I'm not old enough to remember. I known the basics of the armed struggle of the ANC, bantustans, Cuba in Angola, etc. But not enough to compare it to Israel today. My general suspicion is Israel is worse but the US is way more committed to backing Israel than it was apartheid South Africa. I'm mostly want to gauge how the anti-apartheid movement was going then compared to now. Any resources or personal experiences.
I wasn't alive when apartheid ended, but your general suspicion is correct. The United States is way more committed to backing Israel than they backed apartheid South Africa. At the time apartheid ended in South Africa, South Africa was an international pariah state sanctioned by almost every other country, including the United States, under the Reagan administration even. No foreign goods or technology, no ability to participate in international sporting events. Economically the country was broken, militarily it had suffered defeats abroad in the border wars and had outdated equipment that was no match for the superior Soviet and Cuban equipment it's adversaries had. The situation was untenable, and the country was on the brink of civil war.
So F.W de Klerk made the decision to release Nelson Mandela from prison and allow the ANC to participate in elections open to all. This was not done out of the kindness of his heart, but for pragmatic reasons, to try ensure "a new dispensation for the Afrikaner" in Mandela's words. Apartheid was no longer viable, the country was on the brink of civil war. There were lots of negotiations at this time between the apartheid regime and the tripartite alliance (ANC, COSATU, SACP), and the leader of the the South African Communist Party, Chris Hani, was even assassinated by a Polish nazi. There was lots of rabble housing in which the AWB (Afrikaner neo nazi group) and IFP (Zulu nationalist party, made deals with the apartheid regime in the past) engaged in political violence, with ANC-IFP clashes being especially bloody. But overall, apartheid ended as peacefully as it possibly could have, and while there are many problems with modern day South Africa, I can say that on some level, I am proud to be South African.
However, the situation was no where near as polarised as the current situation between Israel and Palestine. South African Air Force planes never bombed homelands/bantustans with the intention to kill tens of thousands of civilians, and South Africa never received the complete US backing that Israel has militarily. In fact, South Africa was only able to obtain nuclear weapons and advanced technology necessary for domestic arms manufacturing from Israel itself. The nuclear weapons situation in particular led to a rare act of co-operation between the USSR and USA, in which a Soviet spy broke the details of upcoming nuclear tests, and an American spy plane (in the SR-71) flew over to verify the information.
Further, thanks to Cuban and Soviet support, South Africa's adversarial countries that they went to war with had superior equipment when compared to the South African army's outdated equipment. Better MiG fighter jets, better air defence systems and better tanks. None of Israel's adversaries are in such a position. However, the anti apartheid movement itself, in the ANC, PAC, SACP, etc, was no where near as militarized as Hamas or Hezbollah currently are. They carried out many attacks, but nothing on the scale of October 7 or Hezbollah's rocket campaign against Israel. Most of the militaristic fighting of that nature took place in the border wars.
In short, I can't see Israeli apartheid ending in the same way that South African apartheid did. The conditions are just too different. The polarization between Palestinians and Israelis is on a different level given the current genocide in Gaza, and the USA is so heavily invested in Israel in a way that it was never invested in apartheid South Africa. Israel's nuclear weapons programme is also far more advanced than South Africa's ever was. South African nuclear weapons had no viable delivery method aside from outdated fighter jets from the 1950s, the RSA ballistic missile programme was a smokescreen and paper tiger that was intended to be a trump card in negotiations. Israel have intercontinental ballistic missiles and stealth fighter aircraft, and have publicly spoken about bringing the rest of the world down with them (Samson option).
Thank you. When did US opinion about South Africa change, both publicly and politically? I don't believe South Africa was always a pariah to the US but maybe it the US was always conflicted about it?
Not OP, but unfortunately the ANC made deals with the neoliberals, which made them not a threat to the US political and financial establishment.
I highly recommend this essay from the late John Pilger (and his interview with Mandela in it). An excerpt:
What was forcing “pragmatism” on De Klerk were the signals from Washington. American companies pumped 40% of the oil that powered apartheid, and supplied the computers that ran the police state, and the trucks and armoured vehicles that attacked the townships. At the UN, America protected South Africa by vetoing hostile Security Council resolutions. And when the regime developed nuclear weapons, Washington winked.
At 4.16 pm on 11 February 1990, Mandela walked free. He wanted an extra week in prison to prepare himself, but De Klerk said no. He was bundled out. When he stepped out onto the balcony of Cape Town City Hall, he reached for his spectacles and realised he had left them in prison. Wearing his wife’s glasses, and with Cyril Ramaphosa supporting him, he spoke to millions in South Africa and around the world. “Now is the time to intensify the struggle,” he said, warning the regime that if its orchestrated violence continued, “the people will not hesitate to fight back.” It was a proud and angry statement and perhaps the most militant speech Mandela ever made.
The next day he appeared to correct himself. Reassuring the white establishment that he was “not a communist” and that majority rule would not result in “the domination of whites by blacks”, he repeated his earlier description of De Klerk as “a man of integrity”. This upset many in the resistance, and when word spread that he and Mbeki had been secretly negotiating for more than two years, there was widespread disappointment and dismay. This turned to anger when it was revealed that Mandela had written to P. W. Botha offering special constitutional protection for whites.
“Do you recognise that many people saw this as betrayal?” I asked Thabo Mbeki during an interview. He replied: “Had we not made the historic compromise, there would have been bloodbath and a great suffering across the land.”
While it is true there was no civil war, the political decisions made by Mandela, Mbeki and their fellow “moderates”, have allowed the continuation of suffering by exclusion: apartheid by other means. Over the course of three years, half a dozen critical decisions were made by a small group around Mbeki (who was advising Mandela), Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, and Trade Minister Alec Erwin. These were, in 1992, to drop nationalisation, to endorse the apartheid regime’s agreement to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, the forerunner of the WTO), which effectively surrendered economic independence and, in the same year, to repay the $25bn of apartheid-era debt, grant the Reserve Bank formal independence, and accept loans from the IMF, and in 1995, to abolish exchange controls which allowed the wealthy whites to take their capital overseas.
Anti apartheid sanctions were passed pretty late in the USA, around 1986. Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994. Reagan tried to veto the anti apartheid bill, and got then South African foreign minister Pik Botha to call US politicians on the fence about the veto. This backfired and Reagan's veto was overruled, and the anti apartheid legislation passed. However, South Africa was subject to a voluntary arms embargo by the United Nations security council since 1963, an embargo the US voted in favour of. Only the UK and France abstained. This is why South Africa had such outdated military equipment by the end of apartheid, their newest fighter aircraft at the time were both of UK and French design, in the Buccaneer and Mirage respectively. This is probably a reason for the abstention. South Africa later attempted a domestic modernisation programme on some of it's weapons using Israeli technology. (The Atlas Cheetah is the best example of this). However the US did covertly support apartheid for many years.
This is a scene from Lethal Weapon 2, a tentpeg blockbuster movie in which reps from the South African state are not only the villains but are immediately understood to be villains by our heroes simply by the fact that they uphold the values of the state.
Not until it's (even remotely) conceivable that a household name hero in a summer blockbuster will emphatically yell "free Palestine you dumb son of a bitch" are we anywhere near the level of ideological success in the west as apartheid activists had.
Yeah but that's 1989. I'm not under the delusion that Israel is going to end in a couple years. I guess more specifically, I'm wondering when did it become normal to be anti-apartheid. In the US that is.
Related question: Did the fall of the Soviet Union speed up or down the fall of Apartheid?
@aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net can probably give you a better answer about Apartheid South Africa compared to Israel.
