http://indymedia.org.il
Columbia University conference focuses on parallels between apartheid and eventsWednesday 02 Oct 2002
author: Sonya Fatah
summary
Secondly, academics reflected that in the SA case the white-black relationship was about both land and labour. The Palestinians, however, are completely marginal to the labour market. Mamdani believes "this makes for a relationship which lends itself to ethnic cleansing, even genocide".
Not Just Simply Convergence Or Divergence
Business Day (Johannesburg)
ANALYSIS
October 2, 2002
Posted to the web October 2, 2002
Sonya Fatah
Johannesburg
Columbia University conference focuses on parallels between apartheid and events in Israel
A HOST of Israeli-Palestine conversations have been held at Columbia University over the years. But last week's academic conference in New York focused on drawing parallels with the SA experience.
This latest initiative, A South African Conversation on Israel and Palestine, the brainchild of the director of the Institute of African Studies, Mahmood Mamdani, brought together US and SA based intellectuals to recount their versions of the "SA experience" and to debate its resonance with the Middle East conflict. However, the thrust of the meeting was not in the similarities, but rather the differences between the two.
This exercise was significant because it lent an international forum for SA academics to voice their views on apartheidera politics, and to dismiss simplistic analogies to the Israeli regime over two days of debates and discussions.
SA participants included Andre du Toit, director the department of political studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Steven Friedman, director of the Centre of Policy Studies, Cape Town High Court judge Denis Davis and Peter Vale of the University of Western Cape.
Mamdani, once chairman of African Studies at UCT, designed the programme to include Palestinians and Israelis. But the situation in the Middle East made travel impossible. Instead, Palestinian American academics such as Mona Younis and Wadie Said participated.
The missing presence of Middle East intellectuals changed a potentially activist conference into a more academic one. In this regard, Du Toit believes the conference was successful.
"There was always the question of how SA in transition may be relevant in the Palestine case. It was a very good conference," he said.
The opening session presented by Jeff Halper, co-ordinator of the Israeli committee of house demolitions, was arguably the most controversial. Halper suggested that while "Nishul" (displacement in Hebrew) as a system, more than a policy, differed as a nation based rather than a race based system of oppression, the similarities were not to be dismissed.
Du Toit rejected Halper's view, warning the connections between the two systems were far-fetched.
"My paper was based on internal debates among Afrikaner intellectuals in the 1980s. These are issues which are primarily of local concern . One should be careful about making such simple analogies," he said.
Hakima Abbas, a masters student at Columbia's school of international and public affairs, said: "The summary didn't emphasise the apartheid nature of the Israeli regime with its collective punishment and extra-judicial killings."
But Abbas' analysis ignored the outcome of the conference, which suggested the Middle East experience differed from SA on three levels.
Mamdani said, first, "the settler/native metaphor was not appropriate because the Jews who go back to Israel see themselves as returning natives and the Palestinians as usurpers. It became clear the more appropriate analogy from the African experience could be found in Liberia and Sierra Leone."
Secondly, academics reflected that in the SA case the white-black relationship was about both land and labour. The Palestinians, however, are completely marginal to the labour market. Mamdani believes "this makes for a relationship which lends itself to ethnic cleansing, even genocide".
On a third level, there was an acknowledgement of the vast differences. In SA while apartheid was the problem, it appeared to be the solution in Israel.
"The two state solution is a call for separate development . apartheid is a concession won by the Palestinian movement," said Mamdani.
Steven Friedman felt there were strategic openings, insisting that international protest was important but useless without domestic political movements.
"In a situation which looks quite bleak, there are strategic openings. What looks like sophisticated control, has strategic corners that are not always obvious."
Friedman called for a search for strategic openings that ended apartheid SA to be applied in the Palestine struggle.