscure military decrees in Hebrew only and are completely inaccessible to Palestinians.” Also, while Palestinians are almost always denied building permits readily available to residents of illegal Jewish settlements, the denials always take a long time coming and authorities pretend to base the decisions on neutral factors.

The murkiness of Israeli rules helps disguise them, which aggravates the injustice of the Israeli form of apartheid and is a key reason for Dugard’s damning verdict: “If one looks at the situation as a whole, … at the way in which Israel applies a policy of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory … there is no doubt that Israel’s transgressions, its violations of international law, far exceed those of apartheid in South Africa.”

The transparency of the South African regime also makes evident a crucial distinction in the motives and purposes of the two systems. South African apartheid never sought the complete displacement of the black population. Rather, the purpose of the legal regime established in 1948 was to codify and harden existing discrimination aimed at exploitation of the black South Africans, at a moment in history when a new age of equality was dawning, heralded by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated in the same year.

The difference between South Africa’s exploitation-oriented apartheid and Israel’s apartheid of displacement and replacement is that the South African whites sought to keep blacks in a position of servitude, while Israel has never really had a place for Palestinians, not even a subordinate one; they were never part of Zionism’s dream of a Jewish state.

The glimpses that Dugard’s personal story gives of South Africa in the era before the formal apartheid legal regime was imposed illustrate the valuable insights derived from comparison of the two countries. Born in 1936, he grew up in the Transkeian Native Territories. His father was headmaster at an Anglican missionary school “regarded as the Eton of black mission schools.” Graduates included many future leaders of the freedom struggle, among them Nelson Mandela, who expressed admiration for Dugard’s father. Dugard admits that he “grew up like any colonial child, accepting the superiority of the white community but somehow aware that it carried with it responsibilities. Relations between black and white were not intimate. Paternalism prevailed. But there was no great distance.”

South African whites and blacks had known, communicated, and worked with each other for generations; they had coexisted, as well as fought with each other, over the vast, thinly populated spaces of southern Africa. In his memoir, “Long Walk to Freedom,” Nelson Mandela describes his childhood in remote, rural Transkei, far from white communities and their doings. He recalls that in adolescence, even as he became aware of the injustices of colonialism, he lived among helpful white school administrators, working with fine black teachers. The gradual gestation of his revolutionary views reflects the surprising tranquility of much of the inter-racial history of South Africa.

Such white paternalism explains why South Africa’s central untruth – white supremacy — was left right out in the open for all to see. White supremacy was based on a belief in the superiority of the white “race” over people of color. This lie squarely pitted the system against science, democracy, and the most powerful moral movement of the 20^th century: the commitment to equality. From the moment apartheid was legislated, there were objections inside and outside the country. As its degrading evil deepened in the face of black pressure for justice and freedom, the world pushed to end it.

Few observers would use the term “paternalism” to characterize Jewish Israeli attitudes toward the Palestinians. Their attitudes have reflected a much greater psychological distance between the two peoples, more like a yawning chasm: On one side were the Jews who made their way to Palestine in the early years: bold, often somewhat desperate pioneers who proudly put on the armor of supposed European supremacy and Jewish exceptionalism. On the other side were deeply rooted, proud and aspiring Palestinians who had not the slightest good reason to yield to the British-Zionist alliance that had swept in on the winds of World War I. Add to that problematic beginning, the bloody history that started with Zionist-aided, British suppression of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt and that has stretched all the way to the bombings and pogroms of 2021.

The European Jews came to Palestine to establish a Jewish state, not an apartheid state. The apartheid that emerged was not premeditated and had little to do with delusions of Palestinian racial inferiority or plans to exploit Palestinian labor. Yet apartheid was inevitable. In 1948, the settlers could not have established a Zionist, Jewish state without imposing a severe, albeit undeclared, form of apartheid – and so they did. In fact, they immediately imposed 18 years of martial law on the remnant of Palestinians who had escaped expulsion inside Israel.

The central untruth of Zionism was the belief that Palestine was a “land with no people.” When that turned out to be untrue, Jewish Zionist settlers silently amended the doctrine to mean “a land with no people who matter.” This untruth – that Palestinians are not people who matter — offends against the exact same values as the beliefs that underlay South African apartheid. However, in the case of Zionism, the untruth is not transparent. It has been disguised and denied by a relentless barrage of shifting alibis, exculpations, and mitigations, as well as heavy demonization of critics.

This defensive strategy has enjoyed a long run, particularly in the U.S. However, the apartheid reports do seem to be changing the terms of debate. After decades of debating whether Israel is an apartheid state, the question is becoming, “Given that Israel is an apartheid state, how can the governments of the West, and many of its citizens, turn a blind eye? How can they support this racist denial of human rights?”

Advocates now can go beyond just swatting away endless lies and half-truths toward finally making the truth about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians visible to Americans, overcoming the self-delusions, willful ignorance, pretended innocence, and hidden agendas that have long given Israel impunity. But communicating the apartheid reality of Israel, which America and the West have for so long refused to recognize, likely will take more than just turning up the volume on the recent reports. Dugard’s reflections on the history and distinctive texture of the lived South African experience, set in the context of the current Palestinian struggle, offer the kind of deeper perspective advocates of justice in Israel-Palestine can use.