Writing on October 27, Josef Federman of the Associated Press made grim observations: “Just three weeks into Israel’s deadliest war with Hamas, it is already clear that The bloodshed has overturned long-held assumptions in Israel and the region. The Israeli military and intelligence services have been exposed as incompetent and ill-prepared…Israelis’ sense of personal security has been shattered.”
Even as many older paradigms have collapsed, as some observers have pointed out, Israel has turned with a vengeance to a familiar paradigm: brutal, crushing violence.
The death toll statistics from Gaza are unprecedented. The Israeli army’s incessant bombings have killed more than 11,000 people, including more than 4,500 children; thousands of people are also missing, buried under the rubble and probably dead too.
The number of children killed in Gaza has exceeded the annual number of children killed in conflicts worldwide; the number of civilians killed in Gaza now exceeds the total number of deaths in Ukraine since February 2022.
These numbers are increasing every day, as the Israeli army continues to indiscriminately bomb civilian buildings, including hospitals and schools.
As a black South African, watching these horrific events unfold, I can only reflect on my country’s violent past.
I remember the relentless planning and violence that accompanied the last decades of white South Africa’s attempts to make apartheid work. I remember the fears that grew among white South Africans as they placed their faith in sophisticated military capability, a conscript army, nuclear capability and loyal friends in the West, especially the United States , in Great Britain and France.
It was the height of the Cold War and South Africa was claiming to be Southern Africa’s only democracy, protecting “civilization” from the encroaching threats around it.
Its military might and extensive police force were accompanied by a series of policies intended to maintain white minority rule.
Every attempt to impose new such policies has failed in the face of mass resistance. The more they failed, the more brutal the violence carried out by the military and police, encouraged by white politicians and a terrified white electorate.
The “terrorists,” as the national liberation movements were called, could not be crushed by the most powerful army in southern Africa. By mid-1985, a significant portion of the white electorate and some members of the ruling party realized that the problem of black resistance was not going to go away. Something more radical is needed.
The state president at the time, the hawkish PW Botha, himself a former defense minister, was encouraged by a faction of his party to open Parliament that year with a conciliatory speech and make a great political statement that would offer the black majority a sign of hope that they would be part of the whites-only democracy that was South Africa. It was called the “crossing the Rubicon speech.”
Botha played along but at the last minute hesitated and went in the opposite direction, instead giving a speech in which he pledged to intensify the fight against “terrorism”, refusing to negotiate with the “terrorists”. » in prison, like Nelson Mandela.
What followed was the extension of South Africa’s state of emergency and the killing of thousands of people resisting the apartheid regime, as Botha and his faction turned to more and more violence and of repression.
Eventually his own party leaders staged a palace coup and installed FW de Klerk in power. The new president and the faction he represented understood that the end was near, that decades of repression were failing to make a political and economic system work that excluded the majority and only benefited the white minority.
De Klerk and his faction realized that the Whites were not going to win the war, even though they had more guns, bombs, tanks and artillery and could probably continue to rule for a long time. by force alone. This situation was not sustainable, because the more repression they deployed, the more resistance they faced and the more white South Africans lived in fear.
The more violence was broadcast on television screens around the world, the more difficult it became for white South Africa’s Western friends to strongly support it. This was a turning point that led to political negotiations, to talking to the “terrorists” who they saw as their existential enemy. It was a turning point that paved the way for a single state with equal citizenship for all, based on residence and not on origins, race, religion or ethnicity.
Until October 7, Israel was also confident that its sophisticated military and intelligence capabilities, its design of urban space and its use of walls and fences to police, control and monitor all aspects of Palestinian life , would help manage its “Palestinian problem”. ” with success.
Israel’s powerful Western allies were even facilitating the establishment of new friends in Africa, the Gulf and South Asia through military cooperation and the sale of arms and intelligence technology.
Most Israelis and their political leaders were so convinced that this handling of their “Palestinian problem” was working that any reference to “peace talks” or even rhetorical acknowledgment of a two-state solution to the outside world became unnecessary. moribund and superfluous.
Life could go on. Rave parties could take place in the desert. The normality that has become normal continues in the abnormality of the occupation. Until October 7.
Ordinary Israelis might begin to realize that no matter how sophisticated or powerful the Israeli army, Mossad or the apartheid regime appear, the “Palestinian problem” is not going to go away as long as Palestinians are alive. .
Just like among white South Africans, fear is increasing exponentially. And Israel is responding to this fear with a colossal bombing campaign of annihilation. But as white South Africans have learned, violence cannot eradicate the “problem,” nor create the life of peace they long for.
At this stage, several questions arise. How far can the notion of “the ends justify the means” go in making the scale of civilian massacres acceptable to those who support Israel’s right to defend itself? How far will Israelis go before realizing they cannot live with the blood of thousands of children on their hands?
Can Israelis and friends of Israel justify these actions as an expression of a civilization that claims to value human life equally? Do Israelis want to be remembered for those who attempted to exterminate men, women and children in an act of collective punishment?
Whatever ruins and rubble await us after this war on Gaza, Israel’s “Palestinian problem” will not have disappeared. Ordinary Israelis will surely never again sleep knowing that their state can fully protect them.
They would do well to learn from white South Africans who, after 300 years of minority rule, realized that continuing to defend so violently while maintaining some semblance of moral superiority was an impossible political project.
There is a turning point when, even for the defenders of such a project, the vague question resonates more and more loudly in the collective consciousness: how far is too far?
There can be no return to promises of security based on what existed before. There can be no progress in peace if it means ever more blood of children and civilians haunting successive generations who will have to take responsibility for the actions taking place before our eyes today.
As a South African who lived to cross the Rubicon, I hope that this catastrophe will force Israelis to understand that only a just and inclusive political solution based on equal citizenship for all will free them from fear.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
