Apartheid - from South Africa to Palestine

SA’s role in the draft UN Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity

- WENDY ISAACK

IT WAS August 2023, and I felt I was being transported back to the 1980s, to my childhood in South Africa. Before me lay a village of tightly packed, concrete structures with corrugated metal roofs wending along dirt roads.

It was my 13th trip to learn about and document human rights abuses in Israeli occupied Palestinian territory in llyears, and as we stopped in one Palestinian community in al-Naqab, I felt I could have been visiting apartheid-era black townships.

South Africa's regime in the 1960s forcibly displaced my parents to a township in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Like the villages in al-Naqab, the township where I was born lacked government services, so the Bedouin dwellings felt all too familiar. Israeli apartheid policies leave them struggling to remain in “unrecognised” villages. Overcrowded and on non-arable land, they lack electricity and water, and villagers face the potential loss of even this bare existence. At the village of Al Araqib I learned that residents had just rebuilt their community for the 218th time in 13 years. Al Araqib’s land is desirable as it lies just within a region in the desert considered arable.

During my journeys in Palestine, it was impossible to miss the resonances between Palestinians’ and black South Africans’ experiences. Apartheid-era policies disproportionately deprived black women of educational and work opportunities, relegating them to the bottom of economic hierarchies. In a similar fashion, apartheid strips Palestinians of inherent human dignity. Palestinian women dispropartionatsly suffer due to Israeli policies that can render them stateless. Representatives of human rights organisations that I had the privilege to work with over the years shared accounts of state-sponsored violence.