Apartheid / ^strike through Apartheid^ / [ ]

“APARTHEID: by itself the word occupies the terrain like a concentration camp,” wrote Jacques Derrida in an issue of this journal thirty-three years ago. “This last-born of many racisms is also the only one surviving in the world, at least the only one still parading itself in a political constitution. It remains the only one on the scene to dare to say its name and to present itself for what it is: a legal defiance taken by homo politicus, a juridical racism and a state racism.” In reply to a critique by Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, Derrida restated one of his central claims: “Apartheid designates today in the eyes of the whole world, beyond all possible equivocation or pseudonymy, the last state racism on the entire planet." Makdisi looks at one of the most important features of the Israeli version of apartheid and one of the most important differences between the South African and Israeli versions of apartheid. Here, he returns to visual and cultural distinctions between the two forms of apartheid, but first he must attend to the details of the two systems and what they have in common. For every major South African apartheid law has a direct equivalent in Israel and the occupied territories today.