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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-south-africa-home-white-colonialists">middleeasteye.net</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">South Africans in Israel: A home away from home for white colonialists</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Joseph Massad - October 20, 2021<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>More than 20,000 <a href="https://telfedhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/70-Years-of-southern-African-Aliyah-Book.pdf" target="_blank">South African Jews</a> have moved to <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine" target="_blank">Palestine</a> since the 1920s and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel" target="_blank">Israel</a> since 1948. The most famous was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abba-Eban" target="_blank">Aubrey Solomon</a>, who changed his name to Abba Eban and became a prominent Israeli politician. Many of them live in the <a href="https://ipfs.fleek.co/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/South_African_Jews_in_Israel.html" target="_blank">wealthy</a> South African colony of <a href="https://yamm.finance/wiki/Savion.html" target="_blank">Savyon</a>, built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/All_that_Remains.html?id=_By7AAAAIAAJ" target="_blank">al-‘Abbasiyah</a>, whose Palestinian population was expelled during the 1948 Zionist conquest of Palestine.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>South African Jews continue to move to Palestine, where some consider
Israel a safer settler colony for white people than post-apartheid
South Africa</p>
</blockquote>
<p>South African Jews <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/asia-and-australia/.premium-anxious-south-african-jews-are-planting-one-foot-or-two-in-israel-1.8473427" target="_blank">continue</a> to move to Palestine, where some consider Israel a safer settler colony for white people than post-apartheid South Africa.</p>
<p>It is unclear, however, how many white Afrikaner Pentecostal
Protestant converts to Judaism are among them. But a recent report in
the <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-cleansed-by-the-torah-why-these-afrikaners-became-jews-and-moved-to-israel-1.10254835" target="_blank">Haaretz</a> newspaper
claimed that such converts had been arriving in Israel in increasing
numbers since the end of apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1990s.</p>
<p>"From a former Pentecostal pastor to entire families, a growing
number of Afrikaners are converting to Orthodox Judaism and swapping
South Africa for Israel," wrote Haaretz's Judy Maltz, "and, in many
cases, West Bank settlements.”</p>
<p>Zionist officials in South Africa assert that the Afrikaner
Protestant emigrants’ “motivation is purely spiritual - which is why in
many cases we are seeing entire families converting”. The official added
that as emigration "from South Africa grows, so does the number of
converts among [them]".</p>
<p>They are said to already number several hundred immigrants. Haaretz
added that "like many Orthodox Jews, they also tend to be quite
right-wing in their politics. It is no coincidence then, that many have
ended up living in West Bank settlements. Indeed, one of their main
strongholds - aside from Ra’anana, which is popular among South African
immigrants in general, and more recently the rural community of Yavne’el
in northern Israel - is the settlement of Susya in the South Hebron
Hills."</p>
<p>These emigrants may well be motivated by spiritual considerations.
But there is also a long history of connection between South Africa and
Israel, and their shared apartheid and settler history could well create
a comfortable environment.</p>
<h3>Historical context</h3>
<p>This emigration should be seen in the context of the long history of
collusion and collaboration between the two settler colonies. The
Afrikaner Jan Smuts, South African prime minister (1919-1924 and
1939-1948) and the only person to sign both the treaty of Versailles and
the UN Charter, was a major supporter of Zionist colonisation of
Palestine, so much so, that socialist Zionist colonists in Palestine
would later name a kibbutz, the major institution of "<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Liberalism/2blvDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Domenico+losurdo&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">master race</a> socialism", <a href="https://samilhistory.com/2017/05/13/a-kibbutz-called-jan-smuts/" target="_blank">after him</a>.</p>
<div>
<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-apartheid-long-making-news" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/read_more/public/images-story/000_SM1T1%20%281%29.jpg?itok=CSaLWJhq" alt="" width="400" height="250"></a></p><p>Israel has long been an apartheid state. Admitting it now is too little, too late</p>
<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-apartheid-long-making-news" target="_blank">Read More »</a>
</p></div>
<p>Zionists believed that the Palestinians were not unlike Black African
natives, and especially those from the former German colonies, such as
Namibia, who Smuts had insisted had no rights to self-determination.
Those people were, Smuts <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Indigenous_Peoples_of_the_British_Domini/qzIw-c1YOAIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=barbarians" target="_blank">said</a>,
“barbarians to whom it would be impracticable to apply any ideas of
political self-determination in the European sense”. These African
settler colonies would function as a model for the Zionists in
Palestine. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Non_Jewish_Zionism/QiWSQgAACAAJ?hl=en" target="_blank">Smuts</a> had
declared: “I need not remind you that the white people of South Africa,
and especially the older Dutch population, has been brought up almost
entirely on Jewish tradition… the Old Testament has been the very matrix
of Dutch culture here in South Africa.” The Jewish people, Smuts<a href="https://books.google.com.lb/books?id=NUYLAAAAIAAJ&q=The+Jewish+people+has+had+a+mission,+a+civilising+mission,+in+the+world,+second,+perhaps,+to+none&dq=The+Jewish+people+has+had+a+mission,+a+civilising+mission,+in+the+world,+second,+perhaps,+to+none&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjk0rrlvdPzAhXh5eAKHWiEAEkQ6AF6BAgFEAI" target="_blank"> said</a>, “has had a mission, a civilising mission, in the world, second, perhaps, to none.” </p>
<p>The British cabinet <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/No_Enchanted_Palace/FGmYDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=smuts" target="_blank">offered</a>
Smuts the position of first high commissioner of the Palestine Mandate
so that he "would civilise the Arabs as well as the Africans". He
declined on account of his commitment to South Africa, and the British
Jewish Zionist Herbert Samuel was appointed instead.</p>
<p>Smuts had also been initially selected by Prime Minister <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/1917/fsFhYp6HQIUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=smuts" target="_blank">David Lloyd George</a>
to lead the 1917 British military expedition to conquer Palestine, but
Smuts preferred to serve in the imperial war cabinet. Lloyd George sent
his second choice to Palestine, General Edmund Allenby, who had himself
served previously in South Africa.</p>
<h3>Torture of Palestinians</h3>
<p>The South African white supremacist model inspired German Zionist Chaim Arlosoroff as early as 1927, when he <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comrades_and_Enemies/OUfZdWktbTQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=bar" target="_blank">claimed </a>that
the need for the Zionists to overlook the welfare of Palestinian Arab
workers was right and necessary and not unlike what was unfolding in
South Africa.</p>
<p>White workers in South Africa had created a "<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comrades_and_Enemies/OUfZdWktbTQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=bar" target="_blank">colour bar</a>",
which excluded non-whites from skilled and well-paid jobs, something
that, according to Arolosoroff, Jewish colonists must implement in
Palestine to create a separate settler-colonial enclave. It was this
policy of apartheid that the Zionist leadership instituted throughout
the British Mandate period and later in Israel.</p>
<div>
<p><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/000_Nic6152896.jpg" alt="Israeli soldiers and their dogs" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="452" height="301"></p>
Israeli soldiers and dogs of the special canine unit during
exercises in Tel Nof army base, central Israel, 14 November 2012 (AFP)</div>
<p>The British, as the colonial sponsor of settler-colonialism
in both South Africa and Palestine, would borrow methods from one
settler-colony and apply them to another.</p>
<p>During the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939, the British torturers brought South African white-trained <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Britain_s_Pacification_of_Palestine/r1N-DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=dogs" target="_blank">dogs</a>
which they flew to Palestine for the task of tracking the Palestinians,
and had them savagely attack Palestinian revolutionaries. The British
military and police torture of Palestinians was on such a scale that it
would later become the basis for Britain’s even more savage torture of <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Britain_s_Pacification_of_Palestine/r1N-DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Mau%20Mau" target="_blank">Mau Mau</a> guerrillas in the British settler-colony of Kenya in the 1950s.<span><span><span><span><span><span><span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Israel’s alliance and friendship with the apartheid South African regime continued until the latter’s final days</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By the 1970s, with the South African and Israeli alliance defying a
decolonising world, the Israelis helped the South Africans keep their
native people down, especially in occupied Namibia, and assisted with
South African aggression against recently liberated Angola.</p>
<p>Israeli General Ariel Sharon instructed his South African hosts on
the best military methods to achieve these objectives. Sharon’s adviser,
the journalist <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Israeli_Connection.html?id=7v-g21ksdVsC" target="_blank">Uriel Dan</a>,
who accompanied Sharon to South Africa as they joined a South African
military unit attacking Angola, described his impressions: “When I look
at the South African officers, when they speak Afrikaans or English, and
during operations, I imagine that soon they will give orders in Hebrew.
Their physical appearance, their freshness, openness, their battlefield
behaviour, all remind me of IDF officers. And I never said that about
the US and South Vietnamese officers I met.”</p>
<p>Israel’s alliance and friendship with the apartheid South African regime continued until the latter’s final days.</p>
<h3>Irony</h3>
<p>The irony today is that the type of South African who reminded Dan of “IDF officers” have themselves <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/south-africans-serving-in-idf-wont-be-convicted/" target="_blank">joined</a>
the Israeli army. As post-apartheid South Africa is no longer as secure
a place for white colonists, Israel joins the United States, Canada and
Australia in welcoming white South Africans who moved settler-colonies
after the fall of apartheid. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is the continued movement of white South Africans to settler villages
in Palestine evidence that this ideological connection continues?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>South African racist dogs may no longer be needed in Israel as the Israeli army has its own well-trained anti-Palestinian "<a href="https://www.idf.il/en/minisites/oketz-unit/" target="_blank">Oketz</a>" dogs, imported from the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/dutch-supplier-israeli-attack-dogs-compensates-palestinian-victim" target="_blank">Netherlands</a> (coincidentally the mother country of Afrikaner settler colonialism in South Africa) to attack the Palestinian people.</p>
<p>Apartheid ideas and South African dogs were exported to Palestine
during the British occupation of Palestine. Is the continued movement of
white South Africans to settler villages in Palestine evidence that
this ideological connection continues? Or is it simply a long-standing
cultural and spiritual connection which draws newly converted Jews to
the relative safety of Israel?</p>
<p><i>The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.</i></p>
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