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Middle East Books Review All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1 Apartheid is a Crime: Portraits of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine By Mats Svensson, Cune Press, 2020, hardcover, 160 pp. MEB $20
Reviewed by Charles Villa-Vicencio
A picture tells a thousand words! It was television and photographs of South African apartheid that, in the 1970s and 1980s, informed global audiences of the barbarities of racism. Thanks to social media, the present Israeli variant of apartheid is even more extensively documented. Whilst South Africa gave the word “apartheid” to institutionalized racism, international law indicates that the Israeli government’s conduct toward Palestinians meets the legal definition of apartheid, as well as the definitions of genocide and war crimes in terms of articles six, seven and eight of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The intricacies of the legal and political debates on the illegality of the Israeli ocCharles Villa-Vicencio, the former national research director of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation based in Cape Town. He is currently a visiting professor in conflict resolution at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. This review
was edited and shortened for space from its original submission. 66
cupation of Palestine continues. Mats Svensson’s album, Apartheid is a Crime, is comprised of black and white photographs and offers a different approach. He captures the mood of “ordinary” Palestinians in a manner that speaks to people who observe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a distance. The photographs include the ruins of stone huts, storage barns and other structures of occupied Palestinian farms, which have been incorporated into Israeli orange groves. The imposing wall along the Gaza border, the separation of East and West Jerusalem and the wall separating “the little town of Bethlehem” from the southern part of the West Bank are blunt structures of conquest and control, embellished on the non-Israeli side with pro-Palestinian graffiti. Svensson also captures the memories of dispossession, which are internalized on the faces of the elderly, the fortitude of women and mothers, and the determination of youths and the mischievous eyes of children who WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
await the future. The firepower of Israeli fighter jets, bombs and teargas is massive. The question is whether youthful conscripted Israeli recruits can match Palestinian resolve—and for how long? For South Africans, the faces generate a sense of déjà vu. Svensson’s lens is on the emotional trauma, bodily suffering and the economic dispossession of Palestinians, which speak to alienated groups in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and elsewhere around the world. This has resulted in growing support for Palestinians, through the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which is reminiscent of the global mobilization that brought apartheid to an end in South Africa and currently inspires the Black Lives Matter movement against racism in the United States. The portraits included in Apartheid is a Crime are augmented with succinct words from people who have lost their land to Zionist settlers, as well as the words of scholars, poets and world leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Comparing the Palestinian situation to that of apartheid South Africa, Tutu speaks of the “corralling and harassing” of Palestinians, warning that “those who turn a blind eye to injustice” are contributing to the mutual destruction of the humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians. An elderly woman captures the sentiment of the first generation of displaced Palestinians, torn away from their land, their identity and their grandmothers’ stories. A wise Palestinian activist encourages Svensson to write about what he sees and hears in the lives of Palestinians. “Write, write, write!” he insists. Svensson went one step further, allowing his camera to do the writing. The candid persistence of the hardened activist is part of the Palestinian story. The context of Svensson’s photography is told and retold by numerous authors. Collectively, they define the emotion, suspicion and intransigence of the conflict, intertwined in the complexities NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
