Photo: Mozambique liberation fighters
Throughout the past year, the world has watched in horror as the state of Israel has committed one of the greatest crimes against humanity of contemporary history in Gaza. Throughout this genocide, longtime efforts of the international solidarity movement against the Israeli apartheid regime have made major headways, with mass demonstrations for Palestinian liberation spanning all corners of the globe, governments recognizing the state of Palestine and restricting trade and arms exports to Israel, and the United Nations General Assembly calling for sanctions on Israel.
Military tech corporation Palantir’s co-founder and billionaire Alex Karp said it bluntly at the peak of the Gaza solidarity encampments on college campuses: “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show. If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”
Israel continues to commit nightmarish crimes and further aggression not just on the people of Palestine, but also Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It would seem that if the goal is to preserve the existence of the state of Israel, a common sense strategy would be to ease off the aggression, not massively expand it across the region. The Israeli regime has suffered massive delegitimization on the world stage, with long-term implications for the survival of the regime.
But past proxies of imperialism like apartheid-era South Africa show that reckless escalation can be a characteristic of a state in crisis. Through the final decades of the apartheid state, the government in Pretoria staged aggression against the people of Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, and Mozambique. This overextension of colonial violence and destabilization efforts led to a weakening of the apartheid government on the world stage as well as at the negotiation table with the African National Congress, South West Africa People’s Organisation, and all other anti-colonial forces that confronted and contributed to the defeat of apartheid on the African continent.
Apartheid South Africa’s war against neighboring states
The colonial legacy of the apartheid government in South Africa was deeply intertwined with the colonial rule of Mozambique and Angola by Portugal and South Africa’s illegal occupation of Namibia. South Africa attempted to maintain hegemony over the southern African region through military interventions directly aimed at stopping anti-colonial and socialist movements for liberation against Portuguese and British colonialism.
Apartheid South Africa along, with full support from the Western imperialist powers, attempted to stymy the independence movements led by the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) by actively supporting anti-communist opposition factions Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Their support for RENAMO and UNITA led to protracted, devastating wars in both countries from 1975 to 1992.
In Namibia, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) established the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), which waged a war of liberation against the South African occupation forces from 1966 until 1990. While Namibia was occupied, it was used as a launchpad for aggression towards Angolan and Cuban forces, the latter sent at the initiative of Fidel Castro as a part of the heroic Operation Carlota. Named to honor Carlota Lucumí, a Yoruba woman kidnapped and enslaved in Cuba who led a slave rebellion in 1843, the operation was an exemplary act of socialist Cuba’s solidarity with African liberation. PLAN played a central role in sabotage and rural insurgencies against the South African occupiers, ensuring that the colonial apartheid forces remained bogged down by the courageous resistance of the Namibian people.
SWAPO also established refugee camps across neighboring countries, sites that become central not only for the provision of health and educational services but also political struggle. In May 1978, one camp in the Angolan village of Cassinga was the target of a South African raid, where around 600 people, including Cubans, were killed by the apartheid forces. This massacre further isolated South Africa on the world stage.
Fears that national liberation struggles across the African continent would inevitably lead to the defeat of the South African settler colonial project, were not just felt in the case of Angola and Namibia but also nearly every neighboring nation. Ignoring the international sanctions on Rhodesia while it fought against the anti-colonial Zimbabwean forces, South Africa continued to supply the white colonial regime with material and military support. In 1985, South African apartheid forces invaded Botswana to attack and intimidate South African freedom fighters living in exile in that country, leading to the killing of 12 people, including women and children. In Zambia, liberation forces were attacked and bombed repeatedly by both Rhodesian and South African military forces.
Even more egregious, the South African apartheid government utilized their collaborationist RENAMO forces in Mozambique to steal crops, spike water wells, and wreak terror on civilian populations to further instigate a famine, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans. In the 1980s, South Africa and Israeli advisors helped construct the Western Sahara berm, a barrier constructed by Morocco to combat the struggle for Sahrawi sovereignty and keep the Polisario Front from lands occupied by the Moroccan monarchy.
The expansion of the apartheid regime’s war across Southern Africa ultimately left it overextended and defeated. In 1990, the racist government was forced to the negotiating table, and the liberation forces of the ANC assumed leadership of a new, democratic state in 1994.
Escalation and liberation
Faced with resistance from the region in which it carries out its occupation, there can be a natural tendency for a settler colonial state to escalate and demand submission of those regional neighbors. In recent years, many in the Israeli elite thought that the movement for Palestinian liberation could be cut off from regional support through deals to normalize relations with Arab states that are clients of U.S. imperialism.
The shock humiliation of the Israeli military during the counteroffensive of October 7th has brought this process to a halt and thrown the idea of Arab normalization with Israel out the window for the time being. Far from normalizing relations, Israel is now dramatically escalating its aggression towards the Arab world and Iran.
Israel has decided that in lieu of capitulating to Palestinian demands for justice and equality on their land, it will expand its war against all those who stand against their genocide. But the massive and constantly expanding violence inflicted by Israel on the people of the Middle East should not be mistaken for a sign of the regime’s invincibility – it could prove to be the opposite.
