On 7 october 2023 I was sitting in a Johannesburg Airbnb, listening with horror to early reports of the Hamas invasion. My horror was not only in response to the immediate loss of life; like everyone else, I wondered what untold atrocities would now befall Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, already devastated by years of Israeli military bombardment. Was this the opening that the Israeli state had been waiting for? I never imagined that the conflict would still be raging, let alone thrusting towards a wider regional war. Previous clashes had ended within weeks, due to Israel’s military superiority. This time was different. The urban terrain, the resilience of Hamas and the people of Gaza, the balance of forces in the region and new warfare technologies posed distinct challenges for the Israeli Defence Forces, who were now fighting on multiple fronts with more ambitious goals than just recovering the hostages: destroying Hamas and then Hezbollah, controlling Southern Lebanon—in addition to making life unbearable for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It was the continuation of the Nakba—an uncivil war of land expropriation.
In those early days, watching with mounting anxiety the indiscriminate bombing of a defenceless population, I wondered why such an eruption of violence had not occurred in apartheid South Africa. Many had anticipated a similar Armageddon. The States of Emergency between 1984 and 1994 saw the militarization of townships, death squads, chemical warfare, assassinations, torture and detention without trial. During this period, an estimated 20,000 were killed in South Africa, the vast majority black; another 1.5 million died in South Africa’s ‘destabilization’ of neighbouring countries. How, after ten years of civil war, did this culminate in a negotiated settlement, the dismantling of the major planks of the apartheid order, and the first elections based on majority rule? Why does such an outcome—with all its problems—seem so remote when we turn to the plight of the Palestinians and the spiralling violence, internal and external, of the Israeli state? How was it that the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 intensified confrontations rather than making progress towards a two-state solution? Why did Israel abandon the Abraham Accords, which outlined collaboration with Arab states, preferring the disproportionate massacre of Palestinians after Hamas’s incursion?
There are many possible answers to these questions but let me prefigure my own. Here I will situate the multiple dimensions of these two conflicts within the framework of ‘settler colonialism’, distinguishing between a type based on land expropriation and one based on labour exploitation. These two types of settler colonialism are intimately connected with the history of both countries, but in South Africa there was a move from the primacy of land expropriation to the primacy of labour exploitation while in the Palestinian case, the movement was the reverse. My argument is that land expropriation tends towards an irreconcilable conflict whereas labour exploitation can lead to class compromise, allowing for the possibility of reform.
To paraphrase Marx, these economic forms are the real foundations from which arise historically specific superstructures, through which settlers and natives become conscious of their conflict and fight it out. Accordingly, what follows has four parts: the first is a methodological-theoretical introduction setting up the second, a brief comparative history of the two lands. This provides context for the third, an examination of the present balance of forces, at national, regional and international levels. I end by turning to the United States, before offering speculative remarks about the future.
The questions above indicate the need for a comparative history—tracking parallel processes in the two countries and their divergent outcomes. Comparison helps to delineate the salient issues driving each case and thus alternative roads forward. To compare, however, we need a common framework. How often have I heard colleagues baulk at comparisons involving Israel or South Africa, let alone direct contrasts between them, claiming that you cannot compare apples and bananas. Yes, you can! Indeed, that is the art of sociology—to perform the magic trick of turning apples and bananas into pineapples.
One term commonly deployed when the two countries are considered together is ‘apartheid’. Here, however, the term often loses its specificity. It gets reduced to a broad definition such as ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group’.footnote1 Calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is a way to condemn it as a racist society. But the concept has also informed the strategy of the Israeli ruling class, who have used it to rationalize their domination; while for their part, the Afrikaner right wing envied the repressive policies of the Israeli state. In each case the term is employed to demonstrate or imagine convergences. I prefer to restrict ‘apartheid’ to South Africa and instead adopt the shared category of ‘settler colonialism’, establishing the similarities between South Africa and Israel in order to understand their differences. In other words, I seek differences within similarities rather than similarities within differences.
By ‘settler colonialism’ I refer to an invasion of a foreign land, supported from an imperial centre, by settlers who permanently subjugate an indigenous people. In South Africa, this began with the Dutch East India Company in the middle of the seventeenth century; in Palestine, with the immigration of Jews at the end of the nineteenth. In both cases the settlers fought wars on two fronts—against both the indigenous population and British imperialism—before they succeeded in establishing their racially exclusive states. Unlike ‘franchise’ colonies of resource extraction, the settlers were firmly rooted with nowhere else to go. European Jews were fleeing their own persecution in the pogroms and then the Holocaust; Afrikaners had lost contact with their European ancestors.