Why South Africans must stand with Palestine and why the world must act
Solidarity with Palestine at the World Cup in 2022. The world must stand against apartheid in all its forms, including against Palestinians. Photo: Supplied
The recent stances taken by the United Kingdom, Canada and France, albeit belatedly, regarding Israel's actions in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories should be welcomed as an overdue, yet necessary, shift in global diplomatic discourse.
These declarations represent a small, yet meaningful, turning point in the international community's reaction to what prominent human rights organisations have long labelled as an apartheid system.
For South Africans, this matter transcends politics, touching on profound moral and historical dimensions. Having suffered under the harsh legacy of apartheid, South Africans are in a unique position to empathise with the Palestinian people's oppression and to express their support. The global community cannot continue to overlook the suffering of Palestinians living under occupation. Apartheid, regardless of where it occurs, is a crime against humanity.
In this undertaking, I would like to examine the historical similarities between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Palestine, highlighting the significance of South African solidarity and suggesting possible solutions to the conflict. But it is important to first unpack the apartheid historical context of both South Africa and Palestine to shed more light on why these two countries should stand by each other and have strong diplomatic relations.
Historical Parallels: Apartheid South Africa and Occupied Palestine
To begin with, the term 'apartheid' should not be taken lightly. It carries profound historical, legal and emotional weight. In international law, apartheid is defined by the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid as inhumane acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group over another.
South Africans lived through such a regime, where race determined every aspect of one's life: where you could live, work, go to school and whom you could marry. This system was enforced through draconian laws, forced removals, passbooks and a militarised state apparatus.
Similarly, Palestinians today live under the regime of segregation and control. In the West Bank, there exists a dual legal framework implemented by the Israeli government: one system applies to Israeli settlers, while a different one governs Palestinians. Israeli settlers are governed by civil law and benefit from well-supported infrastructure, whereas Palestinians are governed by military law, encounter movement limitations and live under the constant threat of demolition or eviction.
Meanwhile, Gaza has been subjected to a stifling blockade for over 15 years, effectively transforming the area into what numerous human rights organisations have termed an open-air prison. In 2022, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published reports asserting that Israeli actions in the occupied territories amount to apartheid.
These concerns extend beyond mere territorial disputes or security concerns as they involve systemic control and entrenched discrimination. As South Africans, we recognise this language. We have witnessed the strategies of divide and conquer; collective punishment; suppression of political voices and the use of security narratives to legitimise oppression. These are the very tactics once employed by the apartheid regime in Pretoria.
South Africa's moral responsibility and legacy of solidarity
South Africa bears a distinct moral responsibility to denounce apartheid in all its manifestations, wherever they might occur. During our own fight for freedom, the support of the international community was crucial. Nations, organisations, religious institutions and individuals worldwide backed the movement for boycotts, divestments and sanctions against the apartheid government.
The global indignation and moral conviction contributed significantly to our democratic transition in 1994. Palestinians have consistently looked to the South African experience as a source of hope. The ANC, the South African Council of Churches and figures such as the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have long been vocal in their support for Palestinian rights.
South Africa's foreign policy after apartheid has frequently been guided by this ethical framework. At the United Nations, South Africa has regularly supported Palestinian self-determination through its votes. In South Africa, civil society remains engaged, with groups like the South African Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Coalition advocating for peaceful opposition to Israeli policies until international law is respected.
While the situations are not identical, the similarities are significant enough to warrant action. As South Africans, we must amplify the voices advocating for justice. Remaining silent or neutral in the face of such suffering betrays our own history and principles.
The role of the international community: A call for moral consistency
The tepid response of many Western powers to the crisis in Palestine has long been a source of frustration for the Global South. While nations are quick to condemn violations of international law in one context, there has been a notable reluctance to hold Israel accountable for its actions. This double standard undermines the credibility of international institutions and erodes the foundations of a rules-based international order.
That is why the recent shift in rhetoric by countries such as the UK, France and Canada is important. It signals a growing recognition that the international community can no longer turn a blind eye. Words must now translate into action: through arms embargoes, economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure — tools that were effectively used against the South African government in the 1980s.
I am also of the view that the International Criminal Court must also be allowed to do its work without political interference. War crimes, the use of collective punishment and the illegal annexation of land must be investigated and prosecuted, where evidence warrants it. These are not radical demands, they are the minimum requirements of international law.
Toward a just and inclusive solution
The path to peace must be based on justice, equality and dignity for all. Any solution that does not recognise the full rights of the Palestinian people — whether in the form of a viable two-state solution or a democratic, binational state — will not endure. The goal must be an end to occupation, equal rights for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and a just resolution for Palestinian refugees.
One potential model is a federated or confederal solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians share sovereignty over the land while maintaining distinct national identities. This would require mutual recognition, compromise and international guarantees — but it is not impossible.
The South African experience teaches us that even the most entrenched systems of oppression can be dismantled when there is moral courage, principled leadership and sustained public pressure. Crucially, such a solution must be inclusive. It must ensure that both Palestinians and Israelis live in safety and dignity, free from fear, occupation and discrimination. The struggle is not against Jews or Israelis, it is against policies that deny rights and perpetuate suffering. Justice must be indivisible.
History will judge us by where we stood in moments of great moral crisis. As South Africans, we have the benefit of hindsight and the burden of memory. We know what it means to be dehumanised, displaced and silenced. We also know the power of international solidarity and the possibility of reconciliation after conflict.
Most importantly, the world must act to end apartheid in all its forms, including in Palestine. We must call for accountability, support peaceful resistance and work toward a just and lasting solution that respects the humanity of all. Anything less is a betrayal of the very principles upon which our own freedom was built.
Sifiso Sonjica is an ANC member in Ward 13 Mtubabtuba, KwaZulu-Natal. He writes in his personal capacity.
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The corporate takeover of South African universities is the living legacy of Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate/politician. This ought to be a prime focus of students who describe themselves as radical, instead of dividing themselves on 'racial' lines. Part 1 in a two-part series. This year is the 10th anniversary of the student rebellion in South Africa and the explosion of the new concepts in popular discussion of colonialism and decolonisation. Forming a related group of ideas are decolonising the mind; a homogenous Africa, along with a similarly homogeneous Global South; and settler colonialism. Other than settler colonialism, which is for another time, this two-part series seeks to show why each of them is problematic. Decolonising the mind is arguably the most obfuscating, while also the most open to question. 1 Colonialism Colonialism is commonly understood as one country establishing and maintaining political and economic control over another territory and its people. Leading dictionaries, encyclopaedias and even the UN agree on this. The Oxford English Dictionary (2014) offers: 'The policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country… and exploiting it economically.' The Encyclopedia Britannica's version is more succinct: 'The control by one country over another area and its people.' For the UN's General Assembly, Resolution 1514, of 1960, colonialism is 'The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation.' 2 Decolonisation It might surprise knowing that this term has conservative, anti-decolonisation origins, having been coined by the British and French 20th century administrations confronted by nationalist movements and anticolonial liberation struggles sweeping across Asia and Africa. The strategic aim of these colonial administrations was the orderly and prolonged transfer of political control to already established native elites who would minimise changes to the existing colonial architecture. In the 21st century, the term — now widely expanded — is still evoked by the elites in the former colonies. In many ways, sections of the broad left support versions of this conservative understanding of decolonisation, as Pranay Somayajula, a Washington DC-based writer, demonstrates. I shall be drawing on him in some of what follows. In many ways, this expanded use of decolonisation reflects the influence of 'coloniality', a school of thought that emerged in the 1990s in Latin America. Coloniality, in its critique of modernity, emphasises colonialism's importance in shaping modernity. Indeed, decolonial theorists often combine 'modernity' and 'coloniality' as a single term: modernity/coloniality. As two leading exponents of coloniality, Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, write: The 'horizon' of decoloniality is not limited to 'the political independence of nation-states' or 'the confrontation with capitalism and the West,' but rather with 'the habits that modernity/coloniality implanted in all of us; with how modernity/coloniality has worked and continues to work to negate, disavow, distort and deny knowledges, subjectivities, world senses, and life visions'. Framing decolonisation in this way transforms it into a need for psychological liberation, a process of unlearning colonial ideology and reclaiming identity, dignity, and agency. The need to 'delink' from these Eurocentric systems of knowledge and power is, for them, a task whose goal is 'no longer to 'take hold of the state' but to engage in epistemic and subjective reconstitution' [On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)] Such disavowals of modernity make it appealing to conservativism, in all its manifestations. Before suggesting what lies behind this development of decoloniality, which embraces all the major, current forms of Identity worldwide — be they racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, language or nation — held by the formerly colonised non-white people, it is important to recognise that Identity, regardless of which particular one, is a social construct. It follows from the rejection of biological essentialism as being without any scientific basis that there is nothing for the supposedly inferior people to prove. This applies to Identity, irrespective of which one different people choose. The challenge is to ensure that the prejudices of the most jaundiced of jingoists are not internalised. There is thus no need to invent cultural histories or celebrate the achievements by, specifically, members of former colonised people. Yet, it is precisely this need to disprove all the dogmas that is daily on display. Hindu nationalism is a prime example of this from Asia. Pranay Somayajula reminds us that, in their calls for a return to an imagined Hindu civilisational glory, a 'golden age', current Hindu leaders frequently invoke the language of overcoming a 'colonised mindset' and reviving so-called 'Indic consciousness' — the array of 'indigenous' philosophies, cosmologies, and epistemologies supposedly suppressed by centuries of Islamic and British colonisation alike. In its most exaggerated form, this atavism can be observed in the viral memes claiming that ancient Indians invented everything from aircraft to nuclear weapons to the internet. This need to invent their own culture or achievements resulted in Afro-Americans inventing their own Christmas, Kwanzaa, in 1966, with twenty-first century estimates of the number of Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa being between 500,000 and 2,000,000. Expressing the same need, African nationalists claimed — some still do — that the Pyramids and the Sphinx were built by black Africans, not Egyptian Arabs, with the Sphinx having been deliberately bombed in order to remove a characteristically African nose. Some black Africans, including those of African descent worldwide, of the Christian faith argue that Jesus was black. Moving on to South Africa, decolonisation hit us, from seemingly nowhere, when a few students at the University of Cape Town threw shit at a statue of Cecil John Rhodes in March 2015. Since then, it has blown across the whole of South Africa to be inhaled as fresh air. Conferences on the subject are big business; there's even a Decolonisation Foundation. To be anything less than exhilarated by the whirlwind is to run the risk of being roughly attacked as racist or reactionary. The gale has especially shaken universities: their need for a thoroughly decolonised makeover, including what is taught and by whom, is the new orthodoxy. During the student rebellion of 2015-17, those who shouted the loudest often made fools of themselves. The proposed rejection of science as a non-African, white Eurocentric imposition was reported across the world. Less well known but in the same league were the medical students who rejected a practical on ankle injuries because the lecturer, attempting to make it real life, had linked the injury to football and football was deemed to be an alien, non-African colonial import. In a similar vein was — and is — the automatic rejection of reading lists on technical subjects purely because the authors are from Europe or the US. Subjects such as architecture have been disavowed for being non-African. Expressions of this same drive for constantly disproving white prejudice was recognised, along with its implicit rebuke, by Mamphela Ramphele, a noted academic, besides being Steve Biko's one-time partner, who said 'we have largely bought into the lie that black people do not have the capacity to excel'. Exposing the lie is manifested in things such as: The need for street names to show that black people are capable of having their own heroes. The rejection of the Homo Naledi fossils because black people have not evolved from baboons. The national celebration following the first black South African to have climbed Mount Everest, a feat which, according to then president Thabo Mbeki, made all South Africans 'stick out our chests in justifiable pride and wonder'. The ANC Women's League's celebration (without any irony) that President Jacob Zuma had used a 'wholly black-owned' bank to pay his Public Prosecutor-ordered, maleficence-laden Nkandla bill. The league's secretary-general noted that the president's 'confidence in supporting black-owned businesses is humbling'. This bank subsequently turned out to be the notorious VBS! The celebration of 'Ubuntu' as a uniquely black South African contribution to world philosophy and ethics. The then minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, Thoko Didiza, who in 2000 announced that the government wanted to build 'a core of successful black farmers in this country. We want to move away from a perception that only white farmers can make it commercially, and that subsistence farming is only for Africans'. For then president Jacob Zuma it was a case of: 'Let us solve African problems the African way, not the white man's way. Let us not be influenced by other cultures…' The need for black people to be rich to prove black ability and the consequent — and often unconscionable — conspicuous consumption to display black achievement. Thabo Mbeki, the urbane, cosmopolitan, British university-educated intellectual, surprised many by his evident internalisation of the most extreme views of supposedly biologically determined black behaviour. His denial of Aids stands testimony to his fear that the worst of white racism is accurate. Consider the following, for instance, from 11 August 2000: 'The white politician (a reference to Tony Leon who had attacked his Aids denialism) makes bold to speak openly of his disdain and contempt for African solutions to the challenges that face the peoples of our continent. According to him… these solutions, because they are African, could not but consist of pagan, savage, superstitious and unscientific responses typical of the African people, described by the white politician as resorting 'to snake-oil cures and quackery'… This racism has defined us who are African and black as primitive, pagan, slaves to the most irrational superstitions and inherently prone to brute violence.' Or, after referring to medical schools where black people were 'reminded of their role as germ carriers', Mbeki said: 'Thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards (evidently referring to trade union leaders and Aids activists) to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its (sic) passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease… Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.' The gruesome reality of Aids rules out any irony in Mbeki's comments. Let me further make explicit and unequivocal that, notwithstanding the above, colonialism was both real and a primary determinant in shaping our history and socioeconomic architecture. In addition, the rediscovery of colonialism is essential to the final burial of the idea that apartheid — the racial organisation and structure of South Africa — began only in 1948, when the Calvinist Afrikaners, unlike the nice, liberal English, took over the running of South Africa. 3 The colonisation supposedly in need of decolonising the mind The left in South Africa, Europe and the US were/are leading advocates of a decolonisation centred on universities and what is taught there. With South Africa this time being the unusual vanguard, meant Britain and the US — particularly since the Black Lives Matter uprisings of summer 2020 — catching up with the demands made by South African students five years earlier. 'Among the most visible targets' of this catching up, Pranay Somayajula notes, 'were intellectual and cultural institutions — universities, museums, archives, and the like — which came under pressure to 'decolonise' through gestures such as land acknowledgments, renaming buildings, repatriating looted artifacts, and reworking curricula to more adequately 'centre' black and indigenous voices.' This forced European institutions to reckon with their complicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, North American institutions to reckon with their complicity in settler-colonial violence against the continent's indigenous peoples, and institutions to reckon with their complicity in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Somayajula's conclusion is that this focus 'on the institutions that function as pillars of Western knowledge production constitutes in many ways an indictment of Western epistemology itself… Implicit in this critique of dominant forms of knowledge production is a call to uplift in their place the indigenous ways of knowing and being that have been suppressed by the same processes of colonial violence and dispossession in which these institutions were (and are) complicit.' South Africa's student rebellion of 2015-17 provides a case study of what this means in practice. The student who threw the poo at Rhodes' statue that sparked the rebellion came dressed as a mine worker. The Marikana Massacre of 2012 is a stark reminder that the problem is not colonialism, or Rhodes' dead legacy, but the awful power of his very-much-alive mining descendants, for whom colonialism is rightly history. The exclusive focusing on the colonial insult symbolised by Rhodes' statue leaves this living legacy untouched. Shouting for the removal of other 'white colonial' names — like in 'Jameson' Hall — makes it very easy for the university authorities to agree. It is easy for them to do so for it serves as a distractive anachronism. Focusing on our formal colonial past obscures the inconvenient present and its truth that UCT is heavily reliant on the various post-colonial forms of Rhodes' legacy for its current funding; a reliance reflected in so many of the corporate names that now festoon supposed 'academic' buildings. Indeed, the entire corporate takeover of all universities, not just UCT, is the living legacy of Rhodes, the mining magnate/politician. This ought to be a prime focus of students who describe themselves as radical. Instead, they divided themselves on so-called 'racial' lines and, as a final mocking irony, did so using the 'races' Rhodes did so much to institutionalise as part of his divide-and-rule legacy. His contribution to the forced creation of an African working class with a ready and self-replenishing supply of dirt-cheap labour for his gold mines is a prominent feature of his legacy. The supposedly 'black students' demanding the removal of the offending statue bring warmth to the coffins containing the heroes of the apartheid pantheon, beginning with Dr Hendrik Verwoerd. These apartheid architects argued that the four 'races' of apartheid South Africa reflected a natural order in which each 'race' had to live separate from the others because of their natural differences and in-born wishes. 'Coloureds' and 'Indians' are not black, according to the students who accused the formerly white universities of still being predominately 'white'. Students were not welcome at some of the student gatherings because of their 'whiteness', even though they fully supported the 'black' campaign to remove Rhodes from UCT as part of the decolonisation campaign that swept the country. Rhodes, too, would have greatly enjoyed this spectacle of how students allowed the 'races' he helped manufacture to divide themselves, even while campaigning against his 'colonial' legacy of dispossession and subjugation. Colour-coding access to scarce resources is the main hallmark of the new, post-apartheid, non-racial South Africa. We'll be returning to this issue in due course. The right wing has also been prolific in its understanding of what decolonising means. The well-known academic, Professor William Gumede, of Wits University, provides one such example in his 2022 Daily Maverick article, ' African economic transformation demands a radical shock to failed post-colonial system '. His article begins: 'Several types of collective mindset changes drove the astonishing industrial transformation of the East Asian developmental states from similar poverty levels to their African and developing country peers, to levels of development similar to or better than those of their former colonial occupiers.' And ends: 'If… South Africa and other African and developing countries want to mimic the extraordinary and radical economic transformation of the East Asian tiger economies, (they) will have to undergo drastic individual and collective mindset changes, and overhaul old institutions, behaviours and customs. Without such a shock to thinking patterns, they will stay locked in mass underdevelopment, poverty and instability.' A single word defines his remedy: entrepreneurship. It is this, he contends, that has transformed all four of the countries he mentions: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. What he singularly fails to mention is that the first three countries all owe their good fortune to the privileges the US allowed them as an integral part of the post-World War 2 challenge posed by both the Soviet Union and the then China. Highly selective perception is required to see Singapore as a success story, as detailed in 'Singapore — little to sing about despite Greg Mills' call for encores', my January 2024 response to a Daily Maverick article by Greg Mills. (This response is the only one never published by the Daily Maverick but is available on request.) Franz Fanon now enters the story with his seminal book, first published in 1952, Black Skin, White Masks. Many worldwide have long attributed the need to decolonise the mind to this book. Yet 'decolonise' does not appear in the book, not even once. It is, indeed, part of his book, The Wretched of the Earth. This difference is not an academic quibble. It alerts us to the confusions caused by the misuse of colonialism and why that matters. Considerably.
