https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/black-south-africans-denounce-un-report-israel-and-hugh-fitzgerald/
The UN Commission of Inquiry tasked with investigating Israel for supposed “crimes” against the Palestinians, headed by the virulently anti-Israel Navi Pillay, has just issued its report, which includes, among other calumnies, the charge that Israel practices apartheid. Black South Africans who were victims of the original, South-African brand of apartheid were incensed at this charge and have answered it, citing the real situation in Israel and invoking both Martin Luther King (“When People Criticize Zionists, They Mean Jews”), and Nelson Mandela (“Israel Has The Right To Exist”). A report on their demonstration against the Pillay Report is here: “‘Nelson Mandela Would Not Approve’: South Africans Denounce UN Report on Palestinians,” by Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, June 10, 2022:
A group of pro-Israel South Africans has invoked the figure of the late Nelson Mandela, the iconic leader of their country’s anti-apartheid struggle, in a forthright condemnation of the recent UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry (COI) report that blamed Israel’s “perpetual occupation” for the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
How can Israel be accused of “occupying” the very territory that was assigned to the future Jewish National Home by the League of Nations in its Mandate for Palestine (1920), that included all the land “from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean sea”? Were the Jews “occupiers” in 1948, when five Arab armies invaded to snuff out the young life of the Jewish state? Were they “occupiers” in 1967, when three Arab armies, led by Egypt’s Nasser, tried to undo the “nakba” of 1948 and destroy the Jewish state, but instead lost the Sinai, the Golan, and Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank) to a victorious Israel?
In a statement issued this week by the South African Friends of Israel (SAFI), a collection of church and community leaders argued that Mandela — South Africa’s first post-apartheid president — would have rejected the report’s findings.
“We sincerely doubt that our first democratically elected president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, would approve of a situation where the antisemitism of Hamas was put on the same moral standing as the righteous fight of black people against the white supremacy of apartheid,” the statement declared.