Drawing on South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, Ronnie Kasrils examines how armed resistance, mass mobilization, underground organization and international solidarity can advance Palestinian liberation.
“Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” – Yasser Arafat, PLO Chairman, UN General Assembly Speech, November 13, 1974
“We South Africans cannot consider ourselves free until Palestine is free.” – President Nelson Mandela addressing Yasser Arafat in South Africa, 1998
“The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa.” – Manifesto of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), armed wing of ANC, 1961
Background
The African National Congress (ANC) is the oldest liberation movement in Africa, formed in 1912. It was founded by intellectuals and traditional leaders whose ancestors had resisted Dutch and British colonial conquest with spears and shields against modern weapons from the 17th century until the dawn of the 20th century, when they were finally defeated and dispossessed of their land. In 1910, the British handed rule to white settlers as junior partners. Seeking redress by nonviolent means, the ANC transformed itself into a radical, mass-based movement in the 1950s.
This followed the victory of the most extreme white party (the Afrikaner National Party) in a 1948 whites-only election, which promised an Apartheid system of even more brutal colonial repression, a fortnight after the establishment, in May 1948, of the settler-colonial state of Israel at the other end of the African continent. Following a decade of increasing mass defiance led by the ANC in the 1950s, the government responded with widespread arrests and massacres, banning the ANC and its rival organization, the incipient Pan African Congress (PAC).
The following year, the ANC turned to armed struggle. A similar trajectory can be seen in Palestine with the Nakba, the emergence of Fatah in 1959 as an armed response from exile, and its merger with other groups to form the PLO in 1969 (Islamic Jihad was established in 1982 and Hamas in 1987). From that time, the ANC and the PLO, both of which were movements based in exile, forged firm common links in a mutual struggle against settler-colonial systems. Even before South Africa was free, the ANC and the PLO recognized the same fundamental struggle in one another: a dispossessed people demanding land, self-determination and freedom from domination.
By 1978, ANC President Oliver Tambo spoke of the liberation of South Africa and the liberation of Palestine as “the key struggles of the age.” He was later succeeded by Nelson Mandela, who, as president of a democratic South Africa, famously stated to Yasser Arafat at a banquet in a free South Africa in 1998, “We South Africans cannot consider ourselves free until Palestine is free.” Mandela observed that the struggle for Palestine is the “moral issue of our times.”
At a time when the Palestinian people are facing the gravest threat to their existence, this overview of the South African experience is presented alongside some thoughts on the meaning and crucial nature of armed struggle, political goals, and the connection between all forms of struggle — from protest to resistance — toward victory. These are my personal views. I am in no way claiming to be some kind of oracle, but they are based on my own experience and understanding.
They are not intended as didactic teaching, but rather as an attempt to impart lessons from our struggle that may or may not be regarded as relevant to the Palestinian cause.
I am moved by Ramzy Baroud’s closing speech to the recent Jewish Anti-Zionist International Congress in Dublin (June 26-28), where he stated: “It is very important for Palestinians—especially those from Gaza, but all Palestinians—to tell you what we think our priorities are right now,” he said. “Palestinians speak of Tahrir — liberation; Al-Awda — the Right of Return; and Muqawama — resistance.”
Features and Differences of Two Struggles
South Africa is a vast country while Palestine, in its entirety, is extremely small. Neither has perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare. But as history has shown, this deficiency, which pertains to many countries, can be overcome – as Amilcar Cabral said of the flat terrain of Guinea-Bissau, “our people are our mountains.” At the onset of the colonial era, both started off with small settler communities. However, although the white population of South Africa grew to 10% by the late 20th century (five million whites), in Palestine/Israel, owing to ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering, parity has been reached between Jews and Arabs at seven million each (excluding the nine million displaced Palestinians).
Palestinians were acquainted with the use of weapons and had engaged in armed struggle from 1936 in what is termed the Great Arab Revolt (1936-39) against British rule and Zionist settlers. South African indigenous people did not have access to weapons at all until the era of the armed struggle, from 1961 onwards, when weapons were smuggled across the border.
Palestinians have faced more severe repression—to the point of mass ethnic cleansing and the horrific genocide witnessed today—amounting since 1947–48 to a policy of incremental genocide, a term Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has been using for years.
Both oppressed peoples were very politically aware, demonstrated high levels of militancy and readiness to resist by all means – at times spontaneously. The greatest disadvantage for Palestinians is that millions have been displaced and consigned to exile.
Alongside demographic differences, South Africa’s economic system was based on exploiting cheap black labor. This was enforced with extreme brutality by a state that did not flinch from massacres to keep the black population in check, though not to the extent of genocide. The mines, farms, and factories needed workers. In Zionist Israel, the objective from the outset was to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. South Africa’s industrial development saw the rise of a black proletariat, powerful trade unions and a communist party that became a firm ally of the ANC. Conditions in Palestine were very different.
Both settler states waged war in the region. Huge changes to the balance of power occurred when the military failed. The South African Defense Force (SADF) was defeated in Angola in 1987-88 by Cuban forces assisting the MPLA government. Israel is encountering just such a “moment” in its misadventure with the US in seeking to “obliterate” Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
As in the case of apartheid South Africa, the global reaction to Israel’s barbarity has led to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement isolating the country. The regime has lost the battle of ideas, with its false narrative discredited. It is losing its foothold in the US, where the leverage of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is failing, and young Jews are increasingly rejecting Zionism, within a broader population swinging to the Palestinian cause.
Unlike Palestinian resistance movements, which have faced inconsistent support from Arab states, at times sheer treachery, the ANC enjoyed relatively consistent backing from African states.
Demographics and racial arrogance are twin Achilles’ heels for both. Neither apartheid state could tolerate the loss of a few soldiers. The armed struggle demonstrated that the enemy was not invincible.
Neither could survive a prolonged war, nor the growing refusal of young conscripts to serve. Neither could show flexibility; both were wedded to an iron-fist doctrine until it was too late. They could win tactical battles owing to their destructive weapons, but they could never define clear strategic goals. Tactics win battles. Strategy wins wars.
Both states had to struggle to handle inner contradictions owing to unjust systems and external boycotts and sanctions.
Both liberation movements employed elements of a strategy that the ANC termed the ‘Four Pillars’: mass struggle reinforced by armed struggle; a clandestine network; and international solidarity. The ANC achieved strategic fusion. This strategy was essential to the ANC’s victory by 1990, forcing the apartheid regime to the negotiating table and resulting in the breakthrough that led to the first democratic elections in 1994. These elections saw political power pass into the ANC’s hands, although economic power has proved elusive.
The PLO, on the other hand, was diverted into the quicksands of the Oslo Accords and a frozen “two-state” interregnum with disastrous consequences.
This paper focuses on the Four Pillars doctrine. It was developed over thirty years of bloody struggle, with advances and setbacks, until the movement grasped how to coordinate and fuse the elements, enabling victory. Before we examine this achievement, we need to consider the difficult path toward it. This requires reflecting on the characteristics of settler colonialism and examining the conditions in which armed struggle emerged. We will then proceed to consider the process by which the ANC developed its doctrine of strategy and tactics and crystallized the Four Pillars of Struggle.
This process was not easy; it took many years and was shaped by the lessons learned from actual struggle, in which the liberation leadership both taught and learned from the masses.
The South African experience is located in the recent past. The Palestinian experience is ongoing, and the situation currently appears dire. While the outcome is uncertain, we agree with many seasoned commentators that it is the US-Zionist axis that is in a deep and irreconcilable crisis.
Palestine is in the eye of a regional storm with global repercussions and has become a defining feature of the struggle against an unstable and increasingly dangerous imperialist system. This is an integral part of the post-colonial struggle of the Global South to build a future of genuine national sovereignty and development, free from imperialist control. The overarching confrontation today, from Havana to Tehran and from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, concerns not only national sovereignty and multilateralism, but also regional and global hegemony and the machinations of the US, Israel and NATO concerning China, Russia and Iran.
The Resort to Arms – High Cost of Resistance
Many freedom fighters have drawn parallels between the liberation struggles of Palestine and South Africa. South Africans who visited Palestine remarked that the repression and methods used were far worse than anything they had experienced back home. This was even before the genocidal hell unleashed by Israel in October 2023.
The most powerful country in the world, the US, together with its allies, supported apartheid South Africa, albeit not brazenly. In its heyday, the UN supported the liberation movements of Palestine and South Africa. These days, a weakened UN, deliberately undermined by the US, is failing the Palestinians at their most critical moment. Yet, as a key theater of contestation, it cannot be ignored. Ways must be sought to ensure the General Assembly’s overwhelming support for Palestine is translated into action by the Security Council. This is the UN where, in 1974, Yasser Arafat delivered his historic ‘Gun and Olive Branch’ speech in military uniform with a pistol on his belt to a standing ovation. It was the first time a leader of a liberation movement had addressed the General Assembly. That can hardly be imagined today.
In that period, during the wave of post-Second World War independence, the UN adopted a series of resolutions recognizing the right of liberation movements to adopt all means of struggle, including armed struggle, to achieve liberation. That process had commenced with the movements in countries under Portuguese colonialism, through to those facing Rhodesian rule, encompassing Namibia and South Africa, and recognizing Palestinian rights in 1974.
In any debate on the relevance of armed struggle, what requires consideration is the set of circumstances that brought about the decision in the first place.
This context arises when the masses cannot accept repression and refuse to live under such conditions. A struggle commences to overthrow those who rule. The question is whether the outcome will be the overthrow, transformation or accommodation of the old system or defeat.
Not for the first time has imperialist counterinsurgency defeated guerrilla struggles fighting a just cause. Much depends on objective conditions beyond people’s control and subjective conditions, such as the dedication and endurance of those fighting for change, the choice of appropriate methods and the goals of the struggle.
In extreme situations of butchery, the question of whether persisting with armed struggle is appropriate will inevitably be raised. What about the high cost of struggle? Debate is necessary to help carefully assess the way forward and avoid adventurism. However, no struggle can be undertaken without risks. Courage and self-sacrifice are prerequisites. Even struggles dedicated to peaceful means have resulted in the massacre of thousands. What about the need for weapons to defend a people subject to merciless attack, whether by a regular army or roving bands of armed thugs, instigating pogroms and terror? It is more than clear that the pressing, justifiable necessity of Palestinian resistance is finding the logistical capacity to defend their people.
Concerning the high cost of resistance: The Soviet people lost 27 million in their war against Nazism; the Chinese lost 20 million in their war against Japan; the Algerians lost 1.5 million in their war against France; and millions more lost their lives in liberation struggles across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Palestinians lost tens of thousands in the Great Arab Revolt (1936–39) against the British and Zionist militias. Since 1948, tens of thousands have been killed, and 700,000 were ethnically cleansed. In addition, 73,000 Palestinians are estimated by the Gaza Health Ministry to have been massacred in the genocide in Gaza between October 2023 and early 2025, though this number is certainly a massive underestimation.
The Vietnamese suffered huge losses in their struggle for liberation. First, they fought against French colonial rule, which was defeated in 1954. Then, from the early 1960s to 1975, they fought against the US invasion. This epic struggle came at a high cost, with an estimated four million Vietnamese killed.
When asked about these figures, Vietnam’s legendary general Vo Nguyen Giap (1911–2012), master of guerrilla warfare, responded: ‘We would have continued for a hundred years regardless of casualties until we won.’ (Stated to American journalists in 1995).
Vietnam’s leader, Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), explained the reason for sacrifice: ‘There is nothing more precious to a people than their liberation and independence.’
Repression Creates Resistance
It is repression that recruits activists contemptuous of death. This has been seen throughout history. In their arrogance, the oppressors believe that they can intimidate people into submission. This may achieve temporary success over some people some of the time, but never over all people all of the time. The sumud of the Palestinian people is one outstanding example. This steadfastness does not mean that nonviolent methods of struggle, legal and diplomatic possibilities, should be rejected. In fact, it is highly desirable to learn to utilize all options.
After the commencement of colonial conquest and dispossession of land, heroic wars of resistance were fought with rudimentary weapons and drowned in blood by the superior force of guns and cannons. That legacy has inspired national liberation and class struggles to this day.
In the modern era, armed struggle for national liberation has taken the form of guerrilla warfare – a method of resistance in asymmetrical struggle against a better-resourced power, a weapon of the weak against the strong. It has taken place within an overarching political framework for liberation. There is an intrinsic nexus between the two forms of struggle. The oppressor/colonizer/ aggressor derides any form of resistance as seditious, and armed resistance as either communist or Islamist (sic) ‘terrorism’. This is to falsify the political narrative and deceive people about the true nature of national liberation struggles. The struggle to liberate Palestine notably reflects that settler colonialism—as with apartheid South Africa— can be far more heinous and vicious in the desperation of its survival than colonial administration from the metropole – as barbaric as that classical form has been.
Let us consider what the term settler-colonialism implies and understand how these systems were overcome.
Settler Colonialism
The countries of Southern Africa were variations of settler colonialism – where settler white minorities dominated indigenous African majorities, including minorities of mixed race or of Asian origin. Black African majority populations in the mid-1970s constituted roughly 82% in South Africa, 93% in Rhodesia, 88% in Namibia, 94% in Angola, and 97% in Mozambique. Angola and Mozambique were ruled directly from Lisbon as integral parts of the Portuguese state, administered by a metropolitan colonial power with no local settler government of its own. Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa were different: in each case a resident white minority held or exercised effective control over the machinery of the state itself, rather than being administered from an external metropole.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) characterized the South African case specifically as Colonialism of a Special Type (CST) — the notion that, unlike classical colonialism, where metropole and colony are geographically separate, in South Africa the colonizing power and the colonized territory occupy the same space, with colonizer and colonized living side by side within a single state. This had implications for both the class character of the struggle and the shape any eventual national liberation would need to take. Though CST was coined for South Africa, the underlying logic — a settler minority governing in place, rather than a distant colonial administration governing at a remove — has some conceptual bearing for Israel/Palestine.
South Africa was the most formidable settler-colonial power. It held the largest settler population and was the most industrialized, urbanized and developed economy on the continent, with formidable security forces, an advanced transport and communications network, and thriving trade with Europe and North America. I
ts economy was structurally dependent on cheap Black labor drawn from a landless peasantry that formed a permanent reserve army of labor. Its terrain, too, was generally unsuitable for rural guerrilla warfare, although the vast black townships were to prove ideal bases of armed resistance. Geography compounded all of this: South Africa was cut off from independent Africa by distance, by a cordon sanitaire of buffer states, and by its own deep trade and economic ties to the West, and it lacked the friendly, contiguous borders that other liberation movements could rely on — Tanzania (independent as Tanganyika in 1962) and Zambia (independent in 1966) were both a considerable distance away, making access to external military training, supplies and safe passage exceptionally difficult.
That changed with the independence of Mozambique, Angola and eventually Zimbabwe, providing friendly borders and transforming the ANC’s strategic position, hemming in the apartheid state in a new geopolitical configuration. We will turn to how the Four Pillars of Struggle changed the balance later.
The Palestinian struggle confronts a different, though comparably even more formidable set of geopolitical difficulties: the nature and reach of a heavily armed Israeli settler-colonial state pursuing sustained demographic and territorial change, the scale of resources it draws from Western allies, particularly the US, the unreliability and even treachery of neighboring Arab states and a small, fragmented territory in which, unlike apartheid South Africa, Palestinian labor has been substantially excluded from the Israeli economy rather than structurally incorporated into it.
This helps to explain why genocide is the preferred method of dealing with an unwanted population, and why the system in South Africa had to control the extent of the extermination, since black labor was required by the economy. At its peak, South Africa’s white population was five million (just under 10% of the total population). Israel’s Jewish population of seven million, compared to a similar number of Palestinians within Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs), reflects the extent of settler colonialism’s power and social base – the result of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Notably, in Algeria, the ratio of indigenous Algerians to French settlers was ten to one in a population of just over ten million in 1962. The FLN policy accepted the settlers on the basis of equality, but the latter fled to France in fear of their crimes. The beginnings of such a reflex are occurring in Israel as settlers flee a sinking ship. In contrast, the fact that Palestinians are holding out under the most frightful conditions in besieged Gaza and the West Bank is testimony to their love of a land they are rooted in.
Settler-Colonial Demographics: Land Area and Population Ratios
Comparative land area and settler-population share at independence and today, for six settler-colonial territories plus Israel/Palestine.
Territory Land area Settler share, independence Settler share, today South Africa 1,221,000 km² ~12% (1994) ~7% (2022) Zimbabwe 391,000 km² ~3% (1980) <1% (2022) Namibia 824,000 km² ~7% (1990) ~2% (2023) Angola 1,247,000 km² ~6% (1975) ~1% Mozambique 802,000 km² ~3% (1975) <1% Algeria 2,382,000 km² ~11% (1962) ~0% Israel/Palestine 27,000 km² (historic Palestine) ~32% (1948) ~50% (2025) Figures are approximate, drawn from national and colonial census data of varying reliability. The Israel/Palestine present-day figure reflects population parity across historic Palestine as reported by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS); Israeli sources calculate demographic shares differently depending on the boundary used. See source notes below.
Both Israeli and South African apartheid states emerged during the demise of the colonial period. Zionism gained a foothold claiming to be the product of a struggle for ‘national’ liberation against Britain. This coincided with Britain handing political power to white settlers in South Africa on a plate in 1910, following the Empire’s victory in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The Balfour Declaration paved the way for a Jewish state, and Britain utilized the Zionist agenda for its own imperial interests. Before South Africa’s liberation and the start of the democratic process in 1994, the struggles of the liberation movements of South Africa and Palestine ran in tandem, from a shared history of British rule and colonial settlement that morphed into apartheid rule.
The ANC had the advantage of a liberation process emerging and succeeding in the post-Second World War era, when independence movements were on the rise, the colonial system was collapsing, and a powerful socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union existed. The PLO likewise came to prominence in that era.
Israel’s importance to the US increased significantly, as it became a key ally of enormous strategic value.[1] Israel’s regional value to Western imperial interests is far higher than that of a lower-middle power such as South Africa. Even the Cape Sea route, important though it is to international trade, is not a choke point like the Suez Canal, the Red Sea or the Strait of Hormuz. South Africa is a thorn in the side of the US – and especially Donald Trump – because of its independent foreign policy, its strong criticism of Israel and the temerity of taking Israel’s genocidal crime of crimes to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
South Africa – From Nonviolent Resistance to Armed Struggle
For several years after its founding in 1912, the ANC, aiming to unite the indigenous African population, pursued its objectives through moderate means, such as petitioning the authorities and sending deputations to the British monarch in London, as South Africa had dominion status and was part of the Commonwealth. The use of nonviolence was less a reflection of principled pacifism and more a strategic assessment: African leaders of the period had concluded that the overwhelming military power of the British Empire and white settlers – given independence in 1910 – made armed confrontation with primitive weapons impossible – a lesson driven home by the crushing of the Bambatha Rebellion in 1906.
The ANC’s founding generation committed itself to nonviolent methods, although as early as 1919, following the notorious 1913 Land Act, a wave of violent resistance erupted. The Act stripped the indigenous African people of land ownership in all but 13% of South Africa. Except to meet the labor needs of white farmers, mine owners, factory owners, and providers of menial services in white towns and cities, the “redundant” indigenous population were confined to distant “Native Reserves”, as in the US and Canada, according to ethnic group, later becoming the Bantustans. From the time of British rule, the authorities enacted severe ‘pass laws’ (detailed identity documents) to control black people’s movements between town and country.
The ANC progressed slowly. During the 1920s–1940s, an inactive period for the ANC, robust resistance emerged from the work of the communists, trade unions and other civil society organizations, including eventually faith groups. The emergence of Young Turks in the ANC Youth League, such as Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu, in the early 1940s, transformed the organization and subsequently the nature of the struggle.
Development in the country along class and color lines represented two cleavages running deeply through every facet of life, where the communists represented the class struggle and African nationalists the struggle for national independence. The convergence of the two streams of struggle was to produce a powerful movement for national liberation. Communists and African nationalists became close allies.
This was a time when the impact of World War II was being felt by colonial peoples from Africa to Asia, who were inspired by the rhetoric of freedom and the weakening of the British and French empires. Economic pressures exacerbated oppression and exploitation.
The leaders of the Youth League took control of the ANC, transforming it into a mass movement that raised awareness, demanded equal rights, and built alliances with communists, trade unionists, and organizations representing people of color. Noteworthy was the ANC-led Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in 1953, which saw many imprisoned, and the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955, after a nationwide drive at the grassroots level to collect resolutions pertaining to the kind of country the disenfranchised majority were seeking. The following year, 157 leaders of the campaign were arrested and charged with treason in a trial that lasted until 1961, when the state’s case collapsed.
This marathon trial cemented the growing alliances referred to, and gave those on trial plenty of time to discuss and debate methods of struggle and a common way forward against a common enemy. In effect, the trial became a school of liberation.
This was against the backdrop of growing agitation, notably a rural women’s revolt against pass laws in the 1950s, the Pondoland Revolt against the Bantu Authorities Act,[2] working-class strikes often turning violent, and acts of sabotage by both radical ANC and SACP youth.
The Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 was a watershed moment in South Africa’s turbulent history. Trigger-happy and nervy police gunned down 69 unarmed protesters, wounding over 200, mostly in the back, at a pass-law protest organized by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a faction that had broken from the ANC the previous year. The massacre was followed by a state of emergency, mass detentions, and the banning of both the ANC and the PAC—the Communist Party having been banned in 1950. With legal political activity closed off entirely, select leaders of the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) began secretly to discuss the resort to armed struggle. The result was the establishment of Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK)—the Spear of the Nation.
The founding manifesto of MK, issued as sabotage groups carried out their first operations on 16 December 1961, declared:
The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defense of our people, our future and our freedom. The government has interpreted the peacefulness of the movement as weakness; the people’s nonviolent policies have been taken as a green light for government violence. Refusal to resort to force has been interpreted by the government as an invitation to use armed force against the people without any fear of reprisals. The methods of Umkhonto we Sizwe mark a break with that past.
The declaration explained why the liberation movement, encompassing all black and brown people and democratic whites, was embarking on this new method of struggle and placed responsibility for violence at the door of the regime. The declaration stressed that the resort to arms had the core political objective of forestalling a descent into civil war through a settlement that would ensure full equality and democracy for all:
We of Umkhonto we Sizwe have always sought – as the liberation movement has sought – to achieve liberation without bloodshed and civil clash. We do so still. We hope – even at this late hour – that our first actions will awaken everyone to a realization of the disastrous situation to which the Nationalist policy is leading. We hope that we will bring the government and its supporters to their senses before it is too late…
Nelson Mandela’s account of MK’s founding deliberations records that the movement considered four categories of armed struggle: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution. The leaders of MK settled on sabotage as a bridge to guerrilla warfare and rejected the use of terrorism. It held out a warning to white society of a choice between civil war or a negotiated transition to a democratic society. The ANC was not wedded to violence but saw it as a tactic to achieve a strategic goal. This goal was to realize the aims of the Freedom Charter, which outlined the requirements and character of a democratic South Africa that would belong “to all who live in it”.
UN Recognition of the Right to Armed Struggle
The recognition of a right to anti-colonial armed struggle was not first established for South Africa; the ANC and MK inherited a norm already under construction. Its starting point lay in the Portuguese territories. In 1960, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) established the general principle of self-determination but without yet addressing the question of means. The more consequential step came in December 1965, when the UNGA recognized the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples under colonial rule and invited member states to extend material and moral assistance to national liberation movements. This marked the point at which the UN moved from endorsing decolonization as a goal to endorsing the movements pursuing it by force. The Security Council moved in parallel, condemning Portugal’s military repression in Africa that same year.
By 1970, the UNGA had sharpened the language further, endorsing “all the necessary means” — a formula that by the early 1970s matured into full institutional recognition of the MPLA (Angola), the PAIGC (Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde) and FRELIMO (Mozambique) as the authentic representatives of their peoples, built explicitly on the Organisation for African Unity’s own prior recognition of those movements.[3] Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), extending prisoner-of-war protections to fighters in wars against colonial domination, alien occupation and racist regimes, arrived only after the Portuguese colonies had won independence in 1974–75, while the South African and Rhodesian struggles were still underway.[4]
It was into this already-consolidating architecture that the ANC and PAC stepped when they turned to armed struggle in the early 1960s, and within which South Africa, Namibia and Palestine would all be included. Addressing the Assembly on 13 November 1974, Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, used a phrase that would define a historic speech: “I appeal to you to enable our people to establish national independent sovereignty over its own land. Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. War flares up in Palestine, and yet it is in Palestine that peace will be born.”[5]
Strategy and Tactics
Getting strategy and tactics right is the essence of any struggle for change, yet striking the correct balance is never simple. Strategy concerns the big picture: long-term objectives and overall direction. Tactics concern how to get there — the program of action, methods, and battles along the way. As the saying goes: if the strategy is wrong, good tactics cannot win; if the tactics are poor, a good strategy will fail.
History offers repeated confirmation. Hitler’s blitzkrieg (lightning war) against Russia (Soviet Union), in which he boasted he would be victorious in six weeks, became a protracted war in which the strategic initiative passed to the Red Army; Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa left it exhausted; French power was broken in Algeria and Vietnam; and the United States, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, and more recently alongside Israel in Iran and the region, has repeatedly miscalculated despite deploying the most advanced weapons available.
It is why Vietnam’s legendary General Võ Nguyên Giáp — who defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and saw off the United States invasion by 1975 — described guerrilla warfare waged as a just war of liberation as a weapon more powerful than the atomic bomb. Tactics win battles; strategy wins wars, a lesson equally visible today in the strategic poverty exposed by Israel’s ‘forever’ wars encompassing Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.
ANC President Oliver Tambo put this most clearly in 1983. Armed struggle, he said, “is not a question of violence as an end in itself… It is a continuing struggle which includes the use of violence and also political action.” By then the ANC had accumulated hard experience under unfavorable conditions.
Yet, even after conditions turned more favorable — the independence of Mozambique and Angola in 1975, then Zimbabwe in 1980, and the merging of rising black consciousness and the 1976 Soweto uprising with strike waves running from Namibia (1973) to South Africa (1974) — organizational difficulties persisted. The ANC, despite a growing base of recruits and a firm Angolan training infrastructure, struggled to align its methods and tactics with a strategy that remained, in principle, correct. Improvement was a learning process; only by around 1985 had the ANC fused its various methods of struggle into the overarching strategy – the Four Pillars of Struggle.
What distinguishes the South African case is less the fact of armed struggle than the difficult, years-long process of keeping its political dimension in command of the military one. Following MK’s formation and its early sabotage campaign, cadre recruitment for training abroad began, dependent on a fledgling underground network and clandestine routes north to Dar es Salaam, where the ANC secured official representation. Initial training took place in Ethiopia, Egypt, and with the Algerian FLN in Morocco — Mandela trained in both Ethiopia and Morocco — while Chinese leadership training was curtailed by the Sino-Soviet split.
The Soviet Union became the mainstay of both training and weaponry, supplemented by the German Democratic Republic and, importantly, Cuba for its rich experience; training quality improved as host countries grew familiar with the ANC’s specific needs, covering political theory, guerrilla warfare, and underground methods. Notably, the Soviet teaching of the concept called Military Combat Work (MCW), which combined clandestine organization, including work within enemy ranks, and armed struggle. Just when arrangements had been concluded for some MK cadres to undergo training with the PLO in Lebanon, the Palestinian leadership was forced to relocate to Tunisia in 1982.
The early attempts at reinfiltrating trained cadres into underground structures met catastrophe: security forces captured Mandela and the top leadership along with thousands of rank-and-file members, smashing the internal organization almost entirely. Only the survival of a mature external leadership and cadres training abroad preserved the movement. A major attempt to fight a route home through Zimbabwe — the 1967–68 Wankie Campaign, in which MK joined ZIPRA forces — also failed, leaving the ANC facing a crisis of confidence.
The 1969 Morogoro Conference in Tanzania confronted this directly, adopting a Strategy and Tactics document rejecting “all manifestations of militarism” that divorced “armed people’s struggle from its political context.” Its central resolution has lost none of its force: “The primacy of the political leadership is unchallenged and supreme and all revolutionary formations and levels… are subordinate to this leadership… the people’s armed challenge against a foe with formidable material strength does not achieve dramatic and swift success.”[6]
Implementation lagged well behind principle. The 1979 Green Book — the Report of the Politico-Military Strategy Commission to the ANC National Executive Committee, following a visit by a Tambo-led delegation to Vietnam — found that in the forward areas “the separation of political and military planning and work has, by and large, become almost total,” with even specialized military departments operating in relative isolation from one another.
The 1983 establishment of the Political-Military Command was a direct response, enabling internal underground structures to function as genuine conduits for political mobilization rather than mere logistical support for infiltrating combatants. The Green Book’s core doctrine held that armed struggle is not a purely military matter: it must grow out of, and remain rooted in, mass political support, with military action at every stage subordinated to building political mobilization, and the balance between political and military emphasis continually reassessed against concrete conditions rather than fixed as a formula.
A national liberation army built on popular internal rear bases was central to this planning, but always under the direction of the political vanguard. Emerging in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprising, the Green Book envisaged “a protracted people’s war in which partial and general uprisings will play a vital role,” rather than a single insurrectionary seizure of power — a vision later fleshed out as the Four Pillars of Struggle (mass action, armed struggle, underground organization, and international mobilization), whose combined dynamic was characterized as “the people in political motion.”
It was the Vietnamese who helped set the ANC firmly on this course. The delegation, previously mentioned, included Joe Slovo, Moses Mabhida, Joe Modise, and others. They traveled to Vietnam at the end of 1979, where General Giáp, after hearing their briefing, observed that the movement needed to learn to walk on two legs: the political and the military. As the ANC itself later put it, armed struggle alone could not be an overall strategy — for a time the movement had become fixated on armed struggle as strategy rather than as one tactic among several, a distortion born of exile and dislocation from the masses.
Only through appreciating the growth of internal mass struggle — the 1970s strike movement and unrecognized trade unions, the 1980s civic organizations, the emergent United Democratic Front (UDF) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) — did the ANC fully apply the Vietnamese lesson of “People’s War”: that armed struggle exists to inspire and reinforce mass political struggle, not to substitute for it, and that underground structures, propaganda, and international solidarity all had to be woven into a single, mutually reinforcing strategy rather than maintained as separate silos.
That fusion, taking place during the period of mass uprising and intensifying MK operations, in the 1980s, carried the movement through to the democratic breakthrough of 1990–94: the unbanning of organizations, release of prisoners, indemnity for exiles, negotiations, and the ANC’s decisive election victory in 1994.
During that period, MK’s growing capacity saw military operations increase from twenty in 1980 to 270 carried out in 1988. The actual number was far higher, as many went unrecorded. There were also spontaneous attacks by activists at the mass level using Molotov cocktails and sometimes guns in clashes with the police and army, as well as the burning of government buildings in the townships; these actions were not included in the MK records of its operations.
Most spectacular were attacks on police stations and military posts, the Sasol oil refinery bombing in 1980, the rocket attack on the SADF’s main base near Pretoria in 1981, the 1982 Koeberg nuclear plant bombing, weeks before it was due to begin operating; a spectacular car bombing on the Air Force headquarters in Pretoria in 1983; bombings of railway lines and the electricity power grid; and the elimination of collaborators and informers.
These operations carried immense propaganda value, demonstrating the movement’s reach and sustaining the mass base’s confidence under intense repression and spreading fear among the white community.
It was never envisaged that the armed struggle alone would break the apartheid regime, let alone its military force. It was the convergence of the Four Pillars of Struggle that produced internal ungovernability, the pressure of external sanctions, and a weakened regime forced to negotiate its way out of complete defeat. The SADF’s defeat in Angola had enormous consequences. The international situation, in all its unpredictability, can bring unexpected change – then as now. For the West and big business interests in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union at the point of implosion meant that the ANC would constitute a far lesser threat should it be brought to the negotiating table. The ANC had foreseen such developments and was well prepared, going as far as obtaining the support of the African states in the Harare Declaration as its approach to negotiating with Pretoria.
The Four Pillars of Struggle
In the ANC’s January 8 statement of 1987, President OR Tambo outlined the multi-front nature of the liberation struggle, and explained that “experience has taught us that liberation cannot be achieved by one method alone.” He continued:
First, the mass political struggle inside the country, involving millions of our people in townships, factories, farms and schools. This is the main pillar. Through strikes, boycotts and mass campaigns we make the country ungovernable.
However, clarity about how to proceed with the armed struggle, following many difficult years and a learning process marked by setbacks and advances, emerged after a visit to Vietnam in 1979 by ANC leaders.
Second, the armed struggle waged by Umkhonto Wesizwe, which strikes at the economic and military nerve centers of the apartheid state. This raises the cost of maintaining apartheid.
Third, the underground organization of the ANC, which links the mass struggle to the armed struggle and provides political leadership under conditions of repression.
Fourth, the international campaign to isolate the apartheid regime politically, economically, culturally, and in the military sphere. Sanctions and solidarity are weapons of the struggle.
The advance of all four fronts is essential. Weakness on any one front weakens the others. The enemy must be made to feel the pressure from all directions at the same time. It is the combined pressure that will bring the apartheid regime to the negotiating table.”
Tambo codified what the ANC had been applying in phases over nearly thirty years, building up a coordinated fusion of various methods of struggle into a unified strategy with a clearly defined goal – a unitary, non-racial, democratic state of all its people. This meant not just stating the strategy in theory, but applying it in practice. The concept was developed in theoretical terms in the ANC’s Strategy and Tactics document at the Morogoro Conference in 1969 in Tanzania and refined at the Kabwe Conference of 1985 in Zambia, but first named as “Four Pillars” in the January 8, 1987 statement. Like all statements, it was relayed by Radio Freedom to the people of South Africa, and spread in printed form by underground units.
What the statement conveyed was that mass action without armed action was vulnerable. Armed action without mass action was isolated. Without an underground network, the political guidance of the movement could not be conveyed. The underground linked the political and military. International solidarity could isolate and weaken the regime, and support and inspire the people.
In context, the concept of the Four Pillars crystallized in the latter part of the 1980s amid huge rolling mass protests demanding the release of political prisoners and the unbanning of outlawed organizations, peaking MK operations, and hard-hitting international sanctions. Apartheid was becoming unworkable and the country ungovernable. The apartheid state was losing legitimacy; contradictions were sharpening between government and business, and white confidence was buckling. The writing was on the wall. The state could no longer rule in the old way. The masses were not prepared to live in the old way. A liberation movement had become an organizational force for revolution, and a revolutionary crisis was brewing. This came close to how V. I. Lenin described the revolutionary situation in Russia in October 1917.
Many of the problems and challenges that the ANC overcame bear a marked resemblance to those still facing the Palestinians today. These included operating from exile, the severe restriction and repression of internal organization, a persistent disparity between political and military organization and tasks, and a recurring bias toward resolving problems militarily rather than politically.
Set against these similarities were crucial differences. The ANC enjoyed a single, undisputed, and centralized leadership enabling it to adapt to changing circumstances as conditions demanded. The masses and the emergent civil and trade union organizations looked to the ANC for direction, and the movement retained firm control over its armed wing. Internationally, the ANC was recognized and supported as the leading force of the struggle and guided the global Anti-Apartheid Movement. Throughout the years of struggle, it maintained the moral high ground.
A further contextual difference lay in the clarity of the ANC’s goal: a united, indivisible, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic state for all its people. Other contextual differences in many ways offered comparative advantages. African states generally supported the ANC. The black population vastly outnumbered the white population by ten to one. This meant that the South African economy depended wholly on proletarianized black labor – a vital point of leverage. Internationally, although the apartheid regime was supported by Western states, capital and business, South Africa was not seen as strategically vital to Western geopolitical interests to the same extent as Israel as an extension of US imperialism.
Conclusion – The Changing Contexts of Struggle
The Palestinian struggle is clearly at the crossroads, but not without possibilities to rise again.
The ebb and flow of revolutionary struggle can be likened to the oscillating pendulum of a clock, swinging back and forth in the ongoing battle between repression and resistance, revolution and counter-revolution. Karl Marx saw this process as one whereby repression forces a revolutionary struggle to develop organizational skills to advance, only to be driven back by counter-revolution and return to the offensive with greater capacity.
This process of contestation for power forces each side to develop greater strength and ability, and the side that can best learn from experience and fight with greater tenacity and resolve will win, regardless of who started with greater resources and power. Time is integral to life, and the outcome will be determined by the concrete objective and subjective conditions of life.
While present conditions look extremely grim for the Palestinian people, other factors have emerged illustrating a marked change in the balance of forces in the region.
Despite the overwhelming means of destruction possessed by the US and Israel, they have shown themselves to be tactically powerful but strategically bankrupt. They have failed to destroy the resistance within Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and further afield in Iran. Taking the pendulum metaphor, having seen at times a back-and-forth engagement, the US-Israel alliance attempted to bomb Iran into oblivion and was met by a powerful response. Iran demonstrated the use of a weapon more powerful than a nuclear bomb – the Strait of Hormuz.
The US, used to dictating terms to those less powerful, has found that those days in the Middle East are over, and the balance of power has been radically altered. A clearly exasperated Trump has found that America’s writ is no longer obeyed. This has profound implications for those who are true to their people, not least the Palestinian situation. Much as Cuban forces exploded the myth of South Africa’s invincibility, Iran has been able to seize the strategic initiative over the US, absorb repeated attacks, cripple US bases in the region and retain control of the Strait of Hormuz. While no one should be so foolhardy as to predict immediate outcomes, Trump and Netanyahu have painted themselves into a corner – as would anyone likely to step into their shoes.
For Palestinians – whether those involved in armed resistance or activists in other fields of mobilization, advocacy or support, this has enormous potential, considering the punishment being sustained at such high cost to the people.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—the initial October 7, 2023, breakout from the Gaza prison—was tactically brilliant. I am not referring here to the subsequent phase involving civilian deaths, many of which resulted from the IDF’s indiscriminate retaliation. Its strategic outcome, however, has been horrendous.
Clearly, there was a fatal miscalculation of Israel’s response. Yet that cannot be the end of the discussion. Errors must be analyzed, lessons learned and strategies rethought. Those who never make mistakes do nothing and are therefore incapable of learning; they merely criticize.
The picture has radically changed; important opportunities are present. Despite the setback and enormity of the ongoing genocide, now inflicted on southern Lebanon, Israel is mortally damaged. Its much-vaunted invincibility and ability to protect its people have shattered; its reputation is beyond redemption. Its cruelty has generated an unprecedented global outrage, unleashing an unstoppable tide of revulsion. Its global isolation has deepened.
Israel’s support base in the US and its key allies is evaporating. Direct action and protest by a new generation of young activists have become a game changer in focusing public attention on Israel’s crimes and impunity. The same goes for the solidarity actions of faith-based organizations in many countries, an echo of the progressive role of churches against apartheid in the South African struggle. The BDS campaign grows from strength to strength.
Trump and Netanyahu are in deep trouble. The Abraham Accords are floundering. Israel has stormed into adventurist wars on all fronts, creating a quagmire. Internal contradictions within Israel are deepening; an economic and social crisis is looming. Thousands of its Jewish citizens are fleeing. Other Israeli Jews with the quality of decency and compassion are standing up, as a minority of whites did in South Africa, in defense of Palestinians facing the wrath of the pogroms. A rotten apple falls. The resistance survives, fights on.
I’m not being starry-eyed. There’s a strong sense among experts who have studied the Middle East for decades that the tide has turned against Israel, the US, the treacherous regimes and corrupt attitudes that have hindered Palestinian liberation. The struggle has entered a new phase, and the role of armed resistance is firmly established in the region as the Axis of Resistance grows stronger, more experienced and more influential, bouncing back from the setback.
The people of the region will rise like lions too: the suffering, stoic masses; the Arab Street, with its creative energy, sumud and anger; men and women; young and old; and the intelligentsia, who contribute in so many decisive ways. There is nothing the oppressor and its minions fear more than the anger of the masses – the intifada. Western imperialist domination of the region is weakening. This would curb Israel’s aggression and spell the end of the Zionist project. Unity of forces, primacy of politics and the power of a united people are essential.
Though impaired by the noncompliance of the US and its allies, international law, including its recognition of the legitimacy of armed struggle, remains an important lever for liberation, as well as for bringing those who perpetrate or are complicit in genocide to book. The challenge for the global community, together with the beleaguered people of the Middle East, is to intensify international solidarity against Israel, the US and its allies, utilizing the proven strength of the BDS campaign as in the South African struggle, reinforcing the power of a people on the path to freedom. I do not doubt that the Palestinian people have the ability to rise to the challenge.
The author is grateful to Mark Waller and Na’eem Jeenah for their kind assistance.
References:
[1] In 1986, the then Senator Joe Biden famously stated in a speech on the Senate floor: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region”.
[2] The Pondoland Revolt was a rural mass uprising in the Eastern Cape (then Transkei) region of South Africa between 1960 and 1961 against unfair apartheid rules, taxes and the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 to create state-appointed tribal authorities and puppet governance.
[3] UNGA (1970) Resolution 2708 (XXV), 14 December 1970; UNSC (1972) Draft Resolution S/10838/Rev.1, 21 November 1972; UNGA (1972) Official Records, 2084th Plenary Meeting, A/PV.2084, 14 November 1972.
[4] Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), adopted 8 June 1977, Article 1(4).
[5] Arafat, Y. (1974) Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 13 November 1974. Available at: https://al-bab.com/documents-section/speech-yasser-arafat-1974
[6] African National Congress (1969) Report on the Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress, 26 April 1969. Available at: https://www.anc1912.org.za/national-consultative-conference-1969-strategy-and-tactics-of-the-african-national-congress/ (Accessed: 5 August 2026).
– Ronnie Kasrils is the Former Chief of Military Intelligence, Umkhonto Wes Sizwe, Deputy Minister of Defense, and Minister of Intelligence Services, Government of South Africa (1994–2008), a solidarity activist and author.