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War Against Apartheid: Why South Africa Won and Palestine Has to Wait

Perhaps the biggest problem facing the Palestinian struggle, and something that our comrades in South Africa did not face, is that Zionism has a ready-made drama that it uses to blackmail and intimidate anyone who dares to criticize it. Read More

Monday January 29, 2024 6:02 PM , Dr Salim Nazzal

I remember a conversation I had with a friend from South Africa

We were sitting drinking coffee at the Fredrika café at the University of Oslo. He asked me:

“Who will win first, South Africa or Palestine?”

I said without hesitation:

“South Africa.”

He said:

“Why did you say that so confidently? Let me tell you, my friend, we both face similar problems, but there is a difference between the two racist systems. The whites of South Africa want the land and the people together, but in Palestine, they want the land and to expel the people.”

Then I started talking about what I believed were significant differences between the two racist experiences, and these are differences that are still relevant to remember today, even after all these years.

Perhaps the biggest problem facing the Palestinian struggle, and something that our comrades in South Africa did not face, is that Zionism has a ready-made drama that it uses to blackmail and intimidate anyone who dares to criticize it.

And here we are now, in the battle of Gaza, we see the clear use of all the arsenal of Zionist blackmail, from the Holocaust to anti-Semitism, which are European problems in the first place, but they are used to suppress the Palestinians.

Secular Zionism was no less criminal than the religious Zionism that rules today. But the difference is that secular Zionism succeeded for decades in wearing a glove to hide its ugliest face because it cared about world public opinion. Its goal was to appear as a democratic state that was considered an extension of the West, as in the cases of Canada and Australia. But religious Zionism does not care at all about public opinion, as evidenced by the shocking level of crimes we are seeing.

When I and a South African activist were invited to speak at the university, I asked him to speak before me because I knew that it would be easier for him to win over Western sympathizers and that might help me when I talk after him. I told him:

“You are lucky that you have an enemy that does not claim to be a victim. Our enemy is no less racist than the South African system, but they have been able to market themselves as a victim.”

It is ridiculous that the attack of 7 October is being portrayed as an attack on Israel. It is a struggle or a chapter in the long Palestinian struggle that has lasted for a century, and it cannot be separated from the past. The position of democratic South Africa in bringing a case against Israel in the ICJ was welcomed by the Palestinian people.

Today, the deliberations of the Hague Tribunal will appear which constitute as expected a blow to the racist Zionist regime.

The struggle of the Palestinian people may be long, but it is bound to succeed, as South Africa did.

[The writer, Salim Nazzal, is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology, in thought, culture and ideology, the road to Baghdad.]

 

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