South Africa’s Boycott of Israel Is Mandela’s Legacy

The South African government instructed that products made in Judea and Samaria not be labeled as “products of Israel.” Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, vehemently declared that South Africa “remains an apartheid state,” which is now turning its discrimination against Israel.

A post-apartheid Pretoria boycotting Jerusalem is one of the more powerful victories for the boycott and divestment campaign. And it’s Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

On March 30, 2001, the anti-apartheid icon Mandela sent a letter to the American journalist Thomas Friedman. Israel, said Mandela, is “not a country that was established normally.”

Rather, it had “occupied another country.” He accused Israelis of indulging in “a vulgar racism.” And then came the peak of his anti-Jewish hatred: “Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality.” This is “an apartheid system.”

Since then, the definition of the Jewish State as an “apartheid state” has become the code word for evil. The labeling of Israel as an “apartheid state” is the embodiment of the new anti-Semitism.

Historically, black leaders in South Africa such as Desmond Tutu viewed the Jews as a part of the “capitalist camp,” and therefore exploitative of the blacks. Neo Mnumzama, chief representative of the ANC (Mandela’s party) at the United Nations, called Zionism an “ally of apartheid” and “an accomplice in the perpetuation of the crimes of Pretoria against the South African people.”

Mandela fabricated the comparison between Israel and South Africa. In his twisted version: both are small bastions of Western values and interests surrounded by a larger and non-Western people; both govern hostile majorities, using force and denying rights to subjugate them; both are run by nationalistic, racist governments unwilling to grant rights to these people but anxious to exploit labor.  However, Mandela concealed the truth: in South Africa’s apartheid, there were 26 million blacks and 6 million whites, while in Israel there is a Jewish majority and a minority of Arabs who attack the Jews.

The special relationship between Israel and South Africa, according to Mandela, was an unholy alliance between pariah states (during the apartheid era, most of the black African states broke relations with Israel). The truth was another thing, however: like blacks in America before the civil rights movement, or in South Africa under apartheid, Israeli Jews and their connection to the holy land have been erased from the environment by the Arabs. It’s Palestinian anti-Semitism, not Israel’s Jewish democracy, which must be compared to apartheid’s Aryanism.

In 2000, the American Jewish Committee canceled a Washington luncheon scheduled to honor Mandela after he said that 13 Jews tried for “espionage” (read: Judaism and Zionism) in Iran were receiving a “fair trial.” While Jews — including community leaders and a rabbi — were presented as agents of Israel and the US, Mandela was laying a wreath on the grave of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Iranian revolution, and warmly greeting his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.