THE SLOGAN, AS OFTEN WITH SLOGANS, is provocative, though it lacks precision as well as any subtlety. Appearing overnight, it’s fly-posted now on the streets of many cities, and it says: FREE PALESTINE – END APARTHEID! (See below right)
That yoking together of two high-temperature political issues is intended to stir passions, and of course it does. In American media coverage, though, it’s now being tossed into that dismissive category of rhetorical hyperbole. Some commentators are seeing, but see no further than, an effort by pro-Palestinian campaigners to accuse Israel of practicing the same kind of discriminatory oppression as the White supremacists of the former South Africa once did. The myopic dismissiveness wants to label the apartheid notion as outdated and irrelevant (as well denying it any truth, of course). “Baseless and exaggerated,” I heard one bloviator saying about it on cable TV.
Now, the cruelty of the former apartheid regime is undoubted; it’s a matter of clear historical record – and maybe it’s only a coincidence that the policy’s introduction in South Africa dates back to 1948, when the racist Afrikaans Herenigde Nasionale Party took power … the same year that also saw the founding of the State of Israel. But for those who actually lived through those decades of vicious white nationalist domination — especially the victimized Black, so-called Colored (that was mixed-race people), Indian and some liberals among the White populations — the likening of Israel’s treatment of Arabs to apartheid carries a strong resonance all its own.
There is of course at the very least some heavy, ugly irony in Israel now standing accused in the International Court of Justice at The Hague (above left), charged with more than practicing apartheid – in fact with committing the crime of genocide. A crime that entered our annals of global law only after Europe’s Jewish populations had been decimated by the Nazis. That irony could not escape western world coverage. We heard it from correspondents every day. But the fact that the country which has accused Israel is actually the Republic of South Africa has its own importance, and I’d suggest it is not being explained very fully.
Before going into that special significance (or motivation) behind South Africa’s pursuit of Israel in the International Court, we should acknowledge a tactical matter. Something immediate is being demanded of the court – or as immediate as anything can be with that judicious, judicial body. South Africa is seeking preliminary court orders to legally compel Israel to stop its military campaign in Gaza – what are called in the Court “provisional measures.”
It’s a calculated device to get a halt or at least a suspension in the pounding war that has already cost a reported 24,000 Palestinian lives, and fourteen hundred on the Israeli side. (That’s 1200 on the day of Hamas’s attack, and about two hundred Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting since then.) The court could, reportedly, decide to impose such ‘provisional measures’ before the end of this current month. The International Court’s decisions are meant to binding on nations, but of course realistically there is no authority that can enforce them upon Israel. The UN’s Security Council, you might possibly think, but there Israel enjoys protection from the United States exercising its veto.
THE PERHAPS PIQUANT QUESTION MUST ARISE. Why is it South Africa that is pursuing the lawsuit in the first place?
There are deep-seated roots for South Africans’ enmity toward Israel. They are perhaps deeper than their immediate (and widely-shared) outrage at Israel’s evidently disproportionate air-bombardment and ground assault against Gaza in response to Hamas’s massacres and kidnappings of October seventh. It concerns Israel’s involvement in the decades-long struggle to create, or re-create, South Africa itself in its present-day form.
Israelis were, at least in public, critical of apartheid during the 1950s and 60s. But after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 they began to take a more benign view of the white supremacist regime. There developed some discreet cooperation – what a former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria, Alon Liel called “a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.” And in total secrecy there was even a defense co-operation agreement signed in 1975.
I recall the ‘affair’ surfacing somewhat in 1976, when Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster — previously, during World War II, a former Nazi sympathizer — to make a state visit. Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin held a state banquet for him, at which Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence“. (You may recall that the South Africans did try to sell the world on the idea that apartheid was a form of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the black and white races.)
I well remember how, shortly after that visit, the South African government published the following statement: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”
During the period when liberation struggles raged all across southern Africa, there was considerable military cooperation. The Israel Defense Force acted as advisers to the South African Defense Force in its ventures into neighboring Angola in the 1980s. In military matériel too, there was considerable collaboration. In a secretive deal (because of international sanctions against the apartheid regime) Israel’s defense industry supplied South Africa with Kfir combat planes, which were upgraded and renamed the Atlas Cheetah when flown by the South African Airforce. The deal was worth $1.7 billion, an unprecedented sum at the time. And to quote Ambassador Liel again, “our link was very intimate.”
On a lower level perhaps, but redolent politically — and not forgotten by today’s South African leaders — a manufacturing plant at Israel’s famous Kibbutz Beit Alfa produced anti-riot, armored vehicles that were used against protesters in the black townships around Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town.
But the biggest secret of all was nuclear. Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa’s development of its nuclear weapons. This was kept well hidden, although I on British television, and some other journalists elsewhere, did reveal some of it – not, however, all of its full dimensions. This was in the late 1980s, during what can now be seen as apartheid’s dying days, ahead of the white regime finally releasing Nelson Mandela from prison, and opening negotiations with his liberation movement, the African National Congress, so leading to today’s non-racial democracy.
And of course, it should not be forgotten that in international arenas the ANC were always staunch allies of the Palestinians’ PLO. The current ANC leaders in South Africa, Mandela’s successors, see Israel – and saw it long before the war broke out with Hamas’s incursion – as oppressing the Palestinian population. In Gaza yes, but also in the occupation of the West Bank, and in if not the exact same way as their own people were once oppressed in the days of apartheid, but certainly similar. And that will still apply, whichever way the International Court of Justice might deny about the genocide question.
And also irrespective of that court decision, we can assuredly say that Israel played its own part in fueling South Africa’s hostility by first supporting what you might call the ‘original’ form of apartheid.
