The state of Israel, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention were all “born” in 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the light of the recently formed United Nations. This was also the year South Africa officially became an apartheid state, although the policies introduced by the largely Afrikaner National Party did not radically depart from three centuries of colonialism, mineral extraction, and exploitation of African labor. Nevertheless, apartheid seemed anachronistic in an era of African independence and civil rights. Israel and South Africa were both settler-colonial regimes founded on violent dispossession that maintained some form of military rule over subject populations at a time when colonialism was said to be dying and the UN was supposed to usher in a new world order. Dr. Fayez A. Sayegh, renowned scholar and rapporteur of the special committee established under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, underscored in a 1970 essay the incongruity of Israel’s settler-colonial project “in a historical era marked by universal rejection of colonialism in principle and near-total liquidation of colonial empires in practice.” But despite the various charters, declarations, and conventions that confirmed human equality and condemned discrimination, the UN was founded on the principles of what the historian Mark Mazower calls “imperial internationalism.” Its principal architects represented nations that still held colonies and/or practiced racial segregation. It was a South African prime minister, General Jan Smuts, who added the phrase “human rights” to the UN Charter. Unsurprisingly, Smuts’s elevated role as statesman did not sit well with the Black majority back home. The Non-European Unity Movement, a multiracial coalition with ties to the Workers Party of South Africa, issued a statement in July 1945 informing the world that South Africa’s nonwhite population “live and suffer under a tyranny very little different from Nazism,” and thus “it is ludicrous that this same South African Herrenvolk should speak abroad of a new beginning, of shaping a new world order, whereas in actuality all they wish is the retention of the present tyranny in South Africa, and its extension to new territories.”
W. E. B. Du Bois and Mohandas Gandhi tried in vain to persuade the UN’s architects to declare colonialism a crime against humanity. If this were not done, Du Bois warned: “There will be at least 750,000,000 colored and Black folk inhabiting colonies owned by white nations, who will have no rights that the white people of the world are bound to respect. Revolt on their part can be put down by military force; they will have no right of appeal to the Council or the Assembly; they will have no standing before the International Court of Justice.” Du Bois’s appeals went nowhere because the UN was designed to recognize nations and not peoples. Only nations had standing, which meant an attack on colonialism was an assault on the sovereignty of the colonizing nations. During its formative years, the UN distinguished “civilized nations” from the rest, a hierarchy consistent with its founding commitment to preserving the Anglo-American alliance over the freedom of 750 million people in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.