With Friends Like These

Clueless in Gaza - MET - Chapter 58

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

On 11 February 1990, at 16:14 local time, Nelson Mandela, once South Africa's most wanted man, walked out of Victor Verster Prison hand-in-hand with his then wife Winnie, after spending 27 years behind bars.

Just four months later, on 21st June, he was invited to the US to be interviewed in front of a huge and mostly enthusiastic crowd by Ted Koppel, the famous American broadcast journalist. 

Not all of them were fans. When Koppel invited questions from the audience, one of them asked Mandela how, given their records on human rights, he could possibly have praised Yassar Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi and Fidel Castro in several public utterances since his release. 

He pondered the question in typical Madiba style — thoughtfully, carefully and coolly — before answering thus:

“One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think their enemies should be our enemies.”

Nelson Mandela - Ted Koppel Town Hall Interview, June 21, 1990

It was brilliant at the time. Today, as every country in the world that isn’t an actual and active protagonist for WW3 is wondering which side to join for the final showdown, it’s sheer genius.

Political analysts from Washington to Moscow are hard at work persuading these neutral or ambivalent nations that the friends or enemies of Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Libya, Palestine, South Africa and Navalny must be their friends or enemies too.   

The hands are slowly going up. 

Yesterday it was historically neutral Sweden joining NATO with Hungary’s approval. Finland had been obliged to make a similarly fatal choice. The day before it was France considering sending troops to help Ukraine. A few hours ago it was leaked that Germany is considering sending its long range Taurus missiles to Ukraine to allow them to hit targets deep in Russian territory. And so on and so forth as the other BRIC nations and the undecided minor players around the world nervously must now calculate which ring to throw their hats into. The choice they make will be existential, and they know it. 

Problematically for all of the bit-players, their historical enemies are unlikely to be the same enemies as those of their big besties. 

South Africa is emblematic of the case in point. The most vocal, active and committed enemies of apartheid weren’t the Western countries like the US and UK. Those bastions of democratic values continued to give tacit support to the apartheid regime as long as their major corporates could profit from the grotesque inequalities of it. Like them, Israel was a staunch and loyal supporter. 

South Africa’s anti-apartheid friends, as Mandela was unembarrassed to acknowledge, were precisely those enemies of the Western alliance and the Israeli lobbyists who deemed apartheid-South Africa to be a staunch and steady bulwark against the encroachment of the communist and socialist designs of Cuba, the Soviet Union, Libya, Palestine and that wider evil horde of anti-capitalists known and labelled by apartheid-Pretoria as die rooi gevaar — the red danger.

It was South Africa’s neighbours, Angola and Mozambique, who bore the bloody brunt of it back then. Until the Revolution of the Carnations that saw the last of Salazar in 1974, their desperate wars for independence from their Portuguese colonial masters were resisted by the same bastions of democracy, freedom and human rights who are right now providing the munitions to exterminate those Palestininans who are resourceful enough not to starve to death in the man-made famine of Gaza.

In 1971 I was called up to join the SADF in its fight against the rooi gevaar. Luckily or unluckily, as readers of my novel Kill Yourself & Count to 10 will judge for themselves, the only border I was obliged to cross was the one that separates civilization from the barbarism of the bosbefok. 

My point is Mandela’s point: the enemies I was called up to fight hated the apartheid regime even more than I did. The countries that supplied us with the weapons to fight them were precisely those western countries most invested in the continuation of the regime I abhorred. 

They were, in short, the enemies of my enemies. 

It’s important to note, some fifty years later, that despite Israel’s history of support for successive apartheid regimes from 1948 to 1994, Mandela himself was far from being the rabid anti-Zionist that the enemies of his friends would like to have made of him. In 1999, he called explicitly upon Arab leaders to “…make an unequivocal statement that they recognise the existence of Israel with secure borders”. 

You may have read my recent blog titled The Curse of the K-boetie. It was a rude, sweary and chaotic rant against the hypocrisy of the great democracies who made enemies of South Africa’s only true friends, and who continue to make enemies of those countries who oppose the self-evident genocide now taking place in Gaza.  

I may have over-indulged in the expletives. I may have wandered off the point. I may have published it without a thorough proof-reading of the facts, the terminology and the grammar. 

Perhaps I could have made it clearer that the curse of the so-called k-boetie is simply the instinctive and sometimes intolerable obligation to empathise with the feelings of other decent human beings, as many brave people did in the fight against apartheid, and which a growing number of people without moribund consciences continue to do in the fight for Palestinian rights.

I may have been blinded by my anger at the dangerous stupidities and hypocrisies emanating from the mouths of people like Biden, Cameron and Netanyahu. I may have been nudged beyond the limits of rational debate by the selective, specious and sententious reporting of the BBC, which I watch way too much of to stay reasonably sane. 

But I stand by every sentiment I tried to express. I was actually and sincerely trying to be helpful.   

I can’t help it. I got it from my mother. Of all the English traits I inherited from her, setting aside the genealogical propensity to be born with a white skin and Aryan blonde hair, was the atavistic English obligation to be nice. 

It was her niceness that prescribed and defined her profound disgust for apartheid, that led her to become an active participant in the Black Sash women’s movement that took a Ghandi-like stance against its self-evident evils; that had her standing, along with her fellow Black Sash colleagues, in silent protest on the streets of Pietermaritzburg when Mandela was trucked to jail in Durban from his capture near Cedara and all the way from Howick down through the crowded pavements of Commercial Road in 1962. I was at the old Merchiston where, at the age of nine, I and my curious contemporaries, alerted by the noise and the fracas, had a close-up view of the procession through the fence of the bottom playing field that bordered on Maritzburg’s main thoroughfare. I thought I saw a glimpse of his face behind the mesh bars of the police van in the middle of the convoy. I want to believe I did. 

I stand by the seven lessons the world never learned from apartheid, and from Mandela in particular. I believe they are profoundly important.  

But apparently I crossed a number of lines in the process, offending several other readers who rejected the Israel-apartheid equivalence out of hand, some who believed only the obliteration of the entire Palestinian population would quench their thirst for revenge for the massacre of 7th October, and many more who disagreed in colourful language with my belief that a only one-state solution, such as post-apartheid South Africa, would put their historical troubles to bed once and for all. 

Minutes after posting it, the following terse message arrived from an old friend of mine. I’ll call him Dick:

Great. Tell Hamas. 

BTW, genocide was coined to describe the Holocaust. It means race murder. Someone has to tell the 2 million Palestinian Arabs to give up their free Israeli  healthcare. 

Ignorance is bliss.

It stung. Especially the ignorance.

Yes, perhaps I could have been more restrained in my language, more diligent in my proof-reading, and more thorough in my research. Perhaps I needed to get my facts straight. If two million Palestinian Arabs were indeed getting free healthcare from Israel, maybe I had misjudged the entire affair. 

My instant response was to delete the post from public view until I checked the facts. After pressing the fatal button, I searched for a credible source. Eventually I found this one: an organisation called The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Among the many other illuminating facts it disclosed were these. It’s long but worth it:

The blockade Israel has been imposing on the Gaza Strip for more than 15 years has crushed Gaza’s healthcare system. The level of medical services available falls far short of residents’ needs, and there is a constant shortage of medicines and medical equipment. In 2022, as in previous years, patients who need medical care unavailable in Gaza are the ones to pay the price: Israel forces them  to file for permits to leave the Gaza Strip in an exhausting bureaucratic process, extending also to the persons accompanying them. The criteria for approving these requests are unknown and the grounds for rejection are never disclosed. Many of the requests go unanswered, and patients must apply time and again without knowing whether they will ever get the permit they desperately need to reach a hospital in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Israel. 

In keeping with its past policy, Israel rejected thousands of applications in 2022, denying more than 20,000 requests by patients and persons escorting them to access medical care in hospitals outside Gaza. Some applicants received no answer at all by the scheduled appointment.  

According to World Health Organization figures, 20,411 applications for medical exit permits from the Gaza Strip were submitted in 2022. About 51% were for treatment in East Jerusalem hospitals, about 31% for hospitals elsewhere in the West Bank, and about 18% for hospitals within Israel. The Israeli DCO rejected 6,848 (34%) of the applications, in some cases directly informing patients their application was denied and in others providing no response before the scheduled appointment. Of the applications submitted, 9,641 were for women, 2,935 (30%) of which were rejected; 6,254 were for minors, 1,906 (30%) of which were rejected; and 3,875 were for patients over the age of 60, 843 (22%) of which were rejected. Additionally, 219 patients were called in for interrogation by the Israel Security Agency at Erez Crossing as a condition for examining their application, including 66 cancer patients, 38 women, and 26 patients over the age of 60. The vast majority of these – 91% – were rejected. 

https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip/20230404_in_2022_too_israel_prevented_thousands_of_palestinians_in_need_of_medical_care_from_leaving_gaza_for_treatment

Yes, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

This is quite enough to sink my teeth into for now. I may or may not be publishing a nicer version of my previous blog in due course. Perhaps events will move too fast for me to care. 

While we wait for the push of the big red button that will make all of it redundant anyway, please feel free to write, comment, criticise and correct.

And watch the brilliant Andrew Feinstein on how and why South Africa’s version of apartheid was by some distance the lesser of the two evils.

At least the alien species that gets to sift through the remains will know that we went down thinking differently.