The "Third Forces," South Africa's transition and Egypt

David Africa at Aljazeera English:

 The apparently sudden and unexpected violence against Egyptian protesters that started on February 2 has an interesting historical ring to it. The date marks the unbanning of liberation movements in South Africa in 1990, and the start of political negotiations between the apartheid regime and the African National Congress. It also marks the start of the most violent period in South Africa’s turbulent political history.

The parallels with Egypt start with Mubarak’s speech to the nation on February 1, ostensibly making a significant concession to the protesters and a commitment to Egypt’s democratic future. The next day thugs, many now clearly identified as members of the security forces, rallied in central Cairo and launched attacks on hitherto peaceful demonstrators.

The tactics of deploying so-called third forces is a tried and tested method of autocratic regimes, usually utilised when the regime realises that it is on the strategic defencive politically. The focus of the regime then shifts from merely ruling as usual to extending its reign as long as possible, while at the same time sapping the material and political energy of its opponents.

In South Africa this tactic was intended to legitimise the regime as the only thing standing between an orderly transition to democracy on the one hand, and chaos on the other. At the same time it sought to drain the energy of the liberation movement by killing some of its leaders, forcing it into a defencive mode of thinking and compelling it to accept a compromise favourable to the regime. Mubarak’s statements prior to the unleashing of his ‘police-in-civilian clothing’, the inaction of the army and the apparently reasonable response of his Prime Minister after the fact that they will vigorously investigate the violence and bring the perpetrators to book, are well rehearsed elements of a ‘third force’ strategy...

Unless the army intervenes on the side of the Egyptian democracy movement, this ‘third force’ will continue to strike, not only in Cairo and other cities but increasingly also in the rural parts of the country. In South Africa the third force violence lasted from 1990 to 1994. In Egypt Mubarak’s regime has until September to produce a disorganised, leaderless and desperate opposition unable to execute a proper election campaign. The lessons of South Africa are instructive in how to defeat this effort by a desperate regime.

The continued unity of South Africans, in protest, was the central element that defeated the efforts of the apartheid regime to continue governing. If the Egyptian people continue protesting, as they have for the last two weeks, any claims of legitimacy by the regime are transparently ridiculous. In South Africa the central demand of the liberation movement at the height of third force violence became one for a transitional government.

No autocratic regime can oversee its own demise, and a real election could only take place if the entire state apparatus, including its security forces, were placed under the control of an interim government. The South African Transitional Executive Council established in 1993 and acting as an interim government, ensured the holding of free and fair elections in April 1994.
Anything less than the departure of Mubarak and his key allies will mean a transition always under threat of violence by a so-called third force, and an election that might disappear amidst the violence visited upon the Egyptian resistance.

A one-state solution for Israel/Palestine?

An opinion piece by Ali Abunimah on Al Jazeera's English website reports that is now Israeli settlers and right-wing parties that are considering a one state solution for Israel/Palestine. I strongly suggest you read the entire article, but I will include some excerpts:

With no progress toward a two-state solution despite decades of efforts, the only Zionist alternative on offer has been outright expulsion of the Palestinians - a programme long-championed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party, which has seen its support increase steadily.

Israel is at the point where it has to look in the mirror and even some cold, hard Likudniks like Arens apparently do not like what they see. Yisrael Beitenu's platform is "nonsensical," Arens told Haaretz and simply not "doable".

If Israel feels it is a pariah now, what would happen after another mass expulsion of Palestinians?

Lessons from South Africa

Given these realities, "The worst solution ... is apparently the right one: a binational state, full annexation, full citizenship" in the words of settler activist and former Netanyahu aide Uri Elitzur.

This awakening can be likened to what happened among South African whites in the 1980s. By that time it had become clear that the white minority government's effort to "solve" the problem of black disenfranchisement by creating nominally independent homelands - bantustans - had failed.

Pressure was mounting from internal resistance and the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. By the mid-1980s, whites overwhelmingly understood that the apartheid status quo was untenable and they began to consider "reform" proposals that fell very far short of the African National Congress' demands for a universal franchise - one-person, one-vote in a non-racial South Africa.

The reforms began with the 1984 introduction of a tricameral parliament with separate chambers for whites, coloureds and Indians (none for blacks), with whites retaining overall control.

Until almost the end of the apartheid system, polls showed the vast majority of whites rejected a universal franchise, but were prepared to concede some form of power-sharing with the black majority as long as whites retained a veto over key decisions.

The important point, as I have argued previously,is that one could not predict the final outcome of the negotiations that eventually brought about a fully democratic South Africa in 1994, based on what the white public and elites said they were prepared to accept.

Once Israeli Jews concede that Palestinians must have equal rights, they will not be able to unilaterally impose any system that maintains undue privilege.

A joint state should accommodate Israeli Jews' legitimate collective interests, but it would have to do so equally for everyone else.

...

That proposals for a single state are coming from the Israeli right should not be so surprising in light of experiences in comparable situations.

In South Africa, it was not the traditional white liberal critics of apartheid who oversaw the system's dismantling, but the National Party which had built apartheid in the first place. In Northern Ireland, it was not "moderate" unionists and nationalists like David Trimble and John Hume who finally made power-sharing under the 1998 Belfast Agreement function, but the long-time rejectionists of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and the nationalist Sinn Fein, whose leaders had close ties the IRA.

The experiences in South Africa and Northern Ireland show that transforming the relationship between settler and native, master and slave, or "horse and rider," to one between equal citizens is a very difficult, uncertain and lengthy process.

There are many setbacks and detours along the way and success is not guaranteed. It requires much more than a new constitution; economic redistribution, restitution and restorative justice are essential and meet significant resistance.

But such a transformation is not, as many of the critics of a one-state solution in Palestine/Israel insist, "impossible." Indeed, hope now resides in the space between what is "very difficult" and what is considered "impossible".

The proposals from the Israeli right-wing, however inadequate and indeed offensive they seem in many respects, add a little bit to that hope. They suggest that even those whom Palestinians understandably consider their most implacable foes can stare into the abyss and decide there has to be a radically different way forward.

Image above: Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank as islands in the sea of Israel.

Image below: Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank in red.

History and forgiveness

Once again Brad DeLong points me in the right direction, which in this case is to a column by Ta-nehisi Coates at the Atlantic site:

It's been twenty years since Nelson Mandela got out. This was like the defining political event of my youth. I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school, can't remember which. What I think is pretty cliche: Whatever South Africa's problems, the fact that the country (and its leaders) did not descend into mass revenge mode is an enduring tribute to compassion and empathy.

It's a great object lesson on how to handle being wronged. It's one of the things I've struggled to accept as an African-American. There is no Rosewood. Often you are wronged, and by your hand, or even in your lifetime, your persecutors will never be brought to account. There are limits to our justice. It doesn't mean you shrink in the face of injustice (South Africa did no such thing) but that you recognize that it's not really in your power to even the odds.

I've been thinking about this a lot in my study of the crimes of slavery, the Civil War and Jim Crow. I don't think the scales will ever be evened. I don't even know how you would begin to do that in any kind of moral way. That said, I want to differentiate between recognizing your limits, and sweeping a wrong under the rug. Our greatest problem, in regards to the legacy of white supremacy, is not it's effects, it's that we don't understand the rudiments of what happened.

There is a long and interesting comment section for this post, much of it about the Confederate general Longstreet, but on the main topic this response is sterling:

You know, I think part of what you're getting at here is revelatory. Most people believe forgiveness is conceptually similar to absolution, in that it is a transaction between people, given from one to another for wrongs against them, and that it wipes the slate clean.

In fact, forgiveness is a far sweeter and more complex thing. It has little to do with the person or thing being forgiven; they are incidental. Instead, it is a letting go within yourself; a surrendering of the right to feel victimized and hurt. You use the example of slavery and systematic dehumanization and oppression of blacks and the longing to have some "evening of the odds". Who is most affected by gripping the hurt of that injustice so strongly, so closely for so long? Who does it weight down and fill with anger and tip over and spill onto the ground? Not the people who perpetrate the injustice; just the people who suffer it.

The revelatory aspect of your post comes in your distinction between recognizing and calling out injustice, and allowing it to take hold in your heart like a cancer: "It doesn't mean you shrink in the face of injustice..." to "That said, I want to differentiate between recognizing your limits, and sweeping a wrong under the rug."

To reiterate: forgiving a wrong is not absolving a wrongdoer. 99% of people conflate these two very, very different concepts. Forgiveness is something you do for yourself; absolution is something you do to someone else.