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The Beinart NotebookA conversation about American foreign policy, Palestinian freedom and the Jewish people. Author: Peter Beinart
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Nelson Mandela’s Grandson Is Right
Monday, 8 September, 2025
Friday Zoom CallThis Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Abdullah Awwad, a doctor in the orthopedic department of the Al Shifa Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. In his Go Fund Me page, he writes that his “once-vibrant city has been reduced to rubble” and that “we are currently living in overcrowded shelters, struggling for basic necessities like food, clean water, and medical supplies.” I’ll ask him what it’s like to work as a doctor in Gaza today.The live call will be for paid subscribers only (due to capacity limits), but the full video will be made available Sunday to all subscribers, paid and unpaid. Please consider supporting Abdullah and other Palestinians.Cited in Today’s VideoMandla Mandela on why Israel’s version of apartheid is worse than South Africa’s.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, Nathan Goldman, and I answered readers’ questions.In the Guardian, Ahmad Ibsais asks why no one believed Palestinians when they called Gaza a genocide.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, Ahmed Moor talks to Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of Holocaust memory who withdrew from teaching at Columbia after it adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism.On MSNBC, I debated whether there was a meaningful difference on Gaza between Trump and Biden.I’ll be speaking this Tuesday, September 9, at the University of Virginia.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:It was an interesting interview last week with Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, in which Mandla Mandela says that what Israel’s doing to the Palestinians is far worse—those are his words—far worse than what apartheid South Africa did to Black South Africans. And I think he’s right, and I think it’s interesting to think about why that’s turned out to be the case. It’s kind of counterintuitive on its face, because there are some Palestinians under Israeli control who have the right to vote. Palestinian citizens, so-called Israeli Arabs, have the right to vote. They’re a minority of the Palestinians under Israeli control, because most of the Palestinians under Israeli control live in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, and don’t vote, basically can’t vote.But the fact that any Palestinians under Israeli control can vote distinguishes Israel from apartheid South Africa in which no Black South Africans had the right to vote. There were, in the 1980s, two other groups, Indians and so-called Coloreds, who got certain kinds of voting rights, but Black South Africans never did. So, for that reason, one, I think, would naturally think that Israel’s domination is more benign, that Palestinians under Israeli control have more rights than Black South Africans did. But I think Mandla Mandela’s point was that modern-day South Africa, apartheid South Africa, didn’t commit a genocide against Black South Africans in the way that Israel is now doing in Gaza, and so for that fundamental reason that what Israel is doing is fundamentally worse.And I think the reason for this difference is that the apartheid regime in South Africa was dependent on Black labor. Black South Africans were the backbone of the economy, so Israel… so South Africa could not engage in mass expulsion or mass destruction of the Black population. It could certainly oppress them very brutally, but it needed their labor. Israel doesn’t need Palestinian labor nearly as much. In recent decades, Israel has moved away from relying on Palestinian labor from the occupied territories, brought in a lot of guest workers from Asia, and that has made the Palestinian population ‘disposable’ from Israel’s point of view, which is part of the reason I think you can see this widespread support now in Israel for mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and indeed, this just mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, because Palestinians are not valuable to the state as a labor force.And beyond that, in apartheid South Africa, because Black South Africans had the power of their labor, that became a very important part of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, when the Black South African trade unions went on strike and put a lot of pressure on the government. In fact, Cyril Romaphosa, the current president of South Africa, was the head of the National Union of Mine Workers, which is a critical ally of the African National Congress in the anti-apartheid struggle. Palestinians don’t have that kind of similar power, which makes them more vulnerable.The other reason that I think Mandla Medela is correct, that Israel’s version of apartheid, and Israel’s system has been declared an apartheid system by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'Tselem, and many others, is that Israel’s version of apartheid simply lasted much longer. Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994. Israel’s has continued now for three decades longer. And I think that’s not only because of the different balance of power internally, it’s also because of the different geopolitical situation. The only really powerful argument that South Africa’s apartheid leaders had for preserving the system was their claim that if it fell, that a Black South African government would be communist and would turn against the West because the ANC was close to the South African Communist Party and did get a lot of support from the Soviet Union. But as the Cold War began to wane in the mid to late 1980s, that argument started to fall apart. It became clear that the West didn’t have so much to worry about in terms of a Black South African government because it couldn’t be a Marxist government, because the Soviet Union was withdrawing from its global competition with the United States. And so, in some ways, South Africa had no argument to make to Europe and the United States for why apartheid should be sustained.Israel is much more powerful geopolitically. It’s much more economically and technologically influential. Many more countries rely on trade with it than they did with apartheid South Africa. Of course, it has the claim of antisemitism, which is a kind of just a cudgel to beat back pro-Palestinian activism in a way that, you know, White South Africans did not. But I think the other critical thing, and the thing which kind of worries me so profoundly about the system, the world, is that apartheid South Africa ended in a moment of this third wave of global democratization, in which there was this global movement for democracy against apartheid that helped to end American and European complicity and ultimately bring down that regime. There was a kind of triumph of a liberal democratic movement around the world over apartheid South Africa in a moment in which liberal democracy was on the ascent.Today, the situation is radically different. Liberal democracy around the world is very, very deeply in decline. And what’s happened is that Israel’s version of supremacist ethno-nationalism, even though there’s widespread revulsion to what it’s doing in much of the world, in many other powerful pockets of the West, has become a kind of a model of the ethno-nationalism that the Republican Party wants in the United States, that Viktor Orban wants, that the AFD wants in Germany, that Marine Le Pen wants in France, that Narendra Modi wants in India. And this is happening at a time in which ethno-nationalism is on the rise.And so, my geopolitical kind of nightmare is that apartheid South Africa is defeated in a moment when global democracy is rising. But that in Israel-Palestine, you potentially have the opposite, in which Israel contributes to the defeat of global democracy around the world, because it kind of serves as a kind of a vanguard for these movements that overthrow liberal democracy in the name of the supremacy of one group and a kind of ethno-nationalist vision of the state. You can see the way that’s playing out to some degree in the United States, in which the Trump administration uses the crackdown against a pro-Palestine solidarity movement as part of its effort to basically impose authoritarian control over American universities.So, I think, to me, the macro question that Mandla Mandela is getting at is not just, is Israel’s version of apartheid worse for Palestinians than South Africa’s version was for Black South Africans, but is potentially Israel’s version of apartheid part of a global system that’s much, much more dangerous for the entire world as the world lurches towards ethno-nationalism than apartheid South Africa’s was, because apartheid South Africa was basically overwhelmed by this global movement towards liberal democracy? I think that, to me, is really, the most frightening scenario from a global perspective. This is a public episode. 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