Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forum“I Love Adolf Hitler”: BDS at South African Universities
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The claim that Israel is an apartheid state is especially salient in South Africa. And students who dont toe the party line often find themselves ostracizedor worse.
Speaking up for Israel is an act of supreme bravery in South Africa these days, particularly if you are a member of the ruling African National Congress. After more than two decades in power, the ANC is becoming discernibly more hostile to Israel with each passing year. The small number of activists inside the movement who have questioned this policy have rapidly become political outcasts.
The deep roots of the ANCs anti-Israel campaign have made it a natural bedfellow of the cacophonous Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in South Africa. On December 20, 2012, the ANC adopted the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel as its official policy. A resolution passed by the ANCs International Solidarity Conference stated, The ANC is unequivocal in its support for the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination, and unapologetic in its view that the Palestinians are the victims and the oppressed in the conflict with Israel.
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The precipitous growth of the BDS movement in South Africa began with Thabo Mbekis presidency, from 1999 to 2008, and stemmed from his unusual fascination with the Arab-Israeli conflict, as chronicled by RW Johnson in the book Will South Africa Survive? Mbekis belief was that now that South Africa had been liberated from apartheid, the natural next step was to free the Palestinians from Zionismcaricatured as a colonial movement dispossessing and expropriating the native population. In South Africa, Mbeki saw with his own eyes an oppressive white minority regimejust ten percent of the total populationwhich had imposed itself upon a non-white majority, creating in the process an oppressive class-system that had to be overthrown. Mbeki likened the Palestinian struggle to the South African experience on several occasions, such as his opening remarks at the United Nations African Meeting in Support of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People in 2004, and at an Al-Jazeera forum in 2010. As chronicled in RW Johnsons book How Long will South Africa Survive?, the Mbeki administration saw the necessity of using the same methods against Apartheid Israel as had been used against the Boers in order to achieve the same result. Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions were those methods, and Jews (cast in the role of whites) handing over power to the rightful owners of the land (Palestinians, cast in the role of blacks) was the intended outcome.
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[url]http://www.thetower.org/article/i-love-adolf-hitler-bds-at-south-african-universities[/url]
shenmue
(38,506 posts)Warpy
(111,261 posts)due to the horrific actions of the Likud government is a Hitler fan?
This post does nothing to raise the already abysmal level of the discourse on the subject.
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)see below
grossproffit
(5,591 posts)azurnoir
(45,850 posts)grossproffit
(5,591 posts)azurnoir
(45,850 posts)South Africa's governing party is facing calls to denounce a member of its election campaign who posted an image of Adolf Hitler on Facebook with the comment, "Yes man, you were right!"
Rene Smit, a social media manager of the African National Congress (ANC) in Western Cape province, published the photo at the weekend. Below the Nazi dictator's face were the words: "I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them to tell you why I was killing them."
According to South Africa's Times newspaper, Smit said she shared the picture as part of the "outpour of protest against the Israeli killing of innocent babies and women in the Gaza Strip".
She posted the picture and the comment: "Yes man, you were right!" in her personal capacity, she added. "I remorsefully removed it immediately once I became aware that it is inappropriate and offensive."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/15/anc-calls-denounce-rene-smit-antisemitic-facebook-post
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)so yes there's some hard feelings towards Israel.
That doesn't excuse praising Hitler, obviously.
oberliner
(58,724 posts)Reagans embrace of apartheid South Africa
The regime of apartheid in South Africa, under which nonwhites were systematically oppressed and deprived of their rights, is remembered as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century.
Despite a growing international movement to topple apartheid in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan maintained a close alliance with a South African government that was showing no signs of serious reform. And the Reagan administration demonized opponents of apartheid, most notably the African National Congress, as dangerous and pro-communist. Reagan even vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on South Africa, only to be overruled by Congress.
http://www.salon.com/2011/02/05/ronald_reagan_apartheid_south_africa/
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Reagan was also an evil imperialist asshole. Great company Israel was keeping. And it wasn't just one Israeli leader. It was every Israeli government, regardless of party.
And Israel has only gotten worse since then. As is befitting the heirs to the Afrikaners' legacy.
oberliner
(58,724 posts)The twelve countries of the European Union (UK, in particular) were South Africa's top trading partners and closest allies into the early 1990s.
Incidentally, Mandela was trained by Mossad.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)...
The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit.
Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".
Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
Vorster's visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.
"We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.
"We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate."
Alongside the state-owned factories turning out materiel for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.
Black South Africans have very good reasons for hating Israel's guts. It actively aided and abetted apartheid. They've seen what Israel's values really are.
More:
"All that I'm telling you was completely secret," says Liel. "The knowledge of it was extremely limited to a small number of people outside the security establishment. But it so happened that many of our prime ministers were part of it, so if you take people such as [Shimon] Peres or Rabin, certainly they knew about it because they were part of the security establishment.
"At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating."
So did many politicians. Israeli cities found twins in South Africa, and Israel was alone among western nations in allowing the black homeland of Bophuthatswana to open an "embassy".
By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts.
"There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights," says Kasrils. "The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."
There are important differences. Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.
White South Africa and Israel painted themselves as enclaves of democratic civilisation on the front line in defending western values, yet both governments often demanded to be judged by the standards of the neighbours they claimed to be protecting the free world from.
"The whites [in South Africa] always saw their fate in a way related to the fate of the Israelis because the Israelis were a white minority surrounded by 200 million fanatic Muslims assisted by communism," says Liel. "Also, there was this analysis that said Israel is a civilised western island in the midst of these 200 million barbaric Arabs and it's the same as the Afrikaners; five million Afrikaners surrounded by hundreds of millions of blacks who are also assisted by communism."
When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel's security establishment balked. "When we came to the crossroads in '86-'87, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, 'You're crazy, it's suicidal.' They were saying we wouldn't have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it's probably true," he says.
On this forum, most of the pro-Israel commentators use the same language and justifications as the Zionist-Afrikaners alliance used back 30 years ago.
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)The article is confusing and fail to give any deeper insights into the situation. While I do think that the attitudes of some South African groups and individuals towards Israel are worth discussing, I don't think this OP is a good basis for such a discussion.
Sorry.
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)like the FB is over a year old and already dealt with but depends on the visceral reaction of its readers
however you're right there are some groups in SA that are worthy of discussion
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)King_David
(14,851 posts)Quelle Surprise
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)My head. These stories are so predictable. Just more evidence the odious bds movement will find zero support among elected officials in the US. The bds folks can't get out of their own way.