South African apartheid unofficially ended in 1991, I was four years old. I didn’t really understand it. By 1994 when South Africa had its first multiracial elections and Nelson Mandela became president, I was seven and I understood a bit more. There was a place where it was illegal to be Black and now a Black guy had been elected president. In 2000 I was 13 years old and I was somehow allowed to watch 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2. The one where Mel Gibson and Danny Glover fight evil South African government officials. I felt an odd mixture of revulsion and titillation when the cartoonishly evil Afrikaner diplomat called Glover a “kaffir”. Was this what racism looked like? It would all be fine in the end. The bad guys were taken care of, their diplomatic immunity was revoked.
I got older and I learned how apartheid worked -- like Jim Crow on steroids. The government gave everyone a legal racial classification to more efficiently systematize oppression. Black South Africans were segregated from the white ruling class in every facet of life. Their schools and hospitals were overstuffed and underfunded. They were legally barred from participating in the political process. In the end and under the euphemistic pretense of providing for the self-determination of the Black Africans, the apartheid government stripped the Black citizens in the country of their civil rights and forcibly moved millions from their family homes into pre-industrial and impoverished areas.
While racism and segregation had been a part of the country since the time of our old friend Cecil Rhodes, the actual government-led apartheid program began with the 1948 election of the National Party in South Africa. It was their contention that South Africa was not one nation of one people but four different races who just so happened to occupy the same land. As the white South Africans were responsible for all of the cultural and economic development in the country, they should have absolute control despite being a minority. Furthermore, they were morally compelled to govern in such a way as to guarantee their rule in perpetuity for if they were no longer able to guide the region as they had done for the previous 50 years then South Africa would cease to exist.
Eventually, condemnation of the Apartheid program would come from both the international community and from within South Africa itself. Black South Africans began to violently resist their occupation and oppression. With help from other sympathetic nations such as Cuba and Sweden, the African National Congress, lead by Nelson Mandela (himself a lifelong supporter of Palestinian liberation) carried out attacks against the Apartheid regime. The government of South Africa was buoyed by either the clear approval or complicit silence of friendly nations like the United States (the politics of the Reagan branded the ANC a terrorist organization), and Israel.
Israel, like apartheid, was born in 1948.
There were many defenders of the apartheid program. One such defender was Charles A. W. Manning. Born in South Africa, he was a Rhodes scholar who taught at Oxford and Harvard and is an influential figure in international relations academia. He was also very racist. In 1968 he wrote an article for the Council on Foreign Relations titled In Defense of Apartheid. In it, Manning makes several arguments that may sound familiar if you’ve either watched the news or went on Twitter last week. For Manning, the critics of the apartheid regime were totally ignorant of the reality in the country. And to these ignorant interlopers Manning would make the following case:
South Africa has a complicated past.
“It is not as if it were open to South Africa to do just nothing. The situation in which she finds herself is a heritage from a complicated past. Where the irresponsible foreign onlooker has merely to insist that apartheid is "morally wrong," the responsible South African has rather to ask himself whether there is any less immoral approach to South Africa's problem.”
People who are not from South Africa have no standing to critique the actions of its government:
“Critics who see the defense of law and order as reprehensible merely because the government responsible happens also to be pursuing policies not widely understood are not considered by South Africans to have any qualification to pass judgment on what is being done.”
The international condemnation of the program was driven by an outside agitator with a secret agenda:
“In few cases, if any, can a Communist-encourage, if not necessarily Communist-inspired, campaign of systematic mood-engineering have met with comparable success in the Western world.”
The South African government is being unfairly blamed for the crisis within its borders:
“It is indeed typical of the spirit in which the anti-South Africa campaign is being conducted that crisis measures there commonly condemned without any reference to the existence of a crisis; and that the crisis, if ever mentioned, is represented as the being of the government's own creation--when the whole effort of so much of the outside world has seemed directed to bringing it about.”
The apartheid program isn’t racist even though racists support it:
“....those South Africans who believe in “keeping the native in his place” may be expected to approve a program of separate development whether they fully understand it or not. But to say that is not the same as saying that at cabinet level the policy is grounded in unfriendliness toward the non-enfranchised majority of the population, for whose welfare the white minority has borne responsibility since 1910.”
Afrikaners have a proud history and they should be expected to defend their identity:
“What underlies apartheid is at the bottom an attitude not toward the black man, but toward the forefathers-and the future-of the Afrikaner people. It is to these that responsibility is felt, to conserve a cultural heritage in defense of which white men fought against white men from 1899 to 1902.”
“A party formed specifically to preserve the integrity of Afrikanerdom against the danger of obliteration by a culture which was seen not as inferior but as different is hardly of a kind to opt for the merging of white society into a culturally uncongenial and in principle homogeneous all-African mass.”
Forced removals and the stipping of civil rights was not meant to hold the Africans in captivity but to allow them to develop on their own:
“And in so far as the declared intention in the creation of the Bantustans is to provide for the several peoples within the Republic at least as good an opportunity for progressive self-fulfillment as is presumably now assured to the peoples of Tanganyika, Ghana and Kenya, the charge that apartheid is meant to hold the African indefinitely in a status of inferiority is without foundation.”
Sure the rights of Africans were restricted but it’s a part of a process and really it’s up to the disenfranchised people to decide how that process plays out:
“True, it is not full sovereign independence that is now being conferred on the Transkei; but today’s developments are declared no more than a phase is a process, the speed of which it will be partly up to the several Bantu peoples to decide.”
The Africans have outrageous demands - like not being occupied for instance:
“Not the least among the many disservices that some of the black man’s self-styled friends have done him is to have encouraged in him a disposition to ask for the moon. White men know better than to train their own offspring to expect the impossible, to suppose the world owes them a living, to believe that if things happen to go ill with them it is because there is a conspiracy against them.”
Because really is it that big a deal that apartheid forcibly relocated a huge amount of people into a relatively small amount of undeveloped land?
“It is no kindness to the African to convince him that his grievances are more serious than they are-to tell him, for instance, that the area of the Bantustans, barely 13 percent of the Republic, is insufficient for his needs and plainly inequitable as the portion for 75 percent of the population.”
By now you probably can see what I’m doing here. I’m not trying to hide it. And you may think to yourself that it’s unfair to compare the actions of the Israeli government to South African apartheid. That is a fair criticism, I don’t think the South African government dropped quite as many bombs on the Bantustans as Israel has on the Gaza strip. But it might be relevant that Israel was one of apartheid South Africa’s staunchest allies, signing a security pact with P.W. Botha for 200 million in arms sales and even reportedly offering to sell them nuclear weapons. South Africa, like Israel, carried out pre-emptive attacks on neighboring countries because they believed those countries were harboring hostile terrorists bent on their destruction. Like Israel, South Africa banned interracial marriage. Also like Israel, South Africa cultivated a militarized civilian population with compulsory military service.
But it’s complicated, right?
Well, the history is complicated. Decades of fighting and subjugation, with millions of lives lost between the Israelis looking for a home and the Arabs afraid of losing theirs. What’s tragic is that if you go far back enough in that history you’ll find a time when Jews and Arabs fought side by side in Jerusalem against invading crusaders. But while that history informs what is happening right now in the West Bank and Gaza, it does not justify it. That part is not complicated.
There isn’t a defense of what Israel is doing right now that doesn’t rest on the premise that the people of Palestine aren’t fully human. We should be clear here, the Jewish people have a deep history with the land that is known as Palestine, the state of Israel is a settler colonialist project and it operates as such. The act of colonization is an act of violence. The only way it isn’t violence is if you don’t believe that the colonized are people. That’s why Bari Weiss can comfortably say from the safety of her fertility clinic that dead Palestinian children are just a necessary consequence of the realization of Zionism. Those dead kids aren’t people, they are obstacles to Bari’s concept of self-actualization.
Oppression is always complicated for the colonizer. It has to be. They don’t want to perform the brutality that is necessary to maintain the colonized state, they don’t have a choice because the situation is just so complicated. What is interesting is that if you just start by assuming that the colonized people are also human, things don’t seem so complicated anymore. Humans don’t like when someone comes and takes their home. So maybe don’t take their homes. Most humans are not violent religious extremists, so if you don’t convince yourself that it’s impossible to live among people who worship the same god a bit differently than you do -- it actually might be possible to live alongside them.
Some people will tell you that because the situation in Palestine is so complicated you shouldn’t have an opinion on it if you’ve never stepped foot in Israel or the West Bank. You shouldn’t have an opinion if you aren’t Jewish. And then a decent number of those people will give their opinion as a white person on race relations in America because that topic is super simple. The thing is, when I say that Israel is committing crimes against humanity it’s not because I follow Halsey on Twitter, it's because Human Rights Watch says that Israel is committing crimes against humanity. It's because the International Criminal Court is investigating Israel for war crimes. It’s because Amnesty International says they are violating human rights. It’s because B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, says that Israel is operating an apartheid state. It’s really not that complicated.
South African apartheid was ended through the collective efforts of Black African resistance, white Afrikaner opposition to the oppression carried out in their name, and the condemnation of the international community made material in the form of boycotts and sanctions. It was the economics of it all that proved the tipping point. While the US and Britain never officially broke economic ties with South Africa, the threat of doing so in the late ’80s was enough to bring the white minority government to the negotiating table. Now a diverse and international cohort of human rights activists and organizations is trying to pressure Israel’s allies to do the same. It’s a proven tactic with a minimal amount of violence. (Economic violence is still violence) In response, Israel and its allies are launching an almost identical rhetorical counter-attack. The same excuses, the same justifications, the same complications.
Israel exists because the global blight of antisemitism left Jewish refugees escaping oppression in Europe with no place to go. America was an active participant in this heartless refusal to provide a safe haven for the Jewish diaspora. It’s important to understand that western support of Israel is not based on compassion for the Jewish people. American anti-semitism never went away and now with the rise of far-right nationalism, it’s bubbling to the surface yet again. It’s also important to understand that antisemitism isn’t as big a priority for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party as they would like you to believe. Or else they wouldn’t enjoy such close relationship with far-right European heads of state, like holocaust equivocator Viktor Orban of Hungary.
America’s support of Israel is not based on concern for the Jewish people living there. Just like our long-running support of South Africa apartheid wasn’t based on concern for preserving the Afrikaner culture. Israel is an extension of American hegemony in the middle east, similar to how South Africa was a bulwark against communist influence in Africa. In 1986, the year I was born, then-senator and now president Joe Biden went to the floor of congress and defended US aid to Israel. He said this:
“It’s about time we stop apologizing for our support for Israel, there’s no apology to be made. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. If there weren’t an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
He would make similar remarks in 2013 and 2015.
Now I have no idea if Joe Biden had read Charles Manning’s In Defense of Apartheid. If he had I doubt he found it persuasive. The same year he defended US support of Israel, he also gave a speech condemning the apartheid government. He explicitly stated that American sympathies should be with the actual people of South Africa and not the state. And yet I wonder if he has read Manning's defense because Biden has a history of “borrowing” from the work of others and Manning had said this in 1964 racist polemic:
“Someone has said that if South Africa did not exist she might have to be invented.”
Solidarity forever.
To put that solidarity in practice here are some links to Palestinian charities if you can provide material support:
Donate to Palestine | Where We Work | Islamic Relief USA (irusa.org)
Movement to Safeguard Palestinian Communities
Palestinian Children's Relief Fund
And here’s a link to Abby Martin’s powerful 2019 documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom, for an unfiltered look at the conditions on the ground:
Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019) | Full Documentary | Directed by Abby Martin
I agree, it's not that complicated...apartheid in Israel/Palestine, and also what the Republicans are moving toward here...
I believe no one is born to hate, as Nelson Mandela said " No one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, or their background, or their religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes naturally to the human heart than it's opposite." Human Rights Watch issued a 213-page report in April that helps put the recent bloodshed in its proper context. It details the crimes against humanity of persecution and apartheid that Israeli authorities are committing against millions of Palestinians... I could be wrong, but I believe if minorities in this country don't watch out we could have the same atrocities here in America... Solidarity Forever!!