> accusing Israel of Apartheid, which is an even more stunningly clear-headed claim for a US president to make.
Carter explained that he is not using the word to describe racism, but the desire to acquire, occupy, confiscate and then to colonize Palestinian land.
The problem is that that is not apartheid. Apartheid “separateness” is explicitly a racist ideology and about forcing people to live in separate lands, not about colonizing.
South Africa very much used townships and bantustans as a means of pushing both black South Africans and Namibians off land they wanted for whites. Yes, it is explicitly a racist ideology, but part of that racism is used to justify a treatment of others that enables confiscation and colonization.
The Bantu peoples also pushed the original inhabitants of Southern Africa off of their land (San, Khoi). If we’re going to apply the term apartheid to non-South African contexts[1] then we should also be intellectually rigorous in applying it in the case where the San and Khoi were victims of the Bantu expansion (and later European and Asian).
The crime of apartheid under international law only looks at existing regimes and whether they apply oppression along racial lines. It does not include provisions on historic oppression done by the ancestors of the currently oppressed. That would be ridiculous.
So saying: “But they did it to a different people, dozens of generations ago” is not admissible as a justification for the crime of apartheid for the ICC. In fact the crime of apartheid has no clauses for any justification, at all, under international law.
People are using “apartheid” without the technical, legal meaning and that is what I have a problem with.
Here is a list of countries that have been accused of apartheid:
- China
- India
- Iran
- Israel
- Malaysia
- Myanmar
- North Korea
- Nigeria
- Qatar
- Saudi Arabia
- Soviet Union
- Sudan
- United States
I would be interested to know whether any country, other than South Africa, has been found guilty of the crime of apartheid by the ICC and what the repercussions for said regime had been.
No, because it's not used about just pushing people off your land. Either you're being disingenuous, or you're unaware of the characteristics of the apartheid Bantustans.
Apartheid is codified in the Rome Statute Part 2 Article 7 Paragraph 2(h):
> "The crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;
So yes it is a racist ideology, but it doesn’t need the perpetrators to be explicitly racist. The fact that the oppressed Palestinians are of a different racial group as the oppressors, and the policy is to maintain a domination of one racial group over the other, that means this counts as apartheid.
“I didn’t mean to be racist” is not an excuse admissible to the ICC
That said, The Rome statute would not become international law until 22 years after Carter was no longer President. And would never be ratified by neither the USA nor Israel. Though interestingly Palestine has ratified it.
Carter explained that he is not using the word to describe racism, but the desire to acquire, occupy, confiscate and then to colonize Palestinian land.
Source: https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2008/january/cartervisit.html
The problem is that that is not apartheid. Apartheid “separateness” is explicitly a racist ideology and about forcing people to live in separate lands, not about colonizing.