Be it war or peace in Israeli-occupied Palestine, a six-metre-high bronze statue of Nelson Mandela grins beatifically over the good people of Ramallah. His fist is raised in a militant salute, the artwork’s contours stylishly capturing the sartorial folds of his tailored suit. His Western attire is incongruous, but hey, what struggle is complete without Mandela? Come as you are!
One can be sure that at the very least Joburgers have been getting plenty of bang for their buck from this gift from the City of Joburg to Ramallah. How could it be otherwise in a place where war has become routinised, normalised?
But what, I wondered during a recent and all-too-brief visit to Israel as a guest of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, is the meaning of Mandela for the Middle East in general and Israel in particular? Does he have any relevance, and if so, what is it?
Would Mandela stand for war and violence or for peace and negotiation with one’s enemies? And is it possible Mandela represents one thing in SA, but another in places such as Ramallah, now under nominal Palestinian rule but nonetheless glowered over by the Israelis nearby?
Israel is the world’s new “apartheid state’’, according to its critics. They see an aggressive, intolerant Jewish entity that has made the Arabs the unwitting scapegoat for the sufferings Jews have endured throughout the ages. And they have been many.
In this setting of hatred, dating back a few thousand years, does SA’s relatively smooth and negotiated exit from apartheid to democracy have any resonance with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? And if so, should the Palestinians not perhaps follow Mandela’s example in trying to secure a deal with Israel that puts peace and the chance of social progress before what they regard as rightful justice? Or have they tried that and found it wasn’t allowed to succeed? Should peace be withheld as a strategy to secure justice?
For Palestinians, Mandela is the equivalent and even equal of Yasser Arafat, the man who went from demon to angel in the course of his flamboyant leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). His PLO has morphed into the Palestinian Authority that now runs the police forces and the administrations of West Bank towns that are the product of the Oslo peace accords. The Palestinian West Bank comprises 165 geographically discrete parcels of land. They include many sites of Biblical fame: Bethlehem, Jericho and Hebron, to name a few.
Choose peace rather than confrontation. Except in cases where we cannot get, where we cannot proceed, or we cannot move forward. Then if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.
— Nelson Mandela
Mandela himself was not especially instructive in his statements on Palestine. If one were to take him at his word alone, one might think that, yes, he is the SA embodiment of Arafat, the man who balked at a final peace deal with Israel. A so-called principled militant. Consider his statement in 1997, in a speech to mark the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’’
Later, on a visit to Palestine in 1999, Mandela supported a “two-state solution’’, albeit with reduced territory for Israel. And he backed the Palestinians’ goal of having their own state, which he supposed would give form to the right to self-determination.
He continued: “Choose peace rather than confrontation. Except in cases where we cannot get, where we cannot proceed, or we cannot move forward. Then if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.’’ What exactly he meant by that in a Palestinian context is not entirely apparent from the words themselves, but it hints strongly at war only as a final resort. Peace first and war a distant second.
This might have been manna from heaven for the radicals among the Palestinians, primarily Hamas which now runs the Gaza Strip with an iron fist. Fortified by Iranian money and armaments, the Hamas faction waged a civil war against its brothers in the PLO, forcing its president Mahmoud Abbas and his followers from Gaza. Hamas’s version of self-determination takes the form of raining countless rockets down on their Israeli neighbours and digging tunnels all the better to engage the Zionist foe on his own turf. At least that’s how the Israelis see it.
During a visit to the PLO headquarters in Ramallah, the PLO folk said countless times that they alone are the sole legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, that is not Hamas. But they no doubt look over their shoulders and worry that what happened in Gaza could happen in the West Bank. Perhaps this explains the reluctance to take the next logical step and declare a lasting peace with Israel. They’d be the sell-outs then.
Mandela, for all his militancy, was above all pragmatic, and patient. Ironically the historical figure he most closely approximates in the Middle East is not any of the Palestinian firebrands who hold his memory so close to their hearts.
One need look no further for a more meaningful historical comparison than the founding father of Israel, its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Similar to the quantum leap Mandela took when he initiated talks with the apartheid government from his prison cell, Ben-Gurion jumped at the chance to declare the state of Israel in 1948, as allowed in the British mandate for the territory. He gambled, and won. It wasn’t everything he wanted, but crucially the Arabs declined to do the same, mostly in protest at the new Jewish state of Israel. They wanted the whole deal, and nothing but, then spent the ensuing 75 years pursuing that.
Ben-Gurion was no dove but he wasn’t too proud to accept what was on offer and build from there. And it’s ironic that in a country where religion is central, that its founder had no time for religion and considered himself a Leninist-Zionist. A militant who knew to take the gap. On the level of strategy alone, he was a man Mandela would have admired. Much like himself, a leader with chutzpah.
South Africans, confronted by the sad truth of the failures of the ANC government, blame Mandela and his “compromises’’ for our apparent cul de sac. But it’s those who followed Mandela who wasted a historic opportunity to exorcise the poisonous pathologies of apartheid.
So is it the Mandela of militant struggle or the Mandela of negotiation and compromise who watches over the people of Palestine? Sadly, it’s not an easy or theoretical question for them.
Patrick Bulger was a guest in Israel of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies
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