Jan Smuts and the genesis of the war in Gaza
Questions about South Africa’s involvement in a conflict thousands of miles away overlook the fact that it dates back more than a century, long before the State of Israel was born, writes Bongani Ngqulunga
Writing in the Jerusalem Post in the aftermath of the South African government’s presentation of its case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the Gaza conflict, Alan Baker, the former Israeli ambassador to Canada, questioned Pretoria’s motives in bringing the matter before the ICJ.
Like many Israeli politicians and opinion makers who have been outraged by the levelling of a charge of genocide against the Jewish state, Baker accused Pretoria of supporting Hamas and ignoring the atrocities it committed against Israeli citizens on October 7.
Many questions have been raised about South Africa’s involvement in a conflict thousands of miles away. What these questions overlook is that this involvement in Palestine dates back more than a century, long before the State of Israel was born. As Tali Feinberg wrote in the Jewish Report a year ago, evidence of the instrumental role played by South Africa in the founding of Israel can be seen in the names of streets and neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and other parts of the country.
To understand the outsize role South Africa has played in the history and politics of Palestine-Israel, one has to go back to a significant moment more than a century ago. On November 2 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, an investment banker and a leading Zionist from the well-known Rothschild family, declaring the British government’s support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
The Balfour Declaration, as it came to be known, set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, and the political convulsions that have beset the Middle East for the last seven decades. One of the members of the British war cabinet who pushed for the declaration of Palestine as the “national home for the Jewish people” was a South African politician by the name of Jan Smuts. As South Africa’s minister of defence at the time, Smuts had been invited by British prime minister David Lloyd George to serve in his war cabinet during World War 1. Smuts would later serve as prime minister of South Africa, first from 1919 to 1924 and then from 1939 to 1948.
Though the Balfour Declaration represented the collective policy position of the British government, Smuts’s support for it was steadfast, passionate and distinct. In a way, the Balfour Declaration marked the beginning of his lifelong commitment to the return of Jews to Palestine as well as the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel.
In an address to the South African Zionist Federation and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies delivered in November 1919 in Johannesburg, Smuts confessed his abiding faith that one day the “whole of Israel” would return to “its own land”, which he considered to be Palestine. Going beyond the fundamental terms of the Balfour Declaration, which envisaged the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people”, Smuts imagined “a great Jewish state rising there [Palestine] once more”.
Why would a South African politician without any direct Jewish ancestry take such a keen interest in the fate of Palestine and the Jewish people? The answer is rather complex. Unlike, perhaps, some leading figures in the British government whose main motivation for the Balfour Declaration might have been influenced by geopolitical considerations, the roots of Smuts’s commitment to the Zionist cause ran deeper.
Smuts had a romanticism about Jewish history and culture that at times transcended political calculations and considerations. For a man who was known for his deep interest in philosophy, science and world affairs, his fascination with the Jewish people and Palestine reflected a strong religious feeling and interest in the Old Testament.
As a young man in Paul Kruger’s administration, Smuts was indoctrinated with the rhetoric of the leader he idolised. Kruger constantly likened the Afrikaners’ Great Trek from the Cape to the Transvaal to the children of Israel fleeing Egypt to the promised land. The modern-day Jewish community, for Smuts, was a small, oppressed nation, like the Afrikaners in South Africa.
Located between the East and the West and bearing witness to the vicissitudes of centuries-old struggles of great empires for dominance, the Jewish people, Smuts believed, had developed a perspective of the world and life from which the whole of humanity could benefit. Reflecting on his experience while visiting Palestine during World War 1, Smuts marvelled at the majesty of its topography and its forbidding climate, which he believed had given birth to the “greatest religion on earth, the loftiest religious spirit in history, and to one of the most wonderful peoples, perhaps the most wonderful people that the world has seen”. He was, of course, referring to the Jewish people.
Back home, Smuts saw the influence of Jewish culture and traditions among whites of Dutch descent in particular. The Old Testament, he observed, “has been the very marrow of Dutch culture here in South Africa”. The Jewish culture was the basis of what he called “our white culture”. Because of that, the two communities shared a strong common bond on the basis of which, he declared, he wanted to “build the future of South Africa”.
For more than three decades, from the moment of the Balfour Declaration and his speech to the South African Zionist Federation in 1919, Smuts endeavoured tirelessly to fulfil his promise to the Jewish people for the establishment in Palestine of their national home. Like many of his contemporaries in the British government, he believed the first step towards meeting this promise was the removal of the Turkish Empire from Palestine, followed by the incorporation of Palestine into the British Empire after World War 1. This dream was realised when the League of Nations formally approved the British Mandate for Palestine in July 1922.
In the Palestine in which he envisioned the establishment of a Jewish state lived a people who had also been there for generations and laid a claim to the territory. As Smuts conceded, there was a “large Arab population still living in Palestine”. The expression “still living” there suggests that Smuts questioned their future status in the territory. Numerous letters he exchanged with his friends in Britain demonstrate that he approached Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine with a significant degree of partiality towards the Jewish people. Keith Hancock, his pre-eminent biographer, notes that Smuts was opposed to “favouring Arabs at the expense of the Jews” in Palestine. This bias would influence his approach to the Israel-Palestine question for the rest of his life.
The rise of Adolf Hitler and the widespread persecution of Jews in Central Europe and Germany, especially in the 1930s, which culminated in the catastrophe of the Holocaust, brought the question of the Jewish community to the forefront of world affairs. Countries such as Britain were confronted by the immigration of scores of Jews fleeing from virulent anti-Semitism and persecution in Hitler’s Germany and Central Europe. European countries responded by tightening their immigration laws.
Faced with this situation, Smuts, in July 1936, wrote to Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, offering a possible solution. “With the persecution of Jews in Central Europe and especially in Germany,” he wrote, “and the tightening of
immigration laws over the world, Palestine is and remains the principal outlet for the Jews.” The problem for Smuts and those who shared his proposal was the revolt by the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine against the control of their country by the British.
In addition to calls for self-rule, the Arab nationalists demanded the suspension of uncontrolled immigration of Jewish people fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in Europe. By the late 1930s, the British government was concerned over the impact of persistent Arab opposition on its economic and political interests, which led it to take modest steps towards reform. This outraged Smuts, who saw it as a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration. He thought the British government was pandering to “Arab agitation”, which he judged “a most dangerous policy”.
He was concerned that the failure by the British government to support the Jewish community facing tremendous persecution and an existential threat from Hitler’s Nazism would turn Jews against Britain and its allies. Britain should, he wrote to Lloyd George, demonstrate its sympathy for the Jewish people by reinforcing its support for the Balfour Declaration and ensuring the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine.
Smuts was also fighting a rearguard battle at home against political agitation by the National Party led by DF Malan, which called for stricter laws that would restrict Jewish immigration into South Africa. Shortly before he became prime minister of South Africa for the second time in 1939, Smuts wrote to Leopold Amery, a former British journalist and Conservative politician, and his longtime political companion, expressing his distrust of Arabs. “I do not believe in the Arabs,” he wrote, and questioned what appeared to him to be the British government’s shifting allegiance to them. He thought Arab loyalty could not be depended on. He advised that the British government and its allies should support the Jewish community over the Palestinian Arabs in a conflict regarding control of Palestine.
Just after World War 2, Smuts submitted a statement to the Anglo-American committee that had been established to inquire into the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine. In the statement, he once again expressed his support for the Balfour Declaration. Crucially, he explained why the declaration had called for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish population in Palestine rather than explicitly for a Jewish state. According to his explanation, it would have been difficult to call for a Jewish state “due partly to the small Jewish population of Palestine”. The question of a Jewish state was postponed for the future, when more Jews would have immigrated to Palestine. For what it was worth, he added that the declaration was not “conceived in a spirit of hostility to the Arabs”.
Yet, when the conflict between the Arab and Jewish communities intensified over the control of Palestine in the aftermath of World War 2, Smuts stood with Jewish Palestinians in the name, partly, of the Balfour Declaration. Looking into the future, he advocated for the Jewish community and Israel to play a leading role in determining the future of the Middle East.
The conflict between the two communities would eventually lead to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. The Smuts government was one of the first to recognise the State of Israel. A few weeks later, Smuts was defeated by the National Party in an election the consequence of which was the introduction of apartheid as official government policy.
Smuts had met Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, in London in 1917. Weizmann became the impetus behind the World Zionist Organization that had pressed for the Balfour Declaration. Smuts maintained a keen interest in Weizmann throughout his career. After leaving office, Smuts proposed one of the toasts for his friend of more than three decades at Weizmann’s 75th birthday luncheon in London on November 27 1949.
For his steadfast support to the Jewish community and the Zionist cause, Israeli streets and neighbourhoods were named after Smuts. In Ramallah in the West Bank stands a 6m statue of another South African politician whose lifelong commitment to the liberation of Palestine has inspired the young and the old in that part of the world. The statue of Nelson Mandela, standing tall with his clenched fist pointing to the sky, is inscribed with his famous words: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
The statue was unveiled in Palestine in 2016, just a year short of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. In one century, two iconic South African leaders envisioned diametrically opposed futures for Palestine. South Africa’s involvement in the titanic struggle continues.