The place names are undergoing change in South Africa

[Marcus Marulus]

'Bull's Testicles'

By R.W. Johnson

Wall Street Journal

DURBAN, South Africa -- South Africa is going through an orgy of name-changing. In Durban alone, the city council, run by the ruling African National Congress, has come up with 194 streets to be renamed while the local provincial authority has listed 78 rivers and 76 places to be renamed. Pretoria, the capital, is no more: It is now Tshwane, though even Africans seldom know that the name refers to a 19th-century local chief. Typically the name changes are pushed by the ANC and resisted by whites, especially Afrikaners, who see the most famous names of their own history disappearing.

Durban has seen a particularly fierce fight. A young Winston Churchill gave a famous speech here, during the Anglo-Boer war in 1899, and always regarded Durban as "a bastion of the imperial spirit"; others would say it was a center of jingoism, the last outpost of the British Empire. Certainly it is that spirit which the ANC wants to puncture.

The council wants Edwin Swales VC highway (after a local World War II hero) renamed after an ANC guerrilla hanged for sabotage, while Natal Mounted Rifles highway is to be renamed after an ANC activist who died of AIDS. (Whites bitterly point out that Swales died in a Lancaster bomber over Germany and the NMR fought the Nazis with distinction, so even "those who fought fascism" are to be forgotten.) The main road to the airport becomes Yasser Arafat highway; Moore Road (after Sir John Moore, the hero of the Battle of Corunna) becomes Che Guevara Road; Kensington Drive, Fidel Castro Drive; and Chelmsford Road (after Lord Chelmsford who defeated the Zulu King Cetshwayo) JB Marx Road, after the former black Communist leader who lies buried next to Khrushchev in Moscow. Naturally, Jan Smuts Highway will be Cetshwayo Highway and Victoria Road, Mandela Road. Most of the city-center streets are to be renamed after local Communists that not many have heard of.

However, the ANC, rather foolishly, decided to wipe out names associated with Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party, even renaming the local stadium being built for the 2010 soccer World Cup after a local Communist leader, when it had been named after the father of King Shaka, founder of the Zulu nation. This led to a 10,000-strong march of angry whites and (mainly) Zulus through the city center, with shops smashed and looted, and a (temporary) council climb-down. Even the local Indians, who outnumber whites two to one, were ambivalent about Point Road's being be renamed after Durban's most famous Indian, Mahatma Gandhi--for Point Road is the red-light district.

The biggest problem is the name Durban itself. In 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed up this coast on Christmas Day and thus called it Natal; the town was called Port Natal by the original trekkers. English settlers renamed it in 1835 after the governor of the cape, Sir Benjamin d'Urban. The ANC, hating this, extended the city limits and called the new metropolitan area eThekwini, the traditional Zulu name for Durban--and then used this designation all the time as, effectively, the city's new name. This doesn't really work: Durban is the world's ninth-biggest port, appears on all world maps, and is internationally famous. But millions have been spent over the last few years promoting eThekwini.

Now, however, the ANC mayor, Obed Mlaba, says he is embarrassed because the term actually refers to the shape of the bay and means "bull's testicles" in Zulu. This has produced convulsions within the ANC and a suggestion that eThekwini now be changed to KwaKhanghela, after Shaka's original military base here.

But currently all is confusion. One suspects that the ghosts of Vasco da Gama, Sir Benjamin d'Urban and Winston Churchill are laughing.

Mr. Johnson is emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Southern Africa correspondent for the London Sunday Times.

[source]

[Marcus Marulus]

Durban has seen a particularly fierce fight. A young Winston Churchill gave a famous speech here, during the Anglo-Boer war in 1899, and always regarded Durban as "a bastion of the imperial spirit"; others would say it was a center of jingoism, the last outpost of the British Empire.

Good for them, to offend the memory of the worst war criminal of the 20ieth century (Winston).

The council wants Edwin Swales VC highway (after a local World War II hero) renamed...while Natal Mounted Rifles highway is to be renamed...(Whites bitterly point out that Swales died in a Lancaster bomber over Germany and the NMR fought the Nazis with distinction, so even "those who fought fascism" are to be forgotten.)

Another one criminal slides into oblivion.

Whining from the "antifascist" point of view is the last miserable rhetorical device they have to resort to.

Jan Smuts Highway will be Cetshwayo Highway

Jan Smuts was a pro-globalist thinker and was (albeit moderate) opponent of the Apartheid.

Some of his ideas (from Holism and Evolution):

Small units need develop into bigger wholes, and they in their turn again must grow into larger and ever-larger structures without cessation. Advancement lay along that path. Thus the unification of the four provinces in the Union of South Africa, the idea of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and, finally, the great whole resulting from the combination of the peoples of the earth in a great league of nations were but a logical progression consistent with his philosophical tenets.

He was one of the founding fathers of the UN.

Even the local Indians, who outnumber whites two to one, were ambivalent about Point Road's being be renamed after Durban's most famous Indian, Mahatma Gandhi--for Point Road is the red-light district.

[Errigal]

I don't see this as anything to celebrate.

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Errigal

I don't see this as anything to celebrate.

Me neither. I'm just happy for the dethroning of Winnie the Butcher's spirit (Churchill).

As regards Afrikaners, I sympathize them to a certain extent.

Although I think their leadership failed (if they had one at all). They should have insisted on creating a special Afrikaner homeland and pursued that goal. Maybe it's not late for them to separate and the South Africa to become o loose confederation of several ethnic homelands: Afrikaners, Zulu, Xhosa...

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Plethon

As regards Afrikaners, I sympathize them to a certain extent.

There are not very many Afrikaner-speaking people in Kwa-Zulu Natal. It is a Zulu and English-speaking province.

This is more serious:

However, the ANC, rather foolishly, decided to wipe out names associated with Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party, even renaming the local stadium being built for the 2010 soccer World Cup after a local Communist leader, when it had been named after the father of King Shaka, founder of the Zulu nation.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Zulu Inkhata Party are the one nationalist-like party in South Africa. Most bloody clashes used to take place between Inkhata and ANC supporters.

Although I think their leadership failed (if they had one at all). They should have insisted on creating a special Afrikaner homeland and pursued that goal. Maybe it's not late for them to separate and the South Africa to become o loose confederation of several ethnic homelands: Afrikaners, Zulu, Xhosa...

Their leadership was scum from the start. The architect of Apartheid, Hendriek Verwoerd, was the son of a Dutch Calvinist preacher. Chosen People's mentality was served from the origins. There was no shortage of Jews, some as significant as JBM Herzog, leader of the NP and PM of the Union of SA. Not to speak that President Paul Kruger even attended the official opening of the Johannesburg Synagogue in the late 19th century.

The sparks of anti-semitism were only noticed when in the mid-30s German Jewish refugees started to flow in the country, and two God's Chosen People saw themselves competing for the same Promised Land.

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

There are not very many Afrikaner-speaking people in Kwa-Zulu Natal. It is a Zulu and English-speaking province.

But in Transvaal and Oranje there are Afrikaners.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

This is more serious:Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Zulu Inkhata Party are the one nationalist-like party in South Africa. Most bloody clashes used to take place between Inkhata and ANC supporters.

Really? I always understood the struggle between ANC and Inkhata as the ethnic antagonism between the Xhosas and the Zulus.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

Their leadership was scum from the start. The architect of Apartheid, Hendriek Verwoerd, was the son of a Dutch Calvinist preacher. Chosen People's mentality was served from the origins. There was no shortage of Jews, some as significant as JBM Herzog, leader of the NP and PM of the Union of SA. Not to speak that President Paul Kruger even attended the official opening of the Johannesburg Synagogue in the late 19th century.

I am aware of their Calvinist mentality of chosenitism, but had no idea that Herzog was a Jew.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

The sparks of anti-semitism were only noticed when in the mid-30s German Jewish refugees started to flow in the country, and two God's Chosen People saw themselves competing for the same Promised Land.

This could well explain the later involvment of South African Jews in anti-Apartheid movements, as in the case of the famous Jewish exile from Lithuania named Slovo.

The chosenitism wrecked them, now they have to devise some new plan to secure their ethnic survival.

[Marcus Marulus]

LITHUANIAN JEWS MAKE
BIG IMPACT IN SOUTH AFRICA

Ed Stoddard, Reuters, June 12, 1998

Casino magnate Sol Kerzner, the late communist Joe Slovo and veteran anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman make an unlikely trio but they share one thing in common. Aside from making a big impact on South African public life, this colourful cast is all of Lithuanian-Jewish descent. "Within the realm of public personalities here, you have a lot of Baltic Jews and their descendants, especially Lithuanian Jews," Tony Leon, head of the small liberal Democratic Party and himself partly of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, told Reuters. "We are quite a little mob here," said Suzman, who for 13 years was the only anti-apartheid voice in the whites-only parliament. Like their Old World ancestors, whose ranks included wealthy capitalists, zealous Zionists, prominent religious scholars and committed communists, South Africa's Litvaks, as Lithuanian Jews call themselves, have spanned the political spectrum. On the left stands Slovo, the former head of the South African Communist Party, who was born in Lithuania in 1926 and came to South Africa at the age of nine. On the right stands Kerzner, a flamboyant businessman who built the casino resort Sun City in a black homeland and founded the entertainment and leisure giant Sun International. The Baltic Jewish community in South Africa also includes Nobel prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, whose father came from Latvia.

SOUTH AFRICA NEW WORLD HOME FOR LITVAKS

Lithuanians dominate the Jewish community in South Africa to an extent seen in no other country, even their former home. "We have around 80,000 to 90,000 Jews in South Africa, and about 80 percent of them are of Baltic descent, most of them from Lithuania," said David Saks, an historian and researcher at the Jewish Board of Deputies in Johannesburg. "We probably have the most 'Lithuanian' Jewish community in the world," said Saks, whose own grandparents came from Lithuania. This ratio even exceeds that of Lithuania itself as most of the Baltic state's small Jewish community, now numbering a mere 5,000, comprises immigrants who arrived from different parts of the Soviet Union after World War Two.

The war devastated Lithuanian Jewry, once a leading centre of Jewish thought and culture. Historians estimate that 94 percent of the country's pre-war Jewish population of 220,000 perished in the Holocaust. The capital Vilnius, once known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, was home to a thriving community of 60,000 Jews, with more than 90 synagogues and the biggest Yiddish library in the world. Aside from one functioning synagogue, few traces of its rich Jewish past remain. "South Africa is more Litvak than Lithuania itself...when Jews from Lithuania look to South Africa, we see our culture and society have been preserved there," said playwright and novelist Mark Zingeris, one of the few Litvaks remaining in Lithuania. "Here, the Litvak culture was all but destroyed by the Holocaust and 50 years of Soviet rule. But it has lived on in South Africa," he told Reuters by telephone from Lithuania.

ROOTS TAKE HOLD IN SOUTH AFRICAN SOIL

The public activities and politics of South Africa's Litvak community were rooted in the Old World but flourished in the soil of oppression and opportunity found in the New. The reformist streak of Lithuanian Jewry, which faced anti-Semitism and repression at home, was carried on by a host of anti-apartheid activists. "Many of the Lithuanian Jews who arrived in South Africa in the late 19th century were fleeing repression in Tsarist Russia and so they were keenly aware of injustice," said Saks. "Those who came after also faced anti-Semitism and the Holocaust." "The striving for social justice for everyone is a very Litvak trait. It has carried on uninterrupted in South Africa," said Zingeris.

Other less altruistic immigrants, reared in a strong entrepreneurial tradition, were lured by gold, discovered in 1886 on the spot where Johannesburg now stands, and the opportunities offered by the booming economy built around it. "One of my great-grandfathers came from Lithuania in the late 19th century with nothing but the freedom to trade," said Leon, whose party is firmly in the pro-market camp. "He started a bag and bottle business and turned it into a huge company in one generation." "I evolved my activist politics under my own steam...my father left Lithuania at the turn of the century to escape anti-Semitism, pogroms and service in the tsar's army. But he was not a radical chap," said Suzman, a part-time member of the South African human rights commission. "He came to South Africa simply looking for a better life." Back home, Lithuania's small surviving Jewish community continues its diverse tradition of public and private service. Several of its members are prominent businessmen while the one Jewish member of Lithuania's parliament, Emmanuel Zingeris, heads its committee on human rights and minorities.

[source]

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Plethon

But in Transvaal and Oranje there are Afrikaners.

Yes. But I thought that we were speaking of the province of KwaZulu-Natal.

There are also Afrikaners in the Cape province. A noticeable Afrikaner town there is Stellenbosch. These were called Liberal Afrikaners, descendents of the Afrikaners who refused to join the Groot Trek and remained under British rule.

Really? I always understood the struggle between ANC and Inkhata as the ethnic antagonism between the Xhosas and the Zulus.

Same thing. Xhosas are the most present and influent tribal group in the ANC. Nelson Mandela too is a Xhosa.

But there are others (Tswanas, Vendas, Sothos), and even Zulus. Chief Buthelezi himself was once in the ANC.

I suppose that the governments of Apartheid days had something to do with the abandoning of Buthelezi of the ANC, as the Inkatha was not outlawed like the ANC.

It is also interesting to notice that as president of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Buthelezi allied with the right-wing Vryheidsfront of General Constand Viljoen in a coalition.

I am aware of their Calvinist mentality of chosenitism, but had no idea that Herzog was a Jew.

It is a distinctive Jewish surname.

This could well explain the later involvment of South African Jews in anti-Apartheid movements, as in the case of the famous Jewish exile from Lithuania named Slovo.

I don't see how. Besides, Apartheid was closely linked to Jewish interests. The very way in which the Apartheid was designed owed much to Jewish influence.

There was never an intention to create separate nations. The so-called Bantustans were a mere joke. They granted independence to territories which were too ridiculous to be self-sufficient, and in this way they reduced the official numbers of the Black population. These independent states provided the South African industry a guest immigrant workforce, at cheaper prices, and for which the South African government did not have to provide any attention.

Judge by yourself:

The chosenitism wrecked them, now they have to devise some new plan to secure their ethnic survival.

Orania. But it is an uncertain future. I feel sorry for them.

[Lucas Corso]

In some way i sympathize for the Afrikaaner, Andries Pretorius must be turning in his grave...

However the Afrikaaner muss murder Winston Churchill is well served

[Marcus Marulus]

Israel and South Africa

excerpted from the book

Israeli Foreign Policy

by Jane Hunter

South End Press, 1987

History

lsrael's ties with South Africa seem to be especially disturbing to many who follow Israel's international activities. Perhaps it is natural that Israel has been castigated more harshly for its arms sales to South Africa than for its sales to other countries: first, because there has been for a decade an arms embargo against South Africa; and second, because of the unsurpassed criminality of the white regime and the uses to which it puts the Israeli-supplied weapons.

It has also been said that those arms sales are understandable, given the striking similarities between the two countries in their day-to-day abuse and repression of their subject populations, South African blacks and Palestinians under Israeli rule; in their operating philosophies of apartheid and Zionism; and in their similar objective situations: "the only two Western nations to have established themselves in a predominantly nonwhite part of the world," as a South African Broadcasting Corporation editorial put it. That understanding, however, is somewhat superficial, and the focus on similarities of political behavior has somewhat obscured the view of the breadth and depth of the totality of Israeli-South African relations and their implications.

Israel's relations with South Africa are different than its interactions with any of its other arms clients. That Israel gave South Africa its nuclear weapons capability underscores the special nature of Tel Aviv's relations with the white minority government and begins to describe it - a full-fledged, if covert, partnership based on the determination of both countries to continue as unrepentant pariahs and to help each other avoid the consequences of their behavior.

***

Arms industry

Nuclear Apprentice

There are few areas where the respective needs and advantages of Israel and South Africa dovetailed so perfectly as in the field of nuclear cooperation.

"The most powerful reason for Israeli willingness to bear the undesirable consequences of expanded and more open trade with South Africa may be her desire to acquire material necessary to manufacture nuclear weapons," wrote a military analyst in 1980.' To that must be added Israel's great desire to test the nuclear weapons it already had, and the attractions of South Africa's vast territory and proximity to even vaster uninhabited spaces-the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Then at the point in its nuclear development where it was fashioning sophisticated bombs (devices which use less nuclear material but have infinitely greater explosive force than the "primitive" bomb dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima), Israel would find it particularly helpful to observe the performance, explosive force and fallout of a detonated weapon.

Since 1984, Israel had been operating a plutonium extraction plant in a secret underground bunker at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Built by the French in the late 1950s, the Dimona plant also included facilities for manufacturing atomic bomb components. At the time of the 1976 accords, Israel was preparing to build an adjoining plant for the extraction of lithium 6, tritium and deuterium, materials required for sophisticated thermonuclear weapons.

Israel's reasons for devoting what had to have been a significant portion of its scant resources to such an ambitious nuclear weapons program - nuclear experts have recently ranked it as the world's sixth nuclear power, after the U.S., the USSR, Britain, France and China - have been variously offered as the desire to develop a credible deterrent to attack by its neighbors and the desire to substitute that deterrent for at least part of the costly conventional arsenal that Israel, with one of the world's most powerful military forces, maintains, and also (with much less frequency) as an "umbrella" over a partial withdrawal from the occupied territories.

***

The South Africans began teaching the lessons of Israel's 1967 war at their maneuver school, and Israeli advisers began teaching the Boers the arts of suppressing a captive population and keeping hostile neighbors off balance...

The white government's practice of domestic counterinsurgency l combines outright military brutality with the extensive use of informers and collaborators. It is impossible to know how many refinements of these age-old techniques have been borrowed from the Israelis' occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. The Israeli system of village leagues is obviously comparable to the hated town councils imposed on segregated townships by the apartheid government. The collective punishment employed by the Israelis, such as the destruction of a whole family's home when one of its members is arrested as a suspect in an act of resistance, has lately been matched by the recent South African practices of sealing off townships, and assaulting entire funeral processions. What is perhaps more salient is the South African victims' perceptions of Israel's involvement in their oppression and how readily that perception is communicated...

***

The Frontline States

The South Africans noted that their May, 1983 aerial attack (dubbed Operation Shrapnel) on Mozambique's capital, Maputo, was analogous to Israel's attack on Beirut the previous summer. one analyst, Joseph Hanlon, believes that one of South Africa's objectives in the attack was to see how its version of events would play in the media. It was received very well indeed, according to Hanlon, with the Western press accepting South Africa's claim that its attack was in "retaliation" for an ANC attack and that ANC "bases" were hit.

Instead, the South African Air Force hit a child-care center and private houses with "special fragmentation rockets," leaving 6 dead and 40 wounded. This follows the Israeli practice in Lebanon of speaking about PLO installations while civilians are the actual targets, and attacking with particularly heinous anti-personnel weapons-cluster bombs and phosphorous bombs.

The victims of South Africa's angst are not blind to the similarity of attacks-or motives.

President Samora Machel likened the Israeli Government to the Pretoria regime. He said that because of its inability to contain the fury of the Palestinian people led by the PLO, the Zionist regime is trying to transfer the war to other regions.

So reported Mozambican radio shortly after Israeli aircraft bombed PI headquarters in Tunisia in October 1985.

The model provided by Israel, which punishes every internal act of resistance and violent act outside its jurisdiction with a bombing raid on Palestinian targets in Lebanon-almost always refugee camps cynically identified by the Israelis as "terrorist bases" or "headquarters"-has served South Africa well. In January 1986, the white government's radio delivered a commentary on "the malignant presence" of "terrorism" in neighboring states and said "there's only one answer now, and that's the Israeli answer." Israel had managed to survive "by striking at terrorists wherever they exist."

In May 1986, South Africa demonstrated that it had assumed the right to attack its neighbors at a time and on a pretext of its own choosing. The chosen time was during a visit by the Eminent Persons Group of the Commonwealth of Nations, which was attempting to establish negotiations between the apartheid regime and its opposition. The victims-Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, all Commonwealth members-were chosen for their alleged harboring of "terrorists"; the real victims were South African exiles and an employee of the government of Botswana. The South Africans said they had attacked "international terrorism" and compared their raids to the Israeli attack on Tunisia and the U.S. attack on Libya in April 1986.

The attack was similar in style to Israel's 1985 attack on Tunisia. Initially, the Israelis had been threatening Jordan and perhaps because King Hussein of Jordan was at the time on an official visit to the U.S., the Israelis chose to take revenge for the killing of three Israelis (believed to be top Mossad agents) in Larnaca, Cyprus on the PLO in Tunisia.

Two weeks after its three-pronged attack on its Commonwealth neighbors, South Africa attacked the Angolan harbor of Namibia, firing their version of the Israeli Gabriel missile.

Israel has also been connected with the mercenary forces deployed by South Africa against Angola and Mozambique. In the 1970s Israel aided the FNLA (Angolan National Liberation Front) proxy forces organized and trained by the CIA to forestall the formation of a government led by the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola-now the ruling party of Angola). John Stockwell, who ran the CIA operation against Angola, recollected three arms shipments Israel made in cooperation with the CIA: a plane full of 120 mm shells sent via Zaire to the FNLA and Unita; a shipment of 50 SA-7 missiles (all of which were duds); a boat-load sent to neighboring Zaire in a deal that the Israelis had worked out with President Mobutu, even though the Zairian strong man had broken ties with Israel two years earlier.

When Israel reestablished relations with Zaire (in 1982) and began to train Zairian forces in the Shaba border province, Angola had cause for concern. The leader of the FNLA had been Holden Roberto, brother-in-law of Zairian president Mobutu, Israel's new client. In 1986, it would be established that Zaire acted as a funnel for "covert" U.S. military aid for the Unita forces of Jonas Savimbi.

In 1983, the Angolan News Agency reported that Israeli military experts were training Unita forces in Namibia. Since Zaire began receiving military aid and training from Tel Aviv, Angola has been ill at ease. Its worries increased after discovering that:

Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was personally involved in the organization, training and equipping of "commando" units of the army of Zaire, especially organized for missions along the borders of the RPA [Angola].

In 1984, the Financial Times (London) wrote of "joint Israeli-South African support for Unita forces." Other sources also report the transfer of Israeli arms and financial support to Unita.

In 1983, Angola's President Jose Eduardo dos Santos told Berkeley, California Mayor Eugene (Gus) Newport that an Israeli pilot had been shot down during a South African attack. The Angolan President showed Newport pictures of captured Israeli weapons. The following year, Luanda reported the capture of three mercenaries who said they had been trained by Israeli instructors in Zaire.

Israel has also been involved with the Mozambican "contras," the South African-backed MNR (Mozambique National Resistance or "Renamo"), which has brought great economic and social distress to Mozambique. Renamo has a particular reputation for ideological incoherence, being regarded by most other right-wing insurgencies as a gang of cutthroats. For several years there have been stories coming from Southern Africa of captured mercenaries of Renamo who say they were trained in neighboring Malawi-one of the four nations to maintain relations with Israel after the Organization of African Unity (OAU) declared a diplomatic embargo in 1973-by Israelis. And more than one report has told of "substantial Israeli aid" to the MNR, thought to have been funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia as well as South Africa and former Portuguese nationalists.

[source]

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

The sparks of anti-semitism were only noticed when in the mid-30s German Jewish refugees started to flow in the country, and two God's Chosen People saw themselves competing for the same Promised Land.

Two chosen peoples competing for the same chunk of "promised" land...not only that, but the very originally chosen people (the Jews) split into two factions: one, more powerful and with strong ties to Zionism, Israel and international Jewish financial institutions, supporting Apartheid and siding with the Calvinist chosenites in keeping the indigenous Amelekites at bay in their unviable Bantustans (Palestinian Autonomy); another Jewish faction, leftist, minoritarian and less powerful, but backed by the USSR, took an active part in the anti-Apartheid movement. Is this the case of some eternal interior Jewish right-left dialectic?

A Lithuanian Jew and Communist (member of the South African Jewish community of Litvaks, see the above post) named Joe Slovo participated actively in ANC's activities to bring the Apartheid system down:

Joe SLOVO
Joe Slovo: Has socialism failed? 1990.
Old Marxist returns (NYT)
Joe Slovo: Ode to a mensch

The ANC led South Africa has rather an anti-Israeli penchant, often deplored and rebuked by the pro-Zionist media. Curiously, one of the main Israel detractors in the South African government is a Jew Ronnie Kasrils. His surname smacks of Lithuanian origins. Here the Israeli journal "Daavot" (Opinion) deplores the allegedly rabid anti-Israeli stance of the South African government, with a special stress on Kasrils' role in it.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...405940,00.html

Excerpt:

However, despite this semblance of warm relations, South Africa is one of Israel's fiercest detractors, rivaling even Arab and Muslim nations. Without doubt, the main proponent of this anti-Israel agenda is the Minister of Intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, who, perhaps somewhat conveniently, is of Jewish descent. Shortly after the Palestinians initiated the Intifada, Kasrils, using the South African parliament as his platform, launched his own campaign - "not in my name" - designed to pressure the Jewish community into publicly denouncing Israel. Its strident rejection by mainstream South African Jewry has served to only goad him on.