I've been reading about South African history in light of ZA's actions to try and stop the genocide in Gaza and hopefully make progress towards ending Israeli Apartheid. Today I learned about Helen Suzman, the only member of the whites-only apartheid South African national assembly who consistently voted against Apartheid laws. She ran on an anti-apartheid platform and was consistently re-elected over and over again for 36 years until apartheid finally was ended. She used her privileges as a member of parliament to do things like evade censorship, smuggle information from ANC rebels into parliament hearings so it would be published in newspapers, attend funerals of anti-apartheid activists to prevent crackdowns, and would frequently visit ANC members like Nelson Mandela in prison because she knew every time she was visiting they would improve the conditions in order to impress her. In memoirs of ANC activists, they sometimes attribute to her frequent visits why they had not been killed by abusive prison wardens.
The great irony is that she was also the only Jewish person in South Africa's government, and that frequently she was told, by other members of parliament, to "shut up and go back to Israel." (She was born in South Africa to parents from Lithuania.)
This is who Jews are supposed to be. People who, when recipients of privilege, utilize it as allies and accomplices to those without it, and who fight to dismantle systems of apartheid. From the nazi ghettos to American segregation to the South African bantustans to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This is all systems of apartheid. We were the victims of ghettos, we love to brag about having fought against segregation, and the most famous South African Jew was an anti-apartheid activist.
So it is devastatingly disgusting and unjewish how many Jews today are supporting the Israeli Apartheid state. Learning about Apartheid the resemblance to Israel is so striking. The ways that Africans were forcibly evicted from their homes and relocated to Bantustans which were claimed to be autonomous, self-governing, or even independent countries, and yet were in reality controlled by South Africa. But because they were citizens of the Bantustans, they did not have South Africa citizenship. The Bantustans were referred by pro-apartheid politicians as "homelands." They were framed as being like North American indigenous/First Nations reservations. It's the same system of colonialism. They're ghettos. Gaza is a ghetto like Warsaw had a ghetto like the bantustans were ghettos like why segregated redlines neighborhoods today that Black people in America were forced to live in are referred to as "ghettos." Whatever small differences existed here and there, it's all the same general principal. Force a group to live in confined separate territories, claim those territories to be somehow independent and simply failing to self-govern as effectively despite that simply not being possible given the circumstances and that they are often not even allowed to self-govern, and cut them off from resources so they live in poverty and starve.
As often as we hear the name "Nelson Mandela" in the United States it's shocking how rarely anyone ever discusses South Africa in detail beyond that there was something called apartheid and that it was bad and it ended. The moment you look at it closer, you start to realize how apartheid was nothing unique. It becomes impossible to not see Palestine.
