Symposium on Unbroken Bond: Tracing the Ties Between African and Palestinian Anti-Colonial Struggles – When Nelson Mandela was (Considered) a Terrorist and the “Natural Alliance” between South Africa and Palestine

[Dr Cristiano d’Orsi is a Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Johannesburg and Senior Consultant in AFRICAN Refugee Law at Witness Experts in London]

Mandela and his First Struggles with the ANC

Nelson Mandela’s birth coincided with the beginning of British rule in Palestine (1918) and what has been called the Third Aliyah, another wave of organised Jewish immigration to the region. He had close friendships with several South African-Jewish people (for example with Arthur Goldreich who provided refuge at his home in Rivonia to Mandela in 1961) although his relationship with the Jewish state was defined as “complex”. While never hate-filled, Mandela’s dealings with Israel were overshadowed by his loyalty to the Palestinian cause. 

While increasingly politically involved from 1942, Mandela only joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1944 when he helped to form the ANC Youth League (ANCYL). Mandela and the ANC continued to encourage anti-apartheid protests in South Africa until 1960, when the Government banned the party following several violent incidents. The worst of these clashes became known as the Sharpeville Massacre (21 March 1960) during which police opened fire on a crowd of anti-apartheid marchers, killing 69 people and wounding 186 others. In response to the ban, Mandela went underground in 1961 and founded the ANC’s armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe or “Spear of the Nation” in Zulu. Mandela would later declare that the ANC’s armed struggle “was forced on us by the Government”.

In October 1963, Mandela and nine prominent opponents of apartheid were tried on charges of sabotage (Rivonia Trial). The trial was a mechanism through which the apartheid government could mute the ANC, though Mandela was not deterred concluding his speech at the trial by stating: 

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die”.

Against this backdrop, a positive development for the ANC was an increasing tide of independent African states in the 1960s. Coupled with the growing influence of Pan-Africanism and African nationalism in the foreign policy of these states, most of them were committed to the liberation of Africa as a whole from colonial rule and apartheid. In this framework, the ANC was supported by a number of African states which hosted ANC leaders fleeing from increasing repression by South Africa. In some countries, like in Botswana, they were allowed to stay as refugees but not allowed to establish military bases while in others, such as in Angola, Tanzania, and Zambia, they could establish military training camps. For his part, Mandela’s plight and his principles earned him plenty of international attention and sympathy throughout the period of his imprisonment.

Mandela’s “Terrorist” Fame

After the creation of Israel on 14 May 1948, and by the 1960s, Israel was a close friend of apartheid South Africa, as both states struggled against isolation and rejection by the rest of the world. In this scenario, Mandela’s terrorist fame grew exponentially. 

Mandela was considered a criminal in his own country and a communist in the eyes of the United States (U.S), where he remained on a Terrorism Watch List until 2008. His terrorist label has largely faded into the background as South Africa marks the anniversary of his historic election victory on 27 April 1994, however, it was the dominant narrative around him when he began his 27 years behind bars on 5 August 1962 (when he was arrested and sentenced to five years for a) leaving the country without a passport and b) incitement). 

Mandela’s fame—or infamy among colonial powers—rapidly spread. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom stated: “The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation […] Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land”. Edward (“Teddy”) Taylor, Member of the Conservative Party and of the British Parliament, echoed her sentiments proclaiming that “Nelson Mandela should be shot.” Though he later claimed it was meant jokingly, in 1994, he reaffirmed his problematic politics asserting once more that “I do still regard him as an ex-terrorist”. Larry Lamb, a personal friend of Thatcher and then Daily Express editor, declared in 1985 that Mandela’s unconditional release from prison would be “a crass error”.  In 1990, when Mandela declined to meet Thatcher on a trip to London, Conservative Member of the British Parliament Terry Dicks asked: “How much longer will the Prime Minister allow herself to be kicked in the face by this black terrorist?” 

Likewise, in a 1986 speech, then U.S. President Reagan warned of “calculated terror by elements of the African National Congress”, including “the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression, the imposition of martial law, and eventually creating the conditions for racial war”. The U.S. Department of Defence added the ANC to a list of key regional terrorist groups in 1988. A report cited several bombing incidents perpetrated by the group between 1980 and 1988: “Although ANC operations have not posed any direct threat to U.S. assets or personnel in South Africa, the indiscriminate nature of recent attacks raises the danger of Americans becoming inadvertent victims”

Palestinian-Post Apartheid South Africa Close Ties 

Despite its self-proclaimed moral origins—to save the Jewish people from persecution—Israel actively pursued ties with apartheid South Africa. By 1976, former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was welcoming South Africa’s John Vorster in Jerusalem by toasting “the ideals shared” by Israel and South Africa, explaining that both countries faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”. By the 1980s, Israel and apartheid South Africa parroted each other in justifying the domination of native 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: The Soweto Youth Uprising in June 1976 and the Palestinian Intifada starting in 1987 were spontaneous events that radically altered the nature of the internal conflicts in the two countries.

There are useful comparisons to be made between the ANC in exile and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under its leader Yasser Arafat, considered in the West as the father of “modern terrorism”, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on 6 June 1982. This was the moment when the PLO reiterated its claim to being “a liberation movement in the tradition of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Algeria and the ANC in South Africa”. However, like for Mandela, Arafat’s “terrorist” fame picked up pace in the West. To illustrate, in his speech at the United Nations 58^th General Assembly (25 September 2003), Silvan Shalom, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, affirmed that “when Arafat wins, terrorism wins, and we all lose”.

Mandela identified with the Palestinian cause and became a close friend of Arafat. In late February 1990, shortly after his release from prison on 11 February, Arafat met with Nelson Mandela in Zambia. On that occasion, Mandela told Arafat, “There are many similarities between our struggle and that of the (PLO). We (South Africans and Palestinians) live under a unique form of colonialism […] (South African) freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. This idea has been repeated on several occasions like, for example, in the address that Mandela as President made at the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People in Pretoria on 4 December 1997: “We are proud as a government, and as the overwhelming majority of South Africans to be part of an international consensus taking root that the time has come to resolve the problems of Palestine”.

To these affirmations, Arafat always recognised the parallels between Palestine and South Africa, anti-colonial movements that have historically struggled against the same enemies and against apartheid, racism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Arafat’s use of the word “apartheid” was prophetic because, at that time, few people had recognised that Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians analogous to South African apartheid, communal separation. Yet, already on 13 November 1974, speaking in front of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Arafat was clear, affirming: 

“The roots of the Palestinian question reach back into the closing years of the nineteenth century, in other words, to that period we call the era of colonialism and settlement as we know it today. This is precisely the period during which Zionism as a scheme was born; its aim was the conquest of Palestine by European immigrants, just as settlers colonized, and indeed raided, most of Africa. This is the period during which, pouring forth out of the west, colonialism spread into the furthest reaches of Africa, Asia and Latin America, building colonies, everywhere cruelly exploiting, oppressing, plundering the peoples of those three continents. This period persists into the present. Marked evidence of its totally reprehensible presence can be readily perceived in the racism practised both in South Africa and in Palestine”.

Under the aegis of Mandela and the ANC, South Africa officially recognised the sovereign State of Palestine on 15 February 1995 and, since then, has supported international efforts to establish an independent Palestinian State. This recognition came on 10 May 1994 when Arafat delivered a speech in a mosque in Johannesburg, about half a year after the signing of the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords were a pair of interim agreements between Israel and the PLO and they marked the start of the Oslo process, a process aimed at achieving a peace treaty based on Resolution No. 242 (22 November 1967) and Resolution No. 338 (22 October 1973) of the UN Security Council (UNSC). While there are questions about the Olso process hijacking the Madrid negotiations that were already underway, that is a matter for another post.

During his speech in Johannesburg, Yasser Arafat made several significant statements, declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and emphasising the ongoing importance of jihad until the eventual liberation of Jerusalem. He drew a parallel between the Oslo Accords and the Treaty of Hudaibiyah, signed in 628 CE, a historical cease-fire agreement brokered by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad with the Quraysh tribe, which was ultimately violated by the Quraysh tribe, leading to their conquest.

Final Reflections: The “Natural Alliance” Between South Africa and Palestine

As Mahmood Mamdani argued in 2015, both South Africa’s apartheid state and the state of Israel are best understood as what he calls “settler-colonial nation-states”, where full citizenship is enjoyed by the chosen nation—the settlers—and indigenous peoples are made into permanent pariahs. The colonial logic of “native reserves” and the apartheid logic of “separate development” use a chimaera of sovereignty to mask processes of exclusion. In neither the South African nor the Israeli case can the trappings of a modern democratic state hide the fundamental attributes of a colonial polity. 

South African struggles for freedom and Palestinian struggles for freedom are essentially struggles for decolonisation. In the case of Palestine, using the words of Robert L. Tignor, we are in the presence of an “incomplete decolonization”. Tignor argued that while Zionists insist on Israel’s historic right to Palestine, it is in fact only Europe’s imperial power that made Israel’s creation possible. Starting with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the British promoted the settlement of European Jews in Palestine similar to the encouragement provided by European colonial states for the migration of settlers to Africa. In this scenario, South Africa followed a tortuous route to independence for its Black majority. South African political conditions resembled those in occupied Palestine today and required outside intervention to realise the political goals of its disenfranchised Black populations. In South Africa, no formal imperial ruler was available to negotiate the transfer of power.

Observing how Palestinian-South African relationships have been developed, and making reference to more recent events, on 26 July 2022, Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, said: “The Palestinian narrative evokes experiences of South Africa’s own history of racial segregation and oppression”. She continued: “South Africa’s view is that strong action to support Palestine must be taken by the UN and a committee on apartheid should be established under the auspices of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to verify it meets the criteria. Pandor concluded: “South Africa calls on UN Member States, as well as the international community to support efforts aimed at resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict and to continue putting pressure on Israel as the occupying power”.

In some sense, these declarations have been prodromal of the proceedings instituted by South Africa against Israel and its requests to the ICJ to indicate provisional measures in December 2023; the request for additional measures under Article 75(1) of the Rules of Court submitted by South Africa in February 2024; the request by South Africa (in March 2024) for the indication of provisional measures and modification of the Court’s prior provisional measures decisions; the request by South Africa (in May 2024) for the indication of provisional measures and modification of the Court’s previous provisional measures and the written comments of South Africa (in May 2024) on the reply of the State of Israel to the question put by Judge Nolte at the public sitting held on 17 May 2024. 

These proceedings were instituted after Israel unleashed what the court determined were genocidal levels of violence against the Palestinian people from 7 October 2023 onwards (though Israeli occupation, apartheid, and war crimes obviously predate this). As I have argued throughout this post, these actions are consistent with the long-lasting reciprocal solidarity, empathy, and understanding (“natural alliance”) between South Africa and Palestine. 

Photo attribution: “Nelson Mandela 1st Black South Africans president” by Awake MZANTSI is licenced under CC BY 4.0.