By Mariam Jooma Çarikci
It was a crisp winter afternoon in Amsterdam nearly twenty years ago. I had landed from Johannesburg only hours earlier and was wandering through the old city centre with a friend, drinking in the sights, sounds, and smells—the rich aroma of coffee and stroopwafels filling the air, the festive lights casting long shadows across the cobbled streets.
As we walked, a group of young women passed us. One smiled and said, “Assalamu Alaikum.”
I smiled back, returned the greeting, and kept walking.
Moments later, my Jewish friend, visibly irritated, turned to me and said,
“That’s not fair! I’ve been living here for months and hardly know anyone. You’ve just arrived, and already people greet you on the street?”
At first, I didn’t understand. To her, it seemed like an injustice. To me, it was familiar: an unspoken, instinctive gesture of belonging.
“They don’t know me,” I said, “but in Islam, greeting another Muslim—whether you know them or not”.
She was baffled. But for me, that moment revealed something fundamental: solidarity is not manufactured through power. It is lived quietly through recognition, even among strangers.
Today, I think about that encounter often, as I watch solidarity itself being turned into something transactional in South Africa—a brand, an identity, a strategy.
A hollowed-out memory of struggle, engineered to comfort the powerful rather than confront injustice.
Since 1994, South African Jewish Zionist institutions have invested heavily in repositioning themselves—not as historic beneficiaries of apartheid’s racial hierarchies, but as natural allies of the liberation struggle.
This was not accidental. It was a deliberate political project—one that laundered their complicity in apartheid through selective storytelling, and sought to shield Zionism from critique by cloaking it in the legacy of anti-apartheid resistance.
To be clear: there were Jewish South Africans who fought bravely against apartheid—Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Denis Goldberg among them.
But they were exceptions.
The majority of Jewish South Africans, sheltered by their classification as white, benefited from apartheid’s violence—economically, socially, politically.
Their privilege remains largely unexamined in the mainstream telling of South Africa’s past.
This rewriting of history found fertile global ground after the 1991 rescission of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379—the resolution that had declared Zionism a form of racism.
The repeal was not neutral. It was a precondition for Israel’s participation in the Madrid Peace Conference, and a crushing capitulation by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), desperate for international recognition.
By allowing the resolution to be revoked, the PLO was forced to accept the legitimacy of Zionism in principle—collapsing the Palestinian struggle from one of anti-colonial liberation to one of negotiating territorial scraps with a settler-colonial state.
The consequences were devastating:
Israel was able to rebrand itself globally as a liberal democracy; Palestinian resistance was criminalized; and Zionism—once correctly understood as a racial project—was sanitized for international consumption.
In South Africa, this shift allowed Zionist institutions to weave themselves into the new democracy, presenting themselves as defenders of human rights even as they continued to support Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
This global sanitization had a domestic mirror.
As South Africa transitioned to democracy, Nelson Mandela himself was transformed into the ultimate symbol of “rainbow nation” reconciliation—a discourse that was less about justice, and more about preserving white comfort.
Rather than dismantling the structures of racial and economic power, the African National Congress (ANC) chose to replace white faces with Black ones in elite positions, while leaving the underlying edifice of land dispossession and wealth inequality untouched.
The land—the heart of the colonial theft—was quietly removed from the center of the conversation.
Instead, the narrative was massaged to present Black South Africans as “friendly,” “forgiving,” and “non-threatening,” soothing the anxieties of a white minority fearful of true revolution.
Mandela’s own relationship with Zionist-aligned Jewish figures served a similar purpose.
As the South African Jewish Report reflected, Mandela “made it clear that South African Jews were ‘part and parcel of the South African nation’… and demonstrated that the way to assuage old fears was to embrace, not reject.”
But this performance of inclusivity came at a price.
It demanded that Black South Africans not only forgive historical injustices—but actively perform reconciliation to make those who had benefited from their suffering feel comfortable.
In doing so, the harder questions—the ones about land, about redress, about dismantling settler structures—were pushed aside in favor of symbolic unity.
Within this sanitized political environment, Palestinian solidarity too was carefully tamed: repackaged as abstract “support” for a distant cause, rather than an active extension of South Africa’s own unfinished struggle.
In this climate, the voices of anti-Zionist Jews—those who refused to allow their identity to be weaponized in support of occupation—were marginalized.
One such voice is Paul Hendler, a South African Jew and housing policy expert based in Stellenbosch.
Hendler, once raised in a Zionist environment, broke ranks with institutional Judaism when his conscience could no longer bear the realities of Palestinian suffering.
Writing about his journey, he reflected:
“My values make it impossible for me to reconcile myself to the war crimes and atrocities that are committed in my name as a Jew.
If you are unmoved by the pain and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, then you have no heart.
If the situation is ‘too complicated’ and you have no interest in studying its history and context, then you are dumbing your mind.
Without compassion, empathy and intellectual curiosity you are in danger of losing your soul.”
Hendler’s honesty stands in stark contrast to the polished narratives of Zionist institutions that claim to speak for “the Jewish community” in South Africa while excluding those who refuse to normalize apartheid abroad.
Figures like Hendler remind us that Jewishness and Zionism are not synonymous.
And that the struggle for Palestinian freedom is not a betrayal of South Africa’s liberation story—it is its logical and moral extension.
If solidarity is to mean anything, it must be rooted not in branding, not in political expediency, but in truth.
It must refuse to erase the past.
It must be willing to name injustice—even when doing so is uncomfortable.
Especially then.
South Africa’s liberation legacy is being rewritten in real time.
We can either confront that distortion—or become complicit in it.
Mariam Jooma Carikci is a Senior Researcher at the Media Review Network (MRN) in Johannesburg, focused on the politics of Africa, Zionism in Africa, and Türkiye’s evolving role in the Middle East and Africa.
