CASSIEM KHAN
THE unfolding genocide in Palestine has brought into sharp focus the violent and brutal seizure of land as the driving force of the Zionist regime’s ongoing occupation. The unwavering support for the genocide has also exposed its sponsors and local supporters as those who believe in and continue to advance the cause of settler colonialism.
Genocidal land-grabbing is unfolding everywhere in Occupied Palestine. While the blood of thousands of Palestinians continues to flow, Zionists are brazenly and unashamedly holding presentations to promote a future Gaza with Israeli settlements.
Settler colonialism is best explained by the martyred spokesperson of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ghassan Kanafani, who said: “They steal your bread and give you a crumb. Then they demand that you thank them for their generosity. Oh, their audacity.”
Zionists have been on the path of settler colonialism since the day its founder, Theodore Herzl, identified Palestine as the land they wished to occupy. Herzl was emboldened by observing the genocides that characterised the colonial era, especially in the US, Canada, Australia and in Africa. More importantly, in South Africa.
British governor to South Africa, Harry Smith, regarded the ‘extermination’ of the Xhosa nation as “the only principle to guide us”. At the end of the Fourth Frontier War (War of Dispossession) in 1812, Lt-Col John Graham proclaimed the “total expulsion of the K ***** tribes from His Majesty’s territories”.
The Germans were not to be outdone. In Namibia, Lothar von Trotha, a general of the Second Reich, declared, regarding the ethnic killing of the Herero and Nama people, “The exercise of violence with crass terrorism and even with gruesomeness was and is my politic. I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain.” The words and actions of Harry Smith and John Graham and Trotha are like those of Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gants, and Ben Gvir.
A democratic South Africa continues to honour the colonial governor Harry Smith, by keeping the name of the man for one of its towns – Harrismith in the Free State. This is just one such example. The crime of conquering continues, the gains of the colonial and apartheid conquest have not been reversed and continue to be defended and preserved. These smallest of gestures of renaming towns, streets and buildings are never smooth and never accepted as atonement.
Inserting and insisting on their apartheid anthem, Die Stem, into the current national anthem is rubbing salt in open wounds, not reconciliation. They use it to continue to remind us of their conquest. The lyrics, “Uit die blou van onse hemel, Uit die diepte van ons see, Oor ons ewige gebergtes, Waar die kranse antwoord gee.” Coloniser, it is not your blue skies, your sea, your mountains, or your cliffs. The land does not belong to the coloniser, the oppressor and the conqueror.
Accepting Die Stem is accepting the land theft that happened as a result of genocide. This dishonours the thousands, if not millions, killed during the genocides just in this southern African region alone. It also makes a mockery of our case against the genocide committed by apartheid Israel at the International Court of Justice. We correctly demand justice in Palestine but our Constitution gives equal status to the victim and perpetrator of genocide at home.
There are many supporters of the Palestinian cause who insist there can be no two-state solution in Occupied Palestine. That all of Palestine should be liberated, “from the river to the sea”. That a unitary Palestinian state will recognise the original names of the conquered cities and will resurrect villages and towns destroyed during, before and after the Nakba. That the land of Palestine must be restored to the pre-1948 borders and that all refugees have a right to return to their ancestral homes and land. These are all correct positions and must be supported.
But when challenged on the genocides in South Africa, the violent land theft that occurred, that was followed by the migrant labour system that severed attachment to the land, the unabated extraction of the mineral wealth from the land, the Group Areas Act, etc, we are presented with arguments such as apartheid is dead, the economy will be destroyed, this country needs foreign investment, food security will be impacted and a plethora of other arguments.
All of these arguments can be countered, but facts are that 30 years after the transition to democracy, the privileged sons and daughters of the settler-colonialists have been favoured. They lost nothing. There was no meaningful expropriation of land, without or even with compensation. The majority of the oppressed continue to live without land, and in hunger, poverty, unemployment, without energy and in constant fear of crime.
The privileged continued to hold on to the ill-gotten wealth, land being their primary gain. The 2017 Land Audit confirms that 70% of all land remains in their possession. The wealth of the country, be it in the form of mines, factories, agriculture, banks and the financial sectors, broadly continues to be dominated by the likes of the Oppenheimers. Is it any wonder that these capitalists want to secure a victory for political parties that support the genocide in Palestine, through party political funding?
The sons and daughters of the settlercolonialists have their hands firmly on the control of the economy. They view the land as their personal property, and not the right and heritage of the occupied people. Any democratic project in these conditions was bound to falter. Democracy spelled the end of the revolution, because the democracy we ushered in continues to be dependent on the settler-colonialists, who view the African majority as ungrateful for the crumbs dished out to them.
Without addressing the causal issue of land dispossession, we will continue to be unsuccessful in addressing the symptoms of our oppression such as poverty, crime and unemployment.
Khan is the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania’s premier candidate for Western Cape.
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