energies of many South
African Jews which have
been constant, critical
elements in organizing and
directing the long,
dangerous struggle against
successive racist regimes in
South Africa.
Indeed, two years after
Mandela was sentenced to
life imprisonment, General
Hendrik Van Den Berg, then
head of the feared South
African security police and
arguably the most powerful
man in the country, was
moved to tell a gathering of
hard-nosed apartheid sup-
porters in Pretoria that
Communists represented the
single greatest threat to the
tranquility of white South
Africa: "And all Jews," he
added, "are Communists."
Jews — some Communists,
others not — have played a
key role not only in the
wider anti-apartheid
struggle, but also in the af-
fairs of the ANC. And no one
knows better than Nelson
Mandela himself the
number of Jews, affluent,
educated and privileged,
who risked their liberty and
their lives for the sake of
black liberation.
Today, the head of the
ANC's military wing is 63-
No one knows
better than Nelson
Mandela himself
the number of Jews
. . . who risked their
liberty and their
lives for the sake of
black liberation.
year-old Lithuanian-born
Joe Slovo, whose wife, Ruth
First, was killed by a parcel
bomb in Dar es Salaam. The
head of the ANC's legal
team, former Cape Town
lawyer Albie Sachs, was the
victim of another parcel
bomb attack while living in
exile in the Kingdom of
Lesotho (he escaped with his
life but was left cruelly
disfigured).
Mandela surely cannot
have forgotten that for two
years before his arrest, when
he was the most wanted man
in South Africa, he was
sheltered and protected by
one of South Africa's most
successful architects, Arthur
Goldreich, and his attorney
brother-in-law, Harold
Wolpe, who allowed their
secluded farm at Rivonia to
be used as a safe haven not
only for Mandela but for the
entire High Command of the
ANC.
Both Goldreich and Wolpe
were subsequently arrested,
only to cheat the executioner
when they bribed a prison
guard, escaped from their
jail cell and fled across the
border disguised as Catholic
priests (Wolpe later died in
London; Goldreich settled in
Israel and is now a professor
at the Bezalel School of Art
in Jerusalem).
Nor can Mandela have
forgotten that for most of the
long years he spent in jail,
the lone, brave voice which
insistently spoke out for him
in the fiercely hostile at-
mosphere of the South
African parliament was that
of Helen Suzman, represent-
ing the wealthy, overwhelm-
ingly Jewish constituency of
Houghton.
He certainly cannot have
forgotten that the only two
whites to stand trial with
him in the Pretoria Supreme
Court in 1964 were Lionel
Bernstein and Dennis Gold-
berg.
Bernstein was acquitted,
but Goldberg, a skilled engi-
neer who helped to design
and manufacture explosives
for use by the ANC against
government installations,
was less fortunate: He, like
Mandela, was sentenced to
life imprisonment.
To be fair, Mandela would
not have leaf ied very much
about Zionism or Israel from
men like Dennis Goldberg, a
hard-line doctrinaire Marx-
ist for whom every form of
national liberation is
laudable and legitimate —
except, of course, the nation-
al liberation of the Jewish
people.
It is unlikely that Dennis
Goldberg or his comrade, Joe
Slovo, who both still dream
of a Stalinist-paradise rising
on the ashes of apartheid
South Africa, will take
Mandela to task for
slighting South Africa's
Jews or for his distorted,
facile analysis of the Arab-
Israel conflict.
In fact, of course, the vast
majority of South African
Jews who joined the battle
against apartheid were not
Communists. They threw
themselves into the struggle
for a non-racial society at
every level. From the for-
midable women of the Black
Sash movement to student
activists, legal aid groups
and trade union organizers,
Jews are involved out of all
proportion to their numbers
in the population.
It would be comforting to
say that Mandela is only
human and entitled to his
opinions, even if they are
marred by error and pre-
judice; it would be comfor-
ting to say that it doesn't
really matter. But it does. ❑
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