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OPINION

By Amb. Kintu Nyago

President Yoweri Museveni and the Munyonyo Non-Aligned Movement Summit’s decision on the Palestine-Israel conflict, to champion the Two State Solution, as the means to create sustained peace in that region is legitimate.

It was first adopted by the United Nations 77 years ago in 1947, and is older than Benjamin Netanyahu or the Hamas leadership.

NAM’s key objectives are to promote multilateralism, human rights and world peace. And it adopted the Two State Solution at its formation in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961. This under the tutelage of the indomitable Marshal Broz Tito, Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sukarno et al. These were leaders respectively, of Yugoslavia, Ghana, Egypt, India and Indonesia.

Additionally, the African National Congress-led South African government’s decision to sue Israel’s right-wing government in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), over its belligerent actions in Gaza, was informed by its principled adherence to a human rights culture and international law. It would be erroneous to suggest that South Africa hates Israel and its people for it hosts an Israeli Embassy in Pretoria and has an embassy in Tel Aviv.

Furthermore, Jews whether by culture, ethnicity or religion, who are South African citizens form the 12th largest Jewish community in the world and the largest on the African continent. They number approximately 60,000 people.

South African Jews originated mostly from Czarist Russia and eastern Europe. They fled from pogroms more than a century ago. Most arrived poor and associated with labour unions, some with the South African Communist Party, formed in the early 1920s.

Around the time Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks captured power in Moscow. Indeed, the SACP was sponsored by the Communist Party of the Soviet Socialist Republics (CCCP).

Nelson Mandela’s meteoric rise to the leadership of the ANC with his cohort that included Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo in the 1940s led to this party’s opening up alliances with the South African Indian Congress and most crucially, the SACP.

This was within the context of the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and its policy of Apartheid.

One has to recall that Afrikaner nationalists, were ideologically opposed to British imperialism and hence sympathised with Nazi Germany during World War II. This conditioned many South African Jews to align themselves with the SACP and the anti-Apartheid struggle.

The alliance that ANC formed with the SACP after the adopting its milestone liberation manifesto called the Freedom Charter in 1955, and saw many Jewish activists, notably from the SACP joining the anti-Apartheid struggle.

Together with Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo, Govan Mbeki and others, they were part of the clandestine team that created Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing, that was used to launch the armed struggle against Apartheid.

These included Joe Slovo and his wife Ruth First. Slovo, a theoretician and strategist became the chief of staff of Umkhonto. His wife unfortunately, got assassinated by the Apartheid regime in the mid-1970s in Maputo, where she worked as a lecturer at the University of Mozambique.

Others were Arthur Goldriech, who owned the property, in the White only suburb of Rivonia, were Mandela and the Umkhonto’s high command were based. This in addition to high command member Dennis Goldberg and ANC military intelligence chief Ronnie Kasrils.

Consequently, the argument that the ANC-led government in South Africa is anti-Semitic is false.

They, however, are opposed to rabid Zionism and the exclusions and marginalisation of Palestinians. Instead, like Uganda and NAM, they promote the creation of the peaceful coexistence, of the Jewish and Palestinian states in a manner envisioned in the Bible in Isaiah chapter 11 and verse 6: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf with the lion...”

That is the envisioned two state solution vision that will solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The writer is the Deputy High Commissioner -Pretoria