This book is a comparison of two ethnic-national "apartheid" states – South Africa and Israel – which have been in conflict, and how internal dissent has developed. In particular it examines the evolution of effective white protest in South Africa and explores the reasons why comparably powerful movements have not emerged in Israel. The book reveals patterns of behaviour shared by groups in both cases. It argues that although the role played by protest groups in peace-building may be limited, a tipping point, or ‘magic point’, can become as significant as other major factors. It highlights the role played by intermediate variables that affect the pathways of protest groups: such as changes in the international system; the visions and strategies of resistance movements and their degree of success; the economic relationship between the dominant and dominated side; and the legitimacy of the ideology in power (apartheid or Zionism). Although the politics and roles of protest groups in both cases share some similarities, differences remain. Whilst white protest groups moved towards an inclusive peace agenda that adopts the ANC vision of a united non-racial democratic South Africa, the Jewish Israeli protest groups are still, by majority, entrenched in their support for an exclusive Jewish state. And as such, they support separation between the two peoples and a limited division of mandatory Palestine / ‘Eretz Israel’. This timely book sheds light on a controversial and explosive political issue: Israel being compared to apartheid South Africa.

The first thorough account of South African Jewish religious, political, and educational institutions in relation to the apartheid regime.

Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel was a darling of the international left, vocally opposed to apartheid and devoted to building alliances with black leaders in newly independent African nations. South Africa, for its part, was controlled by a regime of Afrikaner nationalists who had enthusiastically supported Hitler during World War II. But after Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, the country found itself estranged from former allies and threatened anew by old enemies. As both states became international pariahs, a covert—and lucrative—military relationship blossomed between these seemingly unlikely allies. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive interviews with former generals and high-level government officials in both countries, The Unspoken Alliance tells a troubling story of Cold War paranoia, moral compromises, and startling secrets.

Within the already heavily polarised debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa remain highly contentious. A number of prominent academic and political commentators, including former US president Jimmy Carter and UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, have argued that Israel's treatment of its Arab-Israeli citizens and the people of the occupied territories amounts to a system of oppression no less brutal or inhumane than that of South Africa's white supremacists. Similarly, boycott and disinvestment campaigns comparable to those employed by anti-apartheid activists have attracted growing support. Yet while the 'apartheid question' has become increasingly visible in this debate, there has been little in the way of genuine scholarly analysis of the similarities (or otherwise) between the Zionist and apartheid regimes. In Israel and South Africa, Ilan Pappé, one of Israel's preeminent academics and a noted critic of the current government, brings together lawyers, journalists, policy makers and historians of both countries to assess the implications of the apartheid analogy for international law, activism and policy making. With contributors including the distinguished anti-apartheid activist Ronnie Kasrils, Israel and South Africa offers a bold and incisive perspective on one of the defining moral questions of our age.

This is the first comparative analysis of the political transitions in South Africa and Palestine since the 1990s. Clarno s study is grounded in impressive ethnographic fieldwork, taking him from South African townships to Palestinian refugee camps, where he talked to a wide array of informants, from local residents to policymakers, political activists, business representatives, and local and international security personnel. The resulting inquiry accounts for the simultaneous development of extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the poor in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last 20 years. Clarno places these transitions in a global context while arguing that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both countries. The width and depth of Clarno s research, combined with wide-ranging first-hand accounts of realities otherwise difficult for researchers to access, make Neoliberal Apartheid a path-breaking contribution to the study of social change, political transitions, and security dynamics in highly unequal societies. Take one example of Clarno s major themes, to wit, the issue of security. Both places have generated advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. In South Africa, racialized anxieties about black crime shape the growth of private security forces that police poor black South Africans in wealthy neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a discourse of Muslim terrorism informs the coordinated network of security forcesinvolving Israel, the United States, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authoritythat polices Palestinians in the West Bank. Overall, Clarno s pathbreaking book shows how the shifting relationship between racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire has generated inequality and insecurity, marginalization and securitization in South Africa, Palestine/Israel, and other parts of the world."

In Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, eighteen scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today’s movement for justice in Palestine.

Table of contents

A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organisations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream, the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals, may die. In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the centre of the crisis: Barack Obama, America's first 'Jewish president', a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people's special curse. These two men embody fundamentally different visions, not just of American and Israeli national interests, but of the mission of the Jewish people itself. Beinart concludes with provocative proposals for how the relationship between American Jews and Israel must change, and with an eloquent and moving appeal for American Jews to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late.