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<h1><b>Palestine: the view from South Africa</b></h1><font size=3>Gaza,
One More Bantustan <br><br>
August 21, 2009 <br>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22381" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22381<br><br>
</a>By <b>Alain Gresh</b> <br><br>
<b>During the Gaza war, South Africa expressed strong solidarity with the
Palestinians. No one here has forgotten the collaboration between
Pretoria and Israel under apartheid, and many see parallels between the
Palestinian situation today and that of black and coloured South Africans
back in the days of white rule. <br><br>
</b>Ronald "Ronnie" Kasrils looks just like the caricature of
him drawn by the cartoonist Zapiro in November 2001. It showed him at the
head of a line of Jews, including the Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer and
Zapiro himself, escaping from a fortress. Kasrils has a big smile on his
face. The fortress is emblazoned with the words "unconditional
support for Israel". The jailers are shouting "Catch them!
Catch them!" <br>
<br>
Kasril's smile is the same today, as is his determination; his is a life
that's been devoted to moving mountains. He was born in South Africa in
1938, the son of Jewish immigrants from the Baltic states. It was not
long before he encountered racism, notably in the Sharpeville Massacre on
21 March 1960, when the police fired on unarmed black demonstrators,
killing dozens of people. The international reverberations of the
massacre - the prelude to South Africa's drift towards dictatorship, were
all the greater as 1960 was the year in which the majority of African
nations gained their independence. <br>
<br>
Kasrils was unable to turn his back on the oppression so reminiscent of
the pogroms in eastern Europe which his parents had described. He joined
the Communist Party and the African National Congress (ANC) and began a
30-year journey of secrecy and exile. As head of intelligence for the
ANC's armed wing, he accepted being labeled a terrorist. "Armed and
dangerous" was how the authorities referred to him when they showed
his picture on television in the 1970s. After his return to the country
in 1990 and the subsequent end of apartheid, he held several ministerial
posts until he left the government at the end of last year. <br>
<br>
As an activist who fought apartheid, and as a communist and a Jew, he was
sensitive to the Palestinian issue from early on. In February 2004 when
he was a minister, he visited Yasser Arafat, surrounded by the Israeli
army in the Muqata complex in Ramallah. "Arafat showed me the view
from the window saying 'this is nothing but a Bantustan!' I replied:
"No! No Bantustan has been bombed by warplanes, pulverized by
tanks...the South African government pumped funds, constructed impressive
administrative buildings and even allowed Bantustans airlines so as to
make them recognized by the international community'." <br>
<br>
Cattle through a dip <br>
<br>
The shock waves of the events in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009
were quickly felt in South Africa. They gave rise to mass popular protest
and demonstrations. The powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions
(Cosatu), which had already stopped an Israeli arms shipment destined for
Zimbabwe being unloaded in April of 2008, called for a boycott of Israeli
shipping. <br>
<br>
"At the grassroots level," said Adam Habib, vice-chancellor of
Johannesburg University responsible for research and innovation,
"there is an implicit sympathy for the Palestinians because everyone
understands the parallel between Palestine and South Africa, Gaza and
Transkei or Ciskei." <br>
<br>
The South African government condemned "unequivocally and in the
strongest possible terms the escalation of violence on the part of Israel
brought about by the launching of a ground invasion into Gaza." It
called on Israel to halt its "massacre" and to withdraw its
troops "immediately and unconditionally". In a meeting with the
Israeli ambassador, South African members of parliament asserted that the
army's abuses "made apartheid look like a Sunday school picnic"
and the president of the foreign affairs commission, Job Sithole,
compared the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints to that of
"cattle through a dip."<br>
<br>
In these circumstances, the support for Israeli policy from leaders of
South African Jewish organizations provoked criticism and condemnation,
including from Jewish intellectuals who had campaigned against apartheid.
"The loudest defender of Israel", says Adam Habib with regret,
"is not the embassy but the chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who has
supported the bombings of Gaza without qualification, which nobody can
understand." <br>
<br>
At the height of the Gaza conflict, the Board of Deputies said in a
statement that South Africa's Jewish community "firmly supports the
decision of the government of Israel to launch a military operation
against Hamas in the Gaza strip." It was outraged a few days later
that its own elision of Jews and Israel had given rise to antisemitic
calls on the internet for a boycott of Jewish shops. These calls were
roundly condemned by the South African government, the ANC, Muslim
intellectuals and pro-Palestinian organizations. <br>
<br>
The strength of feeling provoked by a conflict thousands of miles away is
not entirely surprising, however. It stems from the peculiar nature of
the links between South Africa and Israel. By a quirk of history, just a
few weeks separate the creation of Israel in May 1948 and the electoral
victory of the National Pary in South Africa. That election result took
the existing racial segregation to a new level by bringing in the policy
of apartheid or "separate development." The leaders of the
National Party were known Nazi sympathizers (John Vorster, its leader and
later prime minister, was imprisoned on this account during the second
world war), but they were nonetheless able to forge increasingly close
relations with Israel. <br>
<br>
'Tough and resilient' <br>
<br>
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who teaches at the University of Haifa, explained
the paradox: "One can detest Jews and love Israelis, because
Israelis somehow are not Jews. Israelis are colonial fighters and
settlers, just like Afrikaners. They are tough and resilient. They know
how to dominate. Jews are different. They are, among other qualities,
gentle, non-physical, often passive, intellectual. So one can go on
disliking Jews while admiring the Israelis."<br>
<br>
Cooperation began between two states that seemed to have nothing in
common. Moshe Sharett, the Israeli foreign minister, made his first visit
to South Africa in 1950. In November 1984, when the UN had decided on
sanctions against the apartheid regime, South African foreign minister
Roelof Frederik "Pik" Botha visited Israel. Yitzhak Rabin was
then Israel's prime minister. Le Monde wrote of "the close ties
between the two countries" and noted that Israel was the only
country in the world to have relations with the puppet Bantustans, some
of which were even twinned with Israeli West Bank settlements.<br>
<br>
The bedrock of the relationship between the two countries was in the
first instance economic, under the aegis of the Histadrut (the
"socialist" trade union congress), which controlled a
significant part of the Israeli economy during the 1970s and 1980s.
Through the Hevrat Haovdim company, it enjoyed a quasi-monopoly over
trade with South Africa. The kibbutzim played a part too: the Lohamei
Hagetot ("fighters of the ghetto") kibbutz, founded by Jews
from eastern Europe who had fought the Nazis, ran the Kama chemical plant
in the Kwazulu Bantustan. <br>
<br>
When it came to the military and security, the alliance between the two
countries took on a strategic dimension. Israel helped South Africa
become a nuclear power. The Israeli military attaché in Pretoria who was
a member of the General Staff Forum (the only other Israeli military
attaché to hold such high rank was based in Washington). Israeli arms
were manufactured under license in South Africa. <br>
<br>
'Beast of Soweto' <br>
<br>
The two countries' intelligence services had no qualms about
collaborating to fight communism and, even then, to combat
"terrorism" - whether it came from the ANC or the PLO, the
liberation movements in Portuguese colonies (Angola and Mozambique) or
the South West Africa Peoples' Organization (Swapo), which was fighting
for independence for Namibia, then under South African occupation. <br>
<br>
Brigadier "Rooi Rus" Swenenpoel, the main interrogator in the
Rivonia trial of 1964 at which Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life
imprisonment, was a regular guest of the Israelis in the 1970s.
Swanepoel, who set up the counter-insurrection squads in Namibia, was
known as the "beast of Soweto" for the way in which he crushed
the revolt in the township leading to the loss of hundreds of lives. Uri
Dan, meanwhile, a journalist and advisor to Ariel Sharon, proclaimed his
admiration for the South African army.<br>
<br>
Ronnie Kasrils believes that, beyond the obvious differences between the
two systems - Israel for example doesn't need an indigenous workforce and
has granted the vote to its Arab minority - there are pronounced
ideological similarities: "The early Dutch pioneers, the Africaners,
had used Bible and gun as colonizers elsewhere. Like the biblical
Israelites, they claimed to be 'God's chosen people', with a mission to
civilize." <br>
<br>
The collusion between Israel and South Africa didn't give rise to
criticism from the Jewish community, though it ostracized its members who
were involved with the communists and the ANC. Andrew Feinstein, a former
ANC member of parliament who lost some of his family in the Nazi death
camps, managed to get the new South African parliament to devote a
session to the Holocaust in May 2000 for the first time in its history.
<br>
<br>
He explains that, like most white South Africans, the country's 100,000
Jews remained silent during the apartheid years, even though "there
are clear parallels between the policies imposed on the Jews by the Nazis
between 1933 and 1939 and those imposed on the majority of South Africans
during the apartheid era." He mentions Percy Yutar, the chief
prosecutor who called for the death penalty at Mandela's trial. Yutar was
later elected to lead Johannesburg's most important orthodox synagogue
and lauded by community leaders as a "credit to the community."
<br>
<br>
After this collaboration between Israel and the apartheid regime,
relations between the two countries worsened significantly after Nelson
Mandela became president in 1994. The new government suspended military
cooperation (although it honored its contracts until they expired in
1998) and gave its full backing to the PLO and Arafat. It maintains its
relations with them after the declaration of the second intifada in 2000,
in the face of pressure from countries such as the US (as well as Israel)
which had colluded with apartheid. When Arafat died in 2004, Mandela
called him "one of the outstanding freedom fighters of his
generation". <br>
<br>
That said, as Azziz Pahad, a former SA deputy foreign minister with
responsibility for the Middle East, freely admits, the demands of
realpolitik cannot be ignored nor "the contradiction between the
realism of official foreign policy and the positions of principle taken
by the ANC [support for Palestine and independence of the western
Sahara]". <br>
<br>
This realpolitik outraged Palestinian support groups, as is clear even
from the title of a report from the Stop the Wall campaign:
"Democratic South Africa's complicity in Israel's occupation,
colonialism and apartheid." Na'eem Jeenah, director of the
Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, believes that former president
Thabo Mbeki was "in favor of a normalization of relations with
Israel. Trade between the two countries has increased 15-20 % this year,
especially in the field of security equipment. There have even been
attempts to revive military relations." And imposing sanctions on
Israel is no longer on the agenda, even though Richard Goldstone, the
judge who chairs the UN commission on crimes committed in Gaza, is a
South African. <br>
<br>
TRANSLATED BY GEORGE MILLER<br>
<hr>
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives <br>
URL:
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22381">
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22381</a><br><br>
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