Lessons for Israel from Rwanda

Why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should call President Paul Kagame of Rwanda for some advice

THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | As Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Gaza to “destroy” Hamas, it is important to remind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his confederates that this is an exercise in futility. Hamas is a product of the forceful occupation of Palestinian lands by Jewish settlers and the herding of Palestinians into segregated homelands akin to apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans. Israel can destroy Hamas as an organisation but not Palestinian resistance to this injustice. If Hamas is destroyed, another Palestinian liberation organisation will emerge from its ashes. And most likely, the new organisation will be more militant and violent. Besides it is Israel that created Hamas to rival Fatah; now its own strategy has backfired. Military incursions into Gaza will never end this conflict, only intensify it. The only solution is to get Palestinians and Jews to live together in two or even one state. Rwanda offers important lessons.

Israel claims it seeks security by subjugating Palestinians, grabbing their lands and keeping them under myriad humiliations. This strategy has led it to a horrible place: the creation of an apartheid state and the continuous brutalisation and dehumanisation of Palestinians. The irony is that Jews, who suffered one million and one humiliations for centuries in Europe, are repeating the same evils against Palestinians that had never mistreated them. It is no wonder it is the Europeans, who created their nation-states by cleansing their societies of Jews, who are now supporting a Jewish state to persecute and cleanse Palestine of Palestinians.

It is interesting how Europeans notions of modernity have created chaos wherever they have reared their heads. During the colonial period in Rwanda, Europeans used Tutsis to run a state that mistreated Hutus. Towards independence, they turned around and helped “liberate” Hutus during the 1957 “revolution.” But like in Israel, it was not a revolution changing the form of power, but changing the victims of that power. The Hutu “revolution” claimed to end the domination of Hutus by Tutsis. It replaced it with the domination of Tutsis by Hutus. This was achieved via the ethnic cleansing of Tutsis in Rwanda through mass murder and massive evictions that sent hundreds of thousands of Tutsis to exile. After attaining power, Hutu supremacists established an apartheid state where Tutsi were treated as second class citizens. Their access to almost anything and everything was restricted by state-imposed quotas.

Hence Hutu power recreated the very ethnic domination they accused the Tutsi of having presided over. Israel uses this Hutu script. Jewish power is exercised through discrimination of Palestinians. This is most evident in Gaza and the West Bank which are under Israel occupation. There, Palestinians ruled by an apartheid system have no rights whatsoever. When the Hutu apartheid state was challenged by the Tutsi-led RPF, Hutu supremacists sought a final solution to kill every living Tutsi or send them to exile. One can hear echoes of this when Israel leaders use barely coded words about invading Gaza to cleanse it of Hamas. Of course, they are not talking of Hamas but cleansing that region of Palestinians.

Back to Rwanda. In just 100 days beginning April, 1994, one million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were hacked to death. Although the genocide against the Tutsi was organised by the state, it was executed by ordinary citizens in the biggest democratisation of mass murder known to history. Friend murdered friend, husband killed wife and children, neighbour butchered neighbour, priests killed flock, teachers their students. The slaughter was ended when RPF overwhelmed the Hutu supremacist army in decisive battles. The biggest question after the genocide in Rwanda was: Could the Hutu and Tutsi live together peacefully?

Today, Rwanda is one of the most peaceful countries in Africa. Indeed, today people forget that in the mid 1990s, some of the leading scholars and “experts” on Rwanda argued that Hutus and Tutsis cannot live together. This belief was amplified by the horror of the genocide. Many scholars and “experts” even called for separating the Hutu and the Tutsi permanently. One proposal was to shift all Hutu to Burundi and all Tutsi Rwanda. Others said the two countries should be made part of a larger political community: Burundi be given to Tanzania and Rwanda to Uganda.

Yet today, Hutu and Tutsi live together, work together, dance together, dine and wine together, fight together, shop together, go to same churches, etc. How this came about provides important lessons for Israel.

Post genocide Rwanda rejected the politicisation of identity, the idea that being Hutu and Tutsi should define your place/role in the country. The second was not to criminalise all violence. Hence, most of the people who participated in the genocide were forgiven, criminal responsibility was left for the leaders of the genocide. The RPF has made every effort to ensure that Rwandans see themselves not as Hutu or Tutsi but as one people with a shared history, a shared present and shared destiny.

Israel’s mistake it to define citizenship largely in religious and ethnic terms – around Jewish identity. The stated aim of the Israel state is that it should have a permanent Jewish majority. Hence only 20% of its current population is non-Jewish. The rest of the Palestinians live in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank as a conquered and subordinate population without any rights. The attempt to artificially create a permanent Jewish majority in Israel has led it to exclude millions of Palestinians from its citizenship. These excluded live in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. These territories are equivalent of Bantustans in apartheid South Africa and Native Reserves in USA and Canada. They are also the recruitment ground for Hamas. The Americans and Canadian experiment of subjugation of indigenous people and grabbing their land succeeded through genocide – too few natives survived. Can Israel repeat that?

Yet Israel does not need to repeat the evils of Adolf Hitler or the North American settlers or apartheid South Africa to be safe. It can allow total independence for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (the two-states solution) or grant all those in the occupied areas citizenship (the one-state solution). But this would require that Israel reimagines itself not as an ethno-religious state but a liberal democratic state. It would have to avoid the temptation to recreate the modern European state based on ethnic cleansing. Instead, it would seek to build what Rwanda and South Africa have done  a state where membership to the political community is not based on identity.

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amwenda@independent.co.ug