[News] Palestine - Learning from South Africa
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Oct 2 13:09:48 EDT 2008
Learning from South Africa
Savera Kalideen and Haidar Eid, The Electronic Intifada, 2 October 2008
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9869.shtml
The strategic value of international solidarity with the Palestinian
people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, refugees in the Diaspora and
Palestinians in Israel raises some fundamental questions. The most
immediate and urgent are: what the nature of international solidarity
should be and how it can best support the Palestinian struggle for
self-determination?
International solidarity needs, first and foremost, to address the
ways in which colonial Zionism has followed and continues to follow
the Bantustanization policy of apartheid South Africa. There is also
an imperative to address the severe damage that the Oslo Accords have
caused to the Palestinian struggle, given the degree of confusion
that these accords have created in the international arena.
A historical analysis of the current Palestinian quagmire cannot
separate apartheid and Zionism from colonialism. As Samir Amin argues
very persuasively in Unequal Development, in 19th century South
Africa, central capitalism and colonialists forcefully dispossessed
rural African communities to satisfy their need for a large
proletariat to exploit the country's great mineral wealth. The
indigenous people were driven into barren regions which left them
with no alternative but to become cheap labor for European mines and
farms, and later, rising South African industry. This initial
dispossession slowly transformed a vibrant and dynamic society into
mere labor reserves, with a gradual loss of independence, and,
ultimately, to the creation of apartheid and Bantustans.
However, this process was not one-sided: throughout this
dispossession and remaking of South Africa into a haven for racial
supremacy, the international community was mobilized by the internal
South African struggle and a concerted advocacy campaign by South
Africans to protest against apartheid's blatant creation of surplus
labor, and against its inhuman and racist exploitation of black South
Africans. Today it is the Israeli apartheid state that is condemned
for dispossessing the native population, applying a policy of
genocide against them and recently even threatening a "holocaust" in
the Gaza Strip. Israel has over the years been accused of being worse
than the apartheid state by South Africans such as Bishop Tutu, Blade
Nzimande and John Dugard. These South Africans who experienced
apartheid cite the use of F-16s, helicopter gun ships on unarmed
civilians, as well as the home demolitions and arrests of families of
suspected "militants" as practices that make Israeli apartheid
qualitatively worse than South African apartheid.
Similarities between the two apartheid states can be found in their
policies on citizenship, their use of detention without trial, and
laws which limit freedom of movement and the right to live in one's
own home with one's family. Just as apartheid South Africa gave
citizenship to white South Africans and relegated blacks to
"independent homelands" (i.e. Bantustans), Zionism gives all Jews the
right to citizenship in the State of Israel, while denying
citizenship to Palestinians -- the indigenous inhabitants of the
land. While Apartheid used race to determine citizenship, the state
of Israel uses religious identification to determine citizenship.
Just as the apartheid state made laws criminalizing free movement of
blacks on their ancestral land, Israel uses a military occupation
infrastructure composed of checkpoints, Jewish only settlements and
roads, the apartheid wall, combined with a myriad of legal
regulations that govern Palestinian daily life and are designed
specifically to restrict how they work and live.
Since 1967, Israel has detained a quarter of the Palestinian male
population and today has over 11,000 prisoners in its jails,
thousands of whom have no legal recourse. Many of those incarcerated
have spent years in jail for "crimes" such as entering Israel
illegally. Thousands of Palestinian families live with the threat of
forced separation or are already separated because they do not have
the necessary permits to live together -- permits Israel has refused
to issue since 2000. These policies strike at the heart of family
life since Palestinians are forced to apply to Israel for family
reunification permits if they want to live together.
During the years of apartheid, South Africa came under repeated
pressure from the international community and multilateral
organizations such as the United Nations Security Council which
passed countless resolutions against it because of its inhumane
treatment of blacks. This gave much-needed succor to the oppressed,
while Palestinians today are bereft of even this tiny comfort because
the United States continues to use its veto to ensure that Israel
escapes censure from the world body.
International solidarity with the Palestinian people has, over the
decades, played an extremely important, albeit dialectical, role in
enhancing the struggle. There is an undeniable proportional
relationship between the different forms of struggle in the occupied
territories and the international attention and solidarity it is able
to command. Disturbingly, after 15 years of Israel side-stepping
every commitment made in the Oslo Accords, and eight years after the
start of the second Palestinian intifada, there still strongly
lingers in international civil society, a belief that the Palestinian
struggle has, in essence, been resolved. Hence the urgency for an
international solidarity campaign that will highlight the
similarities between apartheid and Zionism, as well as the common
experience of Palestinians today, as a dispossessed people, and black
South Africans under apartheid.
We have all watched as the results of the 2006 elections in Palestine
have been denied legitimacy by the international community and the
Palestinian people collectively punished for their temerity in
choosing their own leaders. South Africans had to wait 27 years for
their chosen leader and political party to be free to lead them;
during those long years they rejected all false leaders that were
foisted on them even when these quislings were celebrated by the
likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. As recently as 1987,
Thatcher was confident enough to say that "Nelson Mandela would never
be the president of a free South Africa."
Like Thatcher's government, other governments around the world were
forced to isolate apartheid South Africa. They would not have done so
without the pressure exerted on them by their own people. Israel
needs to be isolated in exactly the same way as apartheid South
Africa. Today, there is a growing mass-based struggle inside
Palestine, as well as other forms of struggle, exactly as there was
inside apartheid South Africa. An intensified international
solidarity movement with a common agenda can make the struggle for
Palestine resonate in every country in the world, thus closing off
the world to Israelis until they open the world to Palestinians.
Savera Kalideen is a South African solidarity activist, Haidar Eid is
a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and one-state activist
based in Palestine.
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