Settler societies and political conflict

Settler Societies and Political Conflict: A Comparative Historical Study of South Africa and Israel Ran Greenstein October 28, 1990 Introduction The Palestinian Intifada erupting on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on December 9, 1987, has moved the Israeli-Arab conflict into a new stage characterized by massive grassroots opposition to the Israeli occupation. In a similar manner, the period since 1984 has seen an intensification of the struggle of the South African masses against the apartheid regime, forcing a major reform of government policies. In both societies there has been a change of focus in the nature of group conflict with the direct intervention of popular forces in the political process. Obvious similarities in the immediate responses of members of subordinate groups have gone together, however, with quite different perceived solutions to the conflict. In South Africa we can see a growing awareness on the part of whites of the inevitability of the political incorporation of blacks in a unified non-racial system as demanded all along by the antiapartheid opposition. This can be contrasted with the equally growing recognition on the part of significant segments of the Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish populations of the principle of self-determination for both national groups, and consequent partition of the territory between them and formation of two separate states. Recent political moves by the South African government and the major opposition organizations, the African National Congress and its allies, towards negotiations and suspension of armed hostilities clearly show that all sides to the South African conflict (as well as world public opinion) share an understanding that any future solution must be integrative. There is a substantial opposition to the government's new reformist strategy among the white right-wing. With the exception of the marginal Oranjewerkers, however, none of these opposition movements such as the CP, AWB, HNP, etc. calls for an exclusively white South Africa (or part thereof). The advocates of a Boerestaat explicitly or implicitly concede a continuing role for black labor (devoid of political rights) in their ideal future society. The declaration of independence for the State of Palestine by the Palestine Liberation Organization in November 1988, coupled with the recognition of the State of Israel by Yasser Arafat the following month, are moves in a different direction. The majority of the Palestinians together with about half of the Israeli-Jews (though not the Israeli government) and virtually all members of the U.N (except for Iran and the USA) have publicly expressed support for a separatist two-state solution. Most of the opponents of a two-state solution among Israelis and Palestinians do not offer an integrative alternative but advocate, instead, an exclusivist arrangement whereby one or the other group is eliminated from the picture. Why two apparently similar conflict situations (masses of unarmed "native" youth fighting for national liberation against heavily armed "foreign occupation" forces) should call for widely different solutions is the crucial question which I will consider in this paper. A comparative study of economic, ideological and political processes in South Africa and Israel. 1 I refer to these countries as constituted in their present borders. In the case of South Africa it means the territories south of the Limpopo river. In the case of Israel or Palestine it means the territory of Palestine under the British Mandate. can provide insights into the emergence and evolution of the conflicts pervading these societies. It is only by focusing on the historically specific combinations of social factors in each case that we can understand their unique trajectory. While, in principle, any society can be compared to any other society, Israel and South Africa seem to have several characteristics in common which make the comparison particularly interesting. Both societies came into being and have been shaped in a conflict between indigenous people ("natives") and immigrants of European origins ("settlers"). The process of settlement can be seen as part of the overall expansion of European political and economic hegemony over the rest of the world since the 16th century; however, the settlers themselves have not come from the ranks of the principal colonizing power, the British Empire. Before independence then, Israel and South Africa were both instances of a "surrogate colonization" process (Atran, 1989). In addition, unlike most other cases of overseas settlement, the natives in these countries have continuously posed a fundamental challenge to well-entrenched settler domination (no longer controlled by European colonial powers). Natives in other settlement colonies were largely wiped out (as in the Caribbean, North America and Australia), or merged to varying degrees with settlers (as in most of Latin America). In other cases European powers took over Asian and African territories but later withdrew without leaving behind permanent settler populations. It is only in few places, most notably these two casestudies, that the struggle between natives and settlers is going on as intensely as ever. A comparative study of the patterns of conflict in these societies offers a unique perspective from which to explore economic, ideological and political issues in the context of colonial settlement and resistance. Similarity does not mean identity, however, and pointing to certain practices and structures these countries share should not imply that other, not less important, differences do not exist. Ethnic and racial conflicts are widespread phenomena and are not limited to South Africa and Israel. Yet, conflicts in these countries have received more world-wide attention than any others, and have been singled out by international forums as, perhaps, the last major cases of colonial-type conflicts (see Stevens and Elmessiri, 1976: 183-214). Military, political and economic relations between South Africa and Israel have been a controversial topic since the early 1970s. This issue led to a series of United Nations resolutions condemning Israel and demanding that it desist from and terminate all forms of collaboration with South Africa. Several studies published in the last 15 years attempt to document the nature of the relations and assess their significance (Stevens and Elmessiri, 1976; Chazan, 1983; Adams, 1984; Beit Hallahmi, 1987; Hunter, 1987; Joseph, 1988). Only a few of these studies deal with the extent to which the two countries share basic political and social characteristics. Cooperation and similarity should not be confused and need to be analyzed separately. Extensive commercial and military cooperation do not indicate any necessary structural identity between two societies, and political regimes of a similar nature do not always collaborate with each other. However, a growing body of literature directly confronts the latter issue, examining South Africa and Israel from a comparative perspective which seeks to describe and account for the many similarities as well as the substantial differences between patterns of national and racial conflicts in these 2 countries (Jabbour, 1970; Farsoun, 1976; Greenberg, 1980; Mazrui, 1982; Adam, 1983; Houbert, 1985; Will, 1985; Adam, 1986; Beit Hallahmi, 1987; Chazan, 1988; Smooha, 1988; Adam, 1989; Moodley-Moore, 1989; Van den Berghe, 1990; Will and Ryan, 1990). Many of the above studies suffer from one or two basic problems. The first one is their largely ahistorical nature. They usually make little attempt to trace in detail the evolution of the socio-economic and political systems in question. The Israeli and South African societies are products of long and complicated historical processes. It is possible to discover general themes which run throughout this history, as I intend to do in this paper, but one has to be sensitive to variations on these themes and to pay attention to the specific manner in which they have expressed themselves in each historical period. The above-mentioned works usually deal only with the end result of the process. A second problem is the general lack of engagement with theoretical issues (Greenberg's work is a notable exception). Many of these studies stick to descriptions without elaborating on their relevance to social theory in areas such as race and class, economic dependency and development, the nature of the state apparatus, etc. I have three major goals in this work. First, to compare South Africa and Israel and establish the nature of the differences and similarities between them. Second, to use this comparison in order to highlight crucial elements in each society's historical evolution which would remain obscured otherwise. Third, to contribute to the theoretical debate on the relationship between class, nation (race, ethnicity) and the state and their role in political conflicts. I combine two of the three research strategies in historical sociology identified by Skocpol: the use of concepts in order to develop a meaningful historical interpretation of specific cases and the analysis of causal regularities in history in order to advance social theory (Skocpol, 1984). Theoretical Framework I employ here a multi-dimensional theoretical framework, focusing on three dimensions: class formation, and more specifically, land and labor relations established between different groups and the changes through which they underwent over the years; nation formation, that is the emergence, development and consolidation of racial, national and ethnic identities; state formation, the construction of political institutions and the process by which they have come to exercise authority over all or part of the inhabitants and territories which are the focus of study. The central axis of comparison is the relative prevalence of separatist or integrative tendencies in each case. It seems that in all three dimensions there has been an overall stronger separatist trend in Palestine/Israel as compared to a stronger integrative trend in South Africa. Two notes of caution are in order here. First, I use the terms separatism and integration with a specific meaning. Separatism has a quite conventional meaning here of a movement towards the exclusion of others from participation in economic, social, ideological and political institutions and structures. Integration means here a movement towards institutional incorporation but not necessarily on an equal basis. It is important to keep this in mind as the notion of integration is frequently associated with equality. In the sense I use it here, different forms of labor exploitation such as slavery, indentured labor and wage labor would all be considered as instances of economic integration. In all of these cases members of different groups work within the same 3 institutions, though within radically different work settings and hierarchies. Resistance from below is a crucial factor determining the nature of labor relations, whether despotic or hegemonic. Examples of economic separatism would be the preservation or creation of independent economic sectors, each with its own internal stratification, or the establishment of independent political entities with no economic relations between them. I will argue that white-dominated societies in South Africa developed a large degree of dependence on black labor. In contrast, Jewish society in Palestine was considerably less dependent on Arab labor. This difference has had important effects on the course of the conflicts in the respective societies. Secondly, I talk about trends or tendencies. These are not linear tendencies, inexorably working their way towards a pre-determined future. They have been outcomes of certain historical processes which could have turned out differently had different circumstances prevailed. Both societies show evidence of counter-trends which were quite strong at times. However, these counter-tendencies were not the dominant ones. In other words, discussion of trends should be seen in relative rather than absolute terms. Putting the explanatory scheme in more formal terms, the trend towards greater integration or separation of parties to racial and ethnic political conflicts is the dependent variable. The independent variables are the processes discussed above of class, nation and state formation. The direction these processes have taken is, in turn, determined by a number of factors. I briefly mention these factors here, though I do deal with them in a detailed manner in my dissertation. First, I will argue that with regard to the class formation process, land and labor relations between settlers (Europeans in South Africa, Jews in Palestine/Israel) and native or indigenous people (Blacks in the former case, Arabs in the latter), have been shaped by the following factors: the nature of pre-colonial social structures, the origins and composition of the settler population, the availability of sources of personnel, capital and labor power, the integration of the country into the world system, etc. The major question here is the effects of economic developments and the evolving class structures on inter-group conflicts. Second, in the sphere of nation formation, the relevant factors are the existence of a precolonial corporate identity among different groups, the intermixture of ethnic, linguistic and religious elements as a result of the settlement process, the existence (or lack thereof) of ideological blueprints and designs for the future, objective material and subjective ideological foundations for exclusive versus inclusive identity or identities, etc. Identity formation is also affected by class formation processes. Finally, as far as state formation is concerned, I will argue that the nature and capacities of pre-existing political structures of settlers and natives form the background to the process. In addition, the degree of settler independence from the metropolis, the interests of the colonial state, the effects of transition to settler independence, the material resources and capacity for intervention of the state, all shape the extent of incorporation in state institutions. All of these factors are influenced, of course, by demographic realities. I do not regard demography, however, as an independent variable. Rather, it can be seen as a dependent variable shaped by the other formative processes. Several examples can illustrate this. If South Africa has had a black majority in its population, it is because of the expansionist 4 nature of white settlement in the country. If whites had been confined to the area of original settlement, the southwestern Cape, which can support a dense settlement of millions of people, they could have been a majority there. They did move beyond the Cape because of an inadequate supply of capital and labor which were needed for the establishment of the Dutch intensive family-labor farm as the basis for settlement. In other words, capital, labor and land resources determined demographic factors, rather than the other way around. Similarly, if Israeli-Jews are a majority in Israel today, it is because of the eviction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to other Arab territories in 1947-8. This fitted into the Zionist leadership's plans to maintain a solid Jewish majority in the population and clear the way to massive Jewish immigration into the country. The drive towards these goals was due to the exclusivist nature of the economic, ideological and state institutions established in the pre-1948 period. From this perspective, again, the relative proportion of settlers and natives in the population appear as a cause and not an effect. Obviously, once demographic realities are firmly in place they have their own impact. It is important, though, to realize that they are not primary factors and therefore I do not treat them as having an effect independently of other social processes. The basic theoretical assumption of this work is that a comprehensive understanding of the nature and dynamics of political conflicts can only be gained by studying the independent and interconnected effects of the three elements of class, nation and state formation. They should be studied historically, that is, as processes rather than as timeless abstractions. The nature of collective identities, the sources and forms of organization of labor power and the composition of state structures, to take some examples, are constantly changing realities. The goal of historical analysis is to show how these theoretical variables have combined in certain historical moments to produce differing outcomes. In both of the case studies class formation processes have had a decisive impact on the nature and evolution of the conflict. I will argue, however, that nation formation and state formation processes have had a larger role in determining the course of the conflict in the Israeli case. In South Africa, on the other hand, class formation processes have had more impact on the course of the conflict. This is reflected in the different role native labor has played in the two societies. In complementing the role played by economic factors, ideology and politics have contributed to the shaping of the different trajectories. South African natives and settlers have not forged opposing coherent identities which could serve as ideological bases for an independent separatist movement similar to those in Palestine/Israel. In addition, South African natives have gone through a long history of seeing their independent political institutions being slowly undermined by settler economic and political pressures. Native resistance managed to slow down this process and present the colonial and settler states with many difficulties. However, the partial incorporation of the natives in white-dominated political structures, and the resulting erosion of political autonomy, compare with the much larger degree of political independence maintained by Palestinians. As a result, the potential for separatist politics is greater for the latter. This difference demonstrates the importance of the way economic, ideological and political factors join to bring about a unique outcome in each situation of racial conflict. The discussion above implies that while all three processes have an effect on the outcome, 5 generally speaking, some of them may gain explanatory primacy in concrete cases. The crucial theoretical task at this point is to specify the conditions under which we can expect one or more of the independent variables to become the most prominent factor in the historical explanation. No colonial (or other political) project can proceed without meeting a basic condition. States and national movements need access to financial resources in order to be able to implement ideological and other political designs. This is the necessary material basis for the operation of any political institution and it puts limits on the ability of the state and of ideological movements to pursue policies which disrupt economic stability. In capitalist societies it means that the state has an interest in maintaining a secure business environment and reproducing the class relations which are necessary for capitalist accumulation. The threat of divestment and capital flight make most capitalist states reluctant to hurt economic profitability and prone to defend dominant class interests. From this perspective we can expect class formation to be a crucial factor determining state policies. However, I will argue that under certain historical circumstances the state (and other political movements) can transcend their dependence on dominant classes and pursue independent policies which are primarily motivated by ideological and political-institutional considerations. The historical context is an important factor. Under conditions of serious danger to the existence of the whole political-economic project, as may be the case with colonial situations in which sustained native resistance is in evidence, state interests may gain primacy over capitalist class interests because physical survival is at stake. In addition, the international context makes a difference. The availability to the state of externally-generated resources such as foreign aid, grants and donations serves to decrease the leverage of domestic class forces on the state. Likewise, when the material resources which are the mainstay of the local economy are immovable (as is the case with land, oil and minerals) the threat of capital flight is much less effective and to that extent state independence increases. Another factor, particularly relevant for situations of intense ethnic or national conflict, is the degree of ethnic mobilization. When a national movement manages to emotionally appeal to a large number of people it may be able to centralize small-scale dispersed resources and use them to counteract capitalist power. In all of these cases state policies may reflect interests of specific apparatuses within the state or ideological interests or a combination of both. These conditions obtain to varying degrees in the two case-studies. I believe that their more prominent role in the Israeli case can account for the greater explanatory power of nation and state formation processes in Palestine/Israel as compared with the explanatory primacy of class formation processes in South Africa. At a more general theoretical level, I would argue that in situations of colonial, racial and national conflicts one cannot proclaim in advance the primacy of any of these factors, though it is possible to specify conditions under which one of them is likely to play a larger role as I attempted to do in the preceding paragraph. The specific relations between class, nation and state are historically contingent and the task of empirical studies is to establish the concrete ways in which they have interacted over time. How does this position stand with regard to common theoretical approaches in the field? The primordial approach focuses on ethnic and racial sentiments as psychologically or biologically given, and regard them as the primary factor determining the nature of racial situations (Van den Berghe, 1981). The pluralist approach focuses on differential incorporation within the state and regards class relations as of secondary importance (Kuper, 1980; Smith, 1986). Orthodox Marxism emphasizes the role of capitalist class interests to 6 which racial ideologies and state structures are subordinated (Cox, 1948). All of the above privilege one set of variables in their theories and not only in concrete studies. More sophisticated versions of Marxism attempt to go beyond economic determinism and give larger weight to ideological and state factors within a class analysis framework (Hall, 1980; Solomos, 1986; Wolpe, 1986; Miles, 1987). These theoretical formulations represent a move towards a nuanced and non-dogmatic view of complex social realities. However, most of them do not go far enough in breaking out of the conceptual fetters imposed by class determinism since they continue to regard the mode of production as the framework within which everything else takes place (more space for non-class factors, though still within a materialist analytical framework is provided by Greenberg, 1980 and Rex, 1986). I will argue, in contrast, that granting explanatory independence to race (nation) and state, as opposed to adopting a version of the "relative autonomy" thesis, improves our ability to come to terms with racial situations. The evidence for that will be provided in the substantive historical sections of this paper. Other Theoretical Considerations Another important element, often neglected in studies of this nature, is the role of resistance and initiative from below. Conflicts have at least two parties. The responses of all of them are crucial to the result. I give equal consideration to the actions and re-actions of Jews and Arabs in Palestine, whites and blacks in South Africa. The political systems which have been established in these countries are the outcome of peaceful and hostile interactions between the various parties, and should not be seen as unilateral impositions of the designs of one group over all others. The nature and strength of native resistance relative to the settler challenge is the most important factor affecting the extent to which the interests of all parties to the conflicts could be accommodated. Within the general framework presented thus far, I evaluate specific theories such as world system and dependency, the split labor market, the relative autonomy of the state and the primordial nature of ethnicity. I believe that a fruitful application of these theories requires their modification in the light of the overall theoretical framework. For example, the spread of market relations in South Africa was not always synonymous with the destruction or subjugation of indigenous societies as dependency theory would have it. In many cases the natives took advantage of commercial opportunities to increase production and establish themselves as an independent peasantry. The same was true for Palestinians. They did not wait for "advanced" Jewish (and German) settlers to expand the cultivated areas and engage in large-scale production for regional and international markets. Local initiative, then, is an essential element which should be incorporated in any version of a world system analysis or analyses of colonial-type conflicts. Another example is split labor market theory. Discussion of this theory has focused on the profitability, or otherwise, of the employment of "cheap" (black) vs. "expensive" (white) labor in South Africa (Bonacich, 1981; Burawoy, 1981). The approach used here places the controversy over the employment of black labor within the context of the construction of white economic, political and social supremacy. It is not only the interests of individual capitalists, or even those of the entire capitalist class, which determined the outcome. Rather, the erection of job color bars and the institution of the "civilized labor" policy, were 7 implemented as part of the processes of nation and state formation as well as class formation. The creation of a stable political order based on a cohesive white constituency was impossible without the political incorporation of the white working class. Thus, to fully account for the compromises reached with regard to employment policies we need to take into consideration more than just class interests. Historical Conclusions What conclusions can be drawn with regard to the historical evolution of the South African and Israeli conflicts? Basically, South Africa and Israel evolved in similar yet divergent ways. The most important process these societies have shared is the gradual takeover of land from the indigenous people by settlers of foreign origin. They differed, however, in the degree to which economic development was dependent on labor services provided by the natives. This was the material background (though not necessarily the determining factor) for the divergence in the nature of ideological and political incorporation. To arrive at a complete answer to the question posed at the beginning about the trajectories of the conflicts, I intend to cover three historical periods. The first one is the pre-industrial period ending just before the social transformation which accompanied mineral discoveries in the 1860s to 1880s in South Africa, and with World War I in Palestine. In both countries this early period allowed the settlers to establish a basis for future expansion (more securely in South Africa than in Palestine) and created the setting for the crucial struggle for political and economic domination in subsequent periods. Following that is the period of industrialization and political consolidation ending in both places in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel and the beginning of the apartheid era in South Africa. All of the important elements of the situation in both places were established during this period and the differences between the trajectories of the respective conflicts were well entrenched by 1948. Subsequent developments during the third period, from 1948 to the present, have further refined and elaborated on the trends which had already been clearly in evidence by the end of the previous period. By 1948, the processes of class, nation and state formation had led to a separatist outcome in Palestine, the establishment of the State of Israel and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. In the preceding decades the Jewish economic sector achieved a large degree of autonomy, though not complete independence. Jewish workers and farmers were the majority of the labor force in the Jewish sector. Jews were not self-sufficient in food production, but could supply most of their other needs through local production and imports from outside of Palestine. The same was true for the Palestinian sector which was less dependent on Jews to begin with. Separatist ideological and institutional processes brought about the co-existence of two autonomous communities with limited cross-cutting affiliations and alliances. The ground for a separatist solution was set, though the exact shape of the final outcome was also determined by the relative military strength of the opposing sides and the regional and international support they received. In South Africa the outcome of these processes was more complex. During the first half of the 20th century, industrialization and urbanization processes resulted in a growing presence of Africans in the cities. Consequent economic integration created an arena for struggle over the terms of their national and political incorporation. The National Party's call for the 8 implementation of apartheid was one response to this reality. It was an attempt by a section of the white community to preserve integration in the economic sphere without paying the price of social and political incorporation of blacks. The black opposition, and liberal whites, called for accelerated integration in all spheres. The victory of the apartheid forces resulted in a slowing down of non-economic integrative processes, though without arresting them altogether. In both countries the period after 1948 saw the further elaboration of separatist and integrative processes. In Israel, a section of the pre-1948 Palestinian people was incorporated into Jewish-controlled economic, social and political structures. However, about 85% of the Palestinians remained outside Israel. The central arena of Palestinian political activity was not within the boundaries of the Israeli state in a geographical and ideological sense. The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 did not result in the incorporation of their Palestinian inhabitants. Limited economic integration did take place but without any parallel ideological and political incorporation. The dominant tendency is still that of exclusion. Whether through a partition of the territory between two independent states, or through the "transfer" of one group to elsewhere, the majority of Israeli-Jews and PalestinianArabs favor a separatist solution. A two-state solution which is seen by many interested parties as the way out of the conflict would, if implemented, give an international legitimate seal of approval to the separatist dynamics which have been operating all along. In South Africa, the gradual erosion of apartheid since the 1970s is a testimony to the strength of the pre-existing integrative tendencies, overcoming decades of official indoctrination of the population and implementation of exclusionary policies backed by massive political repression. By the early 1980s the government started reversing its policies and moving towards the ideological and political incorporation of blacks, in addition to the economic integration which has always been in evidence. The tri-cameral parliament, the abolition of the pass laws and of the Separate Amenities Act and the negotiations over a new constitution are all steps in an integrative direction. The anti-apartheid opposition has stood all along for an integrative, non-racial solution. In the wake of the new reformist strategy adopted by the government, the opposition continues to struggle for the abolition of the remaining segregationist legislation such as the Land Acts and the Group Areas Act and for the reintegration of the bantustans into a unitary South Africa. A success in negotiating a new nonracial constitution would be the culmination of the formal political and ideological incorporation of all South Africans on an equal basis. I turn now to the substantive analysis of the historical evolution of the conflicts in South Africa and Palestine/Israel as shaped by the processes of class, nation and state formation. The Early Pre-industrial Period A. Land and Labor Relations The economic dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian and the South African conflicts have been dominated by land and labor issues ever since the beginning of systematic contacts between settlers of foreign origin and the native populations. Relations of domination, cooperation, exclusion and exploitation (as the case may be) established between them in this domain have had a profound effect on the future course of the conflicts. Evaluation of these relations should start with the nature of the pre-colonial social structures. 9 South Africa The indigenous inhabitants of South Africa can be classified into two large heterogenous groups with quite distinct modes of socio-economic organization: the hunter-gatherer and pastoralist Khoisan predominant in the southwest and the settled farmers occupying the territories to their east and north. These groups can be further sub-divided into the various societies of the Khoikhoi and San among the former, and the Nguni and Sotho people among the latter. The most important economic asset for the Khoikhoi, around which their society was organized, was livestock. They hardly practiced any agriculture and made a living from hunting, gathering and herding. The weight of these different economic activities changed according to ecological circumstances, affected by climate, rain, pastures, epidemics and loss of cattle to predators. Pastoralism, much more than regular cultivation, was subject to violent fluctuations in its prospects as the most important economic activity. The Khoikhoi apparently did not have private property in land, though they did privately own cattle and sheep. Property inequalities between rich individuals (and tribes) led to the emergence of relations of "crop-sharing" whereby the more wealthy rented out their cattle to the poor in return for a part of the product (newborn calves and milk). Their societies were not completely self-sufficient, and they did engage in limited trade with other societies. However, employment of labor and the marketing of surplus were not activities which were carried out on a large and extensive scale. The ownership of cattle and the control over labor were the crucial elements of the socioeconomic organization of other indigenous societies in Southern Africa -- those practicing sedentary agriculture and belonging to the so-called "Iron Age". One formulation of the principles of stratification focuses on "the continuous acquisition, creation, control, and appropriation of labour power which was the dynamic social principle upon which South African pre-capitalist societies were founded. This labour power was realised by men, through the exchange of cattle for the productive and reproductive capacities of women" (Guy, 1987: 22). The dominant class of married men and homestead heads controlled access to cattle and its products (meat, milk, leather), and appropriated the goods produced by women, children and young men. Other forms of inequality such as cattle-clientage, similar to that of the Khoisan, existed, but did not create a permanent class of laborers (Peires, 1982: 27-44). There existed trade relations in cattle, metals, beads, skins, tobacco and ivory with other indigenous societies, but those were not crucial to the economy. The most important elements of the precolonial farming societies were the existence of communal lands, the homestead as the basic unit of production, sex and age as the bases for division of labor, occasional relations of clientage between more and less powerful individuals, and surplus extraction by the emerging states. This is the background against which white settlement should be seen. Cape Town, the first European outpost in South Africa, was established by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1652 in order to serve as a supply and refreshment station for Company ships going between Holland and the Dutch East Indies (parts of present-day Indonesia). The idea behind it was to organize the sporadic trading with the natives which had taken place before, and to 10 guarantee a regular supply of fresh water, meat and vegetables. The settlement was initially a part of a mercantile capitalist project which was not interested in productive activities in the colonies. Pretty soon, though, independent settlers ( burghers) began engaging in agricultural production which was not directly controlled by the Company. The relations which were first established between VOC officials and the Khoisan involved exchange of Dutch copper, iron and tobacco for sheep and cattle. Company directives mandated that the natives were not to be enslaved or conquered, and were to be treated as a free and sovereign people. The reality on the ground, however, soon became far less idyllic. Elphick and Malherbe (1989) describe the process through which the Khoisan had lost their political and economic independence and were gradually transformed into landless and cattleless laborers on white-owned farms. Though they remained nominally free, the Khoisan were subjected early on to various restrictions on their autonomy, freedom of movement and other legal rights. Since the early stages of white settlement, a few Khoisan worked in the newly-established colony in a variety of jobs. The rapid process of loss of cattle and sheep through coerced trade relations with the Company, led many more in the direction of looking for employment on white farms. They usually settled on farms together with their families and livestock, though living separately from the farmers. Their principal occupation was as shepherds and herders, but they were also engaged in all kinds of other agricultural tasks. The demographic decline of the Khoisan in the western Cape area resulted in a shift to slavery as the major source of labor power for the VOC and for the independent settlers. Only a small and decreasing proportion of the slaves directly worked for the Company, the vast majority being owned by the urban burghers and farmers. They were the mainstay of agricultural production, without whom the economic nature of the colony would have been very different. There emerged two main types of settler agricultural activities. The first one was located primarily in the western Cape. It involved commercial enterprises which focused on food production for the local and international markets, above all wheat and wine. The second one was a mixture of cattle farming with largely self-sufficient agriculture. Both types used various coercive mechanisms to insure a supply of cheap labor. Slaves were the main source of labor in the former, Khoisan in the latter. The adoption of extensive agriculture and the consequent territorial growth and emergence of racial stratification were not inevitable processes. A different strategy pursued by the VOC could have made intensive agriculture viable and therefore make further expansion beyond the Cape peninsula unnecessary (Guelke, 1989). It would have resulted in making the white settlers more like their contemporaries in North America. This did not turn out to be the case, however (see Lamar and Thompson, 1981). The colonial state, which was in fact part of a commercial company, had no motivation for investing in the settler economy which was not really very profitable. Those settlers who could not afford slaves moved into the interior and became stockfarmers ( trekboers). For these people the availability of "free" land, and the existence of a potential reservoir of cheap Khoisan labor in the interior, offered the opportunity to be independent without much initial capital. As long as they could survive this way, without working for 11 others, there was no chance of making intensive agriculture based on white labor into the foundation of the South African economy. The Khoisan shared with the slaves a history of labor exploitation, but differed from them in that they maintained a stronger, if tenuous, link with the means of production - land and cattle. The slaves had never held any property in South Africa, having been dispossessed before arrival. In some frontier regions the Khoisan kept their own livestock and had access to grazing land, side by side with their farmer employers. Thus, they were not totally transformed into full-fledged wage laborers. Their partially autonomous economic basis allowed them some limited room for maneuver since their dependence on the farmers for survival was not complete. As white settlers continued to move farther east, they started to encounter the heavily populated settlements of the Xhosa farmers who proved to be a much more serious obstacle to further expansion than the Khoisan ever were. The result was a fierce competition for land, cattle, water and grazing rights. Since that time, the late 18th century, the conflict between the colonists and the Bantu-speaking communities which engaged in agriculture and livestock-keeping (as distinct from the pastoralist semi-nomadic Khoisan), increasingly dominated the South African political economy. Another change introduced around the same time was the demise of VOC rule, and the taking over of the Cape administration by the British in 1806. Both the Dutch and the British regarded the clashes between white settlers and African farmers as a burden on the colonial administration. The British, however, operating in the framework of the strategic interests of the British Empire, were more willing and more capable of actually assisting the settlers in extending their territorial control. From the beginning, the Xhosa and the colonists established certain forms of economic relations, mostly trade. In addition, a steady trickle of illegal laborers entered the Colony from the 1770s on. They were employed in the same capacity as the Khoisan; men tended herds and women did domestic labor and garden work. Ordinance 49, issued by the colonial government in 1828, made the temporary employment of Xhosa labor legal. Nevertheless, for a long time after that their role in the labor force was still relatively small. The reason for this was the existence of alternative means of survival. Subsequent legislation granted formal equality to the Khoisan, but that did not translate into better economic positions or even better working conditions. The British wanted to remove obsolete barriers to the free operation of the market and institute a system of wage labor (Newton-King, 1980). They had no intention, though, of undermining the basis for colonial prosperity: the availability of non-white cheap labor power (Elphick and Malherbe, 1989). The abolition of slavery in the following decade (emancipation in 1834 to be followed by four years of apprenticeship which ended in 1838) was another step in the same direction. Most slaves remained on farms as permanent and seasonal workers for lack of other options (Armstrong and Worden, 1989). Even this limited liberalization proved to be too threatening to many settlers. They were outraged by what they considered to be undue British concessions to people of color at the expense of small and medium-scale white farmers who had been subject to an economic squeeze even before slave emancipation. The resulting tensions were aggravated by ethnic resentment which many Dutch-speaking farmers felt towards the English-speaking colonial administration (Giliomee and Du Toit, 1983). The outcome was the Great Trek of the late 1830s which drove thousands of settlers to areas beyond British control. The process of subjugation of Khoisan and slaves in the western Cape was not reproduced in 12 other parts of South Africa, at least not to the same extent. One notable aspect of the different effects of white expansion in the eastern Cape was the emergence of a native peasantry. Working on reserves, missions and white landlords' lands (as tenants), many Africans marketed surpluses of grains and vegetables and also engaged in sheep farming and wool production using new advanced techniques (Bundy, 1979: 29-64). Their ability to take advantage of market opportunities enabled them to survive most of the time without having to sell their labor power. African cultivators in the Cape colony and elsewhere were not merely passive victims of a process of conquest and expropriation by an all-powerful homogenous white entity. Whenever possible they used market opportunities in order to improve their material condition, taking advantage of internal divisions and conflicts of interest within the white population (Trapido, 1980; Etherington, 1985). Incorporation into white-dominated economic structures did not necessarily mean that Africans were exploited and peripherialized as world system and dependency theories would lead us to believe. In other white-ruled areas of South Africa, the economic subordination of the natives was even less effective. When Natal entrepreneurs started establishing sugar cane plantations and processing plants in the 1850s, they could not rely on local unskilled African labor. The ability of the natives to survive without having to sell their labor power forced white commercial interests to entice workers from other African territories and from overseas. Tsonga migrant workers from the north and, primarily, Indian contract laborers, indentured for 5 years, performed the major part of plantation work. With the large immigration of Indians another element was added to the South African constantly evolving racial and ethnic spectrum (Richardson, 1986). The white settlers of the Transvaal, establishing themselves in the interior following the Great Trek of the 1830s, faced similar difficulties in attempting to extract labor services from Africans. The natives were reluctant to work for wages except for when they were paid with guns and ammunition. Whenever natives could not get those commodities through exchange of cattle and marketing agricultural surplus, they resorted to selling their labor for a limited period of time. Working for local white farmers was not a very attractive proposition, however, and many young Pedi, for example, preferred to migrate to the Cape Colony which offered higher wages (Delius, 1984: 62-82). Businessmen and other large landlords could coexist with squatting native peasant communities without serious problems. In places where that was the case, as in the northeastern Orange Free State, large landholdings were frequently cultivated by African peasants. The interests of landlords and peasants were complementary rather than competitive (Keegan, 1986: 229). Pressures on the state to crush "Kaffir-farming" and squeeze out African peasants were mostly exerted by small-scale white farmers who saw black access to land and cattle as directly competing with their own needs. The emergence of the native peasantry all over South Africa reflected a convergence of interests between African cultivators and white merchants, land speculators and large landholders. The extension of white settlement into territories in the interior did not generally mean an extension of the land and labor relations which had been established in the Cape Colony between whites, Khoisan and slaves. As long as South Africa remained a pre-industrial country, white economic domination outside the Cape territories proved to be elusive. Economic mechanisms alone could not have forced Africans into providing labor services for whites and the settlers were not strong enough to coerce the natives into doing that. A 13 massive commitment on the part of the colonial state to conquer independent African territories and transform them into pools of cheap labor power was required to ensure the economic subjugation of Africans. However, British strategic interests were not always compatible with those of the settlers, the majority of whom were not of British origin. With the discovery of minerals in South Africa and the beginning of the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the value of South Africa for the British Empire increased and consequent changes in British policies had important implications for the ability of Africans to preserve their economic and political independence. Palestine/Israel Turning now to the case of Palestine, for 400 years, 1517-1917, it was part of the Ottoman Empire governed from the capital of Istanbul (Constantinople). Its economic development should be seen in the context of the social and economic relations in the Empire as a whole, and in particular in its Syrian provinces. The last century of Ottoman rule was a period of increasing exposure to the world economy, leading to the adoption of the Tanzimat, a series of administrative, social and political reforms. These state-sponsored changes were accompanied by an underlying and perhaps more significant transformation of socioeconomic realities. This process of change formed the background to the economic encounter between Jews and Arabs in Palestine in the late Ottoman period, and later on during British mandatory rule. Without a doubt the most important factor affecting economic conditions in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century was the growing impact of the western European economies. Following the industrial revolution in Europe, commercial exchange took for the first time the form of a division of labor whereby the Empire exported food and raw materials and imported machine-manufactured products and capital. The resulting economic transformation led to an expansion of agricultural production and export of cash crops, a change from communal or tribal to private ownership of land and a weakening of handicraft production in a process of de-industrialization. This process has been analyzed as basically positive and potentially progressive in terms of modernization theory (Bonne, 1955; Hershlag, 1964; Issawi, 1970), but also as destructive and responsible for increasing internal inequalities in terms of dependency and world system perspectives (Smilianskaya, 1966; Islamoglu-Inan, 1987; Pamuk, 1988). While this process, however evaluated, was facilitated by the activities of foreign and local Europeans, it should be noted that in the specific case of 19th century Palestine it had started long before the beginning of the modern organized Jewish immigration into the country in the 1880s (Scholch, 1982; Gilbar, 1986; Shamir, 1986). The most important elements in the process of change were the extension of the cultivated area due to increased security in the countryside, growing adjustment of agricultural production to market demand, extension of local, regional and international trade and improvements in the means of transportation and communication. These changes were set in motion by reformist governments, Egyptian in the 1830s and Ottoman after that (Gerber, 1985; Shamir, 1986) and by local Christian and Muslim landlords, farmers and merchants (Gross, 1976; Agmon, 1986; Gilbar, 1986). As was the case with the native peasantry in South Africa, local forces took advantage of opportunities opened by integration into the world system. They were not mere victims of external forces. 14 Of particular relevance for our case were the changes in the land tenure system: the emergence of large-scale private ownership of agricultural land and the dissolution of the village community, the Musha' (Granott, 1952; Baer, 1971, 1983; Gerber, 1987). These changes facilitated a transition to market-oriented agriculture, primarily in the newly created private estates of the plains and the coastal areas specializing in the growing of cereals and citrus fruits. The actual working of the land was done by tenants who, in many cases, had lost their land as a result of a growing tax burden and debts. In the central hilly regions the family-labor farm remained the dominant form of production. It consisted of small-scale cultivation and the marketing a surplus of sesame seeds, olives and other crops (Buheiri, 1981; Riley, 1981). Growing inequalities in the countryside created a surplus of land-poor peasants who had to work for others to supplement their income (Owen, 1981). What was the role of the Jewish population in the period before the beginning of the organized Zionist immigration into Palestine? Throughout most of the 19th century the Jewish community, known as the old Yishuv, was integrated into the socio-economic structure of the country as a whole, while maintaining its religious and institutional autonomy. In other words, it did not form a foreign enclave with no ties to the local economy. Together with the Arab communities, Jews were undergoing a process of gradual change under the impact of contact with Europe and their own internal dynamics. There were no clashes between Jews and Arabs as a result of these limited economic changes since the groups were not in direct competition (though, obviously, individual members of any community may have competed with members of other communities). There was a major ecological difference between Jews and Arabs: the former were virtually all urban while the latter were mostly rural. Jews did not take direct part in agricultural production for the market, though some were involved in marketing the produce. However, in the economic sphere Jews did not enter into overall hierarchical or exploitative relations with Arabs (Bartal, 1976). The emergence of the Zionist movement among Jews in eastern Europe in the last two decades of the 19th century resulted in a steady trickle of immigrants into Palestine. They began to form a new community, autonomous of the established Jewish community. The most important characteristic of this new Yishuv which set it apart from the old Yishuv was its strong emphasis on agricultural settlement. The new wave of settlement resulted in the establishment of more than 40 viable villages and towns by 1914 (a list of all settlements [ Moshavot], year of founding, area, population and principal products appears in Ruppin, 1918: 29-31). Thus, the Jewish community (or a segment thereof) entered for the first time into direct economic contact with the Arab inhabitants of the Palestinian countryside which comprised the majority of the population. Furthermore, the encounter between the settlers and the peasants put issues of land, labor and economic development at the center of intergroup relations in Palestine. The resulting conflicts were to signal the beginning of a centurylong political struggle over the future of the country. The majority of the lands purchased by the Zionist settlement movements were in regions dominated by large landed property: the coastal areas and the plains. These parts of the country were less densely populated with Arabs, and the soil was seen as more suitable for cereal cultivation, and later citrus orchards, which were supposed to be the mainstay of the new colonies' economy. Planning with the goal of establishing a basis for a future independent Jewish economy and society was evident, though the movements had to compromise with economic realities. Only after the reservoir of large estates, ready to be sold to Jews, had been exhausted did the Zionist organizations turn to massive purchases of 15 land from small owners. In the earlier period (1878-1914) only 12.5 percent were purchased from the peasant cultivators themselves, the rest from large private and public owners who usually employed sharecroppers and labor tenants on their land (Granott, 1952: 275-278). The issue of tenants' rights quickly became a bone of contention between the threatened tenants and the settlers as the latter wanted them off the land. The result was increasing tensions between colonists and locals. Tensions and hostilities occurred on various other grounds such as use of water resources, grazing, demarcation of boundaries, money matters, guarding of the settlements, property violations, blood vengeance, etc. Whereas the authorities protected the property rights of settlers, there was an underlying sense of insecurity among the latter due to the Islamic nature of the Ottoman state. Many of them believed that state officials obstructed Jewish settlement which was seen as a foreign intrusion (see detailed descriptions of incidents in Sefer Toldot Hahaganah, 1964; Assaf, 1970; Cohen, 1970; Yaari, 1974; Mandel, 1976; Kayyali, 1978; Beeri, 1985; Khalidi, 1988). The struggle for control over land has been central to the conflict ever since the days of the first Zionist-inspired immigration wave ( Aliyah). Soon after the first settlers arrived in Palestine in 1882 another, not less important, essential ingredient of the conflict emerged: the role local Arab labor was to play in the life of the new Jewish community. The original vision of Bilu, Hibat Zion and other Zionist organizations saw the return to the land, and the establishment of autonomous rural communities employing their own labor, as the core of the program of resettling the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. They realized very quickly, though, that the reality of Palestine was quite different from what they imagined it to be. This forced some fundamental changes in the way the settlers managed their affairs and pursued the goal of working the land on their own. The most important of which was the employment of local Arab labor on a large scale. In many cases the number of Arab families working in Jewish settlements, or leasing land from Jewish farmers, exceeded the number of Jewish colonists. As early as 1878, when the first Jewish farmer of Petah Tiqvah began plowing his newly bought land, there were 12 Arab tenants working at his side. In 1915 a leading settlement activist estimated that there were about 2 to 3 times as many Arab laborers as there were Jewish ones in the settlements of Judaea. In the Lower Galilee the proportion was lower, but in Upper Galilee most of the Jewish-owned land was leased to Arab tenants (Ruppin, 1918). These developments meant that the settlers in the Moshavot began to form an economic elite, making a living off the labor of others. Their political status was quite insecure as the country was not under colonial rule. Their small numbers and limited geographical spread prevented them from having a significant effect on Palestinian society as a whole. They did, however, have a growing impact on the immediate environment, the neighboring Arab villages and Bedouin settlements. The appearance of exploitative relations between the colonists and the peasants added a new and different dimension to intercommunal relations. For the first time a large and growing number of natives came under the economic domination of a segment of the Jewish community. This was obviously reflected in the changing attitudes of the settlers towards their native workers and tenants, as described and condemned as early as 1891 by the prominent Zionist figure Ahad Ha-Am in his essay The Truth from Palestine (Cohen, 1970; Gorny, 1987). This new type of relation between settler farmers and native peasants and workers had simultaneously both an intensifying and a mitigating effect on the national conflict. 16 Maltreatment of the Arab tenants and agricultural laborers at the hand of Jewish landowners was a cause for anger and resentment among the former. These feelings were probably compounded by the foreign origins of the latter. At the same time, the hostility of many Arabs towards the early settlers, whose initial land purchases caused the eviction of hundreds of tenants, was substantially moderated as time passed by. With the development of exportoriented agriculture as the economic mainstay of many Moshavot, the establishment of new Jewish colonies no longer meant the displacement of the former occupants. These peasants were usually able to lease part of the land back, or gain employment in the settlements (Mandel, 1976; Khalidi, 1988). The second Aliyah, 1904-1914, brought into the country thousands of young activists from Eastern Europe seeking employment on Jewish farms. The farmers of the First Aliyah, however, chose to employ local Arabs in agriculture, construction and services for several reasons: they were more productive, being used to the conditions of hard labor in the fields; they were cheaper, still rooted in their own land as tenants and therefore capable of providing part of their living through the subsistence sector; they were more easily disciplined, not having a tradition of organized resistance to labor exploitation. In contrast, Jewish workers, largely influenced by socialist ideas, were less experienced and less adapted to the climate and the harsh reality of agricultural labor; they were more expensive to hire since they were used to higher standards of living and had to satisfy all of their needs from their wages; they were more difficult to discipline. According to some interpretations it was a case of a split labor market (Ben Porat, 1986; Shalev, 1989). There was more to this issue than the price of labor. Jewish settlement was seen by the Zionist movement as part of an overall colonizatory project. Short-term profitability conflicted with long-term national goals. The economic basis for the employment of Arab labor was the inability of the Jewish workers to compete with the Arab workers in the Moshavot. Another way of dealing with this problem, in addition to the struggle for Jewish labor, was the attempt to bring into the country Jews from Yemen who would be able to survive at the same standard of living as the Arabs. That way, it was hoped, the two principles of national self-sufficiency and economic profitability would be satisfied. Nevertheless, this campaign did not make it easier for the labor movement's constituency to find jobs and it was discontinued (Shafir, 1989). By the end of the Ottoman period, then, a small but visible presence of Jewish settlers had been established in Palestine. They purchased land and employed available Palestinian-Arab labor. In this respect, they were not very different from white settlers in South Africa and elsewhere. They operated in a different historical context, though. They were not part of a mercantile or industrial capitalist enterprise and the basic motivation for settlement was not primarily economic. In the last decade of the period the Zionist labor movement applied pressure on farmers to cease the employment of Arabs in the Moshavot. Jewish workers did manage to get a foothold as agricultural laborers, but their overall campaign to abolish dependence on Arab labor was not successful. One development which was not of great importance at the time, but proved more significant later on, was the beginnings of a new kind of settlement based on self-labor and cooperative principles. In the following period of the British Mandate these manifestations of economic separatism became a more prominent trend of the economy. Conclusions 17 The early pre-industrial period created the setting for the conflict over territorial, political and economic control in both countries. The economic rationale for the European colonization of South Africa was the initial motivating force behind the whole settlement project. Class formation processes continued to be a most important factor later on, but they got implicated with the strategic interests of the British Empire in the 19th century. In Palestine, the class interests of settlers had to be reconciled within an overall political-ideological project. In both cases the economic logic of settlement was modified by ideology and state factors, but those were stronger in the case of Palestine. Native resistance was another factor which affected the kind of economic relations which were established between indigenous people and settlers. The extant to which the latter could implement their designs varied with the pre-existing economic viability, density of settlement and organization of the former. Overall, Palestinians presented a more formidable challenge to foreign settlement than Africans did. The ability of South African natives to maintain their economic independence varied enormously, however. The Khoisan economy rapidly collapsed whereas the Bantu-speaking farmers kept their autonomy for a long time, especially in areas less disrupted by political turmoil. B. Nation Formation and State Formation In this section I explore issues pertaining to the formation of identities and the construction of state institutions in the two countries. As in the previous section I start with pre-colonial realities and then move to discuss the impact of the encounter between settlers and natives on processes of creation and dissolution of ethnic and national boundaries of exclusion and inclusion. South Africa Southern African history has been characterized by the formation and coming together of many different groups with multiple loyalties. The degree of homogeneity of each of the groups was lower than that of their counterparts in Palestine, and the extent of intermixture and cross-cutting alliances much greater. As a result, lines of intergroup conflict were often blurred, creating a rather fluid environment facilitating the evolution of an overall common South African identity. The geographical mosaic of groups living among each other has been another factor undermining the basis for exclusive separatist tendencies. Another dimension in which developments in the two countries have led in different directions is the construction of political institutions, especially in the Cape Colony. People of color were co-opted, at least to some extent, into the political system. This was done directly through establishing nominal legal equality and granting of qualified franchise, and indirectly through the incorporation of traditional chiefs into the machinery of control. In other South African territories no direct political incorporation took place, but some form of indirect rule had been established, especially in Natal. The indigenous people of South Africa belonged to many different ethnic and linguistic groups. Categories in present-day use such as San, Zulu, Tswana, etc. (to say nothing of Africans or Blacks) are convenient generalizations but of very limited applicability to precolonial realities. Any analysis of the relations among them, and between them and newly18 arrived settlers should take this into account. The San (or "Bushmen") had inhabited southern Africa for many millennia before any other group migrated into the region. They were divided into small, isolated groups speaking dozens of languages without a sense of overarching unity. The Khoikhoi who arrived in southwest southern Africa about 2000 years ago were more homogeneous, speaking closely related dialects and conscious of their similarity. They were divided, however, into numerous clans occasionally fighting with each other over cattle and grazing land. Their political structures were fragmented without a strong central authority (Elphick, 1989). San and Khoikhoi were not tightly sealed populations. There were many cases of movement between the groups, and physically they were quite similar. The same is true of most of the other populations of pre-colonial South Africa who were part of the Bantu-speaking people. They started moving into the territories south of the Limpopo river around the 3rd century AD, and gradually spread over the whole region except for the western Cape. Their internal diversity in terms of language and political organization was considerable. Even groups speaking identical or similar dialects did not necessarily identify with each other and cannot be seen as segments of the same "nation" or ethnic group (see Wright, 1986 for the problematic nature of anachronistic ethnic categories). However, here too we can see instances of cross-cultural contacts among the farming populations and between them and hunting-gathering-herding populations. The existence of the typically Khoisan clicks in some of the southern African Bantu languages is an indication of prolonged intimate contact (Harinck, 1969). The farmers mostly spoke one of the several Nguni or Sotho languages. Xhosa-speaking chiefdoms inhabited the southeast, living in close interaction with their Khoisan neighbors. While Xhosa political organization was more centralized and on a larger scale than that of the Khoisan, it was characterized by factionalism and the splitting off of dissident chiefs and their followers. Consequent territorial expansion was the norm as long as available land permitted it without fight with other communities. The same was generally true of most other groups who were divided into numerous, generally loosely-organized, political units competing for land, cattle and water resources. The movement from one chiefdom to another was relatively easy and there were no rigid ethnic boundaries separating them (Thompson, 1990: 1-30). In comparison to the indigenous people of the region, the European settlers which arrived there from 1652 onwards were quite homogeneous. The majority came from Holland, with considerable numbers of French and German origin. All of them, however, spoke Dutch or the embryonic form of Afrikaans. There was only one legitimate European power until the end of the 18th century, The Dutch East India Company, though its authority beyond the Cape peninsula was quite limited. Despite that, no serious alternative power centers emerged among the colonists, even those who deeply resented Company rule (Schutte, 1989). The establishment of a European settlement at the Cape set in motion a process of expansion and diversification of the population. In addition to a slow trickle of immigrants from Europe, the major source of growth were the slaves. They were acquired by the Company in various places, primarily the east coast of Africa and Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent and the East Indies. Coming from different countries, the slaves were a very diverse group with people speaking different languages and adhering to different religions and cultural practices. With time they adapted to the new environment, communicating with a mixture of 19 Dutch, Malay and Portuguese which later evolved into Afrikaans (Armstrong and Worden, 1989). The process of acculturation was facilitated by their wide distribution among numerous households in a "family mode of control" (Shell, 1989). Many of them converted to Christianity, though Islam retained a strong influence. Sexual unions, and less frequently marriages, between slaves, whites and Khoisan created a growing number of intermediate groups of mixed origins which were for the most part Christian and Dutch-speaking. Ethnic or "racial" boundaries were thus blurred to some extent. The overall tendency in the Cape Colony was towards the creation of a creole culture out of all the different strains. It was not uniform, though, with several regional variations depending on specific combinations of cultural elements: European with Asian (mostly around Cape Town), a certain degree of Madagascan and other African in the rural areas of the western Cape with a large dose of Khoikhoi in the more remote districts dominated by the pastoral economy (Elphick and Shell, 1989). The turn of the 19th century saw the addition of two new factors contributing to the complexity of the ethnic and cultural picture: The taking over of the colony by Britain and the growing contacts with the Bantu-speaking communities on the eastern and northern colonial borders. In 1820 English-speaking settlers started arriving in large numbers, thereby creating a major divide among whites on linguistic and also occupational grounds. At the same time, colonial expansion resulted in growing incorporation of Xhosa farmers and laborers into the territory. By 1865, when the first census was taken, they comprised about 20% of the population, the rest being of mixed descent (a little over 40%) and European (under 40%) (Thompson, 1990: 66). Two other important political and demographic processes took place in the first half of the 19th century. The first one was the consolidation of larger, more stratified and centralized state structures among the Bantu-speaking populations and consequent wars and disruption (see the collection of papers in Peires, 1981). It was followed by the expansion of large number of whites, accompanied by colored servants, into the northeast and the interior and the establishment of new political entities: The Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic and the British colony of Natal. A process of African ethnic consolidation thus got entangled within an overall restructuring of political relations in Southern Africa. The question of cooptation of the natives into white-dominated political structures posed a new dilemma. The Khoisan had had a weak and decentralized leadership, and within a few decades it disintegrated almost completely. Most slaves had arrived, of course, totally disorganized. The newly-incorporated Africans, in contrast, had their traditional leadership largely intact, even when defeated and conquered by colonial forces, as was the case with the Xhosa. Those Africans who were not bound by the authority of chiefs, many of them Christianized refugees in the eastern Cape and Natal, soon demanded representation in parliamentary and governmental structures. The outcome was largely determined by the balance of interests of various forces: British administrators, Cape merchants, African peasants and land-greedy white farmers. A combination of class and (local and imperial) state interests determined the outcome. Two modes of partial inclusion, and one of exclusion, characterized the responses of the white-controlled states to the African challenge. The first one became known as Cape liberalism. It was a continuation of British policy as reflected in Ordinance 50 of 1828 which 20 established legal equality for the Khoisan, and the emancipation of the slaves in 1834. Its underlying assumption apparently was that European (and more specifically British) supremacy could be maintained by using economic mechanisms of control without needing specific racial legislation (Newton-King, 1980). Extending qualified franchise to people of color would result in dividing them between an educated and prosperous elite, committed to western values and class domination, and the illiterate poor devoid of their natural leadership. The same policy was to be applied to Africans who could thus be similarly incorporated into a stable social order. White traders and missionaries saw the franchise as a way of creating a Christian-oriented, surplus-producing native peasantry, free of the control of chiefs (Trapido, 1980). Liberal policies were an instance of the collusion of class (trader), ideological (Christian) and state (Cape administration) interests. It was also a case of a clash of interests between the colonial state which was interested in political stability and worked within a wider framework of imperial strategy and local settlers and their political representatives who were more concerned with satisfying their immediate economic hunger for land and labor. The second mode of limited inclusion, known as the Shepstone system, was applied in Natal and to some extent in the Cape, and involved an indirect rule over the African masses through their traditional leaders. It consisted of creating tribal reserves and locations in which the natives would run their lives guided by chiefs who would administer "native law" in subordination to the colonial authorities. The system involved taxation of the location residents, thus paying not only for administrative costs but also subsidizing other government activities from which they derived no benefits (Etherington, 1990). For the scheme to function there was a need, of course, for chiefs to collaborate. There was thus a collusion of interests between the British and the chiefs who shared in the revenues which were generated. Again, we can see here a clash between colonial state interests and the desire of white (British) settlers to gain unlimited access to native land and labor resources and to get rid of African chiefs as intermediary powers. The Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State did not attempt to politically incorporate non-whites in any way. Their guiding principle was "no equality of the nonwhite with the white inhabitants , either in church or state". In any event, they were not as militarily powerful as the British colonies and therefore had limited capacity to enforce their rule over the natives. They waged wars and formed shifting alliances with various local chiefdoms, becoming thus one of the many elements fighting for resources in the region (Thompson, 1990: 100-109). Being driven by the hunger for land and cheap labor, they had no use for the more strategic arrangements which were implemented in the Cape and Natal. In addition, their exclusionary ideological and state institutions were premised on the explicit rejection of British practices in the Cape. Replicating the same arrangements which drove them out from the Cape in the first place, would have made no sense in class, as well as nation and state formation terms. On the eve of its industrial revolution, South Africa was composed of many autonomous parts: self-governing British colonies, Boer republics, African kingdoms and others of a mixed nature such as the Griqualands. Ethnically and politically, many of these units were far from homogeneous, consisting of people of diverse backgrounds with differing relations to the state. The Cape colony has gone farthest in the partial political incorporation of people of color. Others lagged behind, or adopted other forms of indirect control, but none had established a coherent identity similar in nature to that of Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The intermixture of ethnicity, religion, language, settlement patterns and political affiliations 21 presented very serious obstacles for the formation of exclusivist national or political entities. More space for politics of inclusion was created by default, if not always by design. Palestine/Israel Palestine, in contrast, was an arena in which two exclusionary national movements, each with its own political institutions, emerged. The rise of nationalism among the Arabs in general, and the Palestinian-Arabs in particular, should be seen against the background of the centuries-long Ottoman rule. The Ottoman Empire, though commonly referred to by Europeans as "Turkish", was in fact a multi-national state. Its most important organizing principle, however, was not nationalism or ethnicity but religion. The basic division in the Empire for most of its history was that between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects. Islam was the state religion, and Muslims were politically and militarily, though not usually economically, dominant. Ethnic and linguistic differences among various Islamic groups were less important, for the most part, than their common membership in the Islamic community. This picture began to change in the second half of the 19th century with the rise of several Christian-based national movements and later Turkish nationalism (Lewis, 1968; Karpat, 1972; Kushner, 1977). An Arab national movement and, more specifically, a Palestinian Arab national identity began to form in the late Ottoman period. The process of nation formation was definitely not completed by the end of the period, but it had made significant progress which was continued later during the British Mandate period. This identity was formed in the context of multiple divisions. The people of Palestine had always shared one very important common element, however. With the exception of several minor variations in pronunciation, Arabic had been the unifying language of the country for many centuries. On the other hand, Arabic (with various dialectal differences) had also been the language of neighboring territories, primarily Syria and Lebanon. Thus, the construction of a separatist Palestinian identity was also a process of differentiation from the more general Arab (or Syrian) identities. The background to the emergence of a common national identity was a society without a clear administrative center which was characterized by religious and sectarian divisions, though to an extent which differed from place to place. Palestine was a country of many groups with multiple and, sometimes, conflicting identities. Before 1882 the population was roughly divided into 85% Muslims, 11% Christians and 4% Jews. In addition to this major division, the people were split between various denominational, regional and factional identities (Hoexter, 1973; Tamari, 1982). This fragmented situation began to change towards the end of the 19th century. One important aspect of this change was administrative. For most of the Ottoman period Palestine was not a coherent unit. Despite the lack of a unified political framework, the Arabic name of the country, Filastin, and the Ottoman term, Arazi-i Muqaddese (the Holy land), helped preserve a notion of the unity of the country (Porath, 1974). In addition to that, Jews, local Christians and European powers had maintained for many centuries their religious interest in the land and emphasized its distinct identity and place in history. After several rearrangements of the districts of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre, they were disconnected from Syria and Lebanon, and united in 1872 to form the province of Kudus-i Sherif, incorporating all of Palestine. The unification lasted for a few months only, but Jerusalem (south and central Palestine) maintained its central position as an independent district linked directly to 22 the capital of Istanbul until the First World War (Abu Manneh, 1978). The creation of the independent district of Jerusalem was part of a general effort of the Ottomans to restructure the Imperial administration, and to strengthen centralized control. It was accompanied by concerted efforts to eliminate, or at least drastically restrict, local power centers which limited the ability of the government to exercise its rule in the provinces. Military interventions in rural and desert areas managed to reduce the capacity of local leaders to challenge central rule, leading to the conclusion that after 1864 the supremacy of Ottoman authority in Palestine was never again in doubt (Gerber, 1985). The establishment of strong administrative boundaries, and the elimination of internal threats to the authority of the central government and the cities over the rural areas and the nomadic population, were accompanied by the erection of representative bodies mediating between the government and the people. Despite the fact that these were not really democratic structures elected by the population as a whole, they did manage to advance the process of emergence of a corporate identity common to members of all religious groups. The Mejlis-i Idare (Administrative Council) of the provinces, the municipalities of the big cities and towns and the Nizami (civil) courts, were all new bodies which included Muslims and Christians (sometimes also Jews) as representatives of the population. These structures did not replace the communal religiously-based solidarities, but they did allow for the first time an expression of the civil interests of citizens from different backgrounds. The existence of organizational frameworks shared by representatives of different groups was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the growth of a common identity which transcended sectarian loyalties. Another process taking place at the same time was the growth of Palestinian and Arab patriotism among Muslims and Christians alike. A significant development in that direction was the struggle of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community against their Greek clergy. Many Palestinian Muslims identified with this attempt to assert national identity against the church which was supported by the Ottoman authorities (Hopewood, 1975). Given the factors which shaped a sense of identity among the Arabs of Palestine, the most important catalyst for the expression of nationalist sentiments was, of course, the rise of Zionism. There is no way of knowing how Palestinian identity would have developed if the organized Jewish settlement movement had not existed. It is clear that the existence of one national movement (Zionism) regarding the country as its homeland, contributed to the notion of a distinct Palestinian identity. Islamic, Ottoman and Arab nationalist solidarities notwithstanding, the Arabs of Palestine (in all of its districts) had to come to terms with the Jewish-Zionist project which targeted a specific, though sometimes vaguely defined, territory. The first documented expression of Arab protest against organized Jewish immigration was made in June 1891, only 9 years after the beginning of the first Aliyah, and 6 years before the founding of the Zionist movement. Muslim and Christian notables sent a telegram from Jerusalem to Istanbul, demanding a stop to Russian Jewish immigration and the buying of land (Mandel, 1976: 39-40; Beeri, 1985: 76-78). A more massive campaign against Zionism began in 1908 with the Young Turks revolution and the publication of several Arabic newspapers and magazines in Palestine itself, the most prominent among them being the Haifa al-Karmil and the Jaffa Filastin, both of which were edited by Christian Palestinians (Khalidi, 1981; Muslih, 1988). 23 As time passed, the need to organize as Palestinians, not merely as Ottoman or Arab patriots, was emphasized more strongly by the press and by political activists. These elements in the opposition to the Jewish settlement movement were not mutually exclusive, and in the mind of most could coexist with each other. In other words, Palestinian identity was not seen as conflicting with wider loyalties to the ethnic group, state or religion. It broke down the boundaries between Muslims and Christians in this respect (Porath, 1974; Muslih, 1988). Towards the conclusion of Ottoman rule, then, the Arab population of Palestine had begun to develop a sense of itself as a group comprising of the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of a specific territory within the general framework of the Empire. This sense did not exclude feelings of solidarity with or belonging to other collectives, Ottomans, Arabs, Muslims, etc. Whichever specific identity was created from the combination of these elements, it was clearly different from and opposed to any Jewish identity in Palestine. Throughout the same period, and indeed for many centuries before that, Palestine maintained its centrality for Judaism and for the Jewish people. Known in Hebrew as Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), the country had always occupied a unique place in the religious and historical consciousness of Jews all over the world--this despite the fact that only a tiny minority of Jews actually lived there. Up until the 19th century, the Jewish community in Palestine numbered no more than a few thousand people. Most of its members lived in the four holy towns of Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron and Tiberias. The dominant group among them, numerically and culturally, was of Sephardi (Spanish) origin. The growth of the Eastern European Ashkenazi community brought not only more ethnic and cultural diversity, but also more organizational fragmentation. The Ashkenazis were internally split into the Hasidim and their opponents, the Prushim. The former were divided, in turn, into sects, followers of different Hasidic dynasties. Other bases for divisions were country of origin and sometimes even region within a country (Friedman, 1976; Eliav, 1981). The Sephardis, though internally less fractionalized, also faced problems in maintaining their organizational unity. For several centuries they had control over the communal affairs of all other groups. Following the Ashkenazi refusal to recognize Sephardi authority, other communities tried to break away. The North African Mughrabis, the Yemenites, the Georgians and others, gradually managed to establish their own autonomous religiouscommunal institutions, though not always with official Ottoman approval. They were still subject, however, to the authority of the Rishon Le'Tzion, the Chief Sephardi Rabbi (see Barnai, 1973 for discussion of the Mughrabi community and its struggle for independence; Tobi, 1976 and Druyan, 1981 for the Yemenite community). Despite their heterogeneous nature, the Jews of Palestine in the Ottoman period maintained a clear sense of their distinct identity. The government and their Muslim and Christian neighbors regarded Jews as a coherent and separate group regardless of internal divisions. Overall social interaction between members of different religious groups was quite limited, and even Arabic-speaking Jews did not consider themselves, nor were they considered by others, as Arabs (Parfitt, 1987: 180-223). In other words, Jews were not only a religious group, but also an ethnic or national group. The forging of a Palestinian-Arab cultural identity based on the Arabic language, and common to Muslims and Christians, largely passed them by. Even before its renaissance as a spoken language, Hebrew served as a common denominator 24 for Jews of different backgrounds. Adding to the sense of common Jewish cultural identity, however, were the Hebrew-language newspapers which began to be published in Jerusalem in the 1860s (Halevi, 1976). There were also many other incidences of cooperation in religious and spiritual affairs between the various Jewish communities, but they coexisted with continuous tensions and cultural differences (Kaniel, 1976). Increasing Jewish immigration into the country since the 1880s, and the rise of the organized Zionist movement, served to bring Jewish distinctness into sharper focus. This was an influx of thousands of new immigrants from eastern Europe who were possessed with a clearly defined Jewish national identity and were driven by a sense of economic, social and political exclusion in their countries of origin. The new Yishuv, mostly Zionist in orientation, put a strong emphasis on creating a modern national community which would replace religion with nationalism as the common denominator. From this point of view, the importance of having a unifying national language became obvious. Hebrew became the only language of instruction in all the Moshavot and in the new urban communities. The educational system proved crucial in this respect. It was conceived by Zionist activists as a major means for raising the national consciousness. By the end of the Ottoman period it was estimated that about 40% of the Jewish community spoke Hebrew as their only or primary language, though many more knew it and used it on various occasions (Shavit, 1983). In addition to promoting the unifying role of a national culture, the new Yishuv provided a fertile ground for the development of numerous social, economic and political organizations (Kollat, 1975). Whether on a local or a national level, these new structures represented Jews only. Arabs were not invited to join, nor did they show any interest in taking part in their activities. There was hardly any sense of a common nationhood encompassing all the inhabitants of the country. Processes of nation and state formation in Palestine, then, led to a crystallization of two clearly demarcated and mutually exclusive communities with their own linguistic, ethnic, religious and political identities. Politics of exclusion became the norm by design, in the case of the modern Jewish community, as well as by default, in the absence of a Jewish or Arab constituency for an incorporationist ideology. Conclusions The creation of boundaries between groups in South Africa and Palestine/Israel had moved in different directions. Nation and state formation processes in South Africa led to rather fluid ethnic/racial categories which made exclusionary identities more problematic than was the case in Palestine. In the latter case the same processes facilitated the emergence of exclusionary identities and political institutions. While class formation processes contributed to the divergence in outcomes, there were several other factors, directly related to nation and state, which had an impact on the fluidity of boundaries. In South Africa there were numerous political entities, some indigenous and some colonial, which were constantly competing for resources, constructing and breaking alliances in the struggle for territorial and economic control. Greater flexibility in the ability to move, physically and mentally, between polities and identities was a natural result of this situation. In Palestine, in contrast, there was only one indigenous state, the Ottoman Empire of which Palestinians were citizens, and it was facing the European-based Zionist movement which was trying to implement itself in the territory. The conflict was therefore more readily posed in dichotomous terms. 25 In addition, the colonization of South Africa took place at the early stages of the crystallization of clear and rigid national identities in Europe, an well before the emergence of nationalism in southern Africa. The Zionist settlement in Palestine was taking place in the context of fierce struggles for autonomy and independence waged by national movements in central and eastern Europe, the birth place of modern Jewish nationalism. Its constituency was a group of people with a strong sense of their own national identity. The boundaries of Palestinian identity were not so clearly defined, but they were in the process of consolidating them. In short, the historical context within which the conflicts evolved has had a strong impact on their courses. The Period of Industrialization to 1948 The period leading to 1948 was in many respects the most crucial for the consolidation of patterns of racial conflict in the two societies under investigation. The following discussion deals with the major trends in land and labor relations, ideological crystallization and the construction of state institutions in both cases. By the end of the period these processes had culminated in the formation of two distinct modes of settler/native relations which have been in place since then. A. Land and Labor Relations South Africa With the beginning of diamond and gold mining on a large scale, in the closing decades of the 19th century, South Africa entered a period of accelerated economic growth. Precious minerals which could be sold on the world market increased state revenues, and allowed for large-scale imports of capital, machinery and skilled labor from overseas. Secondary industry serving the mines made its appearance. The expanding internal market led to a growth in commercial agriculture which found ready customers for its output. All this was taking place in the context of a pre-existing system of racial stratification, one of whose prominent features were black servants supplying labor to meet the demands of white masters. Looking at South Africa in these terms, however, we should keep in mind that not all blacks were servants, nor were all servants black. A large number of landless poor whites, bywoners, flocked to the cities in search for employment (Van Onselen, 1982). At the same time, a considerable number of blacks continued to live on their ancestral lands, engaging in subsistence agriculture and marketing occasional surpluses. In addition to them, large number of peasants settled on mission, reserve or privately-owned land, producing large quantities of food and agricultural products for the market (Bundy, 1979). An industrialization process which was based on large supplies of African labor could not proceed without some mechanism to eliminate these manifestations of economic independence. The state took it upon itself to force peasants into the labor market and prevent them from competing with white commercial farmers. Economic transformations went hand in hand with political and ideological changes. Independent or autonomous African societies such as Venda, Pondoland and the Zulu kingdom were forcibly incorporated into white-ruled political structures by the end of the 26 19th century. The South African Republic and the Orange Free State were defeated in the Anglo-Boer war, 1899-1902, to be united later on with Natal and The Cape Colony in the Union of South Africa of 1910. All Afrikaans-speaking whites were thus reunited within the same boundaries. Africans from different parts of the country started mixing in the townships, newly-erected near the major centers of mining and industry: Kimberley, Durban, Port Elizabeth and, most importantly, Johannesburg. All of these gave rise to new political alignments influenced by the changing ethnic dynamics. Relations of land and labor between whites and blacks followed a familiar pattern already well established by the time diamonds were first discovered in 1867. By the 1940s, with the conclusion of the pre-apartheid period, economic integration was deeply entrenched. All bases for separatist regional economic development were completely eroded. South African racial stratification encompassed all groups in a hierarchical and inegalitarian system. Occupational and residential segregation existed within thoroughly integrated economic structures. The diamond industry started as a highly fragmented business, with small claims divided among hundreds of black and white diggers. In a short time it was transformed into a large operation dominated by few companies which squeezed out all the rest. Underground mining required large amounts of capital and a large, disciplined and cheap labor force. Institutions which became central to the process of economic development in South Africa for many years to come were formed and shaped largely in response to the needs of the mining industry. These were the migrant labor system, together with the accompanying elements of the closed compounds, the racial division of labor between skilled white miners and supervisors and unskilled black workers (the "job color bar"), strict pass laws and other laborrepressive legislation (Turrel, 1982; Worger, 1982). The same was true, on even a larger scale, for the gold mining industry of the Witwatersrand. Deep-level gold deposits, largely of poor grade, made the utilization of a vast army of unskilled laborers an attractive option for the mining companies. Working costs had to be cut to a minimum in order to insure profitability, since the price of gold was fixed internationally. The local industry had no control over it. In addition, since gold was exported rather than sold inside the country, the industry did not worry much about the size of internal markets. Attempts to reduce black wages to the lowest subsistence level could proceed without it harming the Randlords' (mining magnates) interests. The method used was, as in Kimberley, recruitment of laborers from various parts of Southern Africa combined with attempts at strict control of the labor force (Jeeves, 1975; Johnstone, 1976; Richardson and Van-Helten, 1982). The main question at this point then is why was black labor cheaper and how was the migrant labor system related to transformations of the rural economies? One cannot take it for granted that "white" equals skilled and expensive, while "black" is synonymous with unskilled and cheap. The price of labor is established in a historical process which, in the case of South Africa, was determined to a large extent by the rural origins of the workers, the viability of other options of subsistence open to them and the intervention of the state in labor relations. State intervention could be motivated by the desire to promote capitalist interests, white working class interests or by purely ideological considerations (Wolpe, 1976; Bonacich, 1981; Burawoy, 1981; Lipton, 1986). We can detect regional variations in the extent to which capitalist relations of production, dispossession of the direct producers and wage labor became prevalent. The western Cape, 27 the Cape Midlands, the Natal coast and the southern Orange Free State had gone farther in that respect, even before the mineral revolution. On the other hand, the major obstacle facing recruiters of labor for the mines and commercial agriculture in other parts of the country, was the continuing direct access of Africans to the land. Whether in the native reserves (such as the Transkei and Zululand), or on white-owned farms in the Transvaal and the Free State, independent producers and tenants managed to survive without relying on wage labor. Short-term employment of one or more family members was frequently taken, but for specific purposes (Beinart and Delius, 1986). White owners of land continued to co-exist with black farmers in relations of sharecropping or labor-tenancy well into the 20th century. However, the space for independent existence continuously shrunk throughout the century (Morris, 1980; Keegan, 1986; Bradford, 1990; Van Onselen, 1990). Difficulties facing the mining industry's efforts to recruit a reliable labor force among Africans were solved, at times, by importing labor from overseas (China) and from other parts of Africa. It is undeniable, however, that industrialization drastically reduced the ability of Africans to escape proletarianization. White pressure on land, particularly manifested in the Natives Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, resulted in the eviction of black farmers and tenants from white-designated areas and from capitalizing white farms. Overcrowding and soil erosion in the 13% of the territory allocated to blacks as a result of the Land Acts (the native reserves) and the promise of high wages in the cities combined to encourage a steady stream of people who moved out of the reserves into the industrial centers (Lacey, 1981). The state strongly discouraged workers from bringing their families along as there were no provisions for them. Many employers supported the migrant labor system as it was intended to extract labor power from peasant farming and redirect it towards the cities, particularly the mines (Greenberg, 1980). They saw wages as a payment of only the amount necessary for the survival of individual workers, leaving the task of caring for their dependents to the rural economy. The "cheapness" of black labor was based on the assumption of its temporary nature in the urban areas, and the viability of complementary agricultural production in the reserves. These were ideological assumptions which were an essential part of the official discourse on the "Native Question" in South Africa as elaborated in several reports of governmental commissions of inquiry (Ashforth, 1990). They were backed up by repressive state policies which were geared towards preventing black workers from organizing and raising the price of labor (Lacey, 1981). In establishing this pattern of migrancy, the state and Chamber of Mines were operating in an environment which had already seen thousands of young men from all over Southern Africa moving into "white areas" in search of work for a long time before the emergence of mining as the mainstay of the South African economy. There was a certain collusion of interests between employers who wanted to minimize their labor costs, the state which wanted to control black influx into the urban areas and, to some extent, the migrants themselves who saw wage labor as a way to earn enough money to move back to the countryside, afford bride price, buy livestock and establish themselves as independent farmers (Beinart, 1982; Harries, 1982; Kimble, 1982). The underlying basis for this system, however, proved to be quite unstable. The ability of the reserves to support family dependents of migrant workers was rapidly diminishing. Many families had to move to the urban areas in order to survive. The proportion of single males 28 among the urban African population constantly dropped, falling in Johannesburg from over 90% at the turn of the century to 89% in 1921 to 63% in 1946. At the time of the 1946 census, the proportion of migrant workers in the total urban African population declined from 55% in 1911 to 21%. By 1946 Africans became a majority in the cities, acquiring the characteristics of a settled population, even though 75% of them were still rural (Proctor, 1987; Thompson, 1990). Underlying this process was the development of new black petty bourgeoisie and working classes which broke out of the migrant labor system altogether, becoming permanently urbanized (Cobley, 1990). The same trend of urbanization was in evidence among whites, drawing into the cities a large number of poor landless farmers, mostly Afrikaners. Unable to compete with either wealthy white commercial farmers or the black tenants relying on intensive family and communal labor, they were pushed off the land into the cities. There they encountered a growing number of skilled immigrant white workers, largely of British extraction. The latter were attracted by the expanding economic opportunities in South Africa, especially on the Witwatersrand. This emerging white working class was threatened by the competition offered by black workers. They were used to higher standards of living and, having no basis in the countryside, could not support their families on the same individual subsistence-level wages as Africans supposedly could. They organized in order to fight for improved conditions, though without erecting a united front with their black fellow-workers (Van Onselen, 1982). White workers used their higher initial skills and greater political clout to protect their wages, thus making them more costly to employers. They had access to the state by virtue of the inclusionary policies towards poor whites which had been pursued by the Boer republics, and to a lesser extent the British colonies, even before the beginning of industrialization. It was only by imposing artificial barriers on the movement and employment of black workers, making it politically difficult for capitalists to substitute blacks for whites, that the latter could remain competitive. That was the basis for the "civilized labor" policy which gave preferential treatment and more secure employment to white job seekers (Davies, 1979; Lipton, 1986). Incorporation of white workers in a privileged position as compared to that of blacks, was also motivated by other considerations. In the inter-war period it was feared in state circles that widespread white poverty and unemployment opened the possibility of working-class alliances across racial lines. This eventuality, though it has never taken effect in South Africa, was a constant worry for state officials and nationalist white intellectuals afraid of the transformation of poor whites into "white Kaffirs". Such a development would have endangered the whole structure of white domination and prosperity in the country. Occupational, residential, social and political segregation between blacks and whites were seen as the solution to the problem (Dubow, 1989). In other words, one should go beyond class analysis to fully understand the nature of the differential (economic and political) incorporation of whites and blacks in South Africa. The ideology of white racial supremacy and state interests combined with various white class interests to produce structures of white domination. Segregation, however, was not in contradiction to economic integration. In fact, it was an attempt by dominant whites to avoid paying the political price for the use of black labor in mines, factories, fields and homes. The ability of the state to enforce segregation was limited, 29 as the pressure towards dismantling racial barriers became greater during World War II. The economic boom and the rise in manufacturing brought about a large influx of blacks into the urban areas. It also resulted in a relaxation of the pass laws. Growing assertiveness by the black urban labor force culminated in the 1946 miners strike. Although it was eventually crushed, it signified the potential of political resistance based on the crucial role of blacks in the production process. A new balance between integration and segregation in all social spheres was being sought by various political groups. The post-1948 period became the arena for struggle between their respective visions. One element of the situation remained virtually uncontested. The existence of integration in the economic domain reached a point of no return and struggles between class forces over pieces of the economic and social pie were conducted within integrated structures. Palestine/Israel Events in Palestine during the same time were leading in an opposite direction. The period of British rule in Palestine, ending in 1948, proved decisive for the development of two autonomous national economies in the country. The overall trend for the period was that of gradual separation between Jews and Arabs in the economic and social spheres. The process did not result in complete economic independence though, and was not linear. Periods of political tensions reinforced the separatist tendencies, but a reduction of tensions facilitated economic relations between the communities. Throughout the period trade relations in agricultural and industrial products existed. Although some Arabs continued to work in the Jewish agricultural sector, and to a lesser extent in the industrial sector as well, the only economic sector in which both groups worked together in large numbers was that of big state and international enterprises. They worked there as equals, however, with no hierarchical relations evolving between them. The social structure did not develop along the lines of the South African racial stratification system. In South Africa, during the same period, the issue of exploitation of black labor by white employers became a source of conflict and struggle. Ironically enough, in Palestine it was the absence of direct labor exploitation which exacerbated the political conflict, among Jews and between them and Palestinians. Palestinians saw the policy of Hebrew [Jewish] Labor as unfairly depriving them of economic opportunities. In the area of land relations there was a large-scale transfer of land from Arab individuals to Jewish public and private companies. The fate of the Palestinians cultivating some of these lands became a major area of political conflict between the communities, to an even greater extent than during the late Ottoman period. Even the mere existence of tenants, let alone the definition of their rights, was a controversial issue. The intercommunal struggle over the land came to occupy the center stage of the Israeli-Arab conflict during the Mandatory period. The Zionist imperative of acquiring as much land as possible, with as few tenants as possible residing on it, culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the transformation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into refugees. The Balfour declaration of 1917 committed the British government to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. With the abolition of Ottoman legal restrictions, the processes of land acquisition and settlement were greatly facilitated. Between 1920 and 1947 Jews bought about three times the amount of land purchased during the last three decades of the Ottoman period. By the end of the Mandatory period, though, only about 7% of the total 30 area of Palestine was owned by Jews, primarily by the Jewish National Fund (it was around 15% of the cultivable land and 25% of the cultivated land). Hundreds of rural and urban communities were established on these lands, mostly by one of the Zionist settlement movements (Bein, 1954; Kimmerling, 1983). The major sources of sales continued to be large local and foreign absentee landowners. There was a rise since the late 1920s in the proportion of peasants selling their land, but they continued to be a minor source. Zionist organizations preferred to buy large contiguous areas such as the Plains of Esdraelon, Wadi Hawarith, etc. The reasons for this policy were strategic in nature, rather than strictly economic. The ground was laid for the creation of a territorial basis in which Jews would be able to claim their right to exercise self determination. They turned to other sources only after the major ones had been exhausted. Land has always been a form of investment in the Middle East, especially since the 1850s, and many wealthy individuals and families used it for speculative purposes. The urgent need of the Zionist movement for land for settlement drove land prices up, and owners were more than happy to sell it for a nice profit. These transactions ran, however, into serious political obstacles (Porath, 1977; Stein, 1984). The Palestinian national movement had very strong objections to Jewish immigration and land purchases. It regarded the sale of land as a betrayal of the national cause in the pursuit of private interests. In addition, in many cases the land was settled and cultivated by a large number of families who rented it from the absentee landlords. These people lost their livelihood with the transfer since the new owners did not continue with the same relations of sharecropping and labor tenancy, nor did they hire them as agricultural wage laborers. The settlement strategy of the Zionist movement during this period did not allow for a mitigation of the effects of land loss through the employment of the displaced tenants as was the case with the Moshavot of Ottoman times. There are various estimates with regard to the number of Palestinians dispossessed in this way, ranging from a few hundred families to tens of thousands (Kanafani, 1972; Porath, 1977; Zu'bi, 1984). For obvious reasons the debate over numbers has reflected and been used for conflicting propaganda purposes by both sides (Peters, 1984 is a notorious example and see also Said and Hitchens, 1988 for a response). The more important implication, though, was increasing concern among Palestinian peasants for their ability to survive. This fear, together with the squeeze on peasant production in the 1920s and 1930s, combined to create social and political instability. A basic problem of peasant farming in Palestine since Ottoman times has been heavy taxation and lack of credit facilities for small cultivators. This resulted in many peasant families sinking into debt and being forced to leave the land, or at least to have to supplement their income through wage labor. At the same time, well to do farmers benefitted from the growing internal markets for agricultural products following increasing Jewish immigration into the country (Stein, 1984). The result was intensifying class divisions in the countryside and migration or commuting from the rural areas into the cities, especially the fast-growing ones on the coastal plains: Haifa and Jaffa. They did not sever their links to the village, though, and their subsistence was partly subsidized by remaining relatives in the countryside (Taqqu, 1980; Waschitz, 1987; Yazbek, 1987). The consequent social dislocation and the undermining of traditional authority structures were major causes for the intense involvement of peasants and recent migrants to the urban areas in the Revolt of 1936-1939 (Kanafani, 1972; Porath, 1977; Arnon-Ohana, 1981; Swedenburg, 1988). 31 Only a small part of this migrant labor force was employed in the Jewish-owned sector of the economy. Most were unskilled and semi-skilled workers in Arab industries and government and international companies: railways, harbors, oil companies, military industries during the Second World War, public works, etc. A large number of those who did work for Jews were agricultural laborers, especially in citrus orchards. Their continued employment was in conflict with the policy of Jewish Labor as espoused by the Zionist labor movement and adopted by the national institutions. The farmers of the Moshavot, always opposed to political interference with their labor supplies, were worried about the profitability of their businesses. They preferred cheap and unorganized Palestinians to the more costly and unruly Jewish workers. The very intense struggle to prevent Arabs from working there has never been fully successful. During periods of armed hostilities such as 1921, 1929 and especially 1936-39, there was a drastic reduction in the number of Arabs employed in the Moshavot. Yet, with the cessation of overt violence they came back (Shapira, 1977). Despite the dominant position of "national" and strategic considerations in the determination of land and labor policies, there was no easy way to avoid facing economic realities. The class interests of Jewish farmers, and to a lesser extent those of other Jewish capitalists, could not be totally subordinated to the grand designs of labor Zionism. In the urban and industrial sectors of the Jewish economy Arab labor played a smaller role, though far from insignificant. In 1936, just before the outbreak of the Revolt, Arabs were 35% of the employees in agriculture, 25% in transportation, 12.4% in construction, 8.7% in industry and 6.7% in commerce (Sussman, 1974. Waschitz, 1947 gives higher estimates for the 1940s). In several cases skilled Jewish workers were employed in Arab-owned industrial enterprises and construction. Once Arabs acquired the skills necessary for these jobs, they took over from the Jewish workers. Another form of skill acquisition took the form of shortterm employment in Jewish-owned factories and then a move to similar jobs in the Arab economy (Abramowitz and Guelfat, 1944). Overall, however, the majority of Arabs and Jews were employed in their respective autonomous economies. Neither sector developed a significant reliance on labor from external sources, though there were short-term dependencies in several branches, primarily agricultural production. The trend away from economic integration was facilitated by widespread campaigns against economic contacts waged by activists in the two camps. Though their application was uneven, boycotts did create effective pressure on employers, traders and consumers to limit their contacts with the other side. Furthermore, the Jewish economy benefitted from the Arab boycott of the British authorities during the Revolt in the late 1930s. Jewish employees took the place of Arabs in the administration and made progress in building the infrastructure for future statehood by getting British support for projects such as the Tel-Aviv and Haifa harbors. Boycotts were less effective, however, in spheres where interaction between the communities proved indispensable to the supply of basic needs. The Jewish economy never became selfsufficient in food production. Arab peasants and farmers marketed agricultural surplus, and sometimes produced directly for the market. Up to 40% of all marketed Arab produce went to the Jewish market (mostly fruits, vegetables, chicken and eggs). At the same time, 10% of the Jewish industrial products, and a smaller proportion of agricultural produce, were marketed in the Arab sector (Abramowitz and Guelfat, 1944; Waschitz, 1947; Assaf, 1970). 32 As in the case of labor, neither sector was totally dependent on exports or imports to or from the other one. The growing separation of the two communities took place in the context of rapid economic development. Both national sectors, but especially the Jewish one, expanded their productive capacity and made significant progress towards industrialization. The 1930s and 1940s were crucial to this process. First, there was a large influx of capital, people and industrial skills with the massive immigration of German Jews following the Nazi seizure of power. Then, World War II brought about an enormous increase in the demand for industrial, and also agricultural, products to serve the needs of the British war effort. By the end of the war, the Jewish economy was strong and organized enough to provide a sound basis for political independence, despite the lack of self-sufficiency in food production. The Arab economy was considerably less centralized and therefore less capable of self-sustained development. Yet it was not dependent on or subordinate to the Jewish economy. Limited exchange relations notwithstanding, on the eve of the partition of Palestine by the U.N resolution of November 29, 1947 two distinct economic sectors came into being. B. Nation Formation and State Formation South Africa The period of industrialization saw the (forced) incorporation of all the different ethnic and national groups into the framework of the Union of South Africa. The Act of Union, taking effect in 1910, established a federal state composed of the four provinces of the Cape, Natal, Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Internal diversity increased at first, only to be substantially modified by a process of consolidation of new loyalties. Simultaneously, a common overarching sense of a South African identity began to form. Finding an appropriate institutional expression to this emerging reality became the main contested issue in the South African political arena in the period leading to 1948. During the last quarter of the 19th century, a concerted effort on the part of the British colonies and the Boer republics resulted in the conquest of the independent African states remaining within the boundaries of what eventually became the Union of South Africa. The motivation for that was the desire of white forces for more land, a larger and more stable supply of labor for farms and mines, and unchallenged political domination. European superior weapons, better organization and the weaknesses of the African polities due to their internal divisions, all contributed to the loss of independence. Africans were not the only ones to be forced into surrendering their freedom of action. The Boer republics, which were established in the middle of the 19th century, were defeated and conquered by British forces in the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. For the first time in the history of the region, one power managed to gain control of the entire territory. The process of white expansion, settlement and subjection of the indigenous peoples reached its climax, 250 years after the establishment of the first European outpost in the southwest corner of the country. Direct British rule did not last long, leaving the state in the hands of a coalition of the mining industry and the landed Afrikaner bourgeoisie (Marks and Trapido, 1979). White political unification, and collusion of material interests between the English and Afrikaner dominant classes, did not necessarily reflect a sense of common identity among the 33 white masses. One of the crucial developments of the period was the emergence of the Afrikaans language movement. What started as a cultural movement in the late 19th century, was transformed during the first half of the 20th century into a comprehensive framework with intensive political involvement. The development of Afrikaans as a medium of popular, literary, educational and political communication culminated in its substitution for Dutch as the official language of South Africa, together with English. It was a part of the Nationalist project of spreading Afrikaner consciousness in order to mobilize the people on the basis of a politically-motivated version of history (Moodie, 1975; Thompson, 1985). Led by educated lower middle class elements such as teachers, church ministers, writers and journalists, the movement catered to the needs of poor and recently proletarianized working class Afrikaners. It gave them a sense of belonging in the harsh and alienating urban world. It also served to distinguish them from their black neighbors, decreasing the "danger" of uniting with them on the basis of common material deprivation. Communally-based social, economic and cultural institutions provided a platform for aspiring nationalist politicians (most prominently future prime ministers, D.F. Malan in the Cape and H.F. Verwoerd in the Transvaal). They also facilitated the growth of an Afrikaner bourgeoisie, challenging British economic dominance, using the concept of Volkskapitalisme (O'Meara, 1983; Hofmeyer, 1987; Giliomee, 1989). The rise of Afrikaner nationalism intensified existing ethnic divisions among whites. At the same time, it promoted a growing South African (as opposed to regional) identity since it developed as a national movement, bringing Afrikaners from all of the four provinces into a common framework. Regional differences did not disappear, obviously, but they existed in the context of a more comprehensive identity. Afrikaner political mythology notwithstanding, it was only towards the end of the 19th century that a meaningful nationalism began to develop among people who had been deeply divided by region, class, education, political orientation and dialect. It was a new creation, motivated by the economic and social transformations accompanying the process of industrialization and economic development. In that sense it was far from being a continuation of the supposedly centuriesold adherence to exclusivist, primitive frontier Calvinism, portrayed by both nationalist Afrikaner and liberal English historians (for differing views on the role of religion see Van Jaarsveld, 1964; Moodie, 1975; Hexham, 1981; Du Toit, 1985; Bloomberg, 1989). Whites were not united in their approach to the "Native Question". A different response to the same processes of urbanization and social integration in the cities was to move towards a less restrictive social order. A liberal tendency among whites, primarily but not only Englishspeaking, called for a recognition of the permanence of the urban black population. Incorporation of those blacks who lost their ties to the rural reserves and saw their future in the growing cities was an alternative to the hardening of segregationist attitudes and practices advocated by the National Party (Rich, 1984). The fear of the "Black Peril" (Swart Gevaar) proved, however, to be more powerful and the way for implementation of Apartheid was opened in the 1948 white elections. During the same period, Africans went through a similar process of overcoming some of their internal differences and beginning to move towards a more unified and comprehensive identity. With the completion of territorial conquest, the united South Africa had a firm majority of Africans in its population. Their numerical majority was not converted into political power because of ethnic, regional and factional divisions, pitting some of them 34 against others. It is a sad comment on their disunity to realize that active help of Africans and other blacks, frequently outnumbering white warriors, played a crucial role in the conquest of many African societies (Maylam, 1986; Thompson, 1990). African resistance to conquest dates back to the first Dutch-Khoisan wars in the second half of the 17th century. It continued through several frontier wars between the British forces and the white settlers on the one hand, and various Xhosa-speaking groups on the other. This type of resistance, attempting to overthrow colonial rule and re-establish independence, declined with the entrenchment of white rule, though it never really disappeared. In the rural areas, primarily those which were not flooded by white settlers such as the Transkei, the spirit of community-based resistance and separatism continued to exist well into the 20th century (Beinart and Bundy, 1987). Around the same time there emerged a new type of political activity, a struggle for equal rights within the framework of white-ruled polities. The eastern Cape was the major site of the early manifestations of this strategy. A color-blind constitution which gave qualified franchise created a limited space for African parliamentary politics. In Natal there was less room for such activities, and in the Boer republics still less. However, in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war, together with the drive towards Union, African political elites began to organize on a national basis. Frustration over the lack of extension of the Cape franchise to the 1910 Union led to intensifying efforts to establish a representative organization for all Africans. The result was the January 1912 formation of the South African Native National Congress, SANNC, to be later renamed the African National Congress, ANC (Walshe, 1971; Odendaal, 1984). In the period following World War I several other important African political movements appeared on the scene, including the ICU organizing farm and industrial workers, the All African Convention, the Congress Youth League affiliated with the ANC, etc. (Walshe, 1971; Gerhart, 1978; Bradford, 1987). They differed in their ideologies, social bases and strategies, but they shared an appeal to all Africans, regardless of ethnic, let alone "tribal" affiliations. In other words, by promoting a nationally-based organized politics they paved the way for the growth of an overall South African consciousness and weakened, though by no means eliminated, the bases for local or regional separatist movements (see Marks, 1986 for the ambiguous nature and mixed messages of various "traditional" and "modern" political sentiments and organization in the Natal province). The extent to which this South African identity included non-Africans, and more specifically whites, varied. A prevalent, though frequently unarticulated sense of total rejection of white presence undoubtedly existed (see Hill and Pirio, 1987 for its expression in the UNIA, the Garvey movement). However, the incorporationist strategy some Africans began to adopt was gaining ground towards the end of the period. It consisted of a struggle for integration of all South Africans on an equal basis. Another manifestation of it was the participation of many Africans in elections for the Natives Representative Council and for the four white senators representing Africans in the 1930s and 1940s. Although this form of representation had very limited effect on government policies, hundreds of thousands of rural and urban Africans took part in the electoral process (Roth, 1986). A similar consolidation of political identities took place among other groups. In the case of the people classified as coloreds we see a movement towards wide, nationally-based affiliations, though with a regional focus as most of them were concentrated in the Cape 35 province, particularly the western Cape. Organizations such as the African Political Organization (APO) fought for the specific interests of coloreds but from a non-racial perspective, working occasionally in coalitions with the ANC and other opposition movements. More radical activists in the National Liberation League (NLL) and especially the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), rejected the colored identity and worked to form a non-collaborationist national united front of all those excluded from political power by white supremacy (Goldin, 1987; Lewis, 1987; Alexander, 1989). Those fighting for incorporation at the political center of the national state had the black population of the cities as a base. In the urban slums and townships a new culture developed, reflecting the needs and aspirations of the black urban working class and petty bourgeoisie (Coplan, 1982; Koch, 1983). These "de-tribalized Natives", as they were called by government anthropologists, were largely free from the hold of traditional authority structures. They sponsored organizations which represented their interests as a permanently urbanized people, seeking an equal say in determining their life chances (Bonner, 1982; Cobley, 1990). These manifestations of an alternative version of a South African identity existed side by side with the continuing indirect incorporation of rural-based leaders. The system of rule associated with T. Shepstone in 19th century Natal was taken over by the state after unification. The underlying assumption behind state intervention has been the possibility and, indeed, desirability of maintaining (or rather, creating) the reserves as the focus of African identity and political expression. It was done through the transformation of traditional leaders from potential centers of anti-colonial resistance into state officials. It was intended by the Native Affairs Department as a means to prevent radical urban ideologies and movements from mobilizing the rural masses and threatening white domination (Dubow, 1989). Another dimension of the same policies is the use made by the state of African customary law to reproduce relations of authority and social control in the reserves. Here again some traditional elements were selected by government departments, and inserted in a new context, in order to strengthen central control over the "native" population. It would be wrong, however, to see this retribalization solely as a one-sided imposition by an all-powerful whitedominated state on a mass of passive victims. These policies allow for some (limited) measure of autonomy and can be seen as one way of avoiding total cultural disinheritance (Marks, 1986; Suttner, 1986; Beinart and Bundy, 1987). The period leading to 1948 can be essentially seen as a struggle over the terms of political incorporation between conflicting interests. The state, especially under Hertzog's administration, adopted segregation as a goal and moved towards the disenfranchisement of blacks as individuals deserving representation in their own right. Instead, it created intermediary structures which were supposed to represent blacks as members of collectives. Tribal African councils, the Native Representative Council and Coloured Advisory Council were attempts to give black elites a share of control, but on a segregated basis. The opposition fought for direct incorporation on non-racial, equal terms. Neither side seriously regarded separatism as an option. The interpenetration at the economic, social, geographical and cultural levels reached such a degree as to rule this option out. Palestine/Israel 36 During the period of industrialization in South Africa an overall national identity began to form, though it was still in its early phases by the end of the period. In the long run it made the integration of the country inevitable, though not necessarily on a politically egalitarian basis. In contrast to that, in the case of Palestine two mutually exclusive nationalisms strengthened their control over their respective constituencies, creating the institutional infrastructure for separate political development. Economic, social and territorial segregation reinforced each other and facilitated political separatism. A Palestinian-Arab national movement first emerged in the aftermath of World War I, primarily in response to the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. The British committed themselves to the building of a National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine/Eretz Israel. The Zionist movement thus managed to achieve for the first time international recognition of its claim to the territory. The struggle over political control over the land, which had already started taking place in the late Ottoman period, became more intense. The period leading to the U.N. partition resolution of November 1947 was characterized by the violent clash between these two conflicting and seemingly irreconcilable claims. The 1947-8 war and the eventual partition of Palestine which created the predominantly Jewish State of Israel, and the exclusively Arab West Bank and Gaza Strip (but no equivalent State of Palestine), were the outcome of this conflict. The two groups entered the Mandatory period with relatively clearly defined corporate identities. In the following three decades they gave more elaborate expression to that sense of nationhood in the form of organized mass movements, institutions and symbols. A basic motive which runs through the political history of the period is the striving for the dismantling of internal boundaries within each group and the consolidation of external boundaries between them. In the case of the Palestinians it was focused on the overcoming of religious and regional divisions which had the potential to undermine the consolidation of a broader national identity. The earliest form of a nationalist movement were the Muslim-Christian associations, which were organized in the cities to protest against what they considered as pro-Zionist British policies. The fears of massive Jewish immigration into the country were probably shared by all Palestinians, religious affiliation notwithstanding. In addition, the political leadership made a conscious effort to give representation to a variety of groups from different parts of the country, and different religions and denominations, in order to enhance the unity of the movement (Porath, 1974; 1977). In Zionist circles there was a widespread belief that the main forces behind the Palestinian nationalist awakening were actually Christians who were traditionally anti-semitic, and particularly resented the competition offered by Jews in areas such as government services and trade. Jewish organizations made attempts in the 1920s to form exclusively Muslim village associations as a counterweight to the influence of the urban-based nationalist associations. They offered money and assistance to several individuals but never managed to have a big impact on the Palestinian political arena. Leaders could be bought off, but they did not usually deliver their constituency with them (Cohen, 1970; Caplan, 1978). The above organizational developments at the elite level did not amount, however, to the predominance of secular nationalism among the masses. The majority of the Palestinians 37 were Muslim, and it was not surprising that for many of them there was no contradiction between nationalism and Islam. That was especially the case since the mid-1920s when the Supreme Muslim Council became an important political force, competing for influence with the more secular Arab Executive Committee. In the 1930s the Council achieved a dominant position under the leadership of Hajj Amin al-Husaini, the most prominent Palestinian politician of Mandatory times (Kupferschmidt, 1987; Mattar, 1988). What that amounted to was the impossibility of differentiating between opposition to Zionism based on nationalism or on religion. In both cases the fundamental goals were the same: putting a stop to Jewish immigration, terminating land transfers to Jews and moving towards political independence and majority rule. There were no significant cross-cutting affiliations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The two groups were religiously, ethnically and linguistically distinct. They faced each other as opponents in the struggle over the land and that mattered more than any specific ideological rationale for the conflict. Other bases for internal division which had a big impact on the national movement were of a regional and factional nature. The centrality of Jerusalem and its leaders created resentment among elites in other parts of the country who felt they were marginalized. That was particularly true in those areas which had not been under the rule of Jerusalem in Ottoman times: the districts of Nablus and Acre. In addition, struggles between leading families over political and social dominance led to factional conflicts, splitting Palestinians between bitterly-opposed camps. These conflicts took place within the context of a widespread common nationalist consciousness which was not challenged. The outcome was especially noticeable during the later stages of the 1936-39 Revolt which deteriorated into a civil war and social disruption, resulting in thousands of Palestinian deaths at the hands of rival bands (Arnon-Ohana, 1981). One result of this chaos was the growing role played by external Arab forces. The Palestinian movement started as a branch of the more general Pan-Arab or Syrian nationalism. The separation of Palestine (under a British mandate) from Syria (under a French mandate), and the specific problems of Zionism caused the movement to focus on their own issues and to underplay the Arab dimension without, however, abandoning it completely (Muslih, 1988). Left to their own resources, it became clear by the end of the 1930s that the Palestinians would have great difficulties defeating the Zionist movement which was allied with Britain. Internal feuding and the resulting disorientation of the Palestinian movement opened the way to greater Arab involvement. This did not imply any weakening of the Palestinian sense of nationhood. Rather, it was seen at the time as a temporary tactical necessity. However, the "Arabization" of the question of Palestine became a permanent feature of the situation ever since (Nevo, 1977). The Jewish community in the inter-war years moved towards greater organizational and ideological cohesiveness. It was firmly dominated by the Zionist movement, strengthened by the official recognition it was granted under the terms of the British Mandate. Consolidation of a sense of Jewish nationhood meant incorporation of the anti-nationalist Orthodox Jews of the Old Yishuv, and overcoming the internal ethnic divisions between Ashkenazim, Sephardim and other Oriental Jewish communities. By the end of the period the Yishuv presented a united front outwardly. While ethnic and religious factionalisms did not disappear, they existed in the framework of a general commitment on the part of the majority to the national leadership and institutions. 38 The Israeli-Jewish identity, which was enormously strengthened during the period, combined religion and nationalism to an even greater extent than was the case with the Palestinians. Throughout history Judaism has never recognized a secular definition of nationality. The Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire were all part of one millet, sharing the same religious-ethnic organization. The Mandatory government took over the same definition of basic identity, dividing the population into religious communities with their own institutions. A religious component was part of the emerging sense of nationhood, even when the latter was promoted by secular organizations. It proved impossible to offer a version of Jewish history which would substantiate the Zionist claims to the land of Palestine/Eretz Israel without using, at least in part, religious legitimation. That, and not the supposed bargaining power of religious parties, has been the main reason for the continued role played by the latter in Israeli politics. Some Orthodox factions within and without Palestine (especially strong among the old Yishuv of Jerusalem) opposed the use of religious symbols in the service of an ideology and movement they regarded as secular and blasphemous. They were overruled quite early as they became economically, politically and militarily dependent on the new Yishuv. Their proportion of the population rapidly declined as most of the Jewish immigration into the country was absorbed in the new cities and rural settlements which were dominated by secular elements. Only a few small sects continued to reject the nationalization of Jewish identity, but they could not stop the process (Friedman, 1978). The Zionist leadership of the Yishuv had a vision of a Europeanized, technologically advanced society which would be quite different from the neighboring Middle Eastern societies. The prospect of assimilation into the "Levantine" culture was seen by the national institutions as something to be avoided. This attitude, together with the numerical superiority of Ashkenazi Jews as a result of immigration from central and eastern European countries, combined to marginalize Oriental Jews. Their physical and cultural proximity to Arabs put them in a disadvantaged position, preventing them from participating on an equal basis in the emerging national culture (Smooha, 1978). In addition to religion, the Jewish community had a large degree of autonomy in managing its social life, providing education and health services, running local government in Jewish settlements and building representative, democratically-elected political institutions such as Knesset Israel and the Vaad Leumi (Horowitz and Lissak, 1978; Giladi, 1982; Shavit, 1982). The sense of distinctness from the Palestinians and the need for creating and maintaining separate institutional frameworks was felt very strongly. There were hardly any mixed political organizations, and those which did exist, such as the Palestinian Communist Party (PKP), were treated as a dangerous lunatic fringe. Overall territorial segregation, and growing residential segregation in the mixed areas, such as Jerusalem and Haifa, reduced the opportunities for social contact. By the end of the Mandatory period, two full-fledged national communities faced each other as enemies, fighting over control of the same land. They were distinct from one another by virtue of their religion, language, ethnicity and history. They did not share political institutions and had no sense of common identity. Socially and territorially they were largely segregated from each other. Economically they kept limited contacts but those were not enough to offset the trend towards overall separation. The 1947-8 war expressed through military means the same drive towards separatism. The result was the creation of the State of 39 Israel and the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem which is still at the center of the Israeli-Arab conflict today. Conclusions In both countries the events of 1948 were the outcome of processes of class, nation and state formation. In South Africa radically inegalitarian but comprehensive integration in the economic sphere was accompanied by more ambiguous moves towards ideological and political incorporation. Though no integrated political institutions were established, a limited degree of incorporation did take place. The struggles of mainstream African political movements were located within white-dominated state structures rather than outside them with the goal of overturning power relations altogether. In Palestine there were hardly any integrated political institutions. Each side to the conflict established its own separate and parallel structures. The state was an administrative center which created an arena for a fierce conflict between Jews and Arabs over state power. Rather than one side controlling the state, and the other side trying to force its way in as was the case in South Africa, in Palestine the state was controlled by a third force, the British. Struggle was waged over mutually exclusive claims to the legacy of the British whose rule was temporary. This difference in the relation of the conflicting parties to centralized state power determined to a large extent the choice of political strategies. Whereas South Africa has had a strong and unified white-controlled state since the beginning of the 20th century, pre-1948 Palestine had been controlled by two states, the Ottoman and the British, none of which truly represented any of the competing groups. Instead, they provided an arena for the unfolding of the conflict over territorial and political control between two groups, neither of which had exclusive access to the state. The British had collaborated much more closely with their fellow "surrogate colonizers" in South Africa then they did with their surrogate colonizers in Palestine. The primary economic importance of the gold mining industry in South Africa, as compared with the primarily strategic importance of Palestine had a lot to do with the variation in British policies. Theoretical Implications The early pre-industrial period in South Africa and Israel brought together the different parties to the emerging conflicts. In the economic sphere of land and labor relations the two societies were initially not very different. In both cases settlers expanded their landholdings and employed the natives as agricultural laborers. However, white settlement in South Africa had a more significant effect on indigenous society than was the case in Palestine in the early period. Economic integration there, at least in the Cape colony, had also gone farther than in any part of Palestine. In the spheres of nation and state formation, in Palestine two groups moved towards establishing separate political institutions and forming distinct identities. In South Africa the fluidity of ethnic categories created more intermixture and less rigid boundaries. Political incorporation was not very advanced at that stage as different states maintained their autonomy. In the following period these divergent tendencies became more clear and were consolidated. Economic and social separatism took great leaps forward in Palestine, while the opposite was 40 the case for South Africa. The same differences were evident in the ideological and institutional spheres which witnessed greater integration in South Africa and lesser in Palestine. Since 1948 these tendencies were consolidated further still. In Israel they led to the erection of the "green line" as a permanent divider between the Jewish and Arab parts of Israel/Palestine, firmly in place today despite 23 years of consistent attempts by successive Israeli governments to erase it. All Israeli governments, and especially the present one, have been strongly committed to the physical and mental elimination of the Green Line from the map. This ideological stand notwithstanding, the line is constantly re-introduced whenever political circumstances call for a clear separation between Israel proper and the occupied territories. The most recent example are the steps taken by the government in the aftermath of Temple Mount massacre and the consequent spate of killings of October 1990 in Jerusalem. In South Africa the opposite was the case. Artificially erected boundaries aimed at the permanent partition of the country into ethnic homelands never took hold as legitimate dividing lines. By now most of these newly created bantustans have taken the road towards re-integration on all levels in a unitary South Africa. The exception is the so-called independent homeland of Bophuthatswana whose leadership desperately tries to avoid the inevitable destiny of re-incorporation. Its call for an alternative merger with Botswana, totally rejected by the latter, is a testimony to the non-viability of the homeland as an "independent" entity. Overall, then, the combined effects of the three processes of class, nation and state formation led to the creation of a social basis for two separate societies in Palestine/Israel and for an integrated (though politically inegalitarian) society in South Africa. As I argued earlier, this basis had been laid before 1948. It is this historical context which can account for the radical differences in the nature of political solutions being discussed today in the two countries. The preceding discussion of historical developments in South Africa and Israel has some theoretical implications, the most important of which is the need for a comprehensive analytical framework which studies in a historical manner the processes of class, nation and state formation. All too frequently scholars have concentrated on only one of these dimensions to the exclusion of other relevant factors. The result is an incomplete analysis which misses out on some important elements of the picture. All three dimensions are essential to the story, though they do not always carry the same weight. It seems that class formation was the most crucial process in South Africa. Processes of nation and state formation have had an autonomous effect on the course of the conflict there but they were largely, though not exclusively, determined by class formation. In the case of Palestine/Israel nation formation was the crucial process. It has largely determined the other processes, though again not exclusively so. The predominance of one set of factors does not detract from the necessity of studying all three together as they modify each other's effects in important ways. To what can we attribute this difference in the constellation of factors? The overall dynamics of the conflicts were established at an early stage, though they constantly adjusted to changing circumstances. White settlement in South Africa has had an economic rationale from its inception, though the economic strategies adopted by settlers and indigenous people alike were obviously affected by ideological and political considerations. However, the colonization of South Africa took place as part of the 17th-19th centuries expansion of 41 commercial and industrial capitalism. It did not reflect any prior interest in the country and its peoples in anything other than their economic utility. In contrast, Zionist settlement in Palestine targeted the country itself as a solution to the economic and political problems of European Jews. It was interested in Palestine's land, economic and human resources, but only inasmuch as they were essential to the process of nation formation. The whole settlement project took place as part of the late 19th century awakening of central and eastern European nationalisms from which Jews were implicitly or explicitly excluded. It was facilitated by the self-exclusion of historical Judaism from its non-Jewish environments. This difference in their most basic drives and historical contexts is at the core of the differences between the trajectories of the two conflicts. The world-historical context affected all three formative processes. Land and labor relations between settlers and indigenous peoples were affected by the opportunities offered and constraints imposed by the development of the world economic system. Colonization took place in South Africa before production for the world (or even regional) markets made its appearance. Class differentiation was not very pronounced among the natives and surplus labor was not available as it was in Europe. Consequently, a very important element of the conflict revolved around the attempts of the settlers to coerce natives (and imported slaves and laborers) into working for them. In Palestine, market relations, integration within the world system and proletarianization had all been more advanced. The conflict revolved around the exclusion of the natives from the settler economy rather than about their forced inclusion in it. Processes of nation formation were affected by the differential crystallization of nationalist ideologies in Europe, the Middle East and Southern Africa. The European settlement of South Africa took place at the early stages of modern nationalism in Europe, and at a time it was completely unknown in Southern Africa. Zionist settlement in Palestine occurred much later when nationalism had already left its full mark on Europe and to a lesser extent the Middle East as well. The construction of settler-dominated state structures was affected by the prior existence, as in Palestine, or lack thereof, as in Southern Africa, of regional centralized state systems. The relations between the settlers and the colonial states also had to do with the international context within which the latter operated. How does the analytical perspective used here compare with the theoretical approaches commonly used for the analysis of the South African and Israeli/Palestinian conflicts? In the case of South African studies, the emphasis of the 1950s and the 1960s on the role of racial beliefs and attitudes in the creation of white supremacy (Van den Berghe, 1965; Thompson and Wilson, 1970) gave way to an almost exclusive focus on the role of class factors in the 1970s (Wolpe, 1972; Legassick, 1974; Davies, 1979). It is only with the creative explosion of the new school of social history in the 1980s that a more nuanced, theoretically-informed yet historically-specific analysis appeared on the scene (the collections of articles edited by Marks in London and by Bozzoli in Johannesburg are prime examples). In the case of Israel/Palestine, scholarship has almost exclusively focused on ideology as virtually the only explanation for political developments. The last few years have seen a number of new studies which use more innovative theoretical approaches (the works by Kimmerling, Shalev and Shafir are good examples), but the field is still dominated by narrowly-focused analyses. I acknowledge in this paper the central importance of class formation for the understanding of South African history and of nation formation for analyzing Palestine/Israel. I do believe, however, that these factors should be combined with the other theoretical elements discussed above to provide a full picture. In critical junctures in South African history, ideology and the 42 state intervened to tilt the balance in favor of one political-economic strategy among several alternative policies, all of which could equally serve capitalist class interests. Cases in point are the economic reliance on African migrant labor and the implementation of apartheid. Alternative policies based on a settled black labor force and the partial political incorporation of "de-tribalized" urban natives were defeated because of the strength of (Afrikaner) ethnic mobilization and the capacity of the (white) state to block policies deemed threatening to white (not necessarily capitalist) domination. Likewise, in the case of Palestine, ideological blueprints were substantially modified by economic, territorial and demographic realities. One cannot regard the Zionist project as merely the practical application of Zionist ideological designs. A related theoretical lesson we can derive from this study is the need to pay more attention to the power of responses from below to shape social and political relations. Whites in South Africa and Jews in Israel managed to achieve state power, but in the process they had to overcome sustained economic and political resistance which frequently forced them to change strategies and modify their goals. Conventional histories written exclusively from the point of view of the dominant groups (Eisenstadt's work in Israel is the most obvious example) are clearly inadequate in coming to terms with this reality. Another conclusion drawn from this work is the role social and political factors play in the emergence of ethnic and national identity. The historical study of state and nation formation directs us away from the notion of primordial ethnic consciousness. The dominance of specific national (or racial) ideologies in the life of any group is not given. Rather, it is established in a social process involving conflicts with other competing identities. The evolution of colored identity in South Africa, for example, cannot be understood outside a long history of people coming from diverse backgrounds and subjected to economic dispossession and exploitation as slaves and servants. The effect of a similar class location was reinforced by state policy, classifying people on a racial basis and treating them differentially. Thus, a study of the role of class and state is essential for grasping the nature of ethnicity. Our understanding of the notion of relative autonomy and the question of state-class relations can be modified as a result of considering the additional dimension of nation-formation. State institutions have had to deal with multiple and, sometimes, contradictory pressures of various class and non-class forces. The adoption of the policy of segregation in the 1920s and 1930s in South Africa is an example of an attempt by the state to reconcile economic, ideological and institutional imperatives with the overriding aim of promoting white supremacy. The defense of white material interests and the needs of the state apparatus for greater control should be seen in the context of attempting to build a unified white nation. The autonomy of the state at any point in time is a product of the specific combination of all the formative processes discussed above. In conclusion, a comparative study of this nature highlights the general, as well as the specific, characteristics of each situation. Using the two cases to comment on each other contributes to the development of meaningful historical interpretations of the conflicts studied here. In addition, by isolating crucial explanatory variables we can enrich our theoretical understanding of the emergence, evolution and dynamics of racial conflicts. Applying the conceptual and theoretical frameworks employed in this paper to other relevant case studies will allow us to further test and refine this approach and thus contribute to the 43 advancement of social theory. LITERATURE REVIEW Much of the literature dealing with the comparison between Israel and South Africa uses the concept of colonialism and various variants of it (settler colonialism, internal colonialism, frontier situation) as points of departure. Starting from general definitions of colonialism, it usually poses questions about the extent to which these societies (especially Israel) meet the relevant definitional criteria. It is difficult to find in this kind of literature an explicit discussion of the theoretical issues of class, ideology, state and their interrelationships, which were presented in the previous chapter. It is frequently possible, though, to detect underlying theoretical assumptions. I will proceed, therefore, on two levels in discussing the literature: the use of colonial concepts and their theoretical implications. This chapter is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with colonialism, Israel and South Africa. In the first part I present and critique essentialist notions of colonialism which are based on oppositions between mutually exclusive categories. I argue for an approach which looks at the historical phenomenon of colonialism as a terrain for struggles at multiple levels between different groups of people. I do not regard colonialism as an analytical category or a type of society with its own unique laws of motion. In the second part I look at the different ways in which colonial categories and analogies have been used in studies of Israeli society and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I discuss in this section the literature dealing with the comparison between Israel and South Africa. In the third part I review the literature on South Africa and specifically the use to which the analytical categories of race and class have been put. COLONIALISM A good starting point for the presentation of the essentialist perspective on colonialism in Balandier's work (1966). He defines the colonial situation as a system which includes the following interrelated elements: a fundamentally antagonistic relationship between radically different civilizations which consists of the domination of a non-industrialized, non-Christian society by a foreign, racially and culturally different, industrialized society with a Christian background. This domination is maintained by force, as well as by a system of beliefs and justifications. The colonial situation is thus a totality which affects all levels of social life and leads to the transformation of indigenous societies. Generally speaking the relations between metropolis and colony replicate the exploitative relationship between capital and labor. Another element of the colonial situation which is frequently emphasized in this perspective is the total segregation between the two groups - colonizers and colonized. They belong to different worlds and their interests and goals are mutually exclusive. There is no room for compromise or reconciliation as a solution to the inherent conflict between them. The only way to terminate the conflict consists in destroying the colonial system itself (though that does not necessarily mean getting rid of the colonizers as individuals): "For the colonized just as for the colonizer, there is no way out other than a complete end to colonization. The refusal of the colonized cannot be anything but absolute...only the complete liquidation of colonization permits the colonized to be free...if the European must annihilate the colonizer within himself, the colonized must rise above his colonized being" (Memmi, 1967: 150-151). In a similar vein, Fanon sees colonial reality in Manichean terms, as a split world in which 44 the struggle is constructed as a fight between absolute good and evil: "The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous" (Fanon, 1963: 38-9). From this perspective, then, the colonial system is characterized by a permanent struggle between colonialists and natives. Conflict and violence are, by definition, an integral part of the situation and affect self perception and the perception of the other on the part of both sides. Violence need not be overt and bloody but it is ever present: "The colonialist discovers in the native not only the Other-than-man but also his own sworn Enemy...the colonialist reveals the violence ofthe native, even in his passivity, as the obvious consequence of his own violence and as its sole justification...what this basically means is: the colonialist and the native are a couple, produced by an antagonistic situation and by one another" (Sartre, 1976: 720-721). This essentialist view of colonialism, portraying it as a clash between total opposites which share no common ground among them, takes for granted in an uncritical manner existing colonial categories. In contrast to this approach, I regard these categories as having been constructed in a historical process of formation of identities, interests and organizations. Colonizers and colonized have frequently come to share cultural characteristics such as religion and language. Political institutions have varied enormously in the degree to which they accommodate native participation in the exercise of power. Class relations do not necessarily reflect a colonial dichotomy. In short, colonial categories should not be thought of as immutable, pitting two irreconcilable groups against each other, but as "problematic, contested, and changing...[since] the otherness of the colonized person was neither inherent nor stable; his or her difference had to be defined and maintained; social boundaries that were at one point clear would not necessarily remain so" (Cooper and Stoler, 1989: 609-610). Much of the critique of the essentialist notions of colonialism would also apply to the more historically elaborate attempts to identify several variants or models of colonial settlement. Working within this classificatory approach, Fieldhouse (1966) presents an elaborate scheme which consists of 5 types of colonies: Mixed Colonies in which a substantial minority of white settlers created societies based on control and absorption of the indigenous population (Spain in Mexico and Peru); Colonies of Occupation in which there were few settlers and the indigenous peoples were loosely supervised (Spain in the Philippines and other south American countries, Portugal in Angola and Mozambique); Plantation Colonies in which a small European minority settled permanently, importing African slaves to compensate for the absence of an indigenous labor force and lack of precious metals (Portugal in Brazil, Britain in the Caribbean); Trading Settlements which are characterized by few settlers and limited territory, but which organize trade in spices and other "exotic" items (Portugal in Asia); Pure Settlements in which the Europeans attempted to replicate their own societies of origin without employing native or imported slave labor (Britain and France in north America). This last category is also referred to as colonies of settlement by Parry who attributes their construction to necessity rather than choice. The more desirable American territories with a large indigenous labor force were captured by the Spaniards so that in north America "where the native population was too sparse or too intractable to furnish an adequate labour force, and where Negroes could not thrive, Europeans had cleared the land, pushed the natives 45 aside, and formed purely European communities, living largely by their own labour as farmers, fishermen or traders" (Parry, 1961: 185). These colonies of settlement can be distinguished from colonies of exploitation by their source of labor power, whether brought from Europe itself within the framework of the general settlement process, or recruited through non-European sources: indigenous or imported coerced labor. Where exploitation was the central driving force "the basic set of colonial equation was European=dear Native=cheap. To it, the entire political, economic and social structure of the colonial territory could be reduced" (Van den Berghe, 1981: 94). In contrast to that, where the main motivation was land for settlement, as was the case outside of the tropics, the indigenous people were simply brushed aside if not outright exterminated to enable white settlers to take possession of the territory. Schermerhorn (1970) adds another intermediate category which includes Angola, Rhodesia, Algeria and South Africa, in all of which a large number of settlers coexist with and rule over a larger number of indigenous people without overwhelming them demographically or ecologically. This category of white settler or settler colonial society is taken up by Emmanuel who criticizes traditional accounts of European colonialism for not taking systematic account of this issue and failing "to recognize a third factor that intervenes between imperialist capitalism and the peoples of the exploited countries, i.e. the colonialists themselves" (1972: 36). For these people, the colonial project was not a business venture but the mainspring of their existence and their supreme justification. Their interests have never been identical to those of their mother country and they frequently clashed. They have had a strong impact on the nature of colonial society. Good (1976) traces the different trajectories followed by de-colonized African countries depending on the existence or lack thereof of white settlers in the colony. Settler societies and states have gone much further on the road towards industrialization and economic development. Their interference with and destruction of indigenous social formations have been much more thorough and have led to more advanced (i.e. capitalist) class formations. Kuper (1969) presents a comprehensive view of the uniqueness of white settler societies. The most important elements in his definition are intensive permanent settlement of Europeans who constitute a sizable proportion of the total population, expropriation of land from the indigenous peoples, political independence from the mother country, the dominance of the state and politics over civil society and the differential incorporation of the population in the political, economic and cultural systems. The above classifications are an improvement over the crude dichotomy which is characteristic of the essentialist approach. However, they are still problematic in several respects. They focus on European colonial and settler strategies as shaped by their supposed prior interests, and thus leave the very formulation of those interests unquestioned. However, interests were defined and redefined in the course of the colonization process itself and did not exist independently of it. In addition, the presence and response of indigenous peoples have forced colonizing powers to modify their policies and constantly adapt them to the changing circumstances. Classification schemes are too rigid, then, to be able to capture the emergent nature of the strategies and counter-strategies pursued by the parties to the colonial situation. Furthermore, many of the groups which were created as a result of colonialism have been internally divided on many grounds, and have not followed a single unified strategy of settlement or resistance. The multiplicity of colonial structures need to be studied in their 46 historical specificity, including their world-historical context and their economic, political and ideological incorporation within the emerging European-dominated world system. My goal in this chapter, and in the work as a whole, is not to impose yet another scheme on the diverse universe which is colonialism but, instead, to pose a set of questions which can be used to facilitate the concrete analysis of societies born out of the encounter between Europe, its colonial outgrowth and its others. The following sections deal with the ways in which social scientists and historians in the countries under study here have handled the historical and theoretical issues to which colonialism has given rise. ISRAEL/PALESTINE This study has some potential political implications, especially for those involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both the State of Israel and its Palestinian opponents have based their appeal to world public opinion on moral grounds. The general validity of colonial analogies which are widely considered to be morally reprehensible, and the particular comparison to South Africa, a state strongly condemned as racist, have therefore become hotly contested issues among scholars and political activists alike. The following discussion of Israel is divided into two sections; the first deals with perspectives which reject colonial analogies as invalid, and the second with those which use these same analogies. Within each section I review the different approaches in their own terms and evaluate them in light of the theoretical concepts presented in Chapter two. A. Israel as a "New Society" The mainstream of Israeli social science has maintained that Israel should be seen as a new society founded from scratch, so to speak, in a manner similar to other fragments of the modern world which were established in north America and Australia: "The key to their birth as modern societies lies in the migration of their founders to frontier environments where they were able to create a social order with a minimum amount of hindrance from entrenched traditional or feudal ways or from existing populations needing to be assimilated" (Elazar, 1979: 3). Elazar asserts that Palestine, though populated, was effectively empty for the Zionist pioneers since they went on to build their own society, not modelled on any indigenous social order, Arab or Jewish. In terms of our conceptual framework, then, the formative processes of class, nation and state formation took place in a socio-political empty space, with ideology as the key factor determining the objectives and direction of historical developments. The most theoretically elaborate exposition of this view, which is frequently labeled the nation-building perspective, can be found in the work of S.N. Eisenstadt (1967; 1985). He regards Israel as a crystallizing modern society which results from transplanting western social institutions into a new, non-western setting. That became possible because the Jewish settlers before 1948 refused to become an upper-class in a pluralist colonial society or to be Western colonizers in an Arab economy. They chose to build their own independent political, economic and social institutions, motivated by a strong commitment to socialist ideology. He compares Israel to other revolutionary, non-imperial colonizing societies in which the settlers put a strong emphasis on equality, erection of a broad, unified organizational frameworks and conquest of wasteland through work and self-employment. Eisenstadt regards the obvious 47 existence of a native population and the challenge it posed to the settlement project as external constraints which have not had much effect on the nature of the society itself. In a similar manner, Horowitz and Lissak (1978) reject the colonial analogy of hierarchical relations between two opposing groups and adopt instead a dual-society model of segregation between two complete societies which is "a circumstance without parallel in the annals of European settlement in the underdeveloped colonial territories" (ibid: 26). They emphasize the ideological motivation behind the Zionist settlement process which called for political and cultural renaissance of the Jewish people and its social and economic transformation, and was not driven by exploitative or imperial considerations. Avishai (1985) attributes these policies which he terms "socialist separatism" to the fear of the Zionist settlers of becoming a colonialist class like the Pieds-Noirs in Algeria. The conscious motivations of the settlers also play an important part in Avineri's (1981) treatment of Zionism as a movement of Jewish emancipation. Those Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Palestine were seeking self-determination and attempted to construct a new society based on secular and liberal principles. The origins of Israel, therefore, have nothing to do with the usual motivations and justifications of colonialism. The nation-building approach points, then, to the crucial role of ideology as the major force behind the formation of exclusionary societal and state institutions. The proponents of this perspective are justified in emphasizing the importance of the Zionist goal of Jewish national self-determination, but their conception of ideology, and its relations to other social processes, is unduly restrictive and ultimately misleading. They take ideological proclamations at face value, as expressions of conscious motivations. They do not go beyond the level of intents to explore effects. That the Zionist project was not motivated by colonialist intentions does not necessarily mean that it could not have colonial effects, especially as experienced by Palestinians. Zionism from the point of view of its victims, to use Said's formulation (1979), looks very different than it does from the point of view of its beneficiaries. On a theoretical level, the conceptualization of ideology as a coherent, clearly articulated entity which has been taken as is and implemented on the ground of reality is inadequate. Zionism has always been internally divided, especially when it came to the meaning of deeply contested concepts such as Labor or Socialist Zionism and their implications for intraJewish class relations. Ideological prescriptions have been modified in light of the material circumstances obtaining in the country, and the process of constructing Jewish national institutions cannot be analytically divorced from the social and political conditions, concerns, interests and forms of organization of the indigenous population. In short, ideology in itself is insufficient in accounting for the exclusionary form Jewish-Arab relations have taken. Some Israeli writers reject colonial analogies as inappropriate for characterizing Zionist ideology and practices before 1967 but they do apply such analogies to refer to Israeli policies towards the Palestinian territories occupied in June 1967. Sivan (1988) regards the Zionist utopian vision and the attempt to realize it in practice as clearly contradictory to European colonialist practices. He makes a distinction, though, between colonialism as such and colonial situations which obtain when one society dominates another within the same territory, holding a monopoly over political and military power and enjoying a disproportionate share of economic resources. He maintains that following the 1967 war 48 Israel has evolved towards a colonial situation of the Algerian, though not the South African, type. In like manner, Chazan (1988) disapproves of the use of the colonial label, and the comparison to South Africa. She claims that the Zionist struggle for national liberation is directed against exactly the same principles of racial supremacy on which white minority regimes like South Africa are based. Yet, since 1967, the situation of conquest, of dominating large populations against their will, makes Israel act more and more like South Africa even though the basic structures of the national conflict are different. All of the writers mentioned above seem to share an underlying assumption, not always explicitly mentioned, of a process of ideological deterioration, moving away from the ideal type of progressive, humane and egalitarian Zionisn. Thus, the Jewish community in pre1948 Palestine was the closest in its social organization and political ideology to the model; post-1948 Israel maintained its basic elements but in a modified, less pure, manner; post1967 Israel continued to evolve farther away to the point of embracing (according to some interpretations) certain colonialist attitudes and practices. The notion of a supposed "golden age", which has become less and less perfect with the passage of time, is quite common in Israel among academics and the general public alike. This perception is not unrelated, of course, to the social position of its adherents, and it is particularly popular with, though not restricted to, those who have been emotionally, politically and intellectually affiliated with the Labor establishment. Another group of writers deviate, at least to some extent, from the paradigm presented above. Their approach, which I will term here the political conflict perspective, puts a stronger emphasis on the continuity of the national conflict which has played a crucial role in shaping Israeli society and its economic and political structures. They allow more theoretical space for the operation of class mechanisms, among Jews and between them and Arabs, and they pay more attention to questions of state and institutional power. They do share with the nation-building approach a strong emphasis on ideology, but in contrast to it they realize the impossibility of analyzing the development of Zionism and Israel without focusing on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Kimmerling (1983) uses the concept of the frontier to place Israel in a comparative framework. Israel belongs to a group of immigrant-settler societies together with the USA, Australia and South Africa. Its unique feature is a low level of frontierity (lack of free land available for settlement). Land has become the central political resource in the conflict between Jewish settlers and Arab natives, though the means to get it changed with the achievement of Israeli sovereignty over the territory. Kimmerling does not see the Zionist enterprise as colonial since it has not had an economic rationale for its drive for territorial expansion. He does, however, recognize that from the Arab point of view this distinction does not make much difference: "The claim by Zionism that the Jewish immigration to Palestine had different reasons and motivations than the colonialist immigration movement was rejected [by Arabs]. The Zionists focused on the reasons for the Jewish immigration, while the Arabs focused on its results" (ibid: 28). A more direct analogy between settlement processes in Israel and in various overseas European-dominated territories appears in Shafir (1984). He focuses on the continuous impact of territorial accumulation and frontier expansion and conflict on the formation of Israeli nationalism. He identifies the basic dynamics of immigration, colonization and permanent settlement which operate today, as in the past, in Israeli society. The difference 49 between the pre-1948 and the post-1967 periods is that in the former, Jewish-Arab relations were mediated by the British authorities with Jews acting from a position of weakness, while in the latter, Israeli Jews simultaneously play the roles of colonial administrators and settlers. A similar emphasis on the continuity of the essential dynamics, though within a changed context leading to different consequences, is the central idea in the work of Benvenisti (1986; 1988). He rejects the colonial model and the comparison to South Africa because they imply an externally-generated conflict. Palestine, and later Israel, has been of a dual society with two competing indigenous national groups. During the British mandate both groups were equally ranked under the colonial administration. Following the 1967 war there emerged an hierarchical system with a dominant Jewish and a subordinate Arab segments, a herrenvolk democracy. On the descriptive level this system looks almost indistinguishable from the one portrayed by adherents of the colonial model. Yet, analytically it is a bi-national society with both groups deeply entrenched in and committed to the whole territory as their homeland. In other words, the conceptual picture of immigrants (colonizers) and natives (colonized) is not valid here since the former have become as indigenous to the territory as the latter by virtue of their historical legacy and sense of belonging. Smooha (1988), in contrast to Benvenisti, stresses the potential for separatism. Despite extensive similarities between South Africa and Israel as deeply-divided plural societies and herrenvolk democracies, their fundamental policies towards the indigenous populations have been diametrically opposed. In South Africa the natives are absorbed into the economy as a subordinate class. In Israel no class relations have developed between Jews and Arabs and the basic attitude towards the natives has been to have as few of them as possible. As a result, territorial separation in the form of partition of the territory is a viable option for Israelis and Palestinians but not for blacks and whites in South Africa. In this sense Zionist policies have been consistent throughout. The political conflict approach is much superior, in my view, to the nation-building approach in having a more comparative focus and in emphasizing questions of power and resources. It provides valuable historical insights which I find useful for my own work. It is deficient, however, in several respects. It is largely Israel-centric in its focus on Jewish and Israeli visions and political strategies as primary determinants of the outcomes of conflict situations, without giving adequate consideration to the role of Palestinian attitudes and policies in the same process. It does not explicitly link specific historical analyses to broad theoretical discussions of the relations between class, nation, state, etc. Its comparative perspective is fragmentary and implicit, and the lack of systematic study of other cases results in many dubious assertions, about South Africa in particular. Conceptually, its treatment of the fundamental character of Israeli society is problematic, pitting an essentialist model of colonialism in general against a concrete reality, only to reject the applicability of the model. It shares this ahistorical strategy with both the nation-building approach and the colonial approach which I discuss in the next section. B. Israel as a Colonial Phenomenon The colonial model has been used to describe and criticize Zionism almost since its emergence at the turn of the century. It is still used today as a counter-weight to the selfimage of most Israelis and the prevailing opinion among large segments of the Western public (academics and lay people). Its growing popularity in the 1970s was reflected in several resolutions adopted by international organizations. On August 1, 1975 the Organization of 50 African Unity declared that "the racist regime in Occupied Palestine and racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked". The most famous expression of this approach, conflating imperialism with colonialism and racism, is the UN resolution of November 10, 1975 which asserted that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. A more recent expression of this approach is found in the political statement adopted by the 19th session of the Palestinian National Council on November 15, 1988 we can read about "the Zionist lie about the democracy of the Zionist entity that has managed to deceive the world for forty years, [but now] revealing Israel in its true light a fascist, racist, colonialist state built on the usurpation of the Palestinian land and the annihilation of the Palestinian people". The significance of this statement becomes clear when we realize that it was adopted at the same session of the PNC which proclaimed the establishment of the State of Palestine, basing its international legitimacy on UN resolution 181 of November 29, 1947 which recognized the principle of Jewish political independence in part of Palestine. In other words, the PLO's recognition of the State of Israel did not lead it to change its characterization of Israel as a colonial phenomenon. Probably the first theoretical attempt to define Zionism as a part of European colonial expansion overseas was made by the Comintern and the Palestinian Communist Party (Budeiri, 1979; Bashear, 1980). The party was strongly opposed to the Zionist political project. It perceived Zionism as a reactionary colonial movement distracting Jews from their revolutionary role in their home countries, and mobilizing them in the service of British and American imperialist interests. This was done as part of the colonialist strategy of local and foreign Jewish capitalists who were interested "in acquiring a long term socio-political hegemony, which would enable them to develop their businesses, increase their profits and accumulate socio-economic power. This basic interest appeared in a Zionist politicoideological form of `national redemption', since the securing of socio-political hegemony was conditioned upon the recruitment of investment capital as well as Jewish immigrants who would actually carry out the colonization and the displacement of the Palestinian Arab people" (Gozansky, 1986: 237). This analysis by a leading theoretician of the Israeli Communist Party is quite unusual in its orthodox Marxist approach. Ideology is subordinated here to capitalist class interests. Most other writers working within the colonial paradigm put a much stronger emphasis on the role of Zionist ideology and the national (rather than only class) conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Said (1979) examines Zionism within the context of European Orientalist discourses which facilitate the imposition of Western supremacy over the non-European natives of the world. This moral and intellectual environment allowed the Jewish settlers to consider the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as non-existent in an "empty" territory. The Zionist vision is unique, however, among most other European colonial movements, in that it has no place whatsoever for the indigenous population in its framework: "All the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of `native people' in Palestine" (ibid: 82). Whereas Said focuses on the discursive foundations of Zionist ideology, rooted in European intellectual history, others emphasize political-strategic factors which have linked the Zionist movement, whose appeal to the Jewish masses of eastern Europe was not based on any 51 colonialist or imperialist intentions per se, to "the conceptual orbit of Imperialism...[by] one small detail that seemed to be of no importance: Palestine was inhabited by another people" (Rodinson, 1973: 38). This is the main reason one can talk about a colonial process, though with its own special characteristics. A major part of the native population was displaced while another part was left in a state of direct economic dependence on the colonists. Rodinson asserts that all of the important elements of colonialism are to be found in the Israeli case: immigration, occupation, domination and legitimizing legislation. Basing themselves on Rodinson's notion of a "deviant" pattern of colonization, a group of politically active writers, mostly of Trotskyist persuasions, elaborated the idea of Zionism as an exclusionary colonial movement: "[This is] the specific feature of Zionism which distinguishes it from all other modern colonization movements. The European settlers in other colonies sought to exploit the riches of the country (including the labor potential of the `natives') and invariably turned the former population into an exploited class in the new colonial society. But Zionism wanted not simply the resources of Palestine (which were not very great in any case) but the country itself for the creation of a new national state which, through immigration, would provide its own classes including a working class. The Arabs were, therefore, not to be exploited, but totally replaced" (Bober, 1972: 38). This particular feature of Zionism cannot serve, in Weinstock's view (1979), as an argument against the colonial nature of the Zionist movement and Israel. He regards the traditional outline of colonialism as a schema, a model which becomes operative through a concrete analysis of the specific elements of each historical case to which it is applied. There is no such thing as `chemically pure' colonization. There is no doubt that the Zionist immigrants were persecuted in their countries of origin and that it was not their intention to oppress the Arabs of Palestine. Nevertheless, a process must be judged on the basis of its content, not by people's conception of it. Despite its emancipatory ideals the Zionist enterprise resulted in subordination, expropriation and displacement of the indigenous population because of the colonial context in which it took place. It is interesting to note at this point that advocates of the colonial model share with the supporters of the "new society" approach their focus on the lack of development of labor relations between Jewish immigrants and Arab natives. However, whereas the latter approach uses this uncontested fact to argue for the benevolent, non-exploitative nature of the Zionist enterprise (and therefore its non-colonial character), the former regards it as a form of racial exclusion, the impact of which turned out to be even more pernicious than that of "normal" types of colonialism. The debate between the two approaches is not really about "the facts", or about the relative theoretical importance of class as opposed to ideology since both focus on nationalist ideology as the primary motive force behind Zionism. Neither is it about fundamentally contradictory definitions of colonialism; both adopt an essentialist, though somewhat different, conception of it. It is, rather, a directly political debate over the interpretation and implications of historical developments, a debate pitting Zionists against anti-Zionists. An explicit focus on sociological theory is provided by Ehrlich (1978; 1987) who uses the settler-colonial model to emphasize the specific features of Zionism and the State of Israel, and the crucial role of the national conflict in understanding the nature of Israeli social and political structures. Before 1948 Zionist settlers who did not control state power had to rely on the development of capitalist market mechanisms for the acquisition of land. After the 52 establishment of Israel, control over land and immigration allowed the state to consolidate Jewish dominance at the expense of the Palestinians. The massive financial support from outside forces Jewish donations, German reparations and American military and economic assistance and the reality of a permanent state of war led to dependence on Imperialism. Thus, the colonial character of Israeli society is expressed both in its internal structures and policies towards the Palestinians and in its role as an ally of Western imperialism against the Arab national movement. Zureik (1979) analyzes the encounter between Jews and Arabs in Palestine using the model of internal colonialism, following Asad (1975). The three main features of Zionist colonization have been: (1) The transformation in the economic and social structure of the indigenous Arab population which took place in the context of superimposing a capitalist economy upon a traditional peasant social order; (2) The transformation in the economic fabric which has created pockets of hinterland in the midst of areas with native Arab concentration, while metropolitan centers appear solely in regions populated by the Jewish settler group; (3) The creation of a justificatory ideology based on the dehumanization of the culture and way of life of the indigenous population. The Palestinians in Israel are an internally colonized population, combining elements of national and class subordination. I will return in the substantive chapters to the specific issues presented here by Zureik. I believe they raise many important points but I do have a major problem with their work (and by implication with that of others who are not explicitly theoretical but work with similar paradigms). It concerns the utility of their settler-colonial or internal colonial models. They use highly specific models as labels, or as substitutes for historical descriptions, rather than as a way of explaining relations among theoretical factors. Concepts of colonialism do not tell us in themselves anything concrete about the ways in which class interacts with ideology, state or gender. When, on the other hand, these writers do employ more general theoretical models, like Asad's articulation of modes of production, they inevitably run into difficulties in trying to fit into the same model contradictory developments such as the exclusion and exploitation of the pre-capitalist Arab sector. A possible solution to the dilemma between under-theorized idiosyncratic models, and under-historicized general models, is to use theoretical concepts and their possible configurations in order to make sense of historical developments, a strategy I attempt to follow here, without confining them to the straight jacket of a formal model. We have seen so far several ways of conceptualizing the nature of the relations between settlers and natives in Israeli society from a perspective which asserts the colonial character of Zionism and Israel, without necessarily dealing in an extensive way with similarities (or differences for that matter) between Israel and South Africa. The following works explicitly make this comparison, using it in order to reach conclusions regarding the dynamics of the South African and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The first systematic study of this issue is Jabbour (1970). He focuses on conflicts which are still open in the sense of not having been decisively settled in favor of either side to the colonial conflict: "Groups of natives...continued and will continue to surround those pockets of European settlers in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Palestine. The natives' resistance to the settlers, in the experiments under discussion, was not successful insofar as it did not prevent the settlers from achieving their temporary objectives, but it continued to be alive throughout the history of the European intrusion. The natives' resistance was thus successful 53 in keeping the case so to speak open until such time as ours with its ideals of freedom of selfdetermination for all the peoples of the world" (ibid: 14). Jabbour focuses on the similar trajectories of these societies, and the eventual demise of settler power due to armed resistance by the natives. Farsoun (1976) and Stevens (1979) reach similar conclusions. The former defines South Africa and Israel as settler colonial states and herrenvolk democracies which are quite similar in thrust and in general features, although not in details. Stevens describes a situation of increasing resistance by the natives to their subordinate role, leading in turn to growing dependence of settler states on external support. Yet, success in armed protection of an entity founded on alien land cannot last forever: "In occupied Palestine as in South Africa the answer has been given by the inhabitants; it now remains to be seen how long it will take for those now dominant and their supporters to come to grips with that reality" (Stevens, 1979: 284). A similar approach appears in Beit-Hallahmi's work (1987). He explains Israel's close relations and solidarity with South Africa by their similar situation both are fighting for survival against the rising third world from within and without their societies: "The Israeli perspective, which is shared by South Africans, is that of a settler-colonialist, a determined fighter who knows that war is his way of life. The identification of Israelis with Europeans fighting against the natives is natural: this is exactly their lot in this world...this [is a] colonialist way of thinking, which views the natives as an element of nature to be controlled or exploited at will, raw material to be shaped by powerful masters" (ibid: 233). The most comprehensive study of this issue is Will (1985). He examines the two countries as settler states which are comprised of or controlled by immigrants (or their progeny), generally at the expense of the indigenous residents of the territory in question. In both societies the state is highly militarized with a powerful apparatus, it plays a central role in the economic system and is heavily influenced by ideology. Also important for understanding their nature is the insertion of these systems into the global political economy. The basic dynamic of these societies is the expansion of settler capitalism under conditions where a less, or noncapitalized indigenous population came under settler control. Since the question of similarities between the two countries is the focus of this study, I will discuss the issues raised here in the body of the work itself. For now let me just say that these formulations, though pointing to some important issues, cannot account for the radically different roads which are being currently negotiated in these societies. It is not really a question of the inability of earlier writers to predict the future, or of my benefitting from hindsight. I believe that the different trajectories of the South African and the IsraeliPalestinian conflicts have been in evidence for a long while, and that failures to see it require a reconsideration of the validity of the theoretical and historical perspectives which had been used so far. SOUTH AFRICA Historiographical debates about the relative importance of class, ideology and political institutions in South Africa have also dealt, directly and indirectly, with the applicability of colonial analogies. Compared to the debates concerning Israel, a much greater and more explicit concern with theoretical issues is evident here. The focus is less on the uniqueness of 54 the society in question, than on the appropriate conceptual terms and comparative frameworks which can be used in order to analyze it. I divide the discussion of South Africa into three sections. The first deals with the Afrikaner nationalist paradigm whose analytical approach is closely and openly identified with political power. The second deals with the pluralist perspective, the liberal "orthodoxy" of the 1950s and 1960s, and the third presents the radical, class-oriented, perspective which emerged in the 1970s to replace its liberal predecessors as the dominant approach in South African studies. A. Afrikaner Nationalist Historiography With regard to South Africa, and in contrast to Israel, there is a large measure of agreement over the colonial nature of the white-dominated societies which have existed there since the middle of the 17th century. No one disputes the fact that the white community owes its origins to the policy of the Dutch East India Company. Nevertheless, many nationalist historians claim that during the following centuries white settlers became indigenous to the land, as native as other black racial groups. In fact, whites themselves had been victims of colonialism, that of the British empire, and gained their independence after a fierce anticolonial struggle against it. They are in political control today despite their numerical inferiority because they are "generally superior to them [non-whites] in administration, technology, culture and military power" (Muller, 1969: 474). Van Jaarsveld (1975) sees South Africa as one of several permanent communities which were established in the temperate zones of north America and the southern hemisphere. In these cases of European-originated settlements "some of their leaders turned their backs on the mother countries and developed democratic institutions of their own on the widening horizons. An urge for independence, autonomy and an identity of their own emerged among the white colonists" (ibid: 4). The main difference between South Africa and other white settlement colonies is demographic. There was no massive white immigration into South Africa, so whites drew their labor power from the indigenous population. The conclusion is that "South Africa is not a `colonising' mother country, but is centred on her own government. Moreover, South Africa is the home country of both her non-white and white inhabitants who after 300 years are as indigenous as the Bantu people" (ibid: 371). Rhoodie (1969) asserts that South Africa is inhabited by four large population groups which can, in view of their ethnic affiliation and bio-genetic descent, be identified as distinctly separate population segments. Whites have lived in that country for longer than most other non-whites, and they are the single largest ethno-national community in South Africa. At the root of the racial conflict is the desire of whites to survive as an independent bio-genetic, socio-cultural economic and political entity. This conflicts with an unqualified democratic system whereby "the generally primitive and largely illiterate and socio-politically unsophisticated Bantu masses will by sheer weight of numbers determine the way of life and value system that will obtain in the country" (ibid: 373). This approach clearly accords prime importance to national, cultural and ethnic sentiments. In terms of our conceptual perspective they focus on national or group identities (not conceived as processes) as the motive force behind political arrangements. Class and state do not figure at all as independent factors; they are derived, rather, from ideological dynamics. Hostility to dealing with the theoretical questions of power and privilege is closely related to a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of political opposition to the state. The "ideological" (used here 55 in the deliberately crude sense of putting ideas at the service of the powers that be) nature of this approach is quite obvious to all but its proponents themselves. One point raised above is shared, however, by most of those involved in South African politics, including fierce opponents of the regime. Whites are no longer external to the country. They are there to stay; they are not a European foreign element which should be forced to leave the country. As the Freedom Charter adopted at the Congress of the People on June 26, 1955 declares: "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white". It is not the policy of most of the black national movement to deny the right of white South Africans to live in peace and security in a non-racial South Africa. The target of the movement has been the system of white domination and supremacy, rather than the mere presence of whites. This attitude can be compared with the position of the Palestinian national movement which, until the adoption of the slogan of "Secular Democratic Palestine" in 1969, did not officially recognize the right of most Jews to live in the territory. B. South Africa as a Plural Society The pluralist approach focuses on questions of ideology, racial attitudes and the political practices which follow from them. It does not attribute great deal of importance to class factors and argues, instead, for focusing on the racial dimension of the South African conflict. In that, it sharply conflicts with the radical approach which will be discussed in the next section. The liberal school in South African historiography shares with the pluralist school (which is more sociological than historical) basic assumptions and I will conflate the two in the following discussion. Thompson (1964) starts with a comparison of South Africa to Canada. In both countries there is a conflict between two successive fragments of European societies (Dutch and British in the former, French and British in the latter). Yet, there is also a crucial difference between them: "The succession of one European fragment by another and the relations between the two fragments are secondary phenomena in South Africa. The primary phenomenon is that both have been established amidst more numerous peoples of non-European origin" (ibid: 179). The taking of power by the original colonial settlers who became indigenous to the land the Afrikaners resulted in the establishment of a pigmentocracy, a racial stratification system composed of endogamous classes, differentiated by skin color: white, brown and black. Whites and non-whites are increasingly polarized, a situation leading to violent conflict. A systematic comparison between North America and Southern Africa is attempted in a later work focusing on the clash between settlers and natives on the frontier (Lamar and Thompson, 1981). The frontier is defined as a zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies, one of which is usually indigenous to the region, the other is intrusive. Two elements of particular importance in this respect are land and labor. The greed for land "inspired aggressive expansion into indigenous areas...perpetuated hierarchical concepts of society and fostered forced labor systems on the so-called free frontiers of both North America and Southern Africa" (ibid: 30). With regard to the use of indigenous labor, South Africa diverged from other frontier societies. Native Americans were constantly removed from the paths of white advancement in North America since they did not have any practical economic function from the settlers' point of view. In South Africa, native labor has been used on a massive scale and has become the foundation of the the economy created by the end of the 19th century with the closing of the frontiers. 56 The conflict in South Africa according to this approach, then, is between whites who benefit from the racial order and non-whites who wish to overthrow it. Whites, for the most part, have not managed to become self-sufficient (unlike settlers in North America) and have not mixed with the native majority (unlike settlers in Latin America). In other words, the South African conflict is a colonial-type situation since the white settlers failed to win a secure place in Africa, and their long-term prospects are far from certain. A similar perspective informs Van den Berghe's work (1965). He sees a transfer of power from the direct British colonial administration to the white-settler minority, giving rise to the dual nature of South Africa as a "mother country" and a colonial power at the same time: "the Pretoria executive and the Cape Town parliament constitute, in fact, a European power ruling over an internal colonial empire and a subject population" (ibid: 73-4). The South African state is a herrenvolk democracy for whites, and a racist colonial regime for non-whites. Racial identity is the key to socio-economic status, with relatively little impact of linguistic and class divisions. Classes, of course, exist and there is a large degree of overlap between race and class; at the same time, classes are not meaningful social realities in a society dominated by racial conflict. The most likely solution to the conflict under these conditions is the removal of whites from the scene since in a colonial situation there can be no compromise, no middle road between white supremacy and non-racial society based on majority rule (Van den Berghe, 1979). Similarly, Kuper (1980) treats South Africa as an extreme case of a plural society, a politically unified society with pervasive internal divisions which are potentially highly destructive. His theory emphasizes racial, ethnic and religious divisions as phenomena in their own right which are not reducible to other social forces such as class. In South Africa conquest laid the basis for expropriation of African land, political domination by settlers and economic exploitation of the natives. Inequality extends to all spheres of life by means of segregation, discrimination, stereotyping, etc., resulting in "a many-faceted generalized status of ruling race and subject race" (ibid: 257). This situation breeds violence. All the conflicts in society tend to crystallize around the racial dividing line, and the struggle usually leads to polarization and escalation of the conflict. Adam (1979) qualifies the colonial analogy since white South Africans, unlike other settler communities in Africa, gained political and economic independence from European colonialism. They managed to construct an independent state apparatus supported by a strong national bourgeoisie. In a comparative study of South Africa and Israel (Adam, 1983; 1986) he defines both as ethnic states. The state's self-definition is directly tied to the symbols and interests of one ethnic (or racial) group in a multi-ethnic plural society. The dominant group maintains its exclusive rule by denying inclusive secular citizenship rights. The main difference between the two countries is the much more prominent role of racial class conflict in South Africa. Conflicts over allocation of material resources are easier to solve than conflicts over symbolic or national and religious claims, which are very frequently posed in mutually exclusive terms. In this interpretation of conflict, Adam clearly deviates from the rest of the pluralists, especially in his emphasis on the possibility of a negotiated compromise rather than violent uprising. The biggest problem of the pluralist approach is its uncritical acceptance of the essential character of existing racial categories which, in fact, have been constantly created and re57 created in a process of racial formation. I deal with this issue in detail in chapters five and seven, but at this point suffice it to say that blacks and whites have rarely faced each other in the course of South African history as homogeneous, cohesive, mutually exclusive parties to political conflict. Without in any way minimizing the importance of racial attitudes and structures, I would argue that those are far from being immutable and resistant to change. They are not necessarily more primordial or always of greater analytical value than other bases of sociality such as class, nation and political affiliation. The relative importance of these factors changes with time and space and there is no reason to assume that South Africa could not develop cross-racial or even non-racial political alliances as the example of Namibia arguably shows. C. A Class Analysis of South Africa A Marxist class approach to the analysis of conflict in South Africa has become an increasingly elaborate alternative to pluralism. It rejects the emphasis on race in favor of focusing on class relations. There are advocates of class analysis, though, who regard race and class as two equally important factors in South African history. An early exposition of this view was offered in 1928 by the executive committee of the Communist International which urged the Communist Party of South Africa to work simultaneously on both fronts national liberation for the black masses and social liberation for the white (and non-white) working classes. While white workers are exploited as workers, they are favored by the system as whites. In contrast, blacks are doubly exploited (South African Communists Speak, 1981: 91-107). This position still forms the basis for the Communist party's analysis in which the South African system of white domination is seen as a special form of colonialism "in which the oppressing white nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them (ibid: 299; see also Simons and Simons, 1969: 610-625). A similar perspective informs the analysis of the African National Congress which shares with the SACP the concept of CST, colonialism of a special type (see the discussion of ANC texts in Wolpe, 1988). Another analysis which deals with race and class issues is Rex's (1981). He defines South Africa as a unique combination of colonial, settler and capitalist elements in one society. The structure and dynamics of such a society can be understood only in terms of a class analysis. At the same time, it would be wrong to privilege class and the relations of production over ethnicity and race as explanatory variables. It is not enough to talk about capitalism in general since there is a big difference in sociological and political terms between capitalism operating under conditions of white supremacy and a non-racial capitalism. The main struggle in South Africa is not against capitalism as such, but against capitalist exploitation in its peculiar colonial form. A different variant of class analysis emphasizes much less the need for a special conceptual apparatus to explain South African realities, and stresses strict usage of Marxist concepts. Thus, Trapido (1970) complains that the focus on the peculiarities of South African society obscures a process of industrialization quite similar to that of other countries in its use of labor repressive methods in agriculture and industry. In the same vein, Wolpe asserts that "while the concept of exploitation can have a rigorous and explicit meaning in defining class relations, it becomes a vague, descriptive term in the characterization of relations between such entities as racial, national, or cultural groups" (Wolpe, 1975: 240). He claims that in certain situations ideological and political domination tend to be expressed not in their real 58 terms of the relations of class exploitation, but in misleading racial or ethnic terms. In a more recent formulation, however, he has modified his position towards greater acceptance of the "colonialism of a special type" model, though qualifying it by stressing that anti-colonial struggle can take different forms, depending on the class alliances (Wolpe, 1988). Racial and colonial forms of rule are most fruitfully analyzed, according to this view, not in their own terms, but in terms of specific class relations: ultra-exploitation of blacks through the use of extra-economic coercion. To accomplish this kind of analysis we need to do what Legassick calls "decoding the `reality' of Apartheid from its expression at the level of ideology" (Legassick, 1974a: 7). The plural society or internal colonial theses stand in the way of true understanding of the actual forces at work in society. What is needed, then, is a change of direction from an emphasis on culture and ideology to a focus on material factors (Legassick, 1980). Similarly, Burawoy (1981) sees the task of class analysis as penetrating through the ideologies and counter-ideologies of racism, and exposing their roots in capitalist social relations. The context of colonial and racial conflicts is the imperatives of capital accumulation. He rejects the colonial analogy since the natives in South Africa have been fully incorporated in its economic structures, though in a subordinate role, and in many respects South Africa is closer to the classical model of a capitalist country than to that of a colonial anomaly. I take strong issue with the notion that class relations are more "real" or "true" than consciousness. Class is just as much an imagined community as race and nation, and consciousness has no less of a material existence a part of the daily living experiences of people as individuals and as community members. A search for the material roots of ideology is a reasonable analytical strategy, but the assumption that ideology is nothing but a mask, a surface appearance hiding real essence, is unwarranted. It betrays a refusal to take ideology seriously, in its own right, and it is ultimately just as deficient in its essentialist and metaphysical attitude towards class as the pluralist perspective is in its treatment of race as a primordial factor. A balanced summary of the class analysis approach discussed in this section can be found in Magubane (1979). He claims that colonialism cannot be studied separately from capitalism with which it has been aligned for the last 500 years: "The ideology of racism, called into life and fed by the expansionist and exploitative socio-economic relations of capitalist imperialism became a permanent stimulus for the ordering of unequal and exploitative realities of production along `racial' lines, and further demanded justification of these relations. The seemingly `autonomous' existence of racism today does not lessen the fact that it was initiated by the needs of capitalist development or that these needs remain the dominant factor in racist societies" (ibid: 3). Arguments among and between the liberal and radical schools have faded since the early 1980s, with the emergence of the new trend in South African studies associated with the work done at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London and the History Workshop at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. Numerous scholars have contributed to the collections of social historical studies published in the last decade (Marks and Atmore, 1980; Marks and Rathbone, 1982; Van Onselen, 1982; Bozzoli, 1983; Beinart, Delius and Trapido, 1986; Beinart and Bundy, 1987; Bozzoli, 1987; Marks and Trapido, 1987; Bozzoli and Delius, 1990). The focus on investigations of historically-concrete events and processes has made the debate over the respective roles of race and class obsolete, to a large extent. 59 This new school of social history emphasizes the dynamic interconnections between socioeconomic structures, ideology and political institutions. I will not discuss this work in detail here since I make massive use of it in the following historical chapters. The degree of historical specificity and concrete analysis manifested there do not lend themselves to simple categorization in terms of racial or class modes of analysis. CONCLUSIONS The debate over the relevance of the colonial framework of analysis to the study of Israel and South Africa can serve to highlight the centrality of the factors discussed in the introduction: class (land and labor), ideology (nationalism, ethnicity, racism) and the state (political institutions). Supporters and opponents of the colonial model, as applied to either country, differ in the way they weight these variables and conceptualize their contributions to the emergence and evolution of racial conflicts. In the Israeli case, opponents of the colonial model focus on ideology. They generally claim that the egalitarian ideology of the Zionist settlers, leading to the absence of exploitative labor relations between them and Palestinian natives, make the colonial framework irrelevant. Supporters of the model, in contrast, focus on land policies and the state. They claim that settler expansionism and their discriminatory state structures make colonialism a most meaningful concept, essential to the analysis of the ensuing conflict. In the South African case, the picture is more complex. With the exception of the Afrikaner nationalist paradigm, most other analytical approaches use colonial analogies to some extent. It is clearly the case, however, that liberal and pluralist perspectives put stronger emphasis on them than radical and Marxist perspectives do. At the risk of oversimplification, it can be argued that pluralists focus more on racial ideologies, and land expansion, and pay relatively little attention to labor relations. Those who work within a class analysis framework regard labor relations as the most important factor. They often see land policies and state structures as determined, to a large extent, by the need to maintain labor control and exploitation. The utility of theoretical models lies in their ability to identify the crucial forces at work. In the following chapters I explore the concrete ways in which these forces have interacted and affected the development of political conflicts in the two countries. 60