David Saks writes a reponse to Suraya Dadoo's column 'The hijacking of Nelson Mandela's legacy by the Zionist lobby'.
When Nelson Mandela, shortly after his release, met with and warmly embraced Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, it sent shock waves through an already jittery Jewish community in South Africa. This, after all, was before the Oslo Peace Process, and officially the PLO was still wedded to its traditional policy of pursuing Israel's violent destruction.
Interestingly, it turned out that for many local Muslims (and no doubt for many hard-line leftists within his own party as well), Mandela's pro-Palestinian stance did not go far enough. As a report in Muslim Views on his address to Muslim community leaders in March 1992 noted, "It came as something of a shock when Mandela told the audience that he recognised the right of Israel's existence".
In his keynote address to the 1993 SA Jewish Board of Deputies' national conference, Mandela summed up his, and indeed the ANC's stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "As a movement, we recognise the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism just as we recognise the legitimacy of Zionism as a Jewish nationalism. We insist on the right of the state of Israel to exist within secure borders but with equal vigour support the Palestinian right to national self-determination."
This would be Mandela's consistently held view to the end of his life.
However, by dint of constant repetition, what is far better known is his comment, "we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians" (predictably, the concluding part of that same statement reading "without the resolution of conflicts in East Timor, the Sudan and other parts of the world" is invariably omitted.
Claims on Mandela
Given Mandela’s extraordinary stature, it is hardly surprising that those on opposite sides of the Israel-Palestine divide frequently try to portray him as having essentially been in their camp. Part of this inevitably involves cherry-picking quotes he periodically made on the subject, of which the following, said during an speech made in Gaza in 1999 and cited by Suraya Dadoo of the Media Review Network (MRN), is an example: "In cases where we cannot move forward, then if the only alternative is violence, then we will use violence."
According to Dadoo, this refutes the liberal Zionist claim that had Mandela rather than Arafat been the Palestinians' leader, he would "never have resorted to the Second Intifada".
As will be recalled, the Second Intifada - a euphemism for what turned out to be a prolonged war against the Israeli population that only petered out some four years later - was launched in September 2000.
It followed closely on Arafat having rejected Israeli peace proposals that would have given the Palestinians sovereignty over most of the West Bank and all of Gaza and walked away from the negotiating table.
According to Dadoo, Mandela would have supported the Palestinians choosing to jettison the peace process and turn to outright violence in which every Israeli Jew - combatant or non-combatant, man, woman or child - was regarded as a legitimate target.
Dadoo describes me as "a key Israel lobbyist in South Africa", and I return that compliment by pointing out that the organisation she represents essentially functions as the South African Friends of Hamas.
Like Hamas, the MRN is rigidly opposed to any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal based on territorial compromise, insisting instead on the absolutist "river-to-the-sea" formula aimed at the abolition of Israel as a sovereign Jewish majority state and its replacement by a single Arab Islamic-dominated entity. This is why the organisation so enthusiastically applauded and supported the Palestinians having chosen to abandon negotiations and return to outright violence.
However, to assert that Mandela himself shared this view is a far greater, as well as much more insulting distortion of who he was and what he believed in terms of what she holds the pro-Israel lobby is guilty of. It is also a serious distortion of South African history, particularly of the decision by the anti-apartheid underground to eventually resort to the "armed struggle" back in the early 1960s.
Armed resistance
The ANC embarked on armed resistance because all other avenues for peacefully opposing the apartheid system had been closed to it.
Ruthless state crackdowns, mass arrests, detention without trial, outlawing of collective protest action, banning orders (of organisations as well as individual activists) and ultimately the stubborn and arrogant refusal of the white regime to even listen to the grievances of the black majority ultimately left it with no choice.
What is also crucial to remember is that the violence actually engaged in back then involved attacking buildings and other installations, not civilians. That, unfortunately, was not always the case later on, but even then, the numbers of those killed by terrorism in South Africa never came remotely close to that of Israelis killed or injured as a matter of policy by the Palestinians.
To this day, the perpetrators of such atrocities are routinely glorified and held up as role models at all levels of Palestinian society, including in the educational system, government-controlled media and throughout political and religious establishment. Alongside this goes a constant racist demonisation of Jews and brazen denial of their history, something that would have been anathema to Mandela and indeed ran counter to everything he devoted his life to fighting.
No ideology set in stone
Mandela genuinely saw no reason why Israelis and Palestinians could not follow the South African route of successfully negotiating a peaceful settlement of their historic differences and thereafter co-exist in peace, and it was to be a source of real disappointment to him that this never happened.
Tragically, the bitter, vengeful and uncompromising nature of the Palestinian stance has to date made such a resolution unachievable, but even now one should not despair.
If there is one thing we can all learn from the life of Nelson Mandela and the example that he set it is that no ideology is set in stone, that people and those who govern and represent them are capable of change and that by talking, listening, empathising and understanding, even the most implacable enemies can find a way to live in peace and respect with one another.
- David Saks is the Associate Editor of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies.
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