‘Apartheid Israel’ Review: Is the South Africa Analogy Helpful?

“Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy,” published in 2015 and edited by Sean Jacobs and Jon Soske, weaves very rich and at times head-scratching histories that link both contemporary and Apartheid-era South Africa and the establishment of and contemporary landscape of Israel.

This political essay collection illustrates the multifaceted nature of this comparison and global (imperial) power play. Pieces explore ideological comparisons of Zionism and Apartheid, as well as recounted history of Israel playing to both ‘sides’ of South Africa during the height of Apartheid — i.e. selling (embargoed) arms to the white supremacist National Party of South, and building a stadium and financing a cultural center in the ‘independent’ Bantustan of Bophuthatswana.

Summary: A Collection of Essays from Africa Scholars

The collection is authored by seventeen scholars of Africa and its diaspora, with a foreword from Achille Mbembe.

The introduction essay by the editors, Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs, spells out clearly the why and the what of this collection: Why does this comparison of the conditions of apartheid engender more pertinent questions about power and resistance, and what more comes of connecting these dots?

The writers firmly ground us in the debates that have contemporarily surrounded the occupation of Palestine as it pertains to the term, apartheid.

On one hand, the usage of the word, apartheid, by activists, legal scholars and lawyers, and the BDS campaign attempts to categorize Israel’s policies as characteristic of apartheid. This argument then situates Israel’s actions as a crime under international law, specifically a violation of the 1965 International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that declared apartheid a crime, as well as the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1973.

On the other hand, there have been long-standing historical and political comparisons specifically to South African apartheid and the establishment of Israel and the occupation of Palestine. Most visibly, SA and Israel have both implemented rigid segregation on the basis of belonging and ethnicity, carried out violent dispossession and forced removals, and imposed standards of Western hegemony. These comparisons have merit and observable similarities.

The 17 writers lend their voices to parse out the important lessons this analogy offers and the applicable lessons from the past to employ now. And this book offers that considerable similarities and differences between South African apartheid and Israeli apartheid must lead us to different forms of resistance, and necessitate a more incisive response.

Overarching, the analogy discursively and incisively locates Israel as a project of colonization. As the editors wrote, “Perhaps most important, the apartheid analogy has helped to insert the staggering human costs of the occupation at the center of global attention.”

Audience and Genre: (Likely Pro-Palestine and/or Anti-Zionist) Politics Seekers Who Value Historical Grounding

The audience for this book is most likely readers who are already interested in some of these conversations. This book doesn’t seek to explain apartheid, persuade readers that it exists, or make a definitive argument that it is the right or wrong designation for the occupation of Palestine. Authors assume a foundational understanding that apartheid necessitates violence, and the history and utility of that violence is complicated, intertwined and disparate, with the focus on Palestine and South Africa. This book has been cited by and reviewed by academics most likely due to the fact that the co-editors, alongside several contributors, are academics themselves. Both Jacobs and Soske teach in the global north, and many reviews come from universities based there. However, these scholars’ focus areas tend to be either Palestine or South Africa, and of course, the overlaps between the two.

While the book has academic influences, it is not a collection that is totally academic. Some of the chapters read like personal essays, and others, a historical snapshot. Many of the writers attempt to look at the subject through a political lens but do not go deep into the mechanics of ideology.

The length of each essay being usually 5-6 pages ensures each author gets to the point quite succinctly. This collection seems to have a clear legibility to both South Africans as well as Palestinians.

Three Cs: Compelling, Clear, Concise

Editorial Note: We believe these three factors are important for evaluating general writing quality across every aspect of the book. Before you get into further analysis, here’s a quick breakdown to clarify how we’re using these words:

• Compelling: Does the author consistently write in a way that would make most readers emotionally invested in the book’s content?
• Clear: Are most sentences and parts of the book easy enough to read and understand?
• Concise: Are there sections or many sentences that could be cut? Does the book have pacing problems?

Compelling: Apt Comparisons With the Generosity of Thought to Back It Up

There was a disturbing trend identified in 2020: the booklistification of Black literature. In the case of spectacular instances of violence, book lists emerged almost as a solution rather than a context for a moment that is a result of hundreds of years of racialised capitalism. As such, an onus was placed on Black literature to neatly solve racial bias and social violence in 250 pages or less. While sometimes sought out with good intention by readers of all races, certain book lists can position reading as an immediate solution or — in colloquial terms — ‘the work,’ rather than only the beginning of the work.

Similarly, ever since October 2023, there has certainly been a logical and reactive uptick in the interest in deeply understanding Palestine and Israel in the current moment. Equally, that understanding has been intentionally muddied by immense propaganda by the Israeli state and its allies.

This collection is compelling because it doesn’t seek to offer answers on how to stop the genocide at any given point — either in 2015 or now in 2025 — even as that goal feels like the fervent impulse and need.

The essays offer deeper questions about what exactly operationalizes this violence, and how this understanding can offer us more pertinent questions of resistance and solidarity. Diverse understandings of histories between SA and Israel emerge to support the ideological comparisons.

For example, Chapter 4, authored by ​​Arianna Lissoni, detailed a complicated and complex history between Bophuthatswana and Israel. Bophuthatswana was one of many independent governments, which was a kind of annexation of Black populations into what were called Bantustans.

The leadership of Bophuthatswana nurtured a relationship with Israel in the 1960s onward, compelled by the financial and geopolitical opportunities Israel offered. This relationship included representation in Israel in the form of a de facto embassy (Bophuthatswana House in Tel Aviv) and infrastructure building, including cultural centres and Independence Stadium in Mafikeng (also known as Mmabatho stadium, named after Bophuthatswana’s capital city), a 59,000 seat arena conceptualized in the 1970s. Israel functioned as a model for independence and ethno-state longevity, which some Bantustan governments foresaw as their embraced long-term existence.

What was most revealing and compelling about this history was the dismantling of the definition of resistance and freedom in the popular history of Black South African communities. In this instance of Bophuthatswana, the idea of freedom was iterated through independence and insularity, with the help and support of the Israeli government. The benefit the Israeli government received from their investment was ambiguous, but could be seen as establishing legitimate protection from claims that they were only supporting other ‘racist’ governments. Investments in South Africa’s bantustans could represent an investment in a ‘two-state solution’ that Israel was attempting to portray as their ultimate goal and humble ask to the international community.

Robin D.G. Kelley’s essay threads the line of complexity by picking up how Israel found unlikely supporters in Black Americans, via groups like Vanguard Leadership Group (VLG) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI), who denounced boycotts and criticism of Israel. Additionally, certain Black media outlets peddled anti-Arab sentiments around civility.

This support is rooted in, of course, the effective propaganda Israel carried out, but also the conceptual promise of elusive freedom that many former colonized people organized for. Long before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionism had supporters like Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois, though DuBois recanted his support for the country later in his life. This support was due to the alignment of an ethno-state and a promised land that guaranteed reprieve from all the dispossession. In short, a ‘home.’

Fast forward to the establishment of Israel. That conceptual support remained and grew in the face of imperial violence through the 1960s by the aforementioned groups, disguised as a democratic government that supported developing African nations (like Bophuthatswana) and even recognised queer rights.

Clear: Detailed Distinctions Between South Africa and Israel

Chapter 3 employed a political and historical analysis that illuminates the ‘on paper’ differences and similarities between SA and Israel. One of the major striking differences is the point of leverage. In South Africa, as in other settler colonies such as the U.S., Brazil and the Caribbean, Black populations either outright outnumbered settlers and colonists or outnumbered them in the context of the region, i.e. a plantation. Physical uprising and labor were levers of power that resistance was enacted upon in South Africa.

In the case of Palestine and Israel, the hierarchical and exclusive definition of citizenship implies exponentiality of territory. Most Zionists can become Israeli, where proven allegiance to that state and the project of Zionism in combination with white supremacist-informed ethnic preferences work to enforce this citizenship hierarchy. This structure then means Ashkenazi Zionists have a special advantage other non-Ashkenazi practitioners of Judaism and Zionism. For example, it was uncovered that thousands of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants resettling in Israel were unknowingly being administered birth control in 2012 by the state of Israel. This violation resulted in incredibly low birth rates among these immigrant communities for upward of two years, as the birth control jab of Depo-Provera has been severely scrutinized.

The financial backing of Israel has facilitated a much more insular colonial settlement where expulsion and geographical domination generally does not cripple the interior functioning of Israel. The geographic boundaries of Israel also attempt to insulate the manufactured ‘victimhood’ when it comes to the critique of the country. Because Palestine is “outside” the bounds of Israel, the critique of the country can be easily conflated as a critique of solely its citizens, homogenizing the varied people who reside in Israel, in addition to Palestinians and other ‘immigrants.’

The consolidation of power between the more ‘singular’ entities of Israel and Palestine differ vastly from the various competing power forces in South Africa. In SA, the British, the Portuguese, the Dutch and religious missionaries all competed and fought for their own dominance. While most of these groups possessed a common racist pseudoscience or religious prejudice that drove the denigration of indigenous people, their differences didn’t allow for a totalizing power domination. Instead, there were competing interests and strongholds, for better or for worse.

Concise: Well-Paced Essay Arrangement

Several essays of varying length paced the book well and allowed for processing. While some chapters were shorter than others, generally, the content of each chapter had depth without extraneous writing.

Prose Style: Essays, Anecdotes and Academics, Oh My

This collection offers essays that read like anecdotes, memoir and traditional political essays. The variety keeps the reader engaged and able to take in the various touchpoints made across historical and contemporary landscapes.

Cultural and Political Significance: Questions About the BDS Strategy, Neoliberalism, a One-State Solution and More

“Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy” is a collection that presents and weaves political ideology, history and intertwining powers to illuminate the coordinated power and political plays. By drawing these lines, it uncloaks the general and overwhelming dispossession that these powers attempt to yield. It also adds comprehension to incomprehensible violence.

It considers how we arrive at the moment and forgoes the collapsing binaries of “us vs them.”

This book also recounts the effectiveness of boycotts and sanctions, and equally raises the question of how sanctions have worked in SA but not in Israel, to the same degree. This book richly recounts various historical instances of boycotts against SA that make up the tapestry of everything pre-94, anti-apartheid history.

This historical analysis then visibilizes the differences in how apartheid can be exacted. In SA, a small white minority of disparate settler groups eventually fell to majority uprising and international sanctions. Israel, on the other hand, has had a contemporary financial and hegemonic backing that has expedited annihilation and also allowed for less interdependence and internal pushback, both through geographical separation and the censoring of Palestinian lawmakers and politicians.

Importantly, other chapters brought the structure of contemporary South Africa into the discussion. Chapter 5 discusses how neoliberalism automates dispossession on multiple levels, and that contemporary South Africa is just as rife with apartheid and apartheid hangovers as Israel currently is.

This point was well noted by Andy Clarno: “In both Palestine/Israel and South Africa, neoliberal restructuring has intensified race and class inequality and generated new struggles and social movements.” Clarno notes that privatization (of public services and land), promotion of entrepreneurship as a solution to systemic unemployment, and ongoing deregulation of large-scale markets have resulted in widening the gap of inequality and access in both SA and Israel and Palestine.

In South Africa, this problem indicts the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a symbolic happening that did not and could not reckon with the structural inequality and indignity of apartheid and colonialism, but only the artifice. South Africa, as a result of 400 years of slavery, colonialism, and 46 years of formalized Apartheid, is one of the most unequal countries on earth, with immense barriers to entry for decent housing, education, basic services like water and electricity, and the list goes on. This inequality points towards the reality that a one-state solution was not a solution that rearranged the power structure, but leaves many levers of power and social attitudes in place.

This shortcoming then begs the question of what does any kind of solution look like between Israel and Palestine when compared to past misgivings? What needs to be in place and protected to ensure dignity? Perhaps this was one of the most pertinent kinds of questions to emerge from the collection.

Critiquing the Critics: Bridging the Gap Between 2010s and Post-October 7 Perspective

This collection was published 10 years ago, conceptualized and first published as a project by Africa is a Country, and then shortly later, into a formal publication. Most of the reviews of the collection are academic reviews, which tended to focus on the granular measurements on whether new means of thinking were proven to be opened (mostly yes) and the discursive utility of apartheid as an analysis. Support in the form of progressive left publications offered critical and long-form engagement of the major ideological and historical positions of the book, and where they lead readers to go. There has been praise for Mbembe’s foreword as chilling and indicting, whereas I found the utility of the sentiment to fall short as a reader in 2025, as detailed below.

Reviewer’s Personal Opinion: Insufficient Focus on Queerness, and a Weak Final Essay and Forward

This collection can well equip readers with more understanding of history and power, which often get overshadowed by outrage, rage, anger, and of course, the sounds of war and genocide.

I think it equally posed readers with history that is both less well-known, but also odd, unable to slot neatly into a narrative of good versus bad. Academics, when done right, ask deeper questions about how power contracts and expands, what it will target and how it will materialize that violence. As such, most authors brought that large scope, yet specific focus, to their work.

The only essay that centered queerness and queer activism made cogent links between the enshrining of queer rights into South Africa’s constitution and the presence of queer activists in the anti-apartheid movement. Kelly Gillespie, professor at UWC here in Cape Town, where I am writing from, drew upon the legacy of Simon Nkoli and other queer activists who understood that homophobia and transphobia were just as pertinent threats to society as apartheid. They are byproducts of the system of white supremacy. The essay demonstrated that you need to imagine the better future while we are in the present reality. If there shall be queer, anti-imperial values on the other side of a revolution, it must also be practiced and imagined now.

Most of the essays brought an interesting angle, with the exception of the final chapter and the foreword. The final chapter was one of the few chapters that centred the pain and impact of the Holocaust and the indoctrinated fear of violence many Jewish people are shaped to feel to justify the project of Israel, but this author also used very indirect language to talk about apartheid.

The author more reluctantly admits that settler colonialism isn’t so great: “And Jews, we must acknowledge, have been rendered by Europe as superfluous of a special type. The unfortunate response of Zionism to the trauma of the Shoah is that it replicates the very forms of being that sustain the modern European state’s incapacity to accommodate life for too long.”

This kind of euphemism and softening the description of the extermination settler colonialism does seems insufficient, to say the least. Further, this final essay, titled “The Last Colony,” employs an ironic hegemony around the provincial nature of Western imperialism. Palestine is not the last colony when considering numerous global conflicts and standards. Colonialism exists in Western Sahara, Puerto Rico is still a US territory unable to vote in US elections, and several former French colonies are still paying reparations back to France. While the focus of the book is between the two countries, essays were demonstratively enhanced by bringing in other histories and other countries to strengthen the argument as well as reveal the interconnectedness of imperialism and white supremacy (which produces all forms of discrimination), and how it will eat itself over eating a plate of equality. This final essay left me confused about its placement in the book, but also its rigor in establishing a robust argument.

Achille Mbembe’s forward felt decisive but brief, given that he began it with, “There is no need to say much more. We have heard it all by now and from all parties.” The sentiment can be understood — there is no ambiguity in the violence of Israel, and no amount of discourse can justify it or should no longer be used to draw out the actions of the Israeli government while we work on the latest distraction discourse.

While our writing of this time must reflect our times, there is something taken for granted in barely specifying where exactly we are, from where does this book emerge, why explore this analogy question when at the time of the writing of the book, it could be marked by any of the number of atrocities that is broadly captured in his statement: “Thus every two or three years, an all-out, asymmetrical assault against a population entrapped in an open-air prison”.

It’s this exact kind of statement that can actually make us wonder in what two to three-year period we are in and why this period. As it reads now in 2025, two years into a major bombing, starvation, and all-out assault campaign, the generalization of and predictability of violence don’t resonate well, even as violence is our global norm.

Lastly, there perhaps could be more grounding in the deep roots of Zionism, to unchain the sentiment of safety from Zionism itself. As a conceptualization longer before WWII, Zionism has imperialist underpinnings, and therefore cannot be rehabilitated to ensure safety. If anything, that safety or protection has to be quite violently reinforced, as we are witnessing today. This topic could have added one extra layer to the analysis.

Conclusion: Apartheid Has Many Iterations, Underpinned by Imperialism

“Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy,” published in 2015, could unfortunately have been published today, and many of the atrocities named are somewhat interchangeable.

The collection draws lines across South Africa, the occupation of Palestine, as well as other connected countries, including the US and Angola, which again shared predictable and not-so-predictable relations with Israel.

It is a collection of candor that doesn’t apologize or make concessions for a topic that has been made to be unapproachable through repeated punishment and blackballing by critics, and of course, physical harm or disappearance as well. The collection analyses power and structures that have repeatedly been identified as underpinned by white supremacy, with varying results and repercussions.

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