Summary
South African anti-apartheid leader and president, whose life Falk takes in Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope as the exemplary model for the Palestinian Legitimacy struggle: twenty-seven years in jail, refusal to renounce armed struggle as a condition of release, solidarity with the Palestinian cause, and the inspiration for Marwan Barghouti’s prison letter (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.271-274).
Details
- Falk met Mandela in Cape Town while Mandela was serving as president of South Africa, as a member of the International Commission on the Future of the Oceans; Falk drafted remarks for Mandela’s welcome of the commission and responded on its behalf, and Mandela afterwards spoke individually with each of the forty commission members (PDF p.271-272).
- Falk: Mandela’s “spiritual presence” created “a strong impression of moral radiance”, reinforcing his belief that “political greatness presupposes a spiritual orientation toward the meaning of life” (PDF p.272).
- As late as the 1980s, Falk records, leaders in Britain and the United States were condemning Mandela as a “terrorist” and “revolutionary”; Mandela rejected early offers of release if he would “renounce violence”, endorsed the creation of the ANC’s military wing and at one stage supported armed resistance, and was never willing to say the oppressed must renounce whatever means was available to gain their freedom (PDF p.272).
- Mandela on Palestine: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” (PDF p.273; the source, per Chapter 7 endnote 8, is his address at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, December 4, 1997, PDF p.296)
- On separated roads: “Never in the darkest days of South Africa’s apartheid have there been separated roads for blacks and whites.” (PDF p.273)
- Mandela regarded Yasir Arafat as a “comrade in arms” and “one of the outstanding freedom fighters of his generation”, and by affirming Arafat, Castro and Qaddafi made plain that “our enemies are not your enemies” (PDF p.273).
- To gain the political end of apartheid Mandela deferred challenges to social and economic apartheid, leaving that mission to his legacy (PDF p.273).
- In Falk’s December 2013 post, Netanyahu’s and Peres’s boycott of Mandela’s funeral is treated as a dysfunctional Israeli response to the legitimacy struggle, “presumably in retaliation for his frequent statements of support for the Palestinian struggle” (PDF p.65-66).
- In Falk’s Doha remarks Mandela is the authority for the legitimacy struggle’s non-commitment to nonviolence in principle: as Mandela made clear in South Africa, commitment to nonviolent resistance allows the oppressed to use whatever instruments they find useful, including violence, within an ethos limiting its use (PDF p.247-248).
Related pages
Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Marwan Barghouti, Legitimacy struggle, Apartheid, Yasir Arafat