Surrender Without Defeat

Erik Arnold

 

Much has been made in certain anti-Israel quarters regarding the alleged  similarities between the Jewish State and apartheid era South Africa; while the differences between these two countries have been dealt with by others elsewhere, correspondences do indeed exist between the pair, albeit in a way different from that usually proffered. In fact, South Africa's recent history can be used as a guideline whose consequences a "post Zionist" Israel should pay attention to with great circumspection.

 

White-ruled South Africa, like Israel in the Middle East today, was Africa's major state, boasting that continent's leading economy, most advanced cities, and a highly developed culture. Contrary to popular opinion, the Afrikaners, the country's main group of European extraction, were not mere colonists but a fusion of Dutch, German, and French Huguenot

immigrants who were melded together to form a unique community indigenous to South Africa alone. Unlike the settlers of such places as the United States and Argentina, for example, whose modern day descendants are not considered colonists for the sole reason that they became majorities in their respective places of residence, the Boers, as the members of the newborn people were once known, created not only an original society but also a new language, Afrikaans. Like the early Zionist pioneers many of the newcomers came not to live in cities and towns but to plow the virgin earth.

 

Also counter to prevailing notions the Dutch inhabitants did not conquer and subjugate a large, indigenous native population at the outset. Upon their arrival in the country they encountered only small, scattered bands of Bushmen and Hottentots. The Bantu speaking negroes who later coalesced into such tribes as the Xhosa, Zulu, and Basuto were in fact following a centuries-old push southwards from their original homeland in the Lake Region of Central Africa, ousting many other peoples in the process, at the same time as the European pioneers were moving north. Rather than one group invading the territory of the other, both communities encountered each other at a time of singular historical convergence. Like the myth of Jewish

immigrants displacing an original Arab community in Ottoman and subsequently British-ruled Palestine, emotional rhetoric has tended to obscure the actual facts of the situation.

 

Post-apartheid South Africa, then, is not a nation which has been returned to its original owners (there never were any) but rather a government where one ruling aggregation has replaced another. Historically, blacks (outside of the above-mentioned Bushmen and Hottentots, with both groups always being few in number and neither constituting anything resembling an organized union) have no more legitimate claim to dominion in South Africa than the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have to sovereignty in Israel. Both groups descend not from the original inhabitants of their respective lands but are themselves colonists of said regions who came from elsewhere; thus the delegitimization campaign waged against Jews and Afrikaners alike is based on false premises.

 

The replacement in South Africa of an Afrikaner government by a negro one has not resulted in a new age of racial equality but rather has led to the imposition of majority tyranny over minority interests. The ruling African National Congress, an ex-terrorist and communist influenced confederation, has developed into a one party dictatorship first under Nelson Mandela and, subsequently, under the iron leadership of Thabo Mbeki. The use of "one man, one vote," along with the ANC's continuing popularity among non-white voters, ensures that minority voices won't be heard.

 

What this example could mean for an embattled, disconcerted Israeli state desperately looking for a way out of its present political quagmire can best be illustrated by the following letter, dated January 4, 2002, addressed to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Yassir Arafat by the Group of 63, a think tank of Afrikaner academics and intellectuals:

 

"The Group of 63 was keenly interested to hear of the recent visit of Israeli and Palestinian delegations to South Africa, where they, according to media reports, came to "learn" from the experiences of the South African constitutional negotiation process. ... the Group of 63 believes that there are indeed parallels between the situations in the Middle East and South

Africa.

 

  ...The Group of 63 was established in May 2000 as a vanguard Afrikaans intellectual group. It owes its existence to the realization among the Afrikaans minority that South Africa has moved from a situation of illegitimate minority domination to one of unacceptable majority domination. This is an anomaly in the present democratic order.

 

For this very reason the Group of 63 wishes to draw your earnest attention to the imperative need to avoid such an outcome. It will not contribute to an eventual democratic and peaceful dispensation in the Middle East, because it involves, per se, a winner and a loser -  a scenario wholly unacceptable in true settlements.

 

At the same time the Group acknowledges that South Africa's negotiated settlement deserves great credit for bringing apartheid to an end and for avoiding the possibility of greater conflict in South and Southern Africa.

 

This, however, should not be misunderstood as the terminal point of democratic and constitutional development in our country. The reason... is that the process was not concluded with more or less equal concessions by both sides, but produced a clear winner (the African National Congress, ANC) and a loser, (the National Party, NP).

 

There is today a predominant view among the Afrikaans minority that the negotiation process which initially held such promise, was undermined by power plays such as rolling mass action and unsubstantiated accusations and

persistent threats by leaders against others.

 

The upshot was that the then NP government midway through the negotiations abandoned its initial commitments to limit majority power and protect minority interests in accordance with modern democratic practices.

 

"They (the NP) caved in on everything," Mr. Joe Slovo, a leading member of the ANC-Communist Party alliance, revealed.

 

  ... One of the most unfortunate features of the South African negotiation process has already been alluded to: the power plays and violence used and abused by parties to strengthen their bargaining positions. The outstanding example was the Boipatong massacre of 17 July 1992. The ANC held the Government responsible for the outrage and consequently withdrew from the negotiations. Subsequent court verdicts, however, showed that the Government was entirely innocent. Even so, the NP made major concessions to entice the ANC back to the negotiation table: it abandoned its original commitment to minority rights in favour of the principle of unfettered majority rule.

 

This development heralded a decisive power shift towards the ANC - with particularly adverse results for the quality and legitimacy of the eventual constitution.

 

The true nature of South Africa's negotiation process is probably best exposed in two of Mr. Nelson Mandela's utterances addressed to Mr. F.W. de Klerk: "Because you know in the end you are going to have to give in, and be humiliated, and I am trying to save you that humiliation." "The way to strengthen your party is to work with the ANC and working with the ANC means giving in to ANC demands. Because if you don't give in, we are going to humiliate you." (Both quotations are from the book, Anatomy of a Miracle by American journalist Patti Waldmeir).

 

The Afrikaans minority's disillusionment with the settlement is expressed forcefully in the caption of an editorial in the leading Afrikaans daily, Die Burger, in 1997: "Capitulation."

 

The historian Prof. Herman Giliomee, probably the foremost expert on the South African transition, in 1997... referred to the process as "surrender without defeat."

 

Because one party overwhelmed the other during the negotiations, the result was a constitution that primarily embodies the values and preferences of the victor. This has in turn led to the large scale alienation of the minority. Thousands of them have already left South Africa, while discontentment over the defects in the constitution is growing among those remaining in the

country.

 

It should be abundantly clear to Palestinian and Israeli leaders and negotiators that the methods followed during the South African negotiation process should not serve as a model or example. The outcome of the process, the Constitution - which does not guarantee the Afrikaans or any other minority even a school or university and fails to prevent the continued

disregard for languages other than English -  is the ultimate proof that the South African experience should not be emulated by parties in the Middle East." (www.groep63.org.za)

 

Mention must also be made of the purge of all Afrikaners from positions of government and the consequent disenfranchisement of the Afrikaans tongue in school and university alike, the brutal, racially motivated murder of nearly 2,000 white farmers by blacks (the ANC government attributes such killings to poverty and the legacy of apartheid and has prosecuted very few of the culprits), the race based policies which seek to eventually turn over the majority share in most businesses (even family owned firms) and farms to negroes (thereby dooming South Africa to become another Zimbabwe, whose President Mugabe murdered and expelled most white agriculturists from his domain), and the expunging of all traces of an Afrikaner presence in the country (the old Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free state have been broken up and renamed while Pretoria, named after an Afrikaner hero, is to be called Tswane in honor of an obscure tribal chieftain).

 

The quotations from the above letter as well as the overall situation in South Africa today should make amply clear the dangers that can ensue if a dispirited and confused Israel continues to offer suicidal concessions to an unrelenting Arab foe armed with the arrogance of self-righteousness and cloaked in the mantle of victimhood. Simply substituting the names of

Israel, Arafat, and the PLO for South Africa, Mandela, and the ANC reveal the close resemblance between the two circumstances.

 

Neither "disengagement" nor a "state of citizens" will solve the problems in the Middle East; only an Israel aware of the gravity of what is at stake and purged of the negative influences of a baseless defeatism can overcome the swamp which has now swallowed the once prosperous South Africa.