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Were not Afrikaners who resisted the apartheid system also called self-hating Afrikaners? The Zionists, like some Afrikaners, feel ill at ease being minorities within a sea of different ethnic and racial groups.
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It is discouraging to argue with people who shout their bias about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, thinking that it began on 7 October 2023 when Hamas brutally killed and kidnapped Jewish music festival attendees. By this argument, they imply that we must forget everything that has gone before in Palestine. We must concentrate only on the violence of Hamas and not on that of the Israelis, who have occupied the state of Gaza and the West Bank for the past 56 years, since it became a fully fledged settler state and colonial power. And we must ignore the Second Nakba unfolding before our eyes, on a larger scale than the 1948 one, as the Israeli state renders Gaza a wasteland and ethnically cleanses the West Bank as per its aspiration.
The government of South Africa, which has the recent experience of apartheid, refuses to be complicit in all of that. As such, the South African government has instituted a credible case of Genocide Convention violation against the Israeli state in the International Court of Justice, which deals with state contentions on violations of international law. The hearings in The Hague are scheduled for 11 January 2024. Israel will get opportunity to respond to the accusations on 12 January 2024. South Africa is using the Genocide Convention of 1948 to describe genocide as “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. If Israel, which ratified the Genocide Convention in 1950, respects international law, the court process binds it as a respondent for carpet-bombing Gaza, forcefully displacing and killing Palestinians, at least until the verdict is reached.
The defenders of the occupying Israeli state would have us forget about the brutal foundations of the Israeli state. To forget about the complicity of the UK’s Balfour Declaration of 1917, which allowed for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish” in Palestine, to the tragic detriment of the indigenous Palestinians, which include Arabic Jews. That this is basically what instituted Zionism, the movement by European Jews for European Jews. They whitewash facts, making as if the Palestinian people have always resisted their dislocation from their homes and villages by violence. They don’t want to talk about the initial peaceful Arab resistance against the influx of Jewish migrants from Europe in the 1930s. We mustn’t call the waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine colonial imposition. We must forget about the British implications in these tragic foundations, and how the British government helped to violently suppress the Arab revolts when it partitioned Palestine in 1947, which led to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, and the first Arab-Israeli War. These are the years the Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe, and which saw about 750 000 Palestinians expelled and their villages destroyed. Thousands who tried to resist were killed.
We are told to forget all this and pretend that Hamas and Fatah are the only problems, not the Zionists who are behind the history of brutality by the Israeli state against the Palestinians. When the Palestinians organise and resist this brutality by similar violence (because they learned that the only language the colonial oppressor understands is violence), they are termed terrorists. Their resistance is not seen as what Naomi Klein in her recent book, Doppelganger, calls resistance for “a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination”, and everyone who criticises the Zionists is accused of anti-Semitism, as Klein writes:
Many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarized force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe.
We’ve all seen this – what Klein calls the doppelganger politics of the Zionists. The Zionists feel justified in labelling Palestinians eternal enemies of the Jewish well-being in the same way the Nazis labelled the Jews as enemies of Aryan progress. From there, they feel “justified in re-enacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that … targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries”.
In these doppelganger politics, the Zionists don’t feel ashamed of the “process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled”. By the way, Naomi Klein is of Jewish descent herself, and many Zionists have called her a self-hating Jew. Where have we heard that before?
Were not Afrikaners who resisted the apartheid system also called self-hating Afrikaners? The Zionists, like some Afrikaners, feel ill at ease being minorities within a sea of different ethnic and racial groups. Hence, they collaborated in arming themselves to the teeth. The perennial support of some Afrikaner nationalists for the Israeli state does not surprise us; it has deep roots as far back as the foundation of the apartheid system. I recently came across a book titled Solution for South Africa by some Henry Katzew, in a second-hand bookshop. When I did a little research, I was amazed at how popular the Zionist support for the apartheid state is. I had always been exposed only to the liberal wing of Jewish politics, most of whom were in the trenches with us during our struggle against apartheid. So, this was a rude awakening for me. Worse still was discovering that it is flaring up again because of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In her latest book, Vignettes of people in an apartheid state, prolific South African writer Zukiswa Wanner writes with tender empathy about visiting Palestine with other writers for a literary festival. She mentions how she was told there about the resurrecting shenanigans of the Israelis and Afrikaner nationalists:
There is quite a number of Afrikaners who are converting to Judaism and coming to Israel to become settlers. Ah, so apartheid nostalgia? I wonder whether anyone with any modicum of humanity would still want to call the presence of settlers and removal of Palestinians, conflict as opposed to just apartheid. Because you see, there are pro-Zionist organisations in the United States, in Europe, in South Africa, that are raising funds to give settlers monies to settle and displace Palestinians from their ancestral homes. Would the world be as silent, I wonder, if say Algeria decided they would fundraise and ensure the Spanish lose their lands to Africans? Would the world say to the Spanish who will clearly speak up against this injustice, “You’re being racist for not wanting Africans to take your land from you. You are problematic for not wanting Africans to kill you, to incarcerate you, to exile you”? Or does the world continue to be silent and silence anyone else who sees the injustice towards Palestinians because Palestinians, despite coming in all shades, are not considered white?
The most disingenuous argument, for me, is from those who criticise South Africa by saying it has bigger problems than trying to help Palestinians. Really? Better things to do than to help people under a constant barrage from a murderous apartheid regime? Wanner uses the words of Nadine Gordimer during the International Writers Festival 2008 in Israel as an epigraph for her book:
There is a similarity, alas, in the way Palestinians are being treated in the occupied territories, the brutal methods. The humiliation of people, moving people out of their homes, keeping them on one side of the wall while their sustenance, their crops and grain, are on the other. It is indeed comparable to what happened in South Africa.
I wonder where South Africa would have been, had countries like Cuba, Ireland, Zambia, Angola or the Scandinavian nations not supported us against the murderous National Party’s apartheid regime. Of course, we don’t expect much from entities or tragic empires like the UK or USA. Even then, during their complicity with murderous regimes, they called the likes of Mandela terrorists. As justice would have it, even then there were British, American and Afrikaner people who stood up against the betrayal of human values and international law by their governments and said: not in my name! As it is today. Added to them now are Jewish people who, regarding the genocidal murder of Palestinians by the Zionists, are also saying: not in our name! We all join the chorus of Mandela (1997) from whenever the topic of Palestine flared up:
In extending our hands across the miles to the people of Palestine, we do so in the full knowledge that we are part of a humanity that is at one.
Do not allow corridors of power to derail you from the quest for true humanity.
See also:
Kritiese besinnings oor die Israelse eiendomsaansprake op Palestina