African National Congress
Updated 2023-12-08
2023-12-06 Unpack the past: Mandela, the keffiyeh and South Africa’s Palestine embrace Mandela felt a special bond with the Palestinian people. In 1997, while still president of South Africa, he said the ANC’s struggle was ongoing. “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
“The ANC’s support networks in exile crossed the Cold War divide,” he explained. “The party was very good at talking to anybody and everybody. They had an office in London but were also talking to Gaddafi and Castro and the like.” But, Graham stressed, “Their real support came from the Eastern bloc. This meant it developed really close relations at the very top of the ANC, which persisted well into the post-apartheid era.” Mandela’s inauguration in 1994, for instance, saw Arafat and Castro sitting a discreet distance away from US Vice President Al Gore and First Lady Hilary Clinton at a time when Washington treated the PLO and Cuba’s communist government as pariahs.
Despite having now been in power for almost 30 years, the ANC still sees itself as a liberation movement whose project is incomplete, Graham said. “The ANC tailored its foreign policy after 1990 on the basis of its experience in the liberation struggle. They view themselves as pushing for a new international order, and the Palestinian struggle as an extension of the ANC struggle.” There is, he adds, “no strictly economic rationale in supporting Cuba, or Palestine … or Russia. It’s more of an affinity, part of a worldview that looks on these as being separate fronts in a shared global struggle.”
The ANC’s affinity with Palestine is also not surprising given the close ties between Israel and the apartheid government. In the 1930s, the National Party membership card featured the Swastika, and during World War II, BJ Vorster, who went on to serve as South Africa’s prime minister from 1966 to 1978, was jailed for his involvement in the paramilitary wing of the anti-British, pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag.
In 1993, Mandela said the ANC had been “extremely unhappy” with Israel’s collaboration with the apartheid government. The ANC’s senior leadership has not forgotten that many of the weapons the apartheid government used to kill their people were bought from Israel. It has since emerged that Israel even went so far as to offer nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime.
On December 16, 1961, handbills were scattered in the townships of Port Elizabeth and pasted on lamp posts in Johannesburg: “The people’s patience is not endless. The time comes in the life of any nation where there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom.”
That context is vital to understanding comments made by Mandela during a state visit to Palestine in 1999: “Choose peace rather than confrontation. Except in cases where we cannot get, where we cannot proceed, or we cannot move forward. Then if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.” That alternative of violence was one that Mandela used sparingly. Under Mandela, MK only carried out sabotage strikes on state infrastructure and military installations, going to great lengths to prevent civilian loss of life.
A decade after his passing, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is killing thousands of civilians. The death toll is close to 16,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children. To Mandela, it would surely have felt personal. As he said during his 1999 visit to Gaza, he felt “at home among compatriots”. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/unpack-the-past-mandela-the-keffiyeh-and-south-africa-s-palestine-embrace/ar-AA1l2b04
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