The South African anti-apartheid movement in the U.S. made its most significant gains during Ronald Reagan’s second term in office. There are lessons for the Palestine movement as Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The Biden administration’s insistence to continue arming Israel despite it carrying out what a growing consensus of scholars and human rights organizations are calling a genocide in Gaza has been one of the greatest moral failures in modern American history. While the Biden administration’s approach to the situation has been disastrous, there are legitimate fears that Donald Trump’s second term in office may prove even worse for Palestinian survival, much less liberation.
In the wake of these traumatizing times, it is worth looking back at the South African anti-apartheid movement during a similar moment in American history for some hope and guidance.
Ronald Reagan was elected to a second presidential term in 1984 by a landslide. With a platform focused on economic austerity, hawkish cold war politics, and repressive domestic policies important to the religious right, Reagan won every state but Minnesota and nearly 60% of the popular vote. Reagan’s position on South African apartheid was steeped in racism and an approach called “constructive engagement,” by which the American government worked with instead of against the apartheid regime to slowly reform its policies. As the president’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs throughout his two terms in office, Chester Crocker, put it, “all Reagan knows about Southern Africa is that he is on the side of the whites.” Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, who more often focused on the positive qualities of even his bitterest enemies, was blunter: “[Ronald Reagan] is a racist, pure and simple.”
And yet it was during Reagan’s second term in office that the anti-apartheid movement in America made its most significant gains. (more...)
The South African anti-apartheid movement offers hope in the age of Trump
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