REBUTTAL | From Azania to Palestine

The following piece is a response to an opinion published last week written by Kamohelo Chauke .

A marriage of convenience or true love?

It’s neither sentimental nor an exaggeration to call the Palestinian struggle our own as non-white South Africans. The similarities are stark if one reviews the facts: both populations have been subjected to land dispossession through settler colonialism coupled with apartheid. The process began much earlier in what is now South Africa, but the effects endure, whereas in Palestine it is a relatively recent occurrence which is currently heightened in the form of a genocide.

Regardless of the timelines, apartheid South Africa at its peak shared a close relationship with apartheid Israel because they had similar goals and ideologies. This relationship served to strengthen and embolden each country’s mistreatment and occupation of the respective indigenous groups. Both populations have suffered blows to their dignity, self-determination and material wellbeing through dispossession by colonial-apartheid entities. Because we both remain landless and under the boot of white imperialism, it should be trite that solidarity exists and is extended between such peoples.

The hasbara that launched a thousand fallacies

It’s surprising, therefore, that in an op-ed on December 23 former Wits EFF Student Command leader and SRC member Kamohelo Chauke saw fit to cast doubt on said solidarity. Notably, his op-ed was written after he was allegedly gifted a free trip to Israel in July about which he bragged across social media despite the genocide by Israel. The gist of his argument was that Arab Palestinians are anti-black racists and therefore showing them solidarity is questionable. Such argument was interspersed with glowing reviews of Israel’s allegedly antiracist actions in favour of black people serving as a stark contrast to the alleged universal and consistent ill-treatment of black people by Arabs.

He completely ignores Israel’s documented, systematic, ill-treatment of black people as well as recorded instances of solidarity shown by Arabs towards black people. Despite a veneer of nuance, the article was biased and opportunistic. By Chauke’s logic, black people around the world shouldn’t show solidarity with black Americans brutalised and murdered by racist US police because Americans, including black ones, tend to be chauvinistic even towards black non-Americans. Indeed, South Africans’ violent xenophobia can be used to ignore the continued land dispossession happening in cases like Xolobeni and the vicious suppression of black South African poor and working classes as seen in the Marikana massacre and the murder of Abahlali baseMjondolo leaders.

This fallacious reasoning is not new among Israel sympathisers. Other examples include the weaponisation of feminism and LGBTQIA+ rights. This is not care or support for black people, women or queer people, but rather a straw man to isolate Palestinians and distract from the brutal occupation they face.

In fact, it distracts from the far-reaching power of Israeli capital. The Central Bottling Company (CBC), an Israeli corporation that is the exclusive franchisee of Coca-Cola in Israel, took over South Africa’s Clover, through its subsidiary Milco, in 2019 only to decimate it for profit. Among numerous other South African factories, CBC shut down Africa’s largest cheese factory in Lichtenburg, retrenched thousands of Clover workers, and imposed gruelling working conditions on the remaining workforce.

These actions in South Africa mirror the exploitation Palestinians endure under Israeli occupation, as CBC profits from apartheid policies while serving Israel’s military forces through its taxes. This global pattern of oppression underscores the urgent call to boycott Coca-Cola, a brand entangled in sustaining economic exploitation. Worse still, Glencore provides coal to Israel (literally fuelling the genocide) while degrading the environment and disempowering communities in places like eMalahleni right here in South Africa.

These realities make us want to thank Chauke for pointing out this problem because the faster it is dealt with, the faster Palestinians, working-class people and black people can face their common adversary that benefits when they fight and discriminate against each other.

For the record

What Chauke calls a “conflict between Israel and Hamas” is a genocide of Palestinians by the state of Israel, the same state that occupies not just Palestine, but also Syria and previously Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. A state that regularly discriminates against non-white Jews in what is ostensibly a Jewish homeland. Israel is not only “not immune to challenges such as discrimination”, it enables and embodies discrimination. Its very existence and modus operandi is discrimination.

Palestinians are not Libyan, so this is a strange fact to bring up. Punishing Palestinians for the slave trade in Libya would be like punishing Italians for a crime committed by Norwegians, just because they're both European. It is racist to assume that Arabs are a monolith, just as it would be to assume all Africans are a monolith.

Israel is not only 'not immune to challenges such as discrimination', it enables and embodies discrimination. Its very existence and modus operandi is discrimination

Be that as it may, the resumption of the slave trade in Libya can be directly attributed to the assassination of Muammar al-Qaddafi by the CIA and the ensuing destabilisation of the country, which collapsed the migration system and resulted in mass kidnapping of North African migrants passing through Libya. In other words, the same Western powers backing and funding Israel are the ones to blame for the present-day slave trade in Libya.

He also failed to mention that US Vice President Kamala Harris is pro-Israel too and that it’s her administration that has thus far enabled the genocide in Gaza. Most American Arabs chose either not to vote or to vote the third party; a minority voted for Trump and did so in protest against the heartless Democrats. Lastly, other black women Democrats like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib did very well at the same time as Harris, which dispels the idea that she lost purely due to racism and misogyny.

Reality check

It would be silly and counterproductive to pretend there are no tensions between black and Arab (or in the South African case coloured and Indian) communities. But it would be just as silly and harmful to progressive forces everywhere to pretend Chauke’s op-ed isn’t a disingenuous attack on Palestinians at a time when they are being killed at unthinkable scales. Why discuss “the relationship between Arab Palestinians and black Palestinians” now when both groups are being subjected to genocidal violence? Are black people liberated or vindicated by such “discussion” or are we simply used as pawns to justify unjustifiable actions? Does the mass murder of Palestinians reduce racism against us? Of course not. Anti-black racism is serious enough to deserve good faith contemplation and confrontation.

We can only confront capital and the oppression it spawns through organising, which inevitably involves confronting antiblack racism, not using it for the very ruling class we oppose

We’re all better off understanding the occupation of Palestine as a material issue over land to avoid devolving into bad-faith tribalistic rhetoric that serves no one but the powers that be. Black people have political agency and it’s an insult to our intelligence to use our suffering so crassly and to rehabilitate the image of a state that is uninterested in material black liberation.

The actual “uncomfortable truths about race, solidarity and the legacies of slavery” are that oppressed people, while confronting whatever tensions exist between them, have to show radical unity to overcome settler colonialism, apartheid and fascism. We can only confront capital and oppression it spawns through organising, which inevitably involves confronting antiblack racism, not using it for the very ruling class we oppose.