The memorial service for Nelson Mandela last week became, for many of the world leaders who attended, a diplomatic opportunity, laced with amnesia and hypocrisy.
Mourning Mandela was ‘the right thing’ to do, hence the presence of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who demonstrated his grief by posing for a grinning ‘selfie’ with US President Barack Obama and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt — like excited teenagers in Disneyworld. It is unlikely that Cameron was genuinely saddened by the death of the man his role model, Margaret Thatcher, described in 1987 as “a terrorist”. In the early 1980s, Cameron was a member of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS). While liberal and leftist students were singing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, the FCS had badges that read, ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’.
The Americans fare no better. Ronald Reagan described apartheid South Africa as “essential to the free world”. Mandela — who damned the US as a “threat to world peace” and for their “unspeakable atrocities” — was only removed from the US terrorism list in 2008.
Perhaps more telling than the attendances at the historical event were the absences. Most notable among these, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. The latter had last week penned a lengthy eulogy for Mandela, but as Yitzak Rabin’s defence minister, from 1974-1977, he revived the ailing Israeli economy with massive arms sales to the already isolated and heavily criticised Pretoria supremacist regime. Despite strenuous efforts, Israel was unable to suppress the leak, in 2006, of a 1975 military cooperation agreement signed by Shimon Peres and P.W. Botha. By the end of the 1970s, Israel had helped apartheid South Africa become a nuclear power. In exchange, the supremacist regime provided Israel with uranium and gave it space to test its nuclear warheads. Israel’s association with apartheid South Africa goes back decades. Coincidentally, both were born in 1948, and the South African Jewish community was the largest per capita financial donor to Israel in its infancy.
After the 1967 six-day war, and the 1973 Ramadan war, Israel’s international image morphed from refuge of the oppressed to that of coloniser and occupier. Its Arab neighbours and most of the African countries severed their ties with Israel, which turned to some of the most despotic regimes in the world for support — including Argentina, Chile, and apartheid South Africa.
In 1976, South African prime minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster received a red-carpet treatment from Yitzhak Rabin on an official visit to occupied Jerusalem. Vorster even visited the holocaust memorial; nobody seemed to remember that he had been a Nazi sympathiser in the Second World War, describing his Christian Nationalists as the South African equivalent of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism.
Begin’s right-wing Likud government (1977-83) was even more overt in its sympathies for Pretoria, perceiving the Israelis and Afrikaans as civilized Europeans besieged by an inferior, savage race. They each had their ”terrorist” bogeymen — Yasser Arafat and Mandela.
Nor was Pretoria’s contempt for black people at odds with Israel’s world view either then or today. Back in 1968, Rabin, then Ambassador to Washington, told the Israeli Knesset that, “The Negro problem has worsened”. He was referring to the aftermath of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. Although Israel is the only country in the region founded entirely upon migration, today’s black immigrants are imprisoned in camps and, where possible, deported.
The day after she returned from Mandela’s memorial service, Israel’s first Ethiopian-born Knesset member, Pnina Tamano-Shata, went to give blood in response to a government donation drive. She was refused because she was African.
As long ago as 1961, South Africa’s former prime minister and architect of apartheid observed: “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”
Today the apartheid system is more deeply entrenched — from the wall separating Arabs and Jews, and Israeli demands that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a “Jewish state”. Segregation is strictly enforced in the West Bank, with Israel colonists enjoying their own roads, legal system, the lion’s share of water supply and natural resources. In Gaza, the population is imprisoned and besieged by their oppressors.
The Pretoria regime was eventually dismantled — by the efforts of the African National Congress (ANC), certainly, but most of all by international sanctions and humiliating boycotts imposed by the civilised world. No western government has yet afforded the Palestinians this support in their struggle for justice. Not even the African-American President of the US — Obama.
As a result, Israel is emboldened. My relatives have told me about the proliferation of posters threatening young Palestinians with beating if they date Jewish girls. Female Jewish doctors have been banned from working late-night shifts in hospitals in case they have to “mix with Arabs”.
The critical perception of Israel as an apartheid state is gaining currency. Former US President Jimmy Carter’s book, Peace Not Apartheid, brought it into the mainstream and prominent Israelis, including Alon Liel, former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria and former prime minister Ehud Olmert, have warned that the country risks becoming a pariah state.
Mandela had famously said that, “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”.
So what can the Palestinians learn from Mandela’s story?
We can learn from Mandela’s dogged persistence and patience. He was not willing to compromise and when he was offered early release from prison, if he would “unconditionally reject violence as a political weapon”, he refused in the absence of a just settlement for black South Africans. Having exhausted all nonviolent means of protest and securing change, Mandela championed the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the ANC’s armed wing) 30-year campaign of sabotage, bombing and attacks on police and military targets. Even after his release and the start of power-sharing negotiations, Mandela encouraged the continuation of the MK, which protected ANC supporters from attack by white supremacists.
The final great lesson we can take from last Wednesday’s memorial is that nothing is set in stone.
There is already some momentum towards sanctions against Israel and a widening of the boycott. The European Union (EU) recently issued guidelines prohibiting the awards of EU grants, loans or prizes to Israeli entities on Palestinian lands. Last week, UK Trade & Investment warned companies about the risk to their “reputations” if they did business with Israeli colonies. Even the US has begun to distance itself from its embarrassing protege.
Those world leaders who appear disinterested in the Palestinian cause today will quickly clamber over the fence if it becomes the ‘right thing’ to do, and maybe take a ‘selfie’ on the way too.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the former editor of the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi. His latest book is After Bin Laden: Al Qaida, the Next Generation.
