Remembering Nelson Mandela, Thru Zionist Eyes

Remembering Nelson Mandela, Thru Zionist Eyes

Immediately upon receiving the news of the passing of this great leader of the South African freedom struggle and his country’s first post-apartheid president, J.J. Goldberg wrote a remarkable article of remembrance for The Forward.  In part, he recalled the close relationship Israel had with the newly independent states of sub-Saharan Africa until most of them turned against Israel in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.  (There’s also this nuanced appreciation of Mandela by the ADL’s director Abe Foxman, “How Mandela won over the Jewish community.”)

Goldberg included a devastating description of the confrontation that his fellow Habonim (Labor-Zionist youth) activists had with Prime Minister Golda Meir over the Labor party leadership’s embrace of United States policy in Vietnam.  Similarly, we understand that Israel eventually forged a secret  alliance with the apartheid regime — widely believed even to include a sharing of nuclear technology — as part of a realpolitik calculation.  This organization’s fraternal and antecedent groups, both in the U.S. and in Israel — including Mapam, Ratz and Hashomer Hatzair — never supported this “pragmatic” hard approach to international relations.

There was something of an uproar in Israel when Prime Minister Netanyahu decided against attending the grand memorial celebration of Nelson Mandela’s life, citing cost considerations.  Pres. Shimon Peres excused himself for the stated reason of recovering from the flu (a more believable excuse given his advanced age of 90).  The great gathering of world leaders in South Africa reminds us of a similar august occasion in Israel in November 1995, for Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, but that occasion was an enormous tragedy; Mandela’s great mission in life was accomplished years ago, whereas the peace camp was decapitated with Rabin’s murder.

It’s often been said that if the Palestinians had a Nelson Mandela as their leader, instead of Yasir Arafat at the time, they would have achieved independence long ago, alongside Israel.  (Similarly, many of us continue to believe that if Yitzhak Rabin had not been shockingly struck down when he was, that the Oslo peace process would have ended in a successful peace agreement — but we’ll never know for sure.) 

Israel has been represented, finally, with a delegation headed by Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein (a Likud MK). He is reported to have negotiated a significant cost saving for the public coffers in making this trip. The delegation includes Meretz MK Nitzan Horowitz, plus two MKs from Yesh Atid, one from Labor and one other from Likud.  Edelstein is quoted as follows on Mandela:

As someone who was a prisoner of conscience in the past, I had the privilege of meeting Mandela in 1996, and we shared stories of our experiences in prison and in battling for our rights. As far as I’m concerned, this is a type of closure for me.

By | 2013-12-10T18:29:00-05:00 December 10th, 2013|Blog|5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. Lilly Rivlin December 10, 2013 at 7:30 pm - Reply

    THANK YOU RALPH FOR BRINGING TOGETHER VARIOUS THREADS OF INFORMATION RELATED TO MANDELA, AND WHO WAS ATTENDING HIS FUNERAL AND WHY.
    AT THIS POINT I WANT TO REMEMBER MY FRIEND ARTHUR GOLDREICH, A SOUTH AFRICAN JEW, A COMRADE OF MANDELA’S, WHO WAS JAILED AND ESCAPED TO ISRAEL WHERE HE LIVED A LONG AND CREATIVE LIFE. AMONG THE MANY THNGS HE DID WAS ESTABLISH THE DESIGN DEPT. AT BEZALEL ART SCHOOL IN JERUSALEM. LILLY

  2. Unknown December 11, 2013 at 5:44 pm - Reply

    Beautiful job pulling these threads together as Lilly Rivlin said. And thanks to Lilly for citing Arthur Goldreich. There are many S. African Jews who fled S. Africa during the dark anti-apartheid years and are now part of the struggle for democacy in Israel. Most notable today is Robi Damelin of the Bereaved Parents Circle, Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost relatives to the armed conflict.

  3. Anonymous December 13, 2013 at 11:00 pm - Reply

    Dear All,

    I am very sorry to see Meretz-related people, so-called progressives, repeating this trite, reactionary rationalization for Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinians:

    “It’s often been said that if the Palestinians had a Nelson Mandela as their leader, instead of Yasir Arafat at the time, they would have achieved independence long ago, alongside Israel.”

    Are we to accept that only people in the world who are led by a Mandela, or for that matter, Gandhi or MLK, deserve freedom and human rights? Of course not. If that was the case, the entire rest of Africa, most of Asia, Latin America and millions of other peoples suffering from discrimination worldwide would still be languishing under colonial and other forms of oppression.

    We should not rationalize that people only deserve basic freedoms and human rights if they are led by the equivalent of one of two or three of the most respected leaders of the past century. This is an absurdly high bar to set. Stop blaming the victims for not producing a Mandela, and take responsibility for ending Israel’s oppression.

    Ted

  4. Ralph Seliger December 15, 2013 at 11:11 pm - Reply

    Ted totally misconstrues this point about the lack of a Mandela in the Palestinian (also Israeli) leadership. It’s not that the failure to make this high bar makes the Palestinians any less deserving of being liberated from occupation and oppression, it just made this more difficult to achieve.

  5. Anonymous December 17, 2013 at 6:23 pm - Reply

    Dear Ralph,

    Then best to dispense completely with further discussion of the search for a Palestinian Mandela. It’s a useless subject, an equivocation at best.

    Ted

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