Nelson Mandela, Palestine and
the Fight against Apartheid
By Kim Bullimore
Nelson Mandela, a courageous resistance fighter is dead.
Mandela died on December 5, aged 95. He devoted his entire
life to the struggle for his people’s freedom, spending 27
years in prison for both his unarmed and armed resistance to
South Africa’s brutal and racist apartheid regime.
With the death of this courageous resistance fighter, we are
now greeted with a sickening spectacle which whitewashes his
history and the fact that Mandela was first and foremost a
freedom fighter. Politicians and commentators in Australia,
the USA, the UK, Israel, Europe and elsewhere, many of whom
who had previously labelled him a terrorist, supported his
incarceration and the South African apartheid regime, are now
pretending they did no such thing and are falling over
themselves to laud him as a hero, a great man and a man of
peace.
Their eulogies whitewash the South African anti-apartheid
struggle and Mandela’s actions as a freedom fighter. They have
rinsed clean, from their histories of him, that Mandela was a
radical, who worked with and was inspired by communists both
in South Africa and Latin America (Today, in the wake of
Mandela’s death, the African National Congress (ANC) and the
South African Communist Party (SACP) have issued a statement
confirming that Mandela was a member of the SACP in 1962 when
he was arrested and imprisoned – something which had been
previously denied for political reasons). In order to create a
whitewashed caricature of Mandela, these revisionists are
attempting to rewrite history and the fact that Mandela’s
resistance and struggle against apartheid encompassed all
forms of disobedience and defiance, both violent and non-
violent.
As a leader of the ANC Youth, which he helped found with
Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu in 1944, Mandela worked to
convince the ANC to adopt mass militant non-violent tactics,
which included boycotts and strikes. In the wake of the
brutality of the 1960 Sharpville massacre which saw 69 unarmed
Black South African’s gunned down by the regime, Mandela cofounded (with Walter Sisulu and Joe Slovo) the Umkhonto we
Sizwe or Spear of the Nation which carried out sabotage
against both military and civilian infrastructure in South
Africa. In founding Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961, Mandela took
inspiration from the revolutionary struggle taking place in
Cuba, in particular from Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s 26th
of July Movement.
Mandela recognized the importance of all forms of struggle
against the violent oppression being imposed on his people. In
1980, as the non-violent mass struggle once again began to
flourish, both inside South Africa and internationally in the
form of the boycott and sanctions anti-apartheid solidarity
movement, he wrote in a smuggled message from his prison cell
that “between the hammer of armed struggle and the anvil of
united mass action, the enemy will be crushed.”
“Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the
Palestinians”
And today, as the revisionist politicians and commentators
eulogize Mandela, they also seek to scrub from Mandela’s
history his lifelong and steadfast support for the Palestinian
people and their struggle. Just as they were complicit in
supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime, many of these same
revisionist politicians and commentators are today complicit
in supporting Israel’s apartheid regime.
In 1948, the same year as the Palestinian Nakba which saw
Zionist militia ethnically cleanse more 750,000 Palestinians
from their homeland and destroy more than 500 Palestinian
villages, South Africa formally adopted the apartheid regime.
Throughout the long years of Apartheid in South African, as
Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s notes in The Unspoken Alliance:
Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa
(2010), there were close military and trade ties between these
two colonial oppressors. It is unsurprising therefore that
there would be a close comradeship between the two struggles,
viewing their struggles as one and the same: a struggle
against colonialism, oppression and racism. For Mandela and
the ANC, Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians were “comrades in
arms” and they supported their struggle against the Israeli
state – both armed and unarmed.
The comradeship between the two struggles was highlighted by
Mandela, just sixteen days after he was released from 27 long
years in prison in 1990. In February 1990, Mandela met with
Yasser Arafat in Lusaka in Zambia. At Lusaka airport, Mandela
embraced Arafat and reiterated his support for the Palestine
Liberation Organization and the Palestinian struggle telling
the media that Arafat was “fighting against a unique form of
colonialism and we wish him success in his struggle”. He went
on to say, “I believe that there are many similarities between
our struggle and that of the PLO” stating “We live under a
unique form of colonialism in South Africa, as well as in
Israel, and a lot flows from that.”
Eight months later, during his three day visit to Australia in
October 1990, Mandela reiterated his support for the
Palestinian struggle and the PLO saying: “We identify with
them [the Palestinians] because we do not believe it is right
for the Israeli government to suppress basic human rights in
the conquered territories.”
Mandela told the Australian media, “We agree with the United
Nations that international disputes should be settled by
peaceful means. The belligerent attitude which is adopted by
the Israeli government is to us unacceptable.”
He went on to tell the Australian media that the ANC did not
consider the PLO a terrorist group, stating “If one has to
refer to any of the parties as a terrorist state, one might
refer to the Israeli government, because they are the people
who are slaughtering defenseless and innocent Arabs in the
occupied territories, and we don’t regard that as acceptable.”
In 1997, in a speech on the International Day of Solidarity
with the Palestinian People, Mandela once again spoke in
support of the Palestinian struggle stating “it behoves all
South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous
international support, to stand up and be counted among those
contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice”. It
was important, said Mandela, for South Africans “to add our
own voice to the universal call for Palestinian selfdetermination and statehood” because “we know too well that
our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the
Palestinians; without the resolution of conflicts in East
Timor, the Sudan and other parts of the world”.
Worse than Apartheid
Increasingly over the last decade, more and more South
Africans who were active in the South African anti-Apartheid
campaign have joined Mandela and have spoken out in support of
the Palestinian struggle. In many cases, they have denounced
Israel apartheid as being far worse than South African
Apartheid.
Not only has Arch-Bishop Desmond Tutu equated Israel’s
policies and practices to Apartheid, in 2008 veteran South
African anti-apartheid campaigners visited the Occupied West
Bank and declared what they saw as worse than the apartheid
they had experienced in their own country.
One of the participants who visited the West Bank as part of
the trip, Mondli Makhanya, the editor-in-chief of the Sunday
Times of South Africa, told veteran Israeli reporter, Gideon
Levy, “When you observe from afar you know that things are
bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can prepare you for
the evil we have seen here. In a certain sense, it is worse,
worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of the
apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the
worst period of apartheid”.
Another participant in the trip, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, a
member of the South African parliament, who had been
imprisoned during the apartheid era for her opposition to the
South African apartheid regime told Levy, “It is hard for me
to describe what I am feeling. What I see here is worse than
what we experienced”. When asked by Levy why she thought it
was worse than South African apartheid, Madlala-Routledge
explained, “The absolute control of people’s lives, the lack
of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the
total separation and the extensive destruction we saw”.
In November 2011, the Reverend Allan Aubrey Boesak, a veteran
of the South African anti-apartheid struggle reiterated the
assertion that Israeli apartheid is far worse than South
African apartheid. In an interview with Middle East Monitor,
Boesak, explain that “It is worse, not in the sense that
apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South
Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the
apartheid system and perfected it, so to speak; sharpened it”.
Boesak went onto explain:
“For instance, we had the Bantustans and we had the Group
Areas Act and we had the separate schools and all of that but
I don’t think it ever even entered the mind of any apartheid
planner to design a town in such a way that there is a
physical wall that separates people and that that wall denotes
your freedom of movement, your freedom of economic gain, of
employment, and at the same time is a tool of intimidation and
dehumanization. We carried passes as the Palestinians have
their ID documents but that did not mean that we could not go
from one place in the city to another place in the city. The
judicial system was absolutely skewed of course, all the
judges in their judgments sought to protect white privilege
and power and so forth, and we had a series of what they
called “hanging judges” in those days, but they did not go far
as to openly, blatantly have two separate justice systems as
they do for Palestinians [who are tried in Israeli military
courts] and Israelis [who are tried in civil, not military
courts]. So in many ways the Israeli system is worse”.
ANC and South Africa’s Support for Palestinian BDS Campaign
In 2012, Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC)
which is also the ruling party of South Africa, formally
endorsed and adopted as part of its official policy, the
Palestinian call for Boycott,Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
against Israel. In 2005 Palestinian civil society issued a
call to the international community for a program and campaign
of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) to be applied
against Israel as a way to pressure Israel to end its
violations of international law, respect Palestinian human
rights and engage in fair negotiations for a just peace.
The ANC Conference not only formally endorsed the Palestinian
BDS campaign but also adopted a resolution which specifically
called for “all South Africans to support the programs and
campaigns of the Palestinian civil society which seek to put
pressure on Israel to engage with the Palestinian people to
reach a just solution.”
The ANC conference also adopted two other resolutions relating
to Palestine and Israel. One of the resolutions reiterated the
ANC’s long held stance in support of the Palestinian struggle,
stating “The ANC is unequivocal in its support for the
Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination,
and unapologetic in its view that the Palestinians are the
victims and the oppressed in the conflict with Israel.”
In
addition,
the
conference
also
adopted
a
resolution
condemning Israel’s treatment of African refugees stating “The
ANC abhors the recent Israeli state-sponsored xenophobic
attacks and deportation of Africans and request that this
matter should be escalated to the African Union”
The adoption of the resolutions formalized the position
already held by the ANC and the South African government. Two
months before the conference, South Africa’s deputy foreign
minister Ebrahim Ebrahim had noted that: “Because of the
treatment and policies of Israel towards the Palestinian
people, we strongly discourage South Africans from going
there.”
In April 2013, the South Africa’s International Relations
Minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane reiterated the ruling ANC’s
position, saying “the struggle of the people of Palestine is
our struggle”.
Mandela’s Legacy
Today, Mandela is honored by both those in struggle and by
those in power. Once, however, he and his struggle were
demonized and hated by those in power, including many of those
same people now praising him today. And while mealy mouthed
politicians and hypocritical commentators sing Mandela’s
praise today, attempting to whitewash his legacy, they will
not succeed in rewriting history.
For those in struggle, Mandela’s legacy will always be one of
a freedom fighter. It will always be one of a courageous
resistance fighter who waged an uncompromising struggle
against colonialism, racism and oppression. His legacy to
those of us in struggle will be that he was an
internationalist, who saw his people’s freedom tied up with
the freedom of others – who saw his people’s struggle as being
no different from the struggle of the Palestinian people and
all those struggling against colonialism, oppression and
tyranny.
South African apartheid may be over, but apartheid has not
ended. Apartheid is still alive and flourishing today in
Israel. And today, the best way to honor Mandela, his legacy
and the courageous struggle that he and his people fought
against South Africa’s apartheid is to take a stand in support
of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid and
occupation.
This is Mandela’s legacy, a legacy of actions and deeds – not
just empty words – in support of the struggle against
injustice, oppression and a brutalizing regime which oppresses
and dehumanizes an entire nation of people. As Mandela knew:
apartheid was wrong in South Africa and it is wrong in Israel.
Honor Mandela by joining the struggle for a Free Palestine, by
joining the struggle against Israeli apartheid
supporting the Palestinian BDS campaign!
and
by
– Kim Bullimore is a volunteer with the International Women’s
Peace Service in Palestine (www.iwps.info) and the co-convenor
of the Melbourne Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid. She
writes regularly on the Palestine-Israel conflict for the
Australian newspaper, Red Flag (www.redflag.org.au). Kim also
has a blog here, where this article first appeared. She
contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.