Anti-Colonial Resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine

JVL Introduction

With a focus on resistance rather than domination, Ran Greenstein’s book Anti-Colonial Resistance in South Africa: Identity, Nationalism, and Race (Routledge, 2022) turns the Israel-Apartheid analogy on its head.

Scholarship has examined regime policies – legal discrimination, political oppression, land dispossession. In contrast, the book focuses on anti-colonial movements: how they theorized the conditions of struggle, identified allies, defined solutions, formulated strategies.

Both mainstream nationalist movements and radical left alternatives are discussed, including among others al-Ard, Fatah, and the Popular and Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine, and the ANC, SACP, PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. A somewhat tentative, somewhat provocative, attempt to draw historical lessons for current activism is likely to give rise to fruitful discussion.

We repost here a short introductory article to the themes of the book which first appeared in Hebrew in Local Call (forthcoming soon in English on +972) [11 Sep: now published, slightly edited, here] and link to a longer summary article published on the Wits University Social and Economic Research site.

You can also download the introduction to the book on the Taylor and Francis website here and click on the preview button on the top right of the screen.

Anti-Colonial Resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine

Ran Greenstein

Known as ‘the architect of apartheid’, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd should also be known as the architect of the Israel apartheid analogy. In November 1961 he declared: “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state”, after having taken over the country from the Arabs, who “had lived there for a thousand years”. Verwoerd meant that as praise, of course, but others used this notion in African and global forums in the 1970s to condemn Israel for the 1967 occupation and other violations of Palestinian rights.

Since then, the focus of the Israel apartheid analogy has remained on regime policies – legal discrimination, political oppression, land dispossession – as shown by the recent reports on the issue produced by local and global human rights organizations. Scholarly engagements with the analogy, and political campaigns around it, similarly display almost exclusive concern with the comparison of South African and Israeli apartheid-style policies.

On the ground though, another dimension became visible. Palestinian campaigns against the occupation and land confiscations, centered on the Day of the Land of March 1976, coincided with the Soweto Uprising in June that year. A decade later, the South African township rebellion of the 1980s coincided with the first Palestinian Intifada. In both places it seemed that a spontaneous uprising of young people, supported by community organizations and trade unions, would bring the system of domination to its knees. And indeed, that became the case in South Africa but only to a limited extent in Palestine, despite the hopes raised at the time. A relaxation of direct military rule during the Oslo process had been reversed by the second Intifada and its aftermath, with Israel putting in place harsher policies of dispossession, settlement, and Hafrada (literally, segregation/apartheid).

The entrenchment of Israeli domination in the last two decades can be contrasted with the transition to democracy and equality of legal and political rights in South Africa. It is no wonder that the success of the anti-apartheid struggle has become prominent as a historical analogy, moral lesson, and strategy for change. It is this last aspect that features centrally in my book, Anti-Colonial Resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine: Identity, Nationalism, and Race (Routledge, 2022), with special attention to conceptualisations and strategies of resistance over the course of the last century in the two countries.

The perspective I adopt differs from that of other comparative studies, in three key respects:

• it focuses on resistance rather than on domination;
• it looks at nationalist and radical left-wing movements as dynamic forces that responded to social and historical challenges, instead of offering a static set of legal and political principles; and
• it regards South Africa’s political trajectory as a topic in its own right rather than as a given benchmark used in order to examine the Palestinian struggle.

Much of the existing literature takes the dominance of the ANC alliance in the anti-apartheid struggle for granted, without bothering to study the historical process of its rise to such a position. In contrast, I examine it as an outcome of competition with other political tendencies that were just as powerful at certain periods, Africanism and Black Consciousness in particular.

Both in general terms, and specifically in these cases, the unfolding of resistance to domination requires that we look at it from the point of view of activists and intellectuals affiliated with anti-colonial movements, who operated mostly outside the boundaries of academia. Of most interest are the ways in which they theorized the conditions of struggle, identified potential allies and actual enemies, defined strategies and solutions, and confronted national and racial oppression creatively by formulating principled positions and practical programmes of action.

In retrospect, a great historical arch may emerge into view. In South Africa, resistance started from a meagre basis. Black South Africans were politically fragmented, and socially incorporated in a subordinated position into a state that was built on collaboration between white settler groups. As it gained in confidence due to local mobilization, inspired by regional and global developments, the movement shifted its goals: from seeking inclusion into white-dominated structures to demanding an overhaul of the entire political edifice. That strategy rested on a solid material foundation – the centrality of black workers as suppliers of cheap labour that was indispensable to the profitability of capital and the prosperity of white people. It enabled them to use that position as a leverage for political change from within the system. The locus of the most crucial political and social campaigns clearly was inside the country. The actions of leaderships in exile and solidarity movements overseas also played a role but one that hinged on the progress of the internal mass struggle.

An inclusive national identity was created in the process. It was potentially open to all South Africans regardless of their racial and ethnic background, despite varying political emphases on non-racialism, Africanism, and Black Consciousness. The discourse of struggle – that of the ANC in particular – combined appeals to specific constituencies defined by identity with messages raising universal notions of class, freedom, democracy, and justice. This approach facilitated a move towards a negotiated solution and the political transition of the 1990s.

The Palestinian-Arab movement moved in a different direction. It started with a demand for political power as the demographic majority and historical owner of the country. Although it was willing to accommodate Jews as minority, that was done from a position of strength, as a concession, without diluting the Arab claim to the land. That Palestinians owned most of the land until 1948, and only a few of them were employed by Jews who in turn never became dependent on their labour, made their claim to independence stronger, but it also deprived them of the kind of political leverage available to their black South African counterparts.

That stance was shattered with the 1948 Nakba though once the movement began to recover from the military defeat and the dispersion of the people, it continued to claim sole ownership of the country. At the same time, it started to shift its position regarding Jewish settlers, no longer a minority in the territory. They were still regarded as outsiders whose claims were based on the use of illegitimate force, but they had to be accommodated in any future arrangement – as a concession to reality, not as of right.

The slogan of a Secular Democratic Palestine in which all would live equally, adopted in slight variations by Fatah, the Popular Front, and the Democratic Front since 1970, was a major conceptual breakthrough. But, it was formulated within an Arab or a Palestinian-Arab nationalist framework that Israeli Jews never regarded as genuinely inclusive. Whereas anti-colonial nationalism in South Africa encompassed all residents, at least in theory, ethnic nationalism in Israel/Palestine has played a divisive role. An overall national identity to include all groups, even if potentially only, has not emerged. In the absence of such an identity, from the late-1970s onwards compromise solutions have taken the form of separate sovereignties – for Palestinians on an ever-shrinking territorial basis – rather than participation within inclusive political structures as is the case in South Africa. Whether the goal is single or binational state, a federation or a confederation, a sustainable solution would have to be based on recognition of individual as well as collective group rights, based on distinct national identities.

In providing a historical account, I cannot offer a recipe for future progress in the Palestinian struggle, though it is possible to identify lessons from the South African experience. Three lessons stand out:

• The need for mass mobilization inside the country as the central force applying pressure on the regime and pushing for change, encompassing workers, students, community members, religious congregations, NGOs, and structures of civil society. Armed struggle played a role and external solidarity added to the pressure but the key role in the struggle was undertaken by internal forces.
• The need to organize on a non-sectarian basis to facilitate a move beyond racial and ethnic divisions enforced by the state. One of the greatest assets of the ANC, which allowed it to become dominant, was its non-racial perspective that highlighted the central role of the oppressed black masses and created space for all who wished to work for democracy and justice regardless of background. In this way a small but important segment of the dominant group, young white people in particular and to some extent a section of the business community, was encouraged to break ranks with the regime, undermine its legitimacy, and lend support to the efforts of the mass movement.
• Somewhat in tension with the previous point, the need to frame specific appeals to constituencies organised on the basis of race, ethnicity, and religion, within a set of universal principles of justice, redress, human rights, equality, and democracy. This helped make the local struggle more inclusive and facilitated global solidarity efforts.

To what extent the lessons of one specific case can be applied in another case remains a crucial question, of course.

You can also read a longer summary article published on the Wits University Social and Economic Research site, August 2022.

You can also download the introduction to the book on the Taylor and Francis website here and click on the preview button on the top right of the screen.