Thirty years ago, the global community helped end the oppressive system of Apartheid in South Africa by way of economic boycott, divestment, sanctions, and political pressure.

Since then, its citizens have freely chosen to live together in one democratic state that is now led by its black majority. There are numerous historical lessons which can be drawn from the gradual dismantling of Apartheid in the latter half of the 20th Century. These provide inspiration and opportunity for peace advocates in Israel, despite their small number today, to end their country’s occupation of Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank. Ending the Israeli occupation would be the first step toward establishing an independent and viable Palestinian State alongside Israel, and is the only way to avoid the creation of one state where Palestinian Arabs—by sheer demographics—become the ruling majority in the near future.

In hopes of reaching a just peace which fulfills the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to a national homeland, while also guaranteeing Israel’s security, one can retrace the parallel foundations of the Israeli and South African mechanisms of oppression to find the means to deconstruct them.

It is no mere historical coincidence that the establishment of Zionism in Israel and Apartheid in South Africa received British legal and political support on behalf of the West in 1917. It was then that British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced his country’s promise to the Jews to establish a national homeland for them in Palestine. This would come to be known as the Balfour Declaration.

The first announcement of the racist legal characteristics of Apartheid also came in the same year at the hands of General Jan Christian Smuts, from the white minority in South Africa and one of the founders of the British Commonwealth. He later became a British diplomat and minister. He was also a close friend of the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, and helped Balfour formulate his promise to the Jews.

The two declarations were also fully implemented in 1948. The establishment of the State of Israel was based on a resolution passed a year earlier by the United Nations General Assembly to partition Palestine. In the same year, the National Party, led by Daniel Malan, came to power in South Africa and announced the implementation of the Apartheid system of racial segregation in all aspects of life and for anyone residing in the country.

The two British declarations and their methods of implementation, however, were designed as reconciliatory solutions that would enable Jews in Palestine, and whites in South Africa, to live alongside the Arab majority in Palestine and the black majority in South Africa, respectively. The Balfour Declaration stipulated that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. For their part, Apartheid laws in South Africa, despite their cruelty, granted legal rights to blacks for self-governing and even nominal independence in the impoverished regions they were expelled to.

In the 1960s, with the escalation of the civil and political rights movement for Blacks in the United States and Britain, pressure increased in both countries to end their support for the Apartheid regime. Sanctions began to be imposed by both nations on South Africa in the 1970s. This was the same time the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat initiated dialogue with the United States to replace a war footing with peace negotiations to end the conflict between Israel and Egypt, as well as the other Arab states.

A growing Black minority with political influence in the United States succeeded in changing the West’s stance from acquiescing  to Apartheid to boycotting and sanctioning it. But when it came to the Palestinian issue, the push for Palestinian statehood, or resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab and Muslim minorities in the United States were not sufficiently organized to garner similar political clout and influence.

Instead, they were preoccupied with domestic issues in their countries of origin, and did not play a significant role in the civil rights movement in the United States; that movement was, in the meantime, embraced by leaders of Jewish organizations who formed alliances with African American counterparts.

In the early 1990s, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi occupation of Kuwait led to rising international hopes for a new and better world order led by the United States. Dreams were also rekindled for resolving both the Apartheid problem in South Africa and achieving peace in Palestine, especially after the Madrid International Peace Conference.

Coincidentally, secret negotiations between South African President F.W. De Klerk and formerly imprisoned anti-Apartheid leader Nelson Mandela took place at roughly the same time as the secret Oslo peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1993, an agreement was reached to implement the first constitution guaranteeing equal rights for all South Africans, thereby abolishing Apartheid. Mandela was at the helm of the first democratically elected coalition government representing all South Africans.

In the same year, by another historical coincidence, the White House Rose Garden witnessed the signing of the Oslo Declaration of Principles by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. This agreement achieved mutual recognition and a historic reconciliation between the two peoples and outlined a gradual roadmap for realizing the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people through five years of negotiations, which should have led to an agreement to establish an independent sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza, thereby ending the Israeli occupation that began in 1967.

While de Klerk lived to see his agreement implemented and Apartheid abolished, a Jewish  extremist assassinated Rabin in 1995. Over the following three decades, the role of religious and far-right parties increased in shaping most Israeli governments, making it more difficult to reach the desired peace agreement in Palestine. In parallel, the influence and popularity of Palestinian political Islamic factions have widely grown. They rejected the Oslo peace process, which itself failed to produce anything tangible for the Palestinian people, and brought  them no closer to achieving their right to political independence.

Instead, successive Israeli governments focused on expanding settlements within Palestinian territories in the West Bank, making the prospect of establishing a Palestinian state more of an impossible mirage. During the last two decades, with Israel predominantly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, the political division between the West Bank and Gaza was cemented by supporting Hamas’ authority in the Strip with Qatari financial backing.

In tandem, Israeli forces besieged and slowly pummeled Gaza in limited wars that did not diminish their control over the area.  Israeli moves in Gaza effectively turned the Strip into the sole functioning Palestinian quasi-state under Hamas’ leadership while Israeli settlements continued engulfing much of the West Bank (as indicated in the linked map).

America, the Peacemaker?

Given that the United States is the primary supplier of weapons, aid, and investments to Israel, the American president has become the only figure in the world capable of influencing Israeli decisions. However, his influence in shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Israel is also determined by the pressures from American political parties and domestic lobbying groups.

The Israeli lobby and Zionist Christian groups remained dominant in American politics throughout the latter half of the twentieth century due to Arab states’ differing views on the Palestinian issue and their preoccupation with securing U.S. support to maintain their power.

Domestically, the fragmentation of opinions among American Arab and Islamic communities regarding the Palestinian cause, and their limited organizational and influential capacity in shaping American decision-making, further hindered any efforts to bring U.S. pressure to bear on Israel.

Consequently, endorsing American decisions in favor of Israel brought countless benefits to any American politician, while opposing them could lead to political losses that would ruin his or her political future.

As a result, Palestinian issues have continued to suffer setbacks in American politics, and the official stances of successive U.S. administrations appeared to favor Israel  more vehemently. The Trump administration, for instance, recognized unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and endorsed Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. Trump encouraged Arab countries like the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco to establish peace (the Abraham Accords) with Israel without demanding Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 or the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem. The Accords were made possible in exchange for U.S. political and military favors that benefit these Arab  states.

In 2023, the Biden administration was on the verge of reaching another Abrahamic Accord with Saudi Arabia and Israel. According to this intended agreement, Saudi Arabia would have secured from the United States a defense treaty with security guarantees, permission to develop nuclear power and research plants, and artificial intelligence technology transfer to create a state-of-the-art AI R&D center on its territory. This would have facilitated a smooth transition of power to the crown prince in exchange for full normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations. The plan was to present this comprehensive deal to Congress for approval as an international treaty, making it difficult for any future U.S. president to nullify it.

Palestine at the Forefront

However, the Gaza War since October 7, 2023, has disrupted all these scenarios, and reintroduced the Palestinian issue to the international stage with new variables affecting the positions of different parties, especially the United States.

1. The war revealed that Israel’s military superiority is not an adequate guarantee to ensure its security. It also raised doubts about earlier Israeli claims that it could also protect the security of Abraham Accords’ Arab states and those aspiring to join them. The war actually demonstrated that Israel needs its Arab peace partners to help ensure its security in Gaza, and to help effectively confront recent limited Iranian missile attacks.
2. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, international changes, notably the importance of the internet and social media, have diminished the influence of the Israeli lobby and its supporting groups on traditional media, especially among youth worldwide, including in the United States. Therefore, youth protests against Israel and U.S. military support for it have extended to American universities for the first time.
3. American universities witnessed the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement which works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law. In the 1980s, divestment of U.S. universities from Apartheid South Africa was one of the most effective tools in the fight that ended this oppressive regime in the 1990s.
4. The current transition of the world order to one that is multipolar has allowed for stronger criticism of U.S. policies regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and brought further scrutiny about their double standards when dealing with issues like the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories.
5. South Africa, with agonies of Apartheid still alive in its people’s memories, has been leading an international campaign to prove that Israel’s war on Gaza is part of a policy aimed at committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Israeli leaders have thus become threatened with international legal prosecution as war criminals.
6. As much as Arab rulers, especially in Saudi Arabia, need U.S. support to maintain stability and secure their rule, the United States increasingly needs to prevent China from making headway in the Arab Middle East’s commercial, technological, military, and even nuclear industries.
7. For the first time since Israel’s inception, Arab and Muslim voices in the United States have become capable of influencing the outcome of the upcoming presidential elections in several swing or undecided states. This might deprive President Biden of a second term if his current policies toward war in Gaza, and the post-war regional order, remain unchanged.

I recognize that achieving a comprehensive peace deal for Palestine before the U.S. elections is very difficult. This deal would need to include a U.S. declaration that sets its preferred parameters for a Palestinian State after the end of the war in Gaza and after agreeing on an international security system to prevent the recurrence of the October 7 attack.  In return, a Saudi-Israeli pathway to normalization of ties would be promised when Israel accepts the U.S. declaration.

Maintaining public pressure in the United States in favor of peace in Palestine would require a unified effort of American Arabs and Muslims, the support of the Arab World, and the world’s public opinion to demand that the U.S. administration end its support of Israeli Apartheid policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

In his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter warned against acquiescing to Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land and oppressing its people. He stressed that “It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail.” The whole world should get its act together to turn this visionary call into reality. We should act now before it is too late.