Reflections on Gaza: A Personal Perspective
Remarks given at the invitation of Churches for Middle East Peace
Carter Center, Atlanta, USA
30th July 2025
Grace and peace to you, dear friends in Christ, beloved brothers and sisters journeying together in the pursuit of justice and faith. I extend heartfelt greetings from South Africa—a nation marked by profound wounds but also imbued with the grace of resilience and hope.
Let me acknowledge my four colleagues from South Africa, especially, Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana: Molweni!
I speak not merely as a citizen, but as one who has grown up navigating life in the harsh shadows cast by apartheid. I hail from a township in Johannesburg, where the concept of freedom was far from a universal right. Instead, it was an elusive dream shrouded by the presence of military patrols, the separation of families, and a daily struggle to uphold human dignity against overwhelming odds.
Like Naomi Tutu who spoke powerfully last night, I have however also witnessed walls, both physical and metaphorical, tumbling down, and I have seen hearts begin to heal in places where suffering has left deep scars. In the dark era of apartheid South Africa, we were conditioned to believe that our place of birth dictated the trajectory of our lives. It determined not only where we could reside but also whom we could choose to love, and ultimately, whether our existence held any significance at all. Black South Africans faced the grim realities of forced removals from our ancestral lands, being stripped of access to quality education, healthcare, and employment opportunities, all of which should be basic human rights. We were subjected to a substandard education system, policed by unfair laws designed to perpetuate our subjugation, making us feel like outsiders in the land of our forebears.
I recall vividly the oppressive Group Areas Act that dictated our living spaces, the stringent pass laws that controlled our movement, and the Bantu education system that sought to limit our aspirations. I can still hear the soft echoes of protest songs murmured furtively among us, whispering hope in a world drenched in despair. I remember feeling a constant undercurrent of fear alongside a powerful, unwavering faith that sustained us through the darkest times. Our survival was not purely a testament to our strength; it was a collective endeavour, an endeavour bolstered by one another and guided by our unshakable belief in God.
In the bleakest moments of apartheid, the church—though it was not always of one mind—emerged as a haven for the downtrodden. It became a resolute voice against injustice. We found ourselves drawing strength and hope from sacred texts, finding parallels in the stories of old. We saw ourselves in Moses confronting Pharaoh, in the prophets decrying Injustice, in Christ who overturned the tables in the temple of greed, and in Paul’s inclusion of all peoples, transcending divisions as he envisioned a church without barriers of ethnicity or status.
As I reflect upon Palestine today, I perceive it not as a distant or foreign site of settler colonial genocide and ethnic cleansing; rather, I see mirrored reflections of familiar pain and suffering. I witness checkpoints that resemble the oppressive pass laws we endured. The home demolitions echo the traumatic forced removals we experienced in Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town. The systemic categorisation, pervasive surveillance, and the stripping away of rights based on identity remind me all too vividly of our own history. I see a landscape marred by mass incarceration, the weight of military rule, and the damaging narrative of “security” used as a pretext for ongoing tyranny. I see much more, and worse.
What can we learn from SA ?
In almost every way what is happening in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and particularly in Gaza, is incomparable with what happened under apartheid in South Africa. I don't assume to know what Palestinians want. Hence I take every opportunity to listen to Palestinians. I was changed by a sermon I preached at a Sabeel conference in 2011, to which I was invited by Naim Ateek, under the theme “Challenging Empire”. Many who came to South Africa in the time of apartheid were affected by what they saw and became international champions. Within South Africa, some of the least helpful white people were those who assumed they knew what black South Africans needed/ wanted.
Our peaceful struggle against apartheid benefitted greatly from international advocacy, which has been described as the most successful campaign for justice since that against slavery in the British empire two centuries ago. Internally, we were at our most successful when we united civil society, including NGOS, the religious community and the universities, in broad-based coalitions around mutually agreed objectives which were realistically achievable.
We needed to learn to compromise, and not splinter into small, ideologically pure groupings. For example, within my church in the 1980s, there was division over endorsing Archbishop Desmond Tutu's call for comprehensive international sanctions against apartheid. Some of our leaders were sensitive to the accusation that comfortable middle-class leaders were advocating job losses for black South Africans. Our bishops compromised by proposing targeted sanctions such as stopping international airlines from flying to South Africa, which didn’t affect poor people but which was of symbolic importance in isolating the apartheid government internationally and boosting the morale of black South Africans. Similarly, sports boycotts and expulsion from the Olympics reinforced the image of South Africa abroad as a country beyond the pale, not to be dealt with by civilised nations.
Internationally, much of the impetus for advocacy against apartheid also came from peaceful protests from civil society, especially from us as university students. Although the ANC was lobbying strongly for sanctions, its adoption of an armed struggle and its support from the Soviet Union gave it little traction in many Western societies. Both Democratic and Republican Senate staff told a Tutu biographer that the Archbishop's stature as a man of peace was an important ingredient in Congress's adoption of sanctions against apartheid in 1986. The sanctions followed an extensive grassroots campaign on campuses and demonstrations of prominent Americans in Washington DC, including sanctions at state level. President Reagan first vetoed the sanctions, but Congress over-rode his veto in the only foreign policy defeat of its kind during his presidency. He pleaded with senators to back him on the grounds that a defeat would weaken his hand ahead of a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland, but his plea was to no avail.
Again, the capacity to compromise was important. For many in lobbies such as the Congressional Black Caucus, the sanctions adopted had been watered down too much from those originally proposed, but an important signal was sent when bipartisan action was achieved. The administration of George HW Bush subsequently strengthened Republican opposition to apartheid. In another example of how compromise got results, on a 1989 visit to Washington, local activists were upset when the White House offered a South African church delegation including Desmond Tutu a meeting of only 15 minutes with President Bush at the beginning of his term of office. On the basis that it was an important signal that they were the first South Africans to meet Bush, the delegation refused to treat the offer as a snub and accepted the invitation. They were able to spend the best part of an hour putting their case.
Another lesson from the anti-apartheid experience is to look for allies among other governments who can put pressure on reluctant leaders to take multilateral action. Margaret Thatcher was a vigorous opponent of sanctions, but in the end she isolated herself in the British Commonwealth. Similarly, she and Helmut Kohl of Germany were the last hold-outs in Europe against sanctions.
In retrospect, it is important to recognise that to achieve peaceful change, you need to be in the struggle for the long haul. I know we face a particular crisis in Gaza now, and it needs urgent action, but ultimately a solution for Palestine is going to take time, and will involve constant, sustained effort over many years. The system is not unconquerable. In South Africa when we realised this, and we ultimately overwhelmed the kind of settler colonial system that ends up creating insecurity for all, starving, ethnically cleansing and committing genocide against its victims.
We must now overwhelm the system that upholds Israel with praxis rooted in scripture and prayer, from email/telephone campaigns, to online activism, to massive flotillas, to legal action, to embarrassing Arab regimes, and to tracking down the companies named in the report by Francesca Albanese and exposing them and their board members. I also call on nations to stop the sales of arms to governments and systems that cleanse humans and commit genocide.
Also, dialogue is key: refuse to be intimidated from talking, even with your enemies. Our principal liberation movement spoke to our enemies.
Reflecting on more recent experiences, one of the advantages we had in South Africa was broad international acceptance that apartheid was simply wrong. Some of you here today at the Carter Center will no doubt have your own experience of the rejection of President Carter's description of certain Israeli policies as being like apartheid. Unless you have experts on South African and Israeli law and practice explain exactly where the systems are similar and dissimilar, it's very difficult to get many in the West to buy into the notion that a form of apartheid is experienced in Israel. It is probably a little easier to convince people when it comes to the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The use of the word genocide is a similar challenge. For many in the West, the term genocide is automatically associated with the Holocaust, with death camps and the organised murder of six million people. Again addressing this challenge depends on explaining the contents and definitions contained in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN in 1948.
To conclude I hesitantly offer a few further suggestions:
In Cape Town, we are experiencing tension between Jewish and Muslim communities. This is in spite of the fact that there is general acceptance that there is a distinction between being a Zionist and being Jewish. My suggestion is that we abolish the use of the adjective “Jewish” in debating and considering how to achieve justice and peace in the land three faiths call holy. To conflate being Jewish with support of the policies of any particular Israeli administration is not only inaccurate, but wrong.
Secondly, we in South Africa are very sensitive to the use of the term “terrorist”. White South Africans and Margaret Thatcher used the phrase indiscriminately during the struggle against apartheid. While there are justifications for its use in particular circumstances, it loses its currency when it is used to describe anyone who wants to achieve self-determination in a democratic dispensation.
Perhaps instead of debating labels, we should focus on the details of how individuals, families and communities are treated. In democracies, there is nothing more powerful in addressing injustice and oppression than in demonstrating to citizens how people in other parts of the world who share their humanity are suffering at the hands of the powerful.
Thank you for giving this opportunity to a pastor from a land distant both from the United States and the Middle East to voice deep distress at the suffering of the people.
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