The Israeli regime, Palestinian Arabs and the apartheid analogy

This paper examines the apartheid analogy as a useful tool in analysing the relations between the Israeli regime and its Palestinian Arab subjects. In doing that, it looks at current debates over the question, including the work of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. The Tribunal convened in Cape Town in November 2011 to discuss the applicability of the legal concept of apartheid to Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Among the questions raised in the ensuing debates are the definition of concepts such as race and racial domination (do they apply only to conflicts that use the notion of physical/biological differences, or also to differences based on ethnicity and national identity), the meanings of apartheid (a regime specific to South Africa or southern Africa, or a generic notion that goes beyond its historical origins), the boundaries of Israel (do we refer to its pre-1967 boundaries, to Greater Israel post-1967, or to all areas – including the Diaspora – in which the Israeli regime determines the living conditions of Palestinian Arabs), and the concrete implications of citizenship, residence and refugee rights.

While much of the debate has been explicitly political in nature, it also raises important issues regarding social theory and methodology: how to use concepts rooted in specific place and time in a broader comparative context? how to examine diverse and multi-layered societies on their various dimensions in a comparative manner? How to do that without restricting the analysis to one or two core dimensions, and thereby over-simplifying it, but also without overburdening it by invoking numerous dimensions and excessive empirical detail, and thereby obscuring the overall picture? In other words, how to engage in a dialogue between theory and historical evidence, without sacrificing one for the sake of the other? The paper thus uses a theoretically informed perspective to examine empirical case studies.