Where we went wrong with Mandela

 Presidential embrace: Shimon Peres greets Nelson Mandela (Yoav Lemmer / AFP)

How could Nelson Mandela have applied his legendary moral clarity to the Middle East, when Israel's own leaders kept him in the dark? Instead of asserting the rights of an indigenous, colonised Middle Eastern people, Israel allowed itself to be guided by crass pragmatism. Must-read article by Ari Soffer in Israel National News:    

It is indeed ironic that whereas Mandela fought for the rights of the indigenous people of South Africa, when it came to the Middle East he sided with one of the groups which has always stood at the forefront of the push for Arab colonization, the Arabization of other indigenous nations and the eradication or appropriation of the legacies of non-Arab peoples.

And if any more proof were needed of his moral failure when it came to the Middle East, there was his friendship with former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which he once defended by proclaiming that "those who feel irritated by our friendship with President Gaddafi can go jump in the pool."

Again, the irony of that relationship was not simply that Gaddafi was a monstrous violator of human rights, but more specifically that he too was a key figure in the Arab colonialist project, who systematically sought to wipe out the Amazigh (Berber) people who are indigenous to northern Africa, and who ethnically-cleansed the entire Jewish population of Libya.

So, yes, Mandela was far from the infallible, universal icon of human rights he has been portrayed as. But instead of attacking him or seeking to deny the facts, we should ask ourselves two questions.

Firstly: why do we care? Mandela fought a just war against the forces of apartheid, but that did not make him infallible, and nor did it somehow confer upon him the kind of demi-god status which so many accolades attributed to him. He was a man - a great man, no doubt - but a man nonetheless. And men get things wrong. He fought for African rights in Africa, but what did he really know about the Middle East? His silence regarding the ongoing slavery of black Africans in Arab states, and the deeply-embedded racism within Arab society at large indicated that he knew precious little about the region.

But secondly - and more essentially - we must ask what drew Mandela to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Colonel Gaddafi in the first place.

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