The apartheid myth

[FarrenH]

4. South Africa: The Apartheid Myth

Despite the slanderous propaganda against Apartheid South Africa, various indigenous ethnicities not only had their own parliaments, but also higher education institutions, police forces, security forces, justice systems and prisons.

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bophuthatswana

They were called "Homelands", otherwise known as "Bantustans".

Of course, this doesn't mean Apartheid was a myth. Bantustans were part and parcel of Apartheid. So lets look at why the world didn't consider them an acceptable solution to white nationalist desires for single-ethnicity political and economic dominance of a region, in the face of objections from said indigenous ethnicities:

1. Most of them were fragmented in such a way that they could not function as viable autonomous states.
2. All of them existed for the primary purpose of allowing a settler ethnicity who had displaced their nominal citizens to maintain control of a greater area and its resources
3. All of them existed at the indulgence of the encompassing state which was configured around the interests of a single ethnicity, and in reality could not ensure their territorial integrity should that state change its mind.
3. Their shape and location was not determined by territorial claims based on prior occupation of land, or even what constituted workable borders for an autonomous state, but by what was most politically and economically convenient for the single ethnicity served by the encompassing state.
4. Their nominal citizens were all displaced from the wider region, further emphasising their status as, effectively, ethnic "ghetto states"

So how does, say, the West Bank, differ from Bophuthatswana? By all appearances, it differs by being a worse arrangement. Bophutatswana had its own military defense force. The West Bank has none, and is not permitted to have one, just one of many things that makes claims about it being an autonomous state in the sense that say France or Thailand is absurd on their face. It doesn't even match one of South Africa's former bantustans in terms of autonomous features. It is demonstrably subordinate to Israel. And the decisions of a government its people have no representation in directly and materially affect the daily lives of most of its nomiinal citizens.

Bophutatswana controlled its own population registry. The West Bank does not. Bophutatswana controlled its own airspace. The West Bank does not. The de facto borders of Bophutatswana remained fixed for the duration of its existence, whereas those of the West Bank have varied continuously since 1967, according to whatever was convenient to Israel and invariably to the detriment of Palestinians living there.

A signature quality of defenses of Israeli Apartheid is that they trot out the same debunked talking points over and over again, in defiance of extant, comprehensive rebuttals. Because honest discourse that appeals to some common egalitarian and humanitarian values is rarely the intention. Rather most such defenses come from people inured to some conclusion that simply can't be false, so rationalizing to the desired conclusion, rather than reaching conclusions from common ethics, historical fact and the application of logic, is inevitable.