Zionism, Apartheid and Divestment

The CUPE Ontario resolution in defense of Palestinian rights denounces the “apartheid nature” and “apartheid-like practices” of the Israeli state. Indeed, the Zionist rulers’ dispossession of and racist contempt toward the Palestinians do evoke the daily brutality and repression that was meted out to the black majority in apartheid South Africa.

The white-supremacist South African rulers denied black people the most basic rights, segregating them in desolate townships and bantustans (“homelands”). Similarly, Israeli Minister of Education and Culture Ben-Zion Dinur declared in 1954: “In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don’t agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force” (History of the Haganah). Especially since the 1993 Oslo accords that sanctified a Palestinian “mini-state,” Israel’s rulers have increasingly driven the Palestinians into bantustan-like enclaves demarcated by a heavily-guarded wall and sliced up by Zionist settlements, checkpoints and bypass highways.

For many reformist leftists, however, the Zionism/apartheid analogy goes further. They uphold a political strategy modeled on the campaign for divestment from and sanctions against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. The International Socialists write:

“The anti-Israeli apartheid movement also draws inspiration from the successful movement against South African apartheid. The lessons of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against South Africa have inspired the call for a similar campaign against Israel.”

—Socialist Worker, 8 July

And a statement by the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid adds, “It is clear, now more than ever, that only massive action against Israeli apartheid through the implementation of a clear boycott, sanctions and divestment strategy at the grassroots level will force our governments to listen” (“Israeli Military Aggression Highlights Apartheid Reality,” 30 June).

The divestment/sanctions campaign against South Africa in Europe and North America was centrally promoted by the bourgeois-nationalist African National Congress (ANC). It was based on a claim that South African capitalism could be fundamentally reformed through pressure from the “democratic” imperialist powers like the U.S. and Canada. At the time, our organization uniquely told the truth: that divestment was at best an empty gesture; that if foreign companies did withdraw substantial productive assets this would hurt black workers and weaken the powerful black union movement; and, most crucially, that it was obscene to look to U.S. imperialism and its Canadian junior partner as a force for “democracy” anywhere in the world.

Advocates of divestment and sanctions claim these were instrumental in forcing the replacement of the apartheid regime by an ANC-led government under Nelson Mandela in 1994. In fact, it was the mass struggles of South Africa’s black and other nonwhite toilers—centrally the working class—that paved the way for an end to direct white-supremacist rule. The upsurge of black labour struggle in the 1980s won significant wage gains, decreasing the profitability of investment in South Africa. The divestment that occurred largely took the form of overseas corporations signing over their interests to local subsidiaries, which often treated their workers even more brutally. Indeed, 1989 saw strikes by black oil and rubber workers against such divestment schemes.

By the early 1990s, a section of the white apartheid ruling class and their U.S. and British patrons decided to go for a power-sharing deal with the ANC. A key factor in this was the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which for decades during the Cold War had supported the ANC materially and diplomatically. As the Moscow Stalinist regime under Mikhail Gorbachev disintegrated, the South African rulers came to terms with Mandela and the ANC.

Moreover, the end of legalized apartheid and the election of the ANC-led “Tripartite Alliance” did not end the profound oppression of South Africa’s black toilers. Far from it. While a small black elite has made it onto the “gravy train” and into the white-dominated ruling class, the economic conditions of the black workers, urban poor and rural toilers have in important ways actually deteriorated. For example, a 2003 study showed a 19 percent drop in black household income since the end of legal apartheid, while income in white households grew by 15 percent. ANC leaders Mandela and his successor Thabo Mbeki have served as black front men for a neo-apartheid capitalist system whose fundamental character, including enormous disparities between racial groups, has remained intact.

The leaders of the COSATU union federation and the closely allied South African Communist Party consciously maneuvered to tie the working class to these bourgeois nationalists despite the masses’ far more radical aspirations. In this way South African capitalism was restabilized. Today, COSATU and the SACP remain part of the ANC-led government, helping to enforce capitalist oppression and brutality against workers and the urban and rural poor. Our comrades of Spartacist South Africa call to break with the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance and fight for the building of a Bolshevik workers party that can lead the impoverished masses in a struggle to sweep away neo-apartheid capitalism through socialist revolution. The consolidation, or simply survival, of a proletarian seizure of power in South Africa would require its international extension, especially to the imperialist centers of Europe and North America.

The analogy between South African apartheid and Zionism is false at another level too. South African capitalism, both under apartheid and since, is rooted in the brutal exploitation of black labour in the mines and factories. Thanks to its size and centrality to social production, the black South African proletariat has tremendous potential power. In contrast, Zionist Israel is based on the exclusion of Palestinian labour. In the decade following the Oslo accords, the Zionist rulers displaced another quarter million Palestinian workers, replacing them by workers from Asia, Africa and East Europe. This further underlines how Palestinian social and national liberation can only come through common class struggle by the Hebrew-speaking and Arab workers against both the Israeli and Arab ruling classes, which are likewise oppressors of the Palestinian people. The Zionist garrison state must be shattered from within, through Arab/Hebrew workers revolution.

Our Marxist perspective of proletarian class struggle was and is counterposed to the appeals to imperialist governments and corporations raised by the reformist left. At crucial junctures we fought for independent working-class action in solidarity with the South African struggle, such as union boycotts of South African ships on the U.S. West Coast.

In Canada, it was the right-wing Tory government of Brian Mulroney that implemented sanctions against South Africa in the mid-1980s. The reformist left to the contrary, this was not the result of “grassroots” pressure. As we explained at the time:

“The Canadian capitalists, however, have a more immediate and vested interest in sanctions against South Africa: they profit mightily from them. With a resource-based economy, as has South Africa, Canada stands to make a bundle, especially from the sale of gold. With investors shunning South Africa’s Krugerrand (sales in Canada have dropped by $54 million), the popularity of the ‘Maple Leaf’ gold coin is skyrocketing, up an estimated 50 percent from 1984. And with gold prices increasing in reaction to ‘political instability’ in South Africa, every black killed adds to the coffers of the racist Canadian imperialists.”

—“Apartheid State of Terror,” SC No. 64, September 1985

In Canada as elsewhere, the capitalist state is nothing other than an instrument of class oppression, a machinery of violence to maintain bourgeois rule and suppress struggles of the exploited and oppressed. The notion that this state, or its auxiliaries like university administrations, can be “forced to listen,” to take action on behalf of the oppressed abroad or at home, is a con job that can only channel the discontents of working people and rebellious youth back into support for the capitalist system.