NELSON MANDELA’S most-quoted line on Palestine travels the world redacted and stripped of company: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” It appears on murals and banners as though it were the whole of his position. It was delivered on 4 December 1997, as sitting president, at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Pretoria — thirty-three years after Rivonia, not from the dock, and framed alongside East Timor and Sudan as one item in a broader post-Cold War list of causes.
A list of nations, in which Mandela made it abundantly clear he wished to extend the civil rights he had fought for at great cost, here in South Africa, to other parts of the world, not just Palestine, not merely the Middle East.
The case against the sanitized version of the quote, and my criticism of a one-dimensional, binary cartoon Mandela isn’t that he was secretly a Zionist. It’s what he actually did with Zionists, and what this tells us about the non-sectarian, bipartisan pluralism his current admirers have taken great trouble to edit out and eviscerate.
As a youth, I took the time and trouble to track down the real Mandela that was being airbrushed away by the Pretoria regime, (You can read about my experiences with banned literature in the Jagger Library) and I invite you to do the same.
Start at Rivonia. In his 1964 statement from the dock, you can read here, Mandela told the court that Umkhonto we Sizwe’s command structure was “an importation from the Jewish national underground organization Irgun Zvai Leumi, which operated in Israel between 1944 and 1948.” His own armed wing borrowed its organizational template from a Zionist paramilitary. His co-accused, Arthur Goldreich, had served in the Palmach, the military wing of what Mandela himself called the ‘political authority of the Jewish National Movement in Palestine’. Mandela liked and trusted Goldreich enough to recommend him for recruitment into MK.
That wasn’t a youthful anomaly. In 1993, as ANC president preparing to govern, Mandela said plainly that his movement recognized “the legitimacy of Zionism as a Jewish nationalism” in the same breath as recognizing Palestinian nationalism, insisting on Israel’s right to exist within secure borders with equal weight given to Palestinian self-determination. He wasn’t conceding Zionism grudgingly as a fact on the ground. He was naming it a legitimate nationalism, full stop, sitting inside a coalition that also included its sharpest critics.
None of this makes Mandela a Zionist as such. He never used the label for himself, and unlike Goldreich he never took up arms or citizenship for the cause. His own usage of the word was, in reality, more fluid rather than fixed: in 1990, fresh out of prison, he criticised “Zionism” for denying Palestinian self-determination but supported both sides’ right to exist. The same man treated the word as both a legitimate nationalism and a genuine target of criticism, depending on what particular policy or claim was in front of him — which is a far harder position to hold than either pure endorsement or pure rejection, and a much harder one to fit on a banner.
But this truth beyond banners and t-shirts, reveals a pluralist, bipartisan world-view worth restoring. Mandela’s democratic coalition ran the gamut from communists to liberals, Christians to Muslims, secular nationalists to a Palmach veteran he trusted with his life underground. He held that Zionism and Palestinian nationalism could both be legitimate, while simultaneously criticizing specific Israeli policy. Certainly a non-binary position.
A movement that now bears his image and which treats any acknowledgment of Israel’s legitimacy as disqualifying or sinister isn’t extending that position — it’s inverting it. Mandela made room at his own table for a current he also argued with. A truth that he was willing to question.
The redacted, diminished version of him doesn’t.