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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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On a purely practical sense, ending the siege on Gaza would improve the lives of about 2 million people squeezed on a piece of land with a clean water crisis and no medical supplies. Israel, however, is unwilling to take such a step, and the stronger Hamas is, the less likely Israel is to compromise. The reality is grim, not because "either side" won't budge, but because the situation is becoming increasingly impossible.
I've always hated Hamas' tactics. They could have been a better resistance group, they could have not had an extremist idieology. And they could have stopped gambling with the lives of Gazans. All in all, Israel is an apartheid state and this the result of apartheid and decades of collective trauma.
It's interesting that you mentioned apartheid. Although the ANC did declare an armed struggle against the White regime, in fact their attacks were inconsequential and contributed nothing to the struggle. The game-changer was a concerted campaign to mobilise world opinion. It was sanctions and isolation that ended apartheid, not bullets.
Mandela insisted to the end that turning violent was instrumental to actually getting attention. He went on to say this about how ineffectual their non-violent struggle was:
“The hard facts were that 50 years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.” --Mandela
They were largely ignored internationally while they were peaceful.
I trust his assessment of it over yours any day.
Put another way: How long do you think most people believe the anti-Apartheid struggle went on?
I'd be willing to bet most people have no idea about the decades of resistance to increasingly repressive laws that preceded the escalation. Even those vaguely aware that Mandela's arrest happened in 1963, after the start of the sabotage operations.
They didn't get much international support until the 1970's, and that support was still fringe until the 1980's, as violence had been ramping up for two decades.
Do you remember all the hijackings that occurred in South Africa in those days? All the hostage taking, and the civilians shot in cold blood? All the bombings of shopping malls and cinemas? No? Neither do I .. because they never happened. Even in the face of massive repression, imprisonment, torture and murder of its leaders, the ANC focused their armed struggle on acts of sabotage and avoided as far as possible targeting civilians. They bombed electrical substations and oil refineries. They attacked police stations and military facilities. They never commited the barbaric acts we see today from Hamas. If they had I doubt that I, along with tens of thousands of others, would have marched in the streets demanding the release of Mandela.
You're moving goalposts. You claimed ANCs attacks were inconsequential, and now you've changed your tone to focus on civilian attacks.
Sure, they carried out fewer and smaller civilian attacks than Hamas.
There are absolutely arguments over what the most effective use of violent resistance is, and to be clear I have never claimed that Hamas' method is particularly effective, and it might very well be entirely counter-productive. What I argued was specifically against this:
But specifically to what you claimed in this latest reply, I do remember the bombing campaign that targeted a range of Wimpy burger joints during lunch hour. I do remember the regular use of limpet mines against sports venues, bus stations, shopping centres and other shops, restaurants. They were regular enough that they are one of the regular features of the 1980's evening news that was seared into my memory as a child despite growing up half a world away.
The ANC liked to pretend they didn't target civilians, but in the 90's applications were made to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee by ANC members who admitted to bombing civilians, and ANC themselves submitted a lengthy list of bombings to the TRC which also included a long list of civilian bombings that they claimed to be "uncertain" who carried out but nevertheless submitted in a longer list of their operations alongside the police and military attacks you mention. These lists are readily available.
Mandela "escaped" being tarnished by this in large part because he was in prison from years before MK escalated from sabotage to bombings, and to this day it's unclear how much he personally knew, especially about the civilian attacks. It's clear other members of the ANC leadership, like Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo, knew, however.
Apartheid started in 1948, but segregation had existed for 40 years by then, and the fight for equal rights preceded the formal start of Apartheid.
What is clear with respect to Mandela is that he doubled down on the necessity of violence to his death and was clear that things got worse during ANCs nonviolent fight and first improved when they started fighting back. He held onto that view to his death.
ANC was founded in 1912 as segregation was just ramping up. 36 years after they were founded, Apartheid was passed.
They didn't start killing until 1976, after 64 years of the world mostly quietly ignoring them as oppression got worse and worse.
1 year after they started killing, the UN finally made the voluntary and ineffectual arms embargo binding. 8 years after they started killing, the disinvestment campaign started seriously hurting the South African economy. 13 years after they started killing, Thatcher called the ANC a terrorist organisation at the Commonwealth summit, but beside having gone from being seen as a harmless nuisance to being called terrorists by both the UK and US governments, they won the struggle 14 years after they took up arms. But 78 years after they started fighting.
As such, I'll take Mandelas words on the importance of their armed struggle over yours any day.
Are there any sanctions at all on Israel, given the fact that every major NGO and human rights org has declared them an apartheid state?
We can't do that because holocaust.
I actually now blame mostly Europe and the US by the continuation of the situation in Palestine.
It is clearly impossible to solve this from the inside (too much hate by now, too many assholes on both sides whose power rests in the assholes from the other side killing people), which is why I think the US’ and Europe’s treatement of Israel as if it’s a Developed, Democratic, Western nation, all the while it’s more akin to a Theocratic South Africa with a Russia-style leadership, is probably to blame more for this than anybody else (and I say this as an European) - they were the only ones who could have forced a peaceful resolution to this (rather than just mild criticism and no action, which is all that Europe did) by doing the same they did to South Africa, but instead they did nothing at all but hypocrite talkie-talkie (or, worse, taking sides), effectivelly endorsing the choices of the Israeli leadership and totally disenfranchising the Palestinians, prolonging this cycle - want to see who has the most blood in their hands on this, go look in the White House, Number 10, Deutsche Kanselarie, the Palace Du Eliseé and the minion-mindset national "leaders" all over Europe.
The reason even we here go around and around in circles ping-ponging blame between both sides is because both sides are dominate by assholes, so of course they both commit disgusting attrocities and there is no way they'll ever solve it themselves (it's tit-for-tat-for-tit-for-tat all the way down), so it's the international community who has the responsability to force them to do it.
Clearly the cycle cannot be broken form the inside (unless by genocide, which seems to be what the Israeli leadership is aiming for), so it's the refusal of the US and Europe to do the only thing that might solve this - treat Israel just like South Africa was treated during Appartheid and Hamas as a terrorist group (the latter of which they already do, but without he other side of the equation, to pull out the boot of the oppressor, there will keep on being people with nothing to loose that end up with Hamas so it survives ever in the worst conditions) that has kept the cycle of violence going.
Palestinians already tried a less extremist path. It didn't work, they are still mass imprisoned by Israel.
Absolutely agreed. Peaceful resistence in Israel only helped a handful of towns not have their land destroyed by the separation wall. And even then it was totally shit for them and they pay the ultimate price.