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Africa Insights: South Africa’s Striking Divide

Africa Insights is a podcast special from New Lines magazine exploring Africa's unique stories from an African perspective.The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine continues to send reverberations across the globe. In Africa, South Africa stands out as the leading voice, strongly supporting Palestine despite facing criticism from factions in its own Jewish community, opposition parties and faith-based parties.
 
Historically, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has been a longtime supporter of the Palestinian cause, often likening it to the apartheid era, which was a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination against the black majority and other nonwhite ethnic groups in South Africa.
 
The Israel-Palestine conflict has further split an already divided country still grappling with racial and ideological divisions.
 
“We can’t just look at Palestine and Israel without an appreciation of the South African context. So, when Jewish members of the synagogues which are largely if not exclusively white filter their hegemonic presence of a Zionist state in Israel, they filter this through their white consciousness,” the Rev. Michael Weeder, dean at St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town, tells New Lines’ Kwangu Liwewe.
 
The Jewish community in South Africa, which to a large extent supported the anti-apartheid movement, is divided over the conflict, with some reflecting on what the struggle in South Africa was able to achieve for minority groups.
 
“The community is extremely split. There probably is some understanding in the broader Jewish community that South Africa was able to address the issue of African majority and cede power and become a democracy,” says Jonathan Shapiro, a South African political cartoonist.
 
On the political front, the ANC-led government’s stance has been criticized for its tepid response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Ten days after the attack, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor held a call with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which ignited fury among supporters of Israel within the country.
 
“From the ANC government there’s been sort of a fairly lukewarm condemnation of Hamas,” Shapiro says. The biggest difficulty amongst progressive and more radical Jews is how to approach what Hamas did on Oct. 7. There are Jews who won’t sign certain petitions, who won’t take a position as strongly opposed to what Israel is doing because they feel that there's too little condemnation.”
 

Minor Detail, Major Implications — with Salma Dabbagh, Judith Gurewich, Katharine Halls and Lydia Wilson

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest trade fair for books, though it rarely makes headlines outside of publishing trade gazettes. This year was different. Palestinian author Adania Shibli had been announced as the winner of Litprom’s 2023 LiBeraturpreis literature award for her 2020 novel “Minor Detail.” But after the Oct. 7 attacks, Litprom, which is funded in part by the German government, decided to cancel the award ceremony. 
 
“Given the context of what was happening to Palestinians at the time, it felt really cruel that there couldn't even be, on some level, something to celebrate,” British-Palestinian author Salma Dabbagh tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. “But to say one is shocked almost feels naive because there's a history here.”
 
Dabbagh cites the example of Caryl Churchill, a playwright who had been due to receive the lifetime achievement award at the 2022 European Drama awards in Stuttgart. Shortly after the announcement, the award was rescinded on the basis of her support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Since the attacks, Palestinians and others with Middle Eastern backgrounds have been treated with suspicion across the world, but that demonization has been particularly pronounced in Germany. Katharine Halls, a British Arabic-English translator who represents a number of Germany- and Berlin-based authors, says Shibli is far from the only author to feel the chilling effects.
 
“Book launches, conferences, prize-giving ceremonies — they're seeing them canceled,” she says. “Meanwhile, there is a very, very real threat of far-right activism and indeed violence, which seems to be going unchecked.”
 
Halls had been invited by Litprom to host a panel on Arabic literature at the Frankfurt Fair but dropped out after learning of their decision to cancel Shibli’s ceremony. Publisher Judith Gurewich had also been asked to speak, but though she too was appalled by the decision, she says the decision to drop out never crossed her mind. 
 
“I felt that it was very important to somehow take a stand, as a Jewish publisher in Germany,” she says.  “You have to be a little bit thoughtful about what you're doing, when you don't even acknowledge your own history and what you've done with this history.”

The Emotional Fog of War — with Arwa Damon and Faisal Al Yafai

“In my 20 years of covering war, I came to this realization that at the core of almost every single decision that is made — whether it’s by an individual or by a government or by a soldier — is emotion,” says veteran international correspondent Arwa Damon. And in a conflict as steeped in trauma as the current war in Gaza, she tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai, the intensity of emotion clouds judgements, hardens attitudes and distorts decision-making, with devastating consequences. 
“Fear is one of the biggest drivers that allows the military machine and the politicians behind it to justify what their military machine is doing,” she says. 
But emotions aren’t only running high within Israel and Palestine. The Hamas attacks and subsequent invasion of Gaza have divided global opinion like no other conflict in recent memory. With both parties reliant on international political support, the battle for hearts and minds will be one of the most decisive fronts in the war. “This is in so many ways not just a physical war,” says Damon. “This is a war of disinformation, misinformation, manipulation, the scale of which has surpassed post-9/11, and I never thought I would see that.”
In previous conflicts where disinformation has played such a major role, the finger usually points straight to social media. But for all the antisemitism, Islamophobia and genocidal rhetoric metastasizing online, Damon adds that the picture this time around is more nuanced. “Social media is allowing a Western audience to see and feel the Palestinian narrative in ways that are not controlled by the Western media. Before social media, the press was really the only window into the Palestinian narrative that a Western audience had.”
Rather than blaming TikTok or X (formerly Twitter), Damon suggests that the press might want to start by looking inwards. “The Western media doesn’t question what Western officials say strongly enough,” she says. “And I think that really makes it that much more painful, especially for the Palestinian population. They know that their death is being broadcast. And that, in theory, it could be stopped.”
But even amid the doubt created by the unprecedented barrage of distortion coming from every angle, Damon still thinks that journalists need not keep fumbling around in the dark. 
“You bring it back to something undeniable,” she says. “You boil it down to what's in front of you. And that is what you then focus the story on. Because we also need to be fully cognizant — we are getting played by every single side at all times.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Killings Return to Darfur — with Niemat Ahmadi, Gerrit Kurtz and Kwangu Liwewe

The war in Sudan, between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) controlled by Mohamad Hamdan Dagalo and the Sudanese Armed Forces led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions. The two men were formerly partners, leading Sudan’s military junta before Dagalo’s ambitions created a rift between them that has torn the country in two. 
 
But for the people of Darfur, a predominantly Black African region in Sudan’s arid west, the catastrophe has been particularly pronounced. Under Dagalo and Burhan’s predecessor, Omar al-Bashir, Arab supremacist Janjaweed militias terrorized the area for years, torturing and murdering countless civilians in a genocidal campaign aimed at wiping out the non-Arab population. In the intervening years, Dagalo turned those militias into the RSF, his own private paramilitary army — and since the outbreak of war in 2022, they have once more been unleashed upon Darfur to finish what they started.
 
“This time around is even worse than 20 years ago,” Niemat Ahmadi, founder and president of the Darfur Women Action Group, tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe.  “Now they have grown into more sophisticated militia, with training, equipment and international enablers supplying them with weapons and money.”
 
They are a specter that has loomed over the region for decades. Though the international community did eventually declare the Janjaweed campaign a genocide, and al-Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court, the RSF only grew in influence while al-Bashir was never handed over for trial. “People who have been displaced 20 years ago have never been able to go home because their attackers have yet to be held accountable,” Ahmadi says.  
 
Even today, the army has done little to protect people, she adds. Earlier this year, the RSF carried out the worst massacre of the war in front of them, murdering and torturing hundreds of civilians in El Geneina. “They didn't move.”
“This is actually a pattern,” says Gerrit Kurtz, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. When Dagalo and Burhan governed together, he explains, it was common for the regular armed forces to stand by without intervening while RSF fighters committed atrocities. Moreover, he points out, now they are at war, Dagalo’s forces are winning. 
 
“The RSF already controls most of Darfur,” he says. “They've captured the state capitals of  three states in Darfur. And they were already in control of the east.”
 
In the absence of anywhere else to turn, some have looked to the international community for help. They have received little. “International actors are overwhelmed,” Kurtz says. “They are not united, and they are not mobilizing sufficient efforts to actually reign in this kind of horrific violence.” 
“And what is most painful,” says Ahmadi, “is that it seems like this does not mobilize or generate outrage as it used to.”

Prisoners of the Gaza War — with Sharone Lifschitz, Noga Tarnopolsky and Muzna Shihabi

“On the 7th of October I was on my way to a day out in the north of England with my family  when I opened a news feed and found out that things are kicking off between Israel and Gaza,” Sharone Lifschitz tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin. “My parents live about a mile from Gaza. I called my mom, and she didn't answer.”
 
By the evening, it had become clear that her parents were among the hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Her mother, Yochaved Lifschitz, was freed 16 days after the attacks, and images of her handshake with her former captor flashed around the world. Her father, Oded, remains in Hamas captivity. “So we are continuing to speak to whoever would listen in government and in media and try to advocate for their return.”
 
With over 200 hostages still in captivity in Gaza, it’s a nightmare she is far from alone in experiencing. “There's not one family who has not been affected,” she says. And yet many of those affected say that the Israeli government has all but abandoned them.
 
“The truth is that not only has the government not been forthcoming with them, but it's not clear what the government is doing, if anything, to get these hostages back,” says Noga Tarnopolsky, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem. “And so these families feel forsaken and abandoned.”
 
In the face of such apparent official indifference to their plight, some of the families have advocated for a bold proposal: everyone for everyone. In other words, release all of the Palestinians in Israeli detention — a number that has grown dramatically since the war began — in exchange for the hostages. “I am for everything that works,” Lifschitz says.
 
Tarnopolsky is more skeptical. “The offer has never been made in any way by Hamas,” she says. “I think that if this were a real offer, I think that the clamor for it would be so intense that the government would at least have to consider it.”
 
But such a prisoner swap remains the only real hope in the eyes of many of the families, who continue to push for it in the face of apparent government indifference. It may also be the only hope for some Palestinian detainees, many of whom are held without charge — and, according to civil rights groups, face serious human rights abuses in prison. 
 
Since Oct. 7, Muzna Shihabi, a former adviser to the PLO negotiation team says, “according to Palestinian officials, the number has doubled.” Many, she says, report that their treatment has become even more severe over the past month.
 
But as long as Israel and Hamas remain as unwilling to negotiate as they currently seem to be, their plight — like those of the Israeli, Thai and other nationals held in Gaza — is unlikely to end anytime soon.
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Lebanon’s Trauma and the Myth of Resilience — with Dalal Mawad and Rasha Elass

On Aug. 4, 2020, Dalal Mawad was preparing to feed her cat when hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate, left forgotten at Beirut’s busy port, exploded. The blast ripped through the Lebanese capital, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. It was one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in human history, the result not of war but of corruption. Yet, to date, no one has been held accountable.
 
In the aftermath, Mawad began work on her recently published book about the port blast, “All She Lost: the Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive.” But when she set out to interview dozens of women about the distress they endured that day, she discovered that just like the fertilizer at the port, her country’s trauma had also been forgotten. 
 
“I thought, this is a history book,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass. “It's not just a book about the explosion. It's also about Lebanon's unprecedented collapse.”
 
Before the Beirut explosion, the country’s banking sector had collapsed, leaving countless citizens locked out of their life savings. By that time, Lebanon had spent 12 years enduring the shockwaves of the Syrian Civil War, all while the scars of its own civil war remain open and raw. “The Lebanese today, their life is a life of survival. They spend their days fighting for their basic rights,” Mawad says. “I felt like I owed it to myself and to the Lebanese to tell these stories.”
 
“Lebanese resilience” is often claimed as a mark of pride, but Mawad firmly rejects the notion.  “This to me is not resilience. It's trauma on top of trauma,” she says. “They haven't found justice. They haven’t found peace. And I think convincing ourselves that we are resilient is actually counterproductive.”
 
And now, as yet another war rages in the region, the Lebanese people are bracing themselves once more, hoping their country will not become a casualty yet again.

The Day After Hamas — with Gilbert Achcar and Faisal Al Yafai

In retaliation for the brutal Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Israel has been bombarding Gaza for three weeks now, displacing more than 1 million Palestinians and killing thousands of civilians. Israeli forces have made localized raids into the area but have not yet launched the full ground invasion that officials say is planned. 
 
“The military plans can be drawn now. Will they be able to implement them? That's a big question mark,” says Gilbert Achcar, professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS, University of London.
 
In a recent essay published by New Lines, however, Achcar turned his attention to the other big question. Assuming Israel is able to oust Hamas, he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, “the next question is what are we going to do with that?”
 
Achcar outlines two main scenarios for the day after Hamas. The first, which he calls the “Oslo” option, is the one preferred by the United States. This would involve handing control of Gaza to the Fatah government that rules in the West Bank. 
 
“They want the Israeli army to eradicate Hamas in Gaza and put the Palestinian Authority in control of the strip,” he explains. 
 
It would be a very difficult needle to thread. Not only has Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refused to take part in such a scheme, but any Palestinian leader who did would be unlikely to last long in power if it was imposed at the barrel of a gun.
 
The other likely political course, Achcar suggests, is what he calls the “Greater Israel” option. In that scenario, Israel takes over Gaza — and stays there.
 
“And this is the view on the far right,” he says. “October 7 was, for them, an opportunity.”
 
But such an action might be even more of a pipe dream than the “Oslo” option. Occupying Gaza over the long term would stretch the IDF to capacity at the very least, and U.S. President Biden has already ruled out American support for such a scheme. 
 
A military strategy is one thing. But finding a political strategy for the day after Hamas will prove much trickier.
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Geopolitics of the Gaza War — with Ali Hashem, Mairav Zonszein and Aziz Alghashian

On Oct. 6, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel were locked in a delicate diplomatic dance. A tentative normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia was ongoing, while in March, a Chinese-brokered rapprochement began to thaw the Saudi relationship with their common rival Iran. Meanwhile, Iran continued to expand its network of proxies throughout the region as Israel sought to contain the move through diplomatic and clandestine action. 
 
But the events of the next day and beyond have changed everything. The magnitude of Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s response were both unprecedented and have thrown the balance of power into flux. With tensions at a high mark, an escalation risks igniting a region-wide war. As the leadership of all three countries scramble to find their footing, New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai and Joshua Martin spoke to three different analysts to break down the political and military strategies at play. 
Produced by Joshua Martin
 

Hamas, Israel and the PA at War — with Jeroen Gunning, Dana El Kurd and Uriel Abulof

After a surprise attack by Hamas killed nearly 1,000 Israeli civilians, the Middle East stands on the brink of being engulfed by war. Israel’s retaliation has been no less devastating as the IDF laid siege to Gaza, killing more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians so far in a bombing campaign of unprecedented ferocity. A ground invasion seems imminent, and the fighting threatens to spill over into a catastrophic regional war. 
 
To understand the genesis of this crisis, New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel and Joshua Martin spoke to political scientists from three different countries about what the unfolding conflagration means for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
 
“Hamas would have known that by invading Israel itself and puncturing this myth of invincibility of Israel in its own land, Israel would have to respond even more harshly than normal,” says Jeroen Gunning, professor of Middle Eastern politics and conflict studies at King's College London and the author of “Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence.”
 
“It may be that Hamas’s calculation was that this was worth the cost, but they're sacrificing the lives of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.”
 
In other words, the massive response from Israel was almost certainly part of the plan. Moreover, Gunning says, it’s unlikely to deliver lasting security and prevent such an attack from happening again. 
 
“A lot of Israelis, including former heads of the Mossad and former generals, have gone on record that there is no military solution to the conflict,” Gunning says. 
 
“Hamas is one of the few groups that still claims resistance against the Israeli occupation,” explains Dana El Kurd, a political scientist at the University of Richmond and the author of “Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine.” 
 
“So what this moment speaks to is the fact that a lot of these other Palestinian actors have become very irrelevant to the ongoing conflict.”
 
Unlike their counterparts in Gaza, Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has cooperated with Israel since the Oslo Peace Accords were signed in the 1990s. By provoking a response of this magnitude, Hamas has an opportunity to not only delegitimize their main rivals but also shore up its own support.
“In the context of Israel bombing Gaza, there is obviously a rally-around-the-flag effect where even people who are completely ideologically opposed to Hamas are not going to express something like that,” El Kurd points out. “I can't describe how outraged people are, how just dehumanized people feel, that violence against Palestinians is ignored.”
 
“It's the vicious cycle of humiliation and revenge. And we've seen it throughout the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” says Uriel Abulof, a political psychologist at Tel Aviv University and the author of “Living on the Edge: The Existential Uncertainty of Zionism.” 
 
“You feel the fear, you feel the humiliation caused by the others, and you want revenge.”
 
Yet the events of the past week, he believes, have shown the futility of that cycle. “The only thing you can do is live by the sword and hope that you'll be able to survive. And Netanyahu was the main agent of that doctrine over the past 30 years.”
 
But while he may be hoping that a forceful enough reprisal may placate the public, the attacks happened under Netanyahu’s watch, Abulof points out, and a great many Israelis blame him for the bloodshed.  
 
“Although it may sound completely ludicrous and utopian at this dark point, I think that it might also serve as a sort of an awakening for moderates on both sides. And I think there are many, many Palestinians who abhor what Hamas has done,” he adds. “I think there is a potential that both sides may come together and try to do something that we haven't really tried before, which is a real coexistence, truly, fully recognizing the existence of the other.”

The Yellow Wind of Damascus — with Benan Grams and Rasha Elass

The city of Damascus is one of the oldest in the world. Syria’s ancient capital has been continuously inhabited for perhaps 12,000 years and seen countless plagues, viruses and epidemics sweep through its streets. But, says Dr. Benan Grams, a social historian of disease and medicine at the University of New Orleans, the cholera epidemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries stand out among the worst. 
 
“The disease is endemic to the Ganges Valley in India, but it did not have its international journey until the involvement of British imperial forces that took the disease from India to the Persian Gulf,” Grams tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass. “And from there, the disease came to Syria, but did not reach Damascus until 1848.”
 
When it did hit, though, it hit hard. 
 
“It was a shock for everybody, not because of the novelty of epidemics but because of the horrific symptoms,” Grams says. Signs of infection came on suddenly, leaving the afflicted vomiting and unable to control their bowels. Many would be dead within hours. At the height of the epidemic, hundreds were dying over a single day.
 
“By 1902, we learned what causes the disease, and we learned how it is transmitted,” Grams says. Advances in epidemiology had revealed the pathogen behind the devastation —Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium that spread through contaminated water. Yet that same year, the city was struck by its worst epidemic yet. 
 
“Despite all measures and all precautions, people were still dying from cholera,” Grams explains. The situation became so severe that Ottoman officials feared V. cholerae would become endemic to the city’s water supply. 
 
By the time it ended, the outbreak had lasted for more than a year, several times the length of previous epidemics, leaving the city traumatized and its economy crippled by containment measures. Ottoman officials had found themselves caught in an endless cycle, cordoning off the city again and again as the outbreak flared and waned. Every few months, Grams explains, things would seem to die down, no new cases would be reported, and the administration would ease restrictions. 
 
“And then someone died or another case was reported. And then all the measures that were eased were reinstated again. And the misery started all over again,” she says.
 
“Researching cholera during the COVID pandemic,” she adds, “it was quite fascinating to see the similarities.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin