A year before his death in 1993, OR Tambo said: “I reaffirm the principled solidarity of the ANC and the people of South Africa with the struggle of the Palestinian people.”
Like the colonised native Americans and enslaved Africans in the US, Aborigines in Australia, and black people in South Africa, Palestinians are victims of settler colonialism.
To support the liberation of the Palestinians is not to be against Jewish people or spiritual Zionism. Many black South Africans subscribe to spiritual Zionism. Mahmood Mamdani draws a distinction between political and spiritual Zionism. The latter does not necessarily seek to establish a Jewish settler state, whereas political Zionism seeks to support an exclusive Jewish nation state.
Political Zionists understood Jewish oppression as stemming from their not having their own nation state in the context of a world politically organised around them. After serious debates, political Zionists identified Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people to build an Israeli state.
Like Bantustan ethnic nationalist leaders in South Africa, political Zionists never imagined ethnic cultural societies without an ethnic-exclusive nation state. Political Zionists do not believe that a cultural Jewish society could exist without an ethnic apartheid state.
Before the organised Jewish mass migration, Palestine was a place where both Jewish people and Arabs lived together as equals. A Jewish population lived in Palestine before the co-ordinated mass migration into Palestine — as part of the pre-1948 migration for religious reasons to worship in Jerusalem. These first organised immigrants blended into a multicultural community consisting of Muslims and Christians under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, and later the British Empire.
Instead of integrating Jewish people into post-Holocaust Europe as equal citizens, political Zionists saw it as necessary to establish an exclusive state for the Jewish nation
The second wave of migration was motivated by British colonial interests to weaken the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The political Zionist movement became an internal natural ally to establish the Israeli apartheid state.
Instead of integrating Jewish people into post-Holocaust Europe, particularly in Germany, as equal citizens, political Zionists and powerful forces in Europe and the US saw it as necessary to establish an exclusive state for the Jewish nation, which led to the further land dispossession of the Arab Palestinian people.
Jewish people who fled Nazi Germany by boat were turned away by many countries and sent back to be slaughtered by the Nazis. Does this give political Zionists the right to discriminate and kill Arab Palestinians? No, it does not. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is no different from what Hitler did to the Jewish people, Americans to native Americans, and the English to natives in Australia.
Like Afrikaner political nationalists in 1948, the political Zionists installed the Israeli apartheid state in 1948, which intensified the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In South Africa, Afrikaner nationalists further separated Africans into ethnic groups and ethnic Bantustans.
Two- or one-state solution?
Part of the solution that has been put forward to resolve the oppression of Palestinians is the two-state solution. This calls for two separate nation states — one for the Israelis and the other for the Palestinians. This would be like demanding a two-state solution in South Africa in 1994 and accepting the post-1913 land settlement in which Africans (colonially defined) would continue to own only 13% of the land.
At some point, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation believed in a one-state solution, in which there would be equality between and among citizens within the same nation, as opposed to the current Israeli apartheid state. Nation-building through unification, as opposed to separatism, has been one of the calls by revolutionary nationalists such as John Garang in Sudan.
The ANC, under the leadership of Tambo, demanded a united South Africa under one democratic government. While pledging solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine, are we building the society envisioned by Tambo?
The legacy of apartheid-colonialism, however, continues to divide South Africans. Black Africans still live in ethnically segregated former Bantustans.
The legacy of apartheid geography has been codified and reproduced in the post-apartheid state formation. We have replaced ethnic-based homelands with post-apartheid ethnic districts and, in certain instances, with ethnic provinces. This situation of ethnic-based political districts and provinces has created an entitlement to state and leadership purely based on ethnic majoritarianism.
As a result, districts, and provinces — with the exception of Gauteng — are largely politically led and bureaucratically administered based on the ethnic and geographic origins of the occupants of office.
Whereas in China one cannot be mayor or premier in the area in which one was born, in South Africa appointments of officials, particularly in local and provincial governments, tend to coincide with the linguistic identities and geographic origins of the senior officials based on ethnic majoritarianism.
The idea that the majority and minority are ethnically determined is un-ANC. The logic of ethnic majoritarianism as a basis for constituting political communities is also a feature of apartheid Israel. Ethnic nationalism predates apartheid Israel. It is a crisis arising from the conception of the European nation state, which was also defined ethnically in the period 1880-1914.
The ANC has a deracialisation programme implicit in the legislative instruments of BEE. However, it also needs a detribalisation project that seriously questions the tribal aspects of South African politics.
• David Masondo is principal of the OR Tambo school of leadership and an ANC NEC member
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.