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<h1 class="reader-title">What Can South Africa Teach
Palestinians: Reflections on our Palestinian Youth Organizer
Delegation to Johannesburg</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time">June 6, 2019<br>
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<p><strong>By <a
href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/the-palestinian-youth-movement"
title="Display all articles for The Palestinian
Youth Movement">The Palestinian Youth Movement</a></strong></p>
<p><span>From April 1 to April 11, 2019, the <a
href="https://www.pymusa.com/"><span>Palestinian
Youth Movement (PYM)</span></a>, in partnership
with the <a href="https://www.amec.org.za/"><span>Afro-Middle
East Center (AMEC)</span></a>, hosted a <a
href="http://www.pymusa.com/southafricadelegation"><span>delegation
of 20 Palestinian youth organizers</span></a> in
Johannesburg, South Africa. </span></p>
<p><span>The delegation was driven by three goals: first,
to deepen relations of joint-struggle between
Palestinians and South Africans; second, to study how
we, as Palestinians, can learn from the historic
achievements of the South African struggle; and third,
to strengthen working relationships among a new
generation of Palestinian youths from various
geographic and ideological backgrounds toward a
unified national liberation project. </span></p>
<p><span>The intensive study program featured lectures,
seminar discussions, visits to landmark sites of
historic struggle, and meetings with South African
political figures, community leaders and youth
activists.</span></p>
<p><span>Our delegation was comprised of Palestinians from
the homeland, both from 1948 historic Palestine and
the West Bank and Gaza Strip; Palestinian refugees
from Lebanon and Syria; and Palestinians living in
exile in the United States, in Europe, and the Arab
region. In addition to their geographic diversity, the
delegates also represented various sociocultural
backgrounds, political ideologies, and organizational
experiences that exist within Palestinian political
and social life globally. </span></p>
<p><span>Bringing together Palestinian youth from such
different backgrounds has become a critical feature of
PYM’s <a
href="http://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/p2y_27.pdf"><span>programming</span></a>
over the last decade as we attempt to overcome the
fragmentation affecting our role as a new generation
in our national struggle. The delegation in South
Africa was yet another example of how PYM’s political
principles are deeply embedded in our practice.</span></p>
<p><span>The timeliness of the delegation cannot be
overstated. The delegation came at the heels of over a
decade of global campaigning for justice in Palestine
with the South African struggle’s appeal for boycott,
divestment, and sanctions against apartheid as its
blueprint. We note that boycott efforts have long been
a part of the Palestinian and Third World traditions,
even as far back as the 1936 Arab General Strikes.
However, the last decade has seen major BDS victories
as it has been modeled on the South African case. The
delegation also coincided with the South African
government’s decision to <a
href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/south-africa-anc-backs-minister-on-israeli-embassy-downgrade/"><span>downgrade
its embassy</span></a> in Tel Aviv. </span></p>
<p><span>Just three years ago, Palestinians in Ramallah
unveiled a six-meter statue of the late South African
leader, Nelson Mandela, gifted by the city of
Johannesburg. During the statue honorary ceremony,
mayor of Ramallah, Musa Hadid <a
href="https://www.africanews.com/2016/04/26/johannesburg-presents-mandela-statue-to-ramallah-in-palestine/"><span>stated</span></a>
that with the statue, Ramallah would send a “clear
message to the colonizer and occupier, Israel: we are
much closer to freedom than you think.” The emerging
parallels and linkages between Palestine and South
Africa in many ways informed the purpose of the
delegation as an investigative, fact-finding study
tour.</span></p>
<p><span>The delegation took place nearly a quarter
century since both the Oslo Accords and South Africa’s
transition out of Apartheid. This period behind us
provides us with adequate distance to <a
href="https://www.pymusa.com/southafricadelegation"><span>assess</span></a>
the current Palestinian national condition against the
backdrop of a country whose history and ongoing
struggles parallel the Palestinian struggle in many
ways. We examined why the Palestinian and South
African struggles resulted in dramatically different
scenarios since the early 1990s. </span></p>
<p><span>Further, the delegation allowed for deep and
critical reflections on the ethics of solidarity and
mechanisms of revitalizing a national frame <i>and</i>
internationalist trajectory among Palestinians
ourselves. The delegation bore rich discussion amongst
its participants and a commitment to building on the
experience.</span></p>
<p><span><b>Why South Africa? </b></span></p>
<p><span>PYM chose South Africa for three reasons: first,
because of the prominence of the apartheid framework
in driving the global Palestine solidarity movement
and the use of other frameworks of oppression
including settler-colonialism and racial capitalism;
second, because of the longstanding histories of joint
struggle between the two struggles; and third, because
of the parallels and divergent outcomes of the 1990’s
negotiations processes in both contexts.</span></p>
<p><span><b>Apartheid Framework: </b>Over the past 10
years, activists and scholars have increasingly
assessed the conditions in Palestine through a
comparative lens with South Africa, <a
href="https://al-shabaka.org/focuses/focus-on-when-does-it-become-apartheid/"><span>drawing
parallels</span></a> between the Zionist
occupation of Palestine and the apartheid system in
South Africa. Since its start in 2005, the <span><a
href="https://bdsmovement.net/">BDS movement</a></span> has
effectively mobilized the apartheid analogy to further
the movement for Palestinian rights and modeled its
tactics after those employed by global anti-apartheid
struggle: boycotts, corporate disinvestment, and
sanctions of Israel. </span></p>
<p><span>In addition, the use of international law and
human rights law as tools for advocacy for justice in
Palestine have grown, as part, and alongside efforts
for BDS. The 2002 Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court, which made apartheid an
internationally condemned crime, is one example of
this.</span></p>
<p><span><b>Dimensions Beyond Apartheid: </b>Beyond
examining the apartheid framework, the delegation
discussed other dimensions of South Africa’s history
and struggle, during both the colonial and Apartheid
period and after. We explored the South African
struggle through the framework of settler-colonialism
— by which land confiscation and the dispossession and
elimination of the indigenous people shapes the
driving logic of the oppressive order. </span></p>
<p><span>We also explored the struggle as one against
racial colonialism and racial capitalism, which
operates through the extraction of natural resources
and the exploitation of native labor.</span></p>
<p><span>If we, as Palestinians, are to attempt to
envision and implement relevant liberation strategies
in our own context, we must understand these systems,
how they have taken form historically in South Africa,
and the remnants of these legacies today. By visiting
sites of struggle and meeting with South Africans, we
began to see the differences between the Palestinian
context and South African context, which are vital to
accounting for in devising our liberation strategy. We
specifically asked questions about how and why the
Zionist colonization does not rely on Palestinian
labor and how this presents challenges for us as
Palestinians. In the anti-apartheid struggle, South
Africans could leverage their labor to make the
Apartheid system economically unfeasible.</span></p>
<p><span><b>Joint Struggle: </b>In addition to studying
similarities and differences between the two
struggles, our delegation sought to better understand
the history of Palestinian-South African solidarity,
empathy, and joint struggle. Both causes had
reciprocal forms of support for one another. During
his rise to leadership in the post-Apartheid
government, Nelson Mandela made it a point to maintain
his commitment and friendship with Yasser Arafat and
the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), as he
once had recognized Arafat as a comrade in arms and
articulated that the Palestinian struggle was similar
to the South Africa struggle for they both sought to
achieve self-determination. These histories of joint
struggle warranted further attention that our
delegates engaged immensely in conversations with
South African strugglers. Realizing how deep senses of
loyalty and shared principles bound the two struggles
with another, we also realized how robust the
relationship was between Israel and the South African
Apartheid government. </span></p>
<p><span><b>1990’s Negotiations Processes:</b> Most
critical, we wanted to explore the success and
limitations of South Africa’s negotiations process and
the establishment and effectiveness of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. We wanted to understand the
conditions of possibility that led to the
negotiations, the material reality it had resulted in,
and to verify if the negotiations, indeed, had brought
about true liberation for the people and land in
ending the Apartheid regime. </span></p>
<p><span>The youth necessarily asked what differences
existed between South African and Palestinian
conditions on the eve of negotiations and how the two
processes resulted quite differently. We learned that
the leadership of the African National Congress came
to the negotiating table, not because of a decisive
victory, but because of a shift in the international
configuration of power with the fall of the Soviet
Union, coupled with dwindling resources available to
the resistance movement. </span></p>
<p><span>Both of those reasons are causes for why the PLO
also entered the negotiations process at around the
same time. As Dr. Salim Valley, of the Palestine
Solidarity Committee, summarized, “We did not have a
revolution. We had a negotiated settlement.” </span></p>
<p><span>However, a few distinctions exist between the two
cases including the mounting international pressures
on the Apartheid regime in South Africa, which the
Palestinians did not enjoy in the same tenacity at the
time. Further, it became clear to us that Mandela
effectively negotiated a release of all the political
prisoners and return of all exiled leaders before they
sat at the official negotiations table. </span></p>
<p><span><b>Lessons Learned about South Africa</b></span></p>
<p><span>One of our greatest realizations was the way the
apartheid narrative as a single-story, eclipses South
Africa’s extensive history of racial colonialism,
settler-colonialism, and racial capitalism. The
history book start of Apartheid is marked as 1948 when
the South African National Party (the Afrikaner ethnic
nationalist party) came to power in government. This
largely overlooks that the apartheid system was
actually a consolidation of laws implemented by
British and Dutch colonial powers.</span></p>
<p><span>These laws were aimed at subjugating the
country’s majority Black population as a cheap labor
reserve: dispossessing them of their land, enslaving
and exploiting them for production and profit, and
sectioning them off to certain racial areas (later
referred to as <i>Bantustans</i>) in order to control
their movement. This history of colonization dates
back to 1652 and 1806 when Dutch and British
colonialism created the social, political, and
economic conditions of exploitation that shaped what
we now refer to as the Apartheid era beginning in
1948. </span></p>
<p><span>We also learned about the ways colonialism
inflicted gender violence and shaped gender roles and
familial relations throughout South Africa’s history.
In the interest of controlling and subjugating cheap
labor, the Apartheid regime’s policies operated to
restrict the movement of Black South African men,
systematically keeping them away from their families.
</span></p>
<p><span>Black South African men faced brutalization and
degradation by colonial and apartheid state forces in
mines, labor hostels, and prisons, which translated
into violent exertion of power over those more
vulnerable than them through a system of patriarchy:
South African women. Similarly, the state-imposed
various methods of sexual and gendered violence upon
women’s bodies, which we examined more deeply at the
women’s jail at Constitutional Hill. </span></p>
<p><span>We heard from women in the anti-apartheid
struggle about their experiences navigating
patriarchal movement spaces. The persistence of gender
violence until today — demonstrated by Johannesburg’s
record rates of gender violence — is a direct
consequence of a colonial legacy that has gone without
redress as part of the national liberation movement.
This was a powerful lesson in the indivisibility of
social liberation and national liberation for us as
Palestinians and makes us take more seriously this
relation as we revitalize our own struggle. </span></p>
<p><span>After seeing the conditions in Johannesburg and
speaking with local community organizations, it became
apparent that the 1994 negotiations to end Apartheid
in South Africa failed to ensure land and wealth
redistribution. They did not account for the
inequities that had been in the making through three
centuries of colonialism and five decades of de jure
apartheid. In effect, power remained largely
undistributed which is why, in the “post-Apartheid”
period, Whites maintain their historic power in South
Africa despite a growing Black political and economic
elite and a growing Black middle-class. </span></p>
<p><span>Though the South African struggle was comprised
of varying ideologies, most prominently reflected in
the Pan-African Congress, the African National
Congress, and the South African Communist Party, the
dominant strands within the movement centered ending
Apartheid over ending the racial capitalist order.
Where the apartheid framework acknowledges the
segregated political, economic, and social conditions
of South Africa, it also, by default, naturalizes the
presence of White settlers.</span></p>
<p><span>It works to eradicate a system of racial
segregation without paying complete attention to
racial capitalism and colonial settlement. By
addressing primarily the system of discrimination in
favor of a “Rainbow Nation,” the process to end
apartheid neglected to address the colonial history
and capitalist order behind those apartheid laws. The
process to end Apartheid was driven by a strong
commitment to democratic freedoms, human rights, and
an end to state violence.</span></p>
<p><span> However, it did not redress the violence of
labor and land dispossession and in effect, maintained
many of the forms of segregation and inequality from
the colonial and apartheid periods, similar to the
ongoing struggles for racial justice in a so-called
post-Jim Crow United States. We witnessed the ongoing
implications of this in the intense security and
surveillance systems throughout Johannesburg, in the
severe inequities and contrasts in wealth between
Sandton and Alexandra Township, and the ongoing
movements to reclaim the land. </span></p>
<p><span><b>What Do These Lessons about South Africa Mean
for Palestine?</b></span></p>
<p><span>Witnessing South Africa’s persistent social,
racial, and economic inequities, that are remnants of
colonialism and Apartheid, we problematized the way
we, as Palestinians, understand the apartheid
analysis. While apartheid is a structural component of
the Palestinian colonial condition, it does not
comprehensively define it, nor does it prescribe a
political solution for us. We recognized the need for
our struggle to be informed by a de/anti-colonial
praxis in order to obtain full rights and full justice
including a redistribution of land, wealth, and power
and the actualization of the refugee return to
historic Palestine. </span></p>
<p><span>It is critical to sustaining global Palestine
solidarity efforts for BDS modeled after the South
African experience, and the apartheid analogy may be
useful for legal advocacy with South Africa, serving
as an internationally recognized legal precedent.
However, it is important not to allow the apartheid
framework to eclipse a fuller understanding of what
happened in South Africa nor limit the extent of
liberatory possibilities for Palestine. For us,
understanding the rise of <a
href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo25338775.html"><span>neoliberal
racial capitalist systems</span></a> developed
post-Oslo, and centering these forms of oppression in
our liberation strategy are also vital. </span></p>
<p><span>Through our study and reflection, we resolved
that settler-colonialism, racial colonialism,
apartheid, refugeehood, and military occupation are
key systems that work together shaping the respective
conditions of Palestinian people, and therefore our
struggle. These dimensions are what allow for shared
principles with other anti-imperialist,
de/anti-colonial, and anti-racist causes and movements
historically and globally. </span></p>
<p><span>However, we articulate the particularities of the
Palestinian condition as tied to the ways Zionism has
manifested itself. What is sorely needed is a return
to a more robust definition of Zionism that will allow
the movement for Palestine to see all the various
facets of the Palestinian struggle without allowing
one framework to overdetermine or limit our broader
understanding. </span></p>
<p><span><b>Our Assessment of our Conditions</b></span></p>
<p><span>As Palestinian youth coming from different
contexts, reflective of the Palestinian condition, the
delegates realized how rare it was for this many
diverse experiences to be represented in one space and
to be in conversation with one another. For most, it
was their first time in a youth-led space that brought
together all these Palestinian experiences. This
rarity is informed by our geographical fragmentation,
limitations in mobility across colonial borders, and
the lack of institutional forums to facilitate these
exchanges and gatherings in the aftermath of the Oslo
Accords. Oslo marked a rupture in the transnational
Palestinian body politic and national infrastructure,
including<b> </b>institutional forums to archive and
learn our political organizing history.</span></p>
<p><span> As the Palestinian national trajectory sought to
prepare for a state on only a fraction of historic
Palestine, the institutional commitment to preparing
the new generation for the revolutionary struggle was
weakened. We acknowledge the acute need to find ways
to overcome both colonial borders and factional
tendencies in our society and to revitalize liberatory
knowledge-making and access, communal accountability,
social wellness, and political cooperation across our
pluralism.</span></p>
<p><span>We discussed the way the post-1993
neo-liberalization of Palestine, the development of
racial capitalism all while under occupation, has had
severe consequences on Palestinian economy and
subsequently resulted in a social reordering of
Palestinian society. We discussed the normalcy and
pervasiveness of the reliance on aid institutions,
debt-based economy, and non-governmental
organizational industries; all of which play a role in
hindering grassroots participation in the Palestinian
political project. </span></p>
<p><span>We identified the need to develop systems and
institutions of self-reliance and sustainability in
our organizational efforts as a way to limit the
political restrictions of neoliberal debt that was
introduced to Palestine exponentially after Oslo and
to revitalized popular revolutionary consciousness and
community accountability among every day Palestinians
struggling against both colonial occupation,
displacement and a new Palestinian political and
economic elite.</span></p>
<p><span>Witnessing the conditions in South Africa and
knowing our own history of internationalism, we
recognized the need to foster more reciprocal forms of
joint struggle with other peoples of the world
especially with South Africans themselves who continue
to sustain their struggle for an end to government
corruption, for a redistribution of land, wealth and
power and more. We don’t just want to be recipients of
solidarity. We believe we are active agents of
history-making. We follow the ethics of camaraderie
and want to extend our solidarity with people and
places that we have shared interest and shared
principles with.</span></p>
<p><span>Since the Oslo Accords, we have witnessed the
collapse of our national liberation struggle and
strategy. Hearing from South African anti-apartheid
strugglers, we learned about the role of civil society
organizations including unions, popular action
committees, and other forums that made up a mass
movement of South Africans fighting for justice and
liberation. Learning about the roles of the armed
struggle, mass popular struggle to make South Africa
ungovernable, and the global campaigns to make
Apartheid costly, we understand that liberation
movements must be multi-faceted, highly organized and
insurgent at all levels. Our national liberation
movement must also center other forms of social and
gender liberation. </span></p>
<p><span><b>Conclusion</b></span></p>
<p><span>We honor the historic strugglers of South Africa
and the people today who are still engaging in
political work to complete the South African
revolution. Their example has provided many invaluable
insights into our own struggle. The South African
peoples’ consistent display of love, empathy, and
solidarity with Palestinians, even and especially when
there are violent repercussions for such an extension
of support, is something we deeply appreciate. </span></p>
<p><span>We left South Africa understanding the need to
revitalize and reconstitute a national liberation
project that is informed by anti/decolonial frameworks
while also rooted in our lived realities. We left
wanting to combine a serious diagnosis of our
conditions with a revolutionary theoretical
explanation of how we got here and how we can get
ourselves free. Much work remains to be done, but the
conversations and the interactions of the delegation
have left us with a great deal to look forward to, and
we commence these next steps inspired by a sense of
revolutionary optimism. </span></p>
<p><span>Moving forward, we plan to continue building on
our experience in South Africa through working with
the delegates on various campaigns and initiatives and
strengthening our networks. We intend on <a
href="https://palestinetosouthafrica.wordpress.com/"><span>sharing
our insights and lessons</span></a> gained from
the delegation through popular education materials and
community programming.</span></p>
<p><span>Now, more than ever, the time is ripe for a
revived anti-colonial framing of the Palestinian
cause, and we believe that the various lessons learned
and connections made throughout the delegation can
help bolster such an understanding of our struggle. </span></p>
<p><em>– The Palestinian Youth Movement (“PYM”) is a
transnational, independent, grassroots movement of
young Palestinians in Palestine and in exile worldwide
as a result of the ongoing Zionist colonization and
occupation of our homeland. Our belonging to Palestine
and our aspirations for justice and liberation
motivate us to assume an active role as a young
generation in our national struggle for the liberation
of our homeland and people. Irrespective of our
different political, cultural and social backgrounds,
we strive to revive a tradition of pluralistic
commitment toward our cause to ensure a better future,
characterized by freedom and justice on a social and
political level, for ourselves and subsequent
generations.</em></p>
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