Automatically translated by IA.
The brutal offensive of the State of Israel on Gaza brought to the fore, once again, the deeply racist, colonial and segregationist nature of the Zionist regime. More and more sectors, including international human rights organizations, agree that what the Palestinian people are experiencing constitutes a system of apartheid. Faced with this reality, it becomes urgent to recover the historical lessons of another regime of oppression that was also denounced and fought as such: South African Apartheid. Both experiences share institutionalized structures of exclusion, systematic repression and racial domination, and a history of heroic popular resistance. Understanding the causes of the collapse of the South African regime provides key tools to think about how to confront Israeli apartheid and make way for a free Palestine.
By Ariana Del Zotto
The end of apartheid was the result of decades of workers’ and people’s struggle. A combination of strikes, mobilizations, insurgent municipalities and international pressure forced the regime to sit down at a negotiating table[1]. Mass strikes, sabotage, resistance and international solidarity, including the economic and cultural boycott, played a key role. Therefore, it was not a simple negotiation between the white elites of the regime and the African National Congress (ANC) that ended apartheid, but the massive resistance of workers, youth and impoverished sectors of the cities.
One of the most significant turning points in the struggle against apartheid was the Soweto uprising in 1976, where hundreds of students were killed by the police in a mobilization against the imposition of speaking in black schools a language that was not their own, Afrikaans, a language of the white minority. The brutal repression of the regime, which included the murder of almost 200 young people, including that of Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy whose image became a global symbol of the horror of apartheid, generated a wave of international outrage and strengthened the South African resistance. These episodes, added to massive general strikes such as those that took place between 1984 and 1986, made it clear that this regime could no longer be sustained without permanent repression. The accumulation of these elements was eroding the internal and external legitimacy of the regime, preparing the conditions for its collapse.
The murder of young people like Hector Pieterson, portrayed in this photo, aroused international solidarity and marked a turning point in the struggle against apartheid.
The transition process was carefully designed by the ruling class and imperialism to avoid a structural break with South African capitalism and preserve the economic privileges of the white minority. Far from dismantling the economic pillars of apartheid, South Africa joined the neoliberal world order[2]. The government of the African National Congress committed itself from the beginning to a program of neoliberal economic measures, which turned its back on the redistributive promises of the Freedom Charter[3].
That is to say, that democratic triumph of 1994 also marked the beginning of a great disappointment for millions of South Africans who had staged a heroic struggle for a fundamental change. The black leaderships that led the transition process, mainly the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the central trade union COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, played a decisive role not only for the resistance, but also in the architecture of the new regime. Given the opportunity to promote a revolutionary break with the old order, they opted for a negotiated solution with the white bourgeoisie and imperialist interests, which guaranteed the stability of the capitalist system. Under the banner of ”national reconciliation,” they agreed to preserve private property, renounced nationalizing strategic sectors such as banking, the mining and energy industry, among others, and kept intact the agrarian and urban structure inherited from Apartheid.
All these definitions were justified by Nelson Mandela, who relied on the idea of maintaining “stability” and “attracting investment”. Mandela had become an unquestionable symbol of the struggle for freedom and a historical reference of the black South African people, and assumed a central role in this agreed transition strategy. His figure, which synthesized decades of sacrifice and resistance, was used by local and international elites to legitimize an orderly exit that did not question the current economic order. During its mandate, the ANC avoided confrontation with the large capitals that benefited from the Apartheid regime and prioritized maintaining “social peace” rather than moving towards a real redistribution of wealth or structural reform. The figure of Mandela, although deeply respected by the masses, ended up being functional to a project that indefinitely postponed the aspirations of millions for social justice.
Another key element in this capitulation was the role of the South African Communist Party, which throughout the transition subordinated its program and strategy to the leadership of the ANC under the logic of the “national democratic front”, indefinitely postponing any socialist project. Instead of fighting for a class alternative, the SACP acted as the ideological and political support of a government that in a short time became the guarantor of capitalist interests. This policy helped to demobilize the most radicalized sectors of the mass movement, which had come from years of struggle and organization from below.
As the economist and activist Patrick Bond puts it, this “transition of elites” consolidated a new black ruling class allied to international capital, while the material living conditions of the popular majorities changed little or nothing. The frustration spread among millions who had fought for a different world, and racism, although stripped of its previous legal form, reproduced itself under new forms of social, territorial and economic exclusion.
Today, although the legal system of segregation has been dismantled, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. The ANC subordinated itself to international capital and the interests of the national black bourgeoisie, consolidating a neoliberal regime that keeps the bulk of the working population in conditions of structural poverty.
Today, the experience of apartheid in South Africa resonates deeply in the situation of the Palestinian people. Various international organizations, including Human Rights Watch[4] and Amnesty International[5], have documented that the Israeli regime constitutes a system of apartheid: a systematic domination of one population over another through territorial fragmentation, expulsion, repression, and legal and institutional discrimination. The West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Palestinian citizens themselves in Israel live under different forms of oppression, all articulated by the objective of maintaining ethnic and religious supremacy over the whole territory.
The South African experience offers key lessons. Apartheid fell not because it was unfeasible per se, but because mass mobilization and international solidarity made it unsustainable. The Palestinian struggle demands us, as yesterday in South Africa, to build the greatest international solidarity and support, as well as a revolutionary leadership that not only confronts the State of Israel, but also the Arab bourgeoisies that tolerate it and imperialism that finances it[6] and protects it, understanding that nothing that Israel did and is doing would be possible without the support and financing of US imperialism, and the complicity by omission of the rest of the regional and world powers. The construction of this revolutionary leadership in the Middle East and in the world is the definitive element so that these popular rebellions do not stagnate and retreat as happened in South Africa, but advance in the defeat of the genocidal State of Israel and put an end to imperialist interference, making way for a unique, secular, non-racist, democratic and socialist Palestine. Only with such a leadership at the head of a socialist revolution throughout the Middle East, progress can be made in the defeat of the Zionist apartheid regime and towards a true emancipation of the Palestinian people.
Remembering and drawing conclusions about the process that ended with the apartheid regime in South Africa should not be at the service of feeding the false narrative of reconciliation between oppressors and oppressed, that diplomatic pressure or bourgeois humanitarianism is enough, but it should be at the service of reinforcing the conviction that the regimes of segregation and racism can be defeated with the collective action of peoples and socialism as a horizon.
[1] Alex Callinicos, South Africa: Between Reform and Revolution, International Socialism Magazine, Issue 61 (1993).
[2] Sampie Terreblanche, History of Inequality in South Africa, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2002.
[3] Patrick Bond, The Transition of the elite: From apartheid to neoliberalism in South Africa, Pluto Press, 2000.
[4]Human Rights Watch, Crossing a Threshold: The Israeli authorities, their apartheid crimes, and the persecution, 2021.
[https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution]
[5] Amnesty International, Israeli apartheid against the Palestinian population: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity, 2022.
[https://www.amnesty.org/es/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/]
[6] Congressional Research Service, U.S. International Aid to Israel, updated 2023.
[https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf ]
