Shifting Solidarities

Examining the evolution of South African activists’ attitude toward the state of Israel

In recent decades, scholars and activists have increasingly drawn on the language of apartheid to describe the sociopolitical situation in Israel and Palestine. In South Africa today, Israel is notorious for its collaboration with the former white minority regime. This prevailing association, however, belies a more complex relationship between radical South Africans and the state of Israel that existed from the 1940s to the 1960s. During these years, Israel and Zionism divided opinion within South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement.

Shifting Solidarities traces the transition among anti-apartheid activists from support for a Jewish state in 1948 to anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian stances by the 1970s, showing how various ideologies—from Trotskyism to Pan-Africanism—shaped changing attitudes over time. Both an intellectual and a diplomatic history, the book illustrates how for several decades many South African radicals thought of Israel as a potential ally and admired its struggle for independence and postindependence achievements, but eventually came to see it as an apartheid-like state perpetuating the same kinds of injustices they had confronted for years.