The Ghost of Hendrik Present
The Ghost of Hendrik Present
The Freedom of a Prison Yard - MET - Chapter 67
“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
When they finally woke up to the iniquities of apartheid after the bloody Soweto protests of June, 1976, the whole wide world was united in calling for a one-state solution for South Africa.
Apparently forgetting that only a few days ago they were celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the election that ended apartheid, dissolved the borders of the bantustans, and transformed South Africa into a single state with equal rights for all its people, the same wide world is still calling for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
Why?
Flip the pages of history back to 1950, replace the word Bantu with Palestinians and the word Europeans with Jews, and you will find the most eloquent case for a two-state solution written large and loud right here:
My point is that if mixed development is to be the policy of the future of South Africa, it will lead to the most terrific clash of interests imaginable. The endeavours and desires of the Bantu and the endeavours and objectives of all Europeans will be antagonistic. Such a clash can only bring unhappiness and misery to both. Both Bantu and European must, therefore, consider in good time how this misery can be averted from themselves and from their descendants.
They must find a plan to provide the two population groups with opportunities for the full development of their respective powers and ambitions without coming into conflict. The only possible way out is the second alternative, namely, that both adopt a development divorced from each other. That is all that the word apartheid means.
Hendrik Verwoerd, Speech as Minister of Native Affairs, 5 December 1950
Echoing through the decades, but still several years before the genocide of Gaza, we hear precisely the same case being made by one of the most articulate British proponents of a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine. Replace Israel with apartheid South Africa and Jewish with Afrikaner:
“…to those who say a two state solution is now a fantasy, I say it is a fantasy to think a one state solution could ever be either sustainable or consistent with Israel’s democratic values.
A one state solution is simply not a solution at all. It would mean either the demise of Israel as a Jewish state or the demise of Israel as a democratic state. It would be the end of the dream of national self determination for the Jewish people.”
Douglas Alexander, former Member of Parliament for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, July 2013
I had to search the web of the whole wide world to find a single (and, it turns out, very prescient) voice raised against the Verwoerdian dream of a two-state solution:
If Israel’s relentless expansion into Palestinian territories cannot be stopped then we must face one of two possible outcomes. The first is that all Palestinian presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem remains in a permanent and ever-more formalized “Bantustan status”, islands of minimal self-governance with the continued denial of basic rights, facing on-going pressure, perpetual insecurity and possible future physical removal. The second is that they are absorbed into a common Israeli-Palestinian state with the opportunity for pluralism and human rights advancement.
British politician and former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, an alumnus of Pretoria Boys High School, perhaps not accidentally.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/01/peter-hain-one-state-solution-israeli-palestinian-conflict-must-be-considered
My alarmed italics.
As well-meaning and nobly motivated as it clearly is, yesterday’s majority vote by the General Assembly to urge the Security Council to recognise Palestine as an independent state is a grave mistake. It will do little or nothing to protect Palestine from further encroachments by Israeli settlers in the future. And it will inspire Netanyahu only to accelerate his genocidal mission to wipe every Palestinian man, woman and child from the face of the earth before the Security Council finds the time to squeeze the issue onto its agenda.
The two-state idea is not a solution. By blindly following the narrow logic of apartheid, Brexit, separatism and the kind of nationalism that inspired Nazism, it is a recipe for eternal division in what is already the most tragically divided region on the planet. Such freedom as it might promise to the Palestinian people will be the freedom of a prison-yard:
The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.
Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself
In the gloomy light under this swelling cumulus of the world’s stupidity, and in the same spirit of largely self-inflicted fear, hate, loathing and despair, the time has also surely come for the whole wide world to stop referring to Israel as an apartheid state.
It’s giving us an unjustly bad name.