History imposes a burden on us to speak out in defence of the Palestinians

President Nelson Mandela said in December 1997: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

These words are more than the rhetoric of solidarity, and are not merely a statement of fact. They are also a grim warning. He was speaking in the knowledge of the links between Zionism and apartheid. The links are still real. The 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter is an appropriate moment to refer to these links.

The Congress of the People adopted the Freedom Charter on 26 June 1955. On reading the Bill of Rights in South Africa’s Constitution, one will find the entire Freedom Charter has become part of South African law. It thus belongs to all South Africans equally. This was ensured by the manner in which it was drawn up – following a call to all South Africans to state their demands for what South Africa should be like.

If the Freedom Charter defines a free South Africa, then we are not free – yet. There is still much work to do, and some of that involves what Mandela had in mind. 

South African Zionists never welcomed the end of apartheid. As the years have passed since Mandela’s speech on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Zionist hostility has intensified against our South Africa striving to build a post-apartheid democratic state.

Zionism has much to lose from our efforts. Much is made of the Balfour Declaration by Zionists. Lord Arthur Balfour himself was a racist and anti-Semite, and in 1906 he said of South Africa:

“We have to face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.”

The Freedom Charter was adopted in response to demands which the people of South Africa were asked to make, and which defined the South Africa they wanted to live in. What Balfour said was rejected by the words of the Freedom Charter:

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

“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 all 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…”

The apartheid government of South Africa had a different plan for our country, and one with which Zionists have never quarrelled. In his book Zionism During the Holocaust: the Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation (2022), Tony Greenstein describes how the Zionists accepted an apartheid future for South Africa when the National Party was elected by the white electorate. 

The compromise was that in return for an end to National Party anti-Semitism, Zionists – in a lying claim to speak for all Jews – would support apartheid. Usually credited with designing the details of apartheid South Africa, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd said:

“The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”

He was correct. In 2024 his opinion was confirmed by the International Court of Justice. 

Content with Verwoerd’s comparison, Zionist Israel welcomed John Vorster, South Africa’s prime minister, to Israel in 1976. He even laid a wreath at the Holocaust Memorial to the six million Jews whose deaths he had supported during World War 2 when he had been interned because of his active support for the Nazis.

But the scene has changed. The spirit of the Freedom Charter now rides high in South African law, and Zionism must be confronted as our Constitution demands. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) have declared war on South Africa’s anti-racist and democratic objectives. Equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein has even removed the South African government from the Sabbatical prayer.

South Africa’s Zionists are outraged by the proceedings before the International Court of Justice against Israel under what is known briefly as the Genocide Convention, and the ICJ’s provisional conclusions. They refuse to recognise that South Africa’s action is demanded by the Freedom Charter itself, which states:

“South Africa shall be a fully independent state which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations.”

South Africa’s Constitution binds us to international law. History imposes a burden on us to speak out in defence of the Palestinians, whom the world has recognised to be the victims of Zionist apartheid.

Zionist Israel has made no secret of its intentions, and they are free to be read by anyone. What would the world think of South Africa if we remained silent when the gates of hell were opened to unleash the logical conclusions of apartheid on Palestinians?

In fact, the world is beginning to act. South Africa is a co-founder of the Hague Group, which was established to protect and uphold international law in the face of Israeli and American defiance of the United Nations, the ICJ and the International Criminal Court. 

Initially, the Hague Group included Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia and Senegal. To halt the genocide the group is convening an Emergency Ministerial Conference in Bogotá, Colombia, on 15 and 16 July 2025. Significantly, many more governments from Asia, Africa and Latin America have confirmed their participation.

But there is more to the matter than South African solidarity with the Palestinians. The Zionist poison that it is anti-Semitic to criticise Israel in its form as a racist ethno-national state must also be confronted at home. This is a matter of South African self-interest if we are to form a country envisaged by the Freedom Charter, and the Constitution based on it.

There is no space here to set out the history of Zionism, beyond noting that it was