Conflict, Terrorism, and Invented Settler Colonial Victimhood in South Africa Reflections for Solidarity Building towards a Free Palestine

Underlying the logic of war and conflict that proliferates global narratives on the Israeli state’s ongoing onslaught in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, is a subtly communicated victimhood conferred to the settler colonial state. Much like South African racialized victims resisting and 'transitioning’ from a white-minority apartheid state, Palestinians find themselves subjected to a displaced empathy that delegitimizes their victimhood and liberationist efforts through the language of conflict and ‘terrorism’. 

Drawing parallels between South African and Palestinian experiences of settler colonial violence and their respective bureaucracies is not a new intervention. Comparisons are not uncommon considering the coinciding emergence in 1948 of an apartheid state in South Africa and the Palestinian Nakba (the ‘catastrophe’), which saw the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of over 80 per cent of Palestinians from historic Palestine by Zionist militias and the Israeli army, creating the State of Israel. While caution and sensitivity must be exercised in highlighting equivalences to avoid inadvertently flattening both contexts of apartheid, the Israeli settler colonial state’s ongoing genocidal rampage in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank implores us to critically (re)engage with the South African anti-apartheid struggle as we foment our solidarities. Particularly on the discourse around ‘conflict’ and ‘terrorism’, anti-colonial scholars, activists, and artists have rightfully highlighted the self-contradictions of settler colonialism and apartheid as a powerful discursive gaslight in action. Through Zionist weaponization of labels of terrorism and conflict, in justifying a no-holds-barred Israeli right to ‘self-defence’ and collective punishment, besieged and exiled Palestinian communities have pointed out glaring erasures of the settler colonial bureaucracy from which acts, the likes of 7 October 2023, are produced and are necessarily respondent to...