In a comment on the article On the Character of the October 7 Attack by Hamas, David Walters expresses general agreement with World-Outlook’s views but objects to the idea that Hamas targeted its victims on October 7 because they were Jews.

“I think not,” Walters wrote. “The fact they WERE Jews is secondary to the belief by Hamas that they were *Israelis*. For your paragraph to be true, you’d have to argue that if the original settler state were by French Catholics, and maintained the reactionary apartheid state, that the massacre would NOT have taken place or Hamas would [have] gone ‘lighter’ on the French civilians and children of the original settlers. I think that would be nonsense.”

The full text of Walters’ comment can be found posted under the original article.

DISCUSSION WITH OUR READERS

Walters makes a valid point. Any indigenous people facing the theft of their land by colonial settlers would resist fiercely, regardless of the nationality or religious views of the settlers. But we believe Walters is mistaken in failing to see that the political program of Hamas and the actions it takes cannot be separated.

From its inception, Hamas has chosen to incorporate Jew hatred into its program. Likewise, it has chosen to conflate Zionism and Judaism. Its actions are in pursuance of that program, not strictly in opposition to settler colonialism.

Ironically Hamas thus reinforces one of the primary arguments of the Israeli regime. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other spokespeople for Zionism insist that the future of the entire Jewish people depends on maintaining a state in Israel based on Jewish supremacy and Palestinian oppression. The idea that this is a view shared by all Jews — and it is clearly not — only serves to reinforce Jew hatred.

Israeli historian Moshe Zimmermann discussed these claims in a December 29 interview in the Israeli daily Haaretz:  The Hamas Pogrom Demonstrates that Zionism Has Failed, Says Israeli Historian Moshe Zimmerann.

“Because Israel dared, with its effrontery, to present itself as the exclusive representative of Judaism and of the Jewish people,” Zimmermann said, “it is bringing about a situation in which whoever attacks Israel can make use of the same Israeli arrogance that identifies Jews with Israel, in order to speak in condemnation of Jews when they speak about condemnation of Israel.”

Those who claim that the survival of one people — even a people who have themselves experienced centuries of hatred, discrimination, and violence — depends on the oppression of another, cannot win the sympathy of the rest of humanity. This claim endangers Jews, it does not protect them from Jew hatred.

The problem is Zionism not Judaism

Targeting Jewish Israelis because they are Jewish, as Hamas does, rather than clearly opposing the policies of Zionist settler colonialism, undermines support for the just struggle of Palestinians. It feeds the claims by Netanyahu and others that Israel is fighting religious bigotry — rather than practicing it.

Walters concedes Hamas’s Jew hatred when he writes, “Hamas in their 1987 ‘Covenant’ issues antisemitic statements and anti-Jewish bigotry woven throughout. In 2017 they dropped the antisemitism from the ‘new Covenant.’ I think it’s bullshit as apparently they never changed the anti-Jewish aspects of the text books they [have] given their children to learn the history of the Zionist created disaster.”

The first document Walters refers to was adopted by Hamas in 1988 and is sometimes referred to as the “charter.”

Its antisemitic character is unambiguous as only one brief excerpt, among others, makes plain:

“Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.” 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a notoriously false screed of Jew hatred.

It is true that the 2017 Hamas program does not repeat the 1988 document’s claims. Neither does it disassociate Hamas from its earlier overt endorsement of antisemitism. We agree with Walters that the difference between the two Hamas documents is cosmetic at best.

In his book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, Tareq Baconi addressed this issue. Baconi is president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, which describes itself as “the first and only independent, transnational Palestinian think tank.”

Referring to Hamas’ program, Baconi wrote:

“The charter spoke of how such an Islamic polity would allow for Christians and Jews to live in peace and harmony under Muslim rule. Despite this assertion, the rest of the charter shed light on Hamas’s understanding of Israel, Judaism and Zionism at the time it was released. The text was replete with anti-Semitic references that built on age-old stereotypes about the Jewish people, including their alleged accumulation of immense wealth, their treacherous and devious nature and their ability to influence the global media.”

Baconi continued, “Hamas attributed Zionism’s success in creating Israel to Jewish manipulation of global affairs, including the two world wars and the establishment of the United Nations.”

“The movement drew its insight about Zionism,” Baconi concluded, “from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic text that fabricated a myth about a Jewish plot to dominate the world. Throughout the charter, Hamas used references to Jews and Zionists interchangeably, constantly conflating the two.”

The choice of conflating Judaism, a religion, with Zionism, the political program of settler-colonialism in Palestine, is the political foundation for attacks such as October 7 that target civilians, largely because they are Jewish.

Lessons from South Africa

Supporters of the Palestinian struggle often point to analogies with the movement to overthrow apartheid in South Africa. Many of those analogies are accurate. However, attention should also be paid to the political lessons taught by those who led the struggle in South Africa.

Under the leadership of Nelson Mandela and others, including Oliver Tambo and Walter and Albertina Sisulu, the African National Congress (ANC) adopted a conscious policy of non-racialism. Its goal was not the expulsion of the European settlers who had by that time lived in South Africa for decades.

Rather the ANC’s aims were spelled out unambiguously in its Freedom Charter adopted in 1955 at the Congress of the People, a gathering of 3,000 in Kliptown, Soweto, outside Johannesburg. Its organizers described the congress as one made up of “workers, peasants, intellectuals, women, youth and students of all races and colours.”

The ANC charter declared:

We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:

That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people;

That our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality;

That our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;

That only a democratic state, based on the will of the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief;

And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white, together-equals, countrymen and brothers-adopt this FREEDOM CHARTER. And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing nothing of our strength and courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won.

The fight for non-racialism

This perspective was challenged by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and other forces that counterposed a different outlook, described by the ANC as “Africanist.” In the article “Congress and the Africanists,” which appeared in the July-September 1959 ANC journal, Walter Sisulu, then the organization’s Secretary-General, answered those arguments.

“In recent months much has been published in the South African press about the ‘Africanists’…the general trend of their ideas is manifest: it lies in a crude appeal to African racialism as a reply to white arrogance and oppression,” Sisulu explained.

“The principal target of their attacks is the broad humanism of the African National Congress, which claims equality but no domination for the African people and regards South Africa as being big enough and rich enough to sustain all its people, of whatever origin, in friendship and peace…”

The ANC, Sisulu continued, “has repudiated the idea of ‘driving the white man into the sea’ as futile and reactionary and accepted the fact that the various racial groups in South Africa have come to stay.”

“Congress has repudiated the idea of ‘driving the white man into the sea’ as futile and reactionary and accepted the fact that the various racial groups in South Africa have come to stay.”

ANC leader Walter Sisulu, writing in the ANC journal, Africa South,  July-September 1959.

Sisulu and the ANC were well aware of the legitimate anger towards those with white skin. In South Africa, Sisulu explained, “where the whites dominate everything and where ruthless laws are ruthlessly enforced, the natural tendency is one of growing hostility towards Europeans. In fact, most Africans come into political activity because of their indignation against whites, and it is only through education in Congress, and their experience of the genuine comradeship in the struggle of such organizations as the Congress of Democrats,^[1] that they rise to the broad non-racial humanism of the Congress movement.”

Sisulu then issued a warning that still resonates today. “In certain circumstances,” he wrote, “an emotional mass-appeal to destructive and exclusive nationalism can be a dynamic and irresistible force in history… It would be foolish to imagine that a wave of Black chauvinism provoked by the savagery of the Nationalist Party^[2] (and perhaps secretly encouraged and financed by it too), may not some day sweep through our country. And if it does the agony will know no colour-bar at all.”^[3]

Such words seem timely in light of the grisly October 7 attack led by Hamas and the monstrous response of the Israeli regime. It has left more than 25,000 Palestinians dead — with no end in sight — and has created a humanitarian nightmare in Gaza that threatens the lives of countless more.

No one should question the right of an oppressed people, such as the Palestinians, to resist the oppression imposed on them by those who have stolen their land and have enforced that dispossession with decades of unrelenting violence. But only with a program such as the one the ANC fought for, and a strategy that mobilizes the masses of the people themselves to fight for their own liberation, can the oppressed hope to wage effective resistance.

A perspective of mass action

In South Africa the policy of non-racialism was central to such a strategy. Mandela spelled this out in a 1991 speech to a conference of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s military wing launched under Mandela’s leadership in 1961.

“The foundation stone of the ANC’s strategy,” said Mandela, “is that no group of revolutionaries, acting on their own, no matter how courageous, disciplined, and self-sacrificing, can hope to overthrow the system of oppression.

“Victory in the national liberation struggle,” he continued, “is dependent upon the active and conscious participation of the masses of the oppressed people, determining their own destiny through struggle…. It was always our view therefore, that the armed liberation struggle was based on and grew out of the mass political struggles waged by the oppressed.” (Emphasis added.)

That is the opposite of the course Hamas has chosen. Hamas substitutes armed actions — which primarily target civilians — for any mass political struggle by the Palestinian people. It relegates them first to observers of the armed resistance and then as victims of the vicious Israeli reaction. A reaction, it is now clear, that Hamas expected. It opened the door to this response while making no realistic plans to defend the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza who are its victims.

In contrast, in South Africa the armed struggle itself was initiated in complete consonance with the ANC’s non-racialist outlook and mass action perspective. A 1961 flyer, issued by “command of Umkhonto we Sizwe,” announced that its units “today carried out planned attacks against government installations, particularly those connected with the policy of apartheid and race discrimination.” It declared itself “a new independent body formed by Africans,” but added that it “includes in its ranks South Africans of all races.”

This statement concluded with an appeal to all South Africans: “We hope — even at this late hour — that our first actions will awaken everyone to a realization of the disastrous situation to which the Nationalist policy is leading.”

It added, “We are working in the best interests of all the people of this country — black, brown and white — whose future happiness and well-being cannot be attained without the overthrow of the Nationalist government, the abolition of white supremacy, and the winning of liberty, democracy and full national rights and equality for all the people of this country.”

The contrast of this approach with the antisemitic demagogy and actions of Hamas could hardly be more stark.

All analogies — including those between the anti-apartheid fight in South Africa and the Palestinian struggle to end Israeli oppression — have limits. The conditions leading to each struggle are not identical and no liberation movement copies the development of another.

The history of the fight to overthrow South African apartheid does not offer any kind of “prescription” for the Palestinian struggle. But there are lessons to be learned by fighters who look to the day when the Palestinian people — and their allies — can make gains again in their just struggle, rather than reel from the blows being dealt to them daily since the Hamas assault of October 7.

Every battle for national liberation confronts the brutal violence of the oppressors. We agree with Walters that this inevitably provokes fierce resistance no matter the nationality of the oppressors. But Hamas has chosen precisely the course Sisulu warned against: “A crude appeal to… racialism as a reply to… arrogance and oppression.” This choice has resulted in the agony Sisulu predicted could arise. It is the Palestinian people who are experiencing this agony most acutely.

What political perspective and strategy can defeat Israel’s savage violence and oppression? This is where the lessons of the successful democratic revolution in South Africa can help point a way out of the desperate situation Palestinians find themselves in today.

                                                                                    — World-Outlook editors

NOTES

[1] The South African Congress of Democrats (COD) was a small but important organization of white South Africans opposed to apartheid. As Mandela explained in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, “The COD served an important symbolic function for Africans; blacks who had come into the struggle because they were anti-white discovered that there were indeed whites of goodwill who treated Africans as equal.”

[2] The Nationalist Party was the ruling party of the South African apartheid regime.

[3] The excerpt from Sisulu’s 1959 article is taken from The Unbreakable Thread: Non-racialism in South Africa by Julie Frederikse. The book appears to be out of print although used copies can occasionally be found online. Access is also apparently available through the South African History Archive. This valuable work, published in 1990, consists largely of interviews with leaders and activists in the ANC and the anti-apartheid struggle. It traces the decades-long work by the ANC leadership to win new young fighters to the non-racial perspective.

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