Lisa Hajjar
Author of Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Lisa Hajjar
“Through careful comparative analysis, Clarno undermines the popular misconception that Israel/Palestine and South Africa took divergent paths in the 1990s, with the latter becoming a model of post-racial freedom and equality. Instead, as he persuasively explains, the experiences and standards of living of poor Palestinians and poor Blacks in South Africa are similarly precarious and vulnerable to violence and marginalization. The theoretically rich ways in which Clarno explains apartheid in terms of neoliberal political economy will give the concept a far broader cache among scholars and activists than it currently has.” (from Amazon)
In recent years, as peace between Israelis and Palestinians has remained cruelly elusive, scholars and activists have increasingly turned to South African history and politics to make sense of the situation. In the early 1990s, both South Africa and Israel began negotiating with their colonized populations. South Africans saw results: the state was democratized and black South Africans gained formal legal equality. Palestinians, on the other hand, won neither freedom nor equality, and today Israel remains a settler-colonial state. Despite these different outcomes, the transitions of the last twenty years have produced surprisingly similar socioeconomic changes in both regions: growing inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. Neoliberal Apartheid explores this paradox through an analysis of (de)colonization and neoliberal racial capitalism. After a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Andy Clarno presents here a detailed ethnographic study of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The first comparative study of the changes in these two areas since the early 1990s, the book addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both contexts.