One Country by Ali Abunimah

Author:Ali Abunimah [Abunimah, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 0805086668
Publisher: Picador Paper
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Learning from South Africa

On May 10, 1994, watching Nelson Mandela take the oath as president of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, the outgoing president of the apartheid regime, reflected on his Afrikaner ancestors. “The dream they had dreamt of being free and separate people, with their own right to national self-determination in their own national state in southern Africa” was, de Klerk recounted, “the ideal to which I myself had clung until I Anally concluded, after a long process of deep introspection, that, if pursued, it would bring disaster to all the peoples of our country, including my own.”1 The ability of white South Africans to make this once unthinkable transition prevented an endless civil war. What made the change much easier was that the African National Congress (ANC), headed by Nelson Mandela, simultaneously led the internal and global resistance to apartheid and white minority rule, while constructively addressing white fears about the postapartheid future.

Drawing parallels between Israel-Palestine and apartheid South Africa makes some people very uncomfortable, as I learned a few years ago when I spoke on a panel with Rabbi Arnold

Wolf, a highly regarded Chicago community leader and early proponent of a Palestinian state among liberal American Jews. I compared arguments that were made to shield Israel from international criticism to those used to justify the actions of apartheid South Africa. Wolf was incensed. “The analogy is despicable,” he roared. “The situation was never like it was in South Africa.”2 His reaction is not surprising. Mandela himself observed that with the exception of Hitler’s genocide against the Jews, “there is no evil that has been so condemned by the entire world as apartheid.”3 Few people, let alone Jewish supporters of Israel, want to be placed in the same league. Many liberal Zionists were active in the antiapartheid struggle and cannot accept that the Israel they love could have anything in common with the hated apartheid regime. But my purpose here is not to argue that Israel is or is not as bad as apartheid South Africa, nor to deny the differences between the two situations, but to consider a recent experience where people with fundamentally incompatible views of history, locked for centuries in a bitter conflict of unfathomable misery and suffering, could emerge in peaceful reconciliation. When asked what he might tell some visiting Israelis, Pik Botha, foreign minister during the apartheid regime, said, “We could explain how we overcame our own fear of majority rule and began to realize that majority rule was something in our interest in the long term.” If the Israelis “are interested,” Botha offered, “we can, in all humility, explain how we came to the point of transforming our society.”4 Can Israelis and Palestinians really afford not to learn all the lessons South Africa may hold?

♦ * ♦

The struggle against apartheid earned the support of the world because it was waged in the name of universal values. As a Palestinian, I identified with the antiapartheid struggle and yet saw beyond its universality specific elements that shed light on the situation in my own country.

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