Thread by @heshidicjudaism

A lot of aggressively antagonistic reactions to this tweet – while I’m somewhat sympathetic, I wonder how many people know the history of the Jewish role in the South African anti-apartheid struggle. (thread)

https://twitter.com/insfiresssss/status/1720092058025857231

In every aspect of the anti-apartheid struggle - political, military, legal, cultural - Jews were vastly disproportionately represented. Jews only accounted for 2.5% of South Africa’s white population, and .3% of South Africa’s total population. But, for example, more than half

the whites charged at the Treason Trial in 1956 were Jews, as were all the whites initially charged in the 1963 Rivonia Trial that would send Dennis Goldberg to prison for life, along with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Govan Mbeki. Joe Slovo, Ray Simons, and Raymond Suttner

served on the ANC’s National Executive Committee. Ronnie Kasrils was head of intelligence for the ANC’s military wing, Umikhoto we Sizwe. Jewish involvement was more expansive still in lower-level ANC staff positions, especially during the period in exile. Until 1985, whites in

South Africa were not permitted to become members of the ANC, though whites had been able to join the ANC in exile since 1969. The first white members in exile were Jews.

In Mandela’s own words in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, among whites it was Jews who hid Mandela when he was forced to go underground, who defended him as lawyers, who comprised anti-apartheid journalists and the formal political opposition to apartheid, who advocated

for Black political prisoners. Not only Mandela cites this particular relationship with anti-apartheid Jews. So did other Black ANC leaders like Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Moses Kotane.

To be sure we ought to oppose self-congratulation and exceptionalism as well as unhelpful self-flagellation, and we can’t shirk responsibility for the majority of our community’s fascism then and there and here and now. But we can learn and take inspiration from the role of Jews

in anti-racist struggle in the past. There is nothing about Jewishness that necessitates being an oppressor. I want to be like that current of Jewish people who vehemently and substantively opposed racism and fascism. Do we act as Jews or as communists? We act as both.