Much has been made in certain anti-Israel quarters regarding the alleged similarities between the Jewish state and apartheid-era South Africa. While the differences between these two countries have been dealt with by others elsewhere correspondences do indeed exist between the pair albeit in a way different from that usually proffered.

In fact South Africa’s recent history can be used as a guideline whose consequences a post-Zionist Israel should pay attention to with great circumspection.

White-ruled South Africa like Israel in the Middle East today was Africa’s major state boasting that continent’s leading economy most advanced cities and a highly developed culture. Contrary to popular opinion the Afrikaners the country’s main group of European extraction were not mere colonists but a fusion of Dutch German and French Huguenot immigrants who were melded together to form a unique community indigenous to South Africa alone.

Unlike the settlers of such places as the United States and Argentina for example whose modern day descendants are not considered colonists for the sole reason that they became majorities in their respective places of residence the Boers as the members of the newborn people were once known created not only an original society but also a new language Afrikaans. Like the early Zionist pioneers many of the newcomers came not to live in cities and towns but to plow the virgin earth.

Also counter to prevailing notions the Dutch inhabitants did not conquer and subjugate a large indigenous native population at the outset. Upon their arrival in the country they encountered only small scattered bands of Bushmen and Hottentots. The Bantu-speaking Negroes who later coalesced into such tribes as the Xhosa Zulu and Basuto were in fact following a centuries-old push southwards from their original homeland in the Lake Region of Central Africa ousting many other peoples in the process at the same time as the European pioneers were moving north. Rather than one group invading the territory of the other both communities encountered each other at a time of singular historical convergence.

Like the myth of Jewish immigrants displacing an original Arab community in Ottoman and subsequently British-ruled Palestine emotional rhetoric has tended to obscure the actual facts of the situation.

Post-apartheid South Africa then is not a nation which has been returned to its original owners (there never were any) but rather a government where one ruling aggregation has replaced another. Historically blacks (outside of the above-mentioned Bushmen and Hottentots with both groups always being few in number and neither constituting anything resembling an organized union) have no more legitimate claim to dominion in South Africa than the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have to sovereignty in Israel. Both groups descend not from the original inhabitants of their respective lands but are themselves colonists of said regions who came from elsewhere; thus the delegitimization campaign waged against Jews and Afrikaners alike is based on false premises.

The replacement in South Africa of an Afrikaner government has not resulted in a new age of racial equality but rather has led to the imposition of majority tyranny over minority interests. The ruling African National Congress an ex-terrorist and communist-influenced confederation has developed into a one-party dictatorship first under Nelson Mandela and subsequently under the iron leadership of Thabo Mbeki. The device of one man one vote  along with the ANC’s continuing popularity among non-white voters ensures that minority voices won’t be heard.

What this example could mean for an embattled disconcerted Israeli state desperately looking for a way out of its present political quagmire can best be illustrated by the following letter dated January 4 2002 addressed to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat by the Group of 63 a think tank of Afrikaner academics and intellectuals:

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