As South Africa navigates its divided stances on Palestine, it must also confront the lingering separations within itself—separations of identity, history, and morality that continue to shape its future, says the writer.
Image: IOL
By Mariam Jooma Çarikci
"You know that community WhatsApp groups are where humanity goes to die," came the text response from fellow journo during our discussion on the social ‘policing’ of topics related to Zionism and Israel.
It was a fairly busy morning for fingers across the neighbourhood chat with the text that started it all calling for the community to ‘bid vir die Joode’ even as Israel had already killed more than 3,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza by the middle of October 2023. Writing in English for the benefit of the many neighbours who do not speak Afrikaans I suggested that we are praying for the innocent Palestinians killed by the illegal occupation force. It was of course bound to flare up but what I was not expecting was the shallowness of the arguments.
Immediately the response came from another who furiously texted: ‘Don’t you know that Groenkloof was a predominantly Jewish area before?’, to which another supported, ‘I was thinking the same but I’m glad someone said so’. Naturally I responded with the obvious, that Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing and that my respect for the Jewish faith is obligatory for me as a Muslim, but I can have no respect for a colonial project called Zionism that appropriated Judaism as a front. Don’t take it from me – these are the words of numerous anti-Zionist scholars including prominent South African Jews. These authors were accused of ‘throwing Jews under the bus’ and I was promptly deleted from the group charged with ‘spreading hate’!
Forget the irony of claiming ownership over a land that clearly belonged to Indigenous South Africans before being separated out for its good parts by the Apartheid government, the ridiculousness of ownership through settlement in South Africa should raise the question of why then would you need to be in favour of evicting Palestinians from Occupied Palestine if your roots are in South Africa? It brought to mind the mood amongst the Jewish community in 1994 when many schoolmates headed off to bunker in Israel as they explained that ‘we don’t know what will happen after the elections’. The seamless move from one colony to another was not coincidental. Apartheid South Africa’s ideological, structural and cultural affiliation with the Zionist project was a matter of pride for both parties. Israel and South Africa bff’s forever – at least until global civil society pressure and the limits of race-based capitalism encroached on the dreams of the former.
And now more than a year later and close to 50,000 killed, half of whom are children these deep fissures remain. It especially evident when examining how white South Africans often align themselves with Israel, in a dynamic that speaks volumes about identity, power, and memory in post-apartheid South Africa.
These are the questions of identity and belonging that post-Apartheid South Africa has failed to reconcile and failing which has exacerbated the idea of a beleaguered minority.
This scenario has played out in tens of thousands of communities around the world in different formats as the global momentum to boycott Israeli products or opposing the appropriation of what sociologist’s call ‘surface culture’ in the form of Palestinian food and traditions. The backlash from Zionists is always predicated on the notions of simultaneous entitlement and victimhood. In post-Apartheid South Africa entitlement is no longer legally enforced but the sinister inversion of identity from perpetrator to victim.
Yes, there were many white South Africans and South African Jews who supported the anti-apartheid struggle even paying with their lives for it, but these individuals remain exceptions to the rule. The privilege of being considered white under Apartheid was far too comfortable and essential to private enterprise and the development of the Zionist colonial project that began simultaneously in 1948. Despite being exterminated by the Nazi’s for not being of the ‘superior race’, Zionist Jews found common cause for their colonial project in the white supremacist ideology of Apartheid.
The use of the suffering of Jews during WWII has become the principal reason for justifying Israel’s war crimes over almost eight decades. Israeli author, Alon Mizrahi argues that: ‘We must firmly reject the now openly-admitted establishment narrative that says only Jewish people have a history, memory, and meaning.’ To do so would be to begin to uncage the Zionist/white supremacist mind from the alienation it has brought upon itself – and to allow it to connect with the core beliefs of equality, peace and genuine human solidarity.
Steve Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness, rooted in self-awareness, dignity, and liberation from psychological and systemic oppression, offers a compelling lens for Israelis and post-Apartheid whites and others to critically examine and counter biases, including Zionist perspectives that perpetuate inequities against Palestinians and blacks. Biko was clear on his stance that the power asymmetry between whites and blacks in South Africa could only be dismantled through white people doing anti-racism work within their own communities. The key was to be honest about the circumstances of power and the limitations that power places on seeing others as human.
Prof of Journalism Nabil Echchaibi highlights the effects of not addressing the structural foundations of racism and by extension Zionism. He argues that, ‘Some of us can forget while others live permanently in the chokeholds of history… Statues of whiteness everywhere must fall, not because they offend us but because the ideological deafness that erected them is a license to kill.’
Indeed, the dehumanisation of Palestinians has been at the heart of the Zionist project which allows IDF soldiers to convince themselves of being the ‘most moral army in the world’ while pummeling six year old Hind Rajab with 335 rounds of fire including multiple tank rounds as she sat trapped in a car with her dead relatives calling out for help.
Hind’s story is one of millions that have been murdered in the name of an ethno-state since 1948. But the continuation of the colonial project is exhausting and its benefits to the ‘security’ of Israel a contradiction in terms. Zionist Jews must free themselves from the constant fight or flight mode of engaging the world and use the current moment as a spiritual and mental purging of racist entitlement that is eating itself from within.
Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone has written on the assault on Palestine almost daily for the past year powerfully captures Biko’s spirit in her own sentiments writing,
‘To be an authentic person is to stare deeply into the face of uncomfortable truths.
It’s to experience all the footage of shredded bodies in Gaza with a visceral understanding that these are real things happening to real people whose lives mattered just as much as your own.
To come to terms with the reality that the power structure you were raised to trust and the political party you were raised to side with are responsible for some of the worst things that have ever happened in our world, and that their depravity must be fought tooth and claw.
To admit that your previous understanding of an issue was a misguided perception caused by propaganda, and to be fully open to the possibility that this is also true of your current understanding of other issues as well.
To deeply recognize the ways your own delusion and dysfunction have played a role in the delusion and dysfunction of humanity as a whole, and to cease viewing yourself as separate or separable from the self-destructive patterning of our species.
To be honest with yourself about the circumstances of your birth and the ways in which you have it better than other people in different circumstances and in other parts of the world — often at the expense of those very populations.’
The contrasting positions on Palestine in South Africa reflect the unresolved tensions of a post-apartheid society still grappling with its past and its place in the world. Solidarity with Palestine, for many South Africans, is a profound expression of shared struggle and moral clarity. For others, particularly among white communities, Israel represents a different set of values—security, survival, and a rejection of what they perceive as biased narratives.
In this context, the words of the late South African poet Breyten Breytenbach offer a poignant reminder: “The great secret of apartheid was that it separated not only the people who lived in this land, but also the living from the dead, the memory from the act, the man from himself.” As South Africa navigates its divided stances on Palestine, it must also confront the lingering separations within itself—separations of identity, history, and morality that continue to shape its future.
* Mariam Jooma Carikci is a journalist and researcher at the Media Review Network (MRN). She has written and conducted field research on post-conflict reconstruction in several countries in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. She is the author of, 'Kurdistan: Achievable reality or Political Mirage? (2013)'.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.