Above photo: Thousands participated in a march against ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza, at Cape Town on October 14, 2023.
Demand Expulsion Of Israeli Ambassador.
With the memory of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid still intact, people’s movements and the ruling bloc have reiterated solidarity with Palestine.
Multiple pro-Palestine rallies and demonstrations have been held in South Africa since last week, calling on its government to expel the Israeli ambassador and take other actions against the “apartheid state” for its ongoing bombardment and siege of the Gaza strip.
Ever since Palestinian resistance fighters resistance broke the 17-year long blockade on the densely populated Gaza, Israel has launched an indiscriminate and deadly bombardment of Gaza.
Close to 11,000 Palestinians have been wounded and at least 2,800 people have been killed as of Tuesday, October 16. Fatalities include more than 1,000 children, who are being killed at the rate of one every 15 minutes since the start of Israel’s military offensive on October 7.
Condemning these atrocities and declaring solidarity with the Palestinians’ struggle to liberate their historic land from Israeli occupation, thousands took to the streets in the Lenasia suburb of South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, on Sunday, October 15.
Duty To Mobilize Support From The Global South
The Palestinian Solidarity Alliance (PSA), which organized the Walk for Freedom in Lenasia, maintains that Hamas’ retaliation against Israel on October 7 was “an expected human response to the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people in besieged Gaza… in the refugee camps and in Occupied Palestine.”
Denouncing the “US and its nefarious sub-imperialist allies in the Middle East” for their “military and financial support” that enables the “apartheid state of Israel”, the PSA maintains that “it is our duty to mobilize support from the global South against the imperial forces which shackle Palestinians”.
Its statement called “on workers, especially those at our ports, to stop handling any goods coming from or being exported to Israel.”
The president of the General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA), Mametlwe Sebei, told Peoples Dispatch that “over 5,000 people turned up for the Lenasia walk. Houses in the area were empty. People were out cheering us on the streets. They were at every intersection to give us water, food, etc. It was an all-out mobilization.”
“The turnout was all the more remarkable” because it was not a national event, but a local mobilization in one suburb, he said, adding that he saw another Palestine solidarity demonstration in South Africa’s capital Pretoria while on his way to attend this rally in Lenasia.
In Absolute And Unqualified Solidarity With Palestine
“For the black working class in this country, there cannot be a question about which side of this struggle against apartheid we stand,” Sebei said in his address to the Lenasia demonstration. “They are fighting…a just war for their land, their country, and their democratic right to their own state,” he added. “And in that war… we stand with them in absolute and unqualified solidarity.”
Along with labor unions and civil society organizations, the South African Communist Party (SACP), an ally of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), also took part in the rally.
Questioned about the Israeli deaths in this war, reported to be 1,400 as of Tuesday, SACP spokesperson Alex Mashilo told Newzroom Afrika that in South Africa too “there were lives lost on both sides” during the struggle against Apartheid.
But “our struggle was just”, Mashilo said, adding that so is the struggle of the Palestinians, who, “like ourselves, have the right to stand up and fight for their freedom.”
“The Palestinian people find themselves where we as the African people of this land…found ourselves before [the defeat of the apartheid regime] in 1994,” he added.
In the current conflict, “the lives lost on the other side are lost because the other side has expropriated the Palestinian land,” Mashilo maintained, insisting that the “racist state” of Israel “must immediately end its occupation of Palestinian territory.”
The argument that the Israeli occupation is the cause of this conflict, for which blame cannot be laid at the door of the Palestinian resistance, is also echoed by the leadership of the ruling ANC.
“Palestinians Have The Right To Armed Struggle”
“People who throughout history have faced tyranny have the right to resort to armed struggle,” senior ANC member and former Minister for Intelligence Services, Ronnie Kasrils, told Peoples Dispatch at a demonstration outside the US Consulate on October 12.
“We are totally…with them in their just struggle against this diabolical colonial settlement of Israel within historic Palestine.”
While giving condolences to the families and loved ones of both Israelis and Palestinians who have lost lives in this conflict, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa made it clear, however, that solidarity can only be extended to Palestine.
Recalling the struggle of South Africans and the ruling ANC against an apartheid state that was defeated only three decades ago, Ramaphosa said in a video shared on his X account on October 14, that South Africa has always pledged solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
What has “sparked off this conflict that is now unfolding”, he argued, is “the violation of the rights of the Palestinians…through the occupation of their land” by Israel, which has “been dubbed an apartheid state.”
Condemning the Israeli bombardment of homes and hospitals, as a result of which “pregnant mothers are not even able to give birth in a respectable manner”, Ramaphosa added that the “worst part” is Israel’s warning “that 1.1 million people must evacuate the northern part of Gaza.”
Calling on the international community and the UN “to make sure that.. the Israeli government is directed at withdrawing this command” for “getting people out of the northern part of Gaza”, he warned that a failure to stop Israel might cause deaths on a scale that might amount to “genocide”.
The Struggle Against Apartheid Within The Living Memory
The South African government is compelled to take a position against Israeli apartheid because “the struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa is within the living memory” of the country’s masses, Sebei pointed out.
Despite the difference that Apartheid South Africa was “dependent on the native enslaved Black working class,” while Apartheid Israel has a program of “ethnic cleansing by replacing the native Palestinian labor with Jews and other migrants”, the similarities are “profound”, he adds.
He recalled the observation by Hendrik Verwoerd, “the architect of Apartheid in this country”, that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”
Speaking at the III International Conference on the Dilemmas of Humanity, which began in Johannesburg on October 14, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor also alluded to the similarities in experiences of South Africans and Palestinians under Apartheid.
“Gaza Strip has been under siege, with its people struggling to survive. Palestinians are denied exit and entry. We also had to enter separate entrances here in South Africa. We went through that too,” she recalled.
“The Israeli regime,” Sebei said, “was one of the major supporters of the apartheid regime in this country. It assisted apartheid South Africa to develop nuclear weapons which could have been used against the frontline states that supported the movement for liberation in this country.”
This recent history and the sentiment it evokes among the black South African masses informs ANC’s solidarity with Palestine.
However, the extent to which the South African government translates its words of solidarity into actions is limited by its integration into the global capitalist system, dominated by the imperialist interests of American and European finance capital that is backing Israel, Sebei adds.
Therefore, he argued, it has remained indecisive in the face of the popular demands for the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador and the boycott of its companies that profit from occupation or operate on occupied Palestinian lands.
GIWUSA has also called on the government to “expropriate all the Zionist interests in the economy.” The government, as of now, has not been receptive to these demands, even though it has been raised from within the ANC itself.
South African Freedom Is Incomplete Without Palestinians Liberation
“We have seen our president speaking on numerous occasions in parliament and of recent at the United Nations General Assembly, stating that we stand side by side with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. We want to say to the ANC-led government: let it not be lip service,” ANC MP, Mandla Mandela, said at a pro-Palestine demonstration in Cape Town on October 13.
He called on President Ramaphosa “to instruct the Minister of Transport to cancel the flight permits of EL-AI, which is an apartheid Israeli national air carrier, with immediate effect.”
He also called on Foreign Minister, Naledi Pandor, “to send a clear message to President Ramaphosa that the apartheid state of Israel’s embassy is no longer welcome in South Africa.”
Palestinians are “counting on each and every one of us to stand and be counted, like they stood side by side with us in the trenches when we fought to liberate our country,” insists Mandela.
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” his grandfather, Nelson Mandela, had said in his address 25 years ago on the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People in 1997.