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  • probablyaCat@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Jesus fuck. I wasn’t reductive of apartheid. I was pointing out that apartheid was the policy and south Africa was the nation state. You are reductive of apartheid by trying to simplify it enough that Israel fits your definition of it.

    And again, it did not start from scratch. There was a lot of things that were done and existed during the change. A constitution is only one part of a nation state. They already had international recognition. No one was disputing the borders of south Africa. Changing internal borders is an entirely different thing to changing international borders. Literally right next door was south West Africa. Which, if you really want to shoehorn this comparison is a clearly better comparison. But they had an entire civil war forming national and international boundaries. Seriously. It is clear you’ve just read a few lefty articles about how some people from SA say that Israel is an apartheid state.

    But let me show you. SWA was a territory controlled by Germany until WWI (check), British gain control (check), UN defines it as mandatory swa governed by SA governed by great Britain (check), great Britain makes plan for SA to be independent and swa to be independent, but (now this is where things differ) SA is like nah and takes control, doesn’t give it up, and institutes apartheid there as well. Eventually the whole region falls into a border war and closely intertwined civil war in Angola. And then we got Namibia.

    There are a lot of parallels. But that doesn’t mean it is the same. And when you try to make it the same it is reductive for both sides. The apartheid of SA and SWA is orders of magnitude above the restrictions in the west bank and Gaza. It ignores the backgrounds and why some of those things exist. It was made to have essentially an entire slave class in SA and SWA. Palestinians are not slaves. Arab Israelis certainly experience systemic racism in Israel. But not something that can be classified as apartheid.

    Like what things specifically do you think qualifies it as apartheid.