Sari Bashi ’03 Connects Human Rights Movements in South Africa and Israel-Palestine

At the April 18, 2019 Human Rights Workshop, Schell Center Visiting Human Rights Fellow Sari Bashi ’03 discussed her research into the ways that different social movements “talk to and about the dominant group whose conduct [they] wish to change.”

This is a question Bashi has often asked herself and her fellow advocates in Israel-Palestine, where she has worked as a human rights lawyer for the past 15 years. Bashi has long thought that the human rights movement in Israel-Palestine could do more to respond to Israelis’ fears about what the end of occupation would bring for them, and that doing so would enable their movement to “form alliances, win the moral high ground, and get external support for ending occupation and other systems of oppression.”

To learn successful strategies for engaging the oppressor, she turned to other contemporary and past social movements — in particular, the Black Lives Matter Movement and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. In her Human Rights Workshop, she focused on the African National Congress (ANC)’s “partial but very significant victory over the white minority” in South Africa and the strategies the ANC deployed for “engaging their oppressor prior to and after the transition” from apartheid to democracy.

Bashi posited that one reason the ANC succeeded was their “deeply rooted commitment” to multiracialism. Bashi explained that ANC leaders acknowledged that people of different races would need to coexist after apartheid was dismantled, and they worked to placate white South Africans’ fears that black South Africans would take revenge on them if apartheid ended. She noted that even while Nelson Mandela was being sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia Trials in 1964, he told the crowd, “It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination.” Bashi argued that Mandela maintained this strategy even once he became president, as demonstrated by his support for the all-white, Springboks national rugby team, which hosted and won the 1995 World Cup. According to Bashi, this was a way for Mandela to tell white South Africans, “You, white minority, are part of South Africa. Your triumph is our triumph.”

Bashi argued that embracing multiracialism enabled the ANC to recruit a broad base for their movement, including white South Africans, to attract support from the international community, and, ultimately, to be able to negotiate an end to apartheid.

But Bashi acknowledged that the ANC’s strategies came with costs: “Even though the ANC got majority rule,” she said, “they couldn’t create a platform that could engage with serious economic redistribution.” She noted that economic apartheid persists in South Africa — for instance, whites earn five times more than black South Africans, on average.

Nevertheless, Bashi maintained that the ANC’s experience could offer lessons for activists in Israel-Palestine on how to engage with Israelis. Bashi said she had heard many Palestinian human rights activists express their frustration and humiliation at having to refute Israelis’ assertions that they are anti-Semitic. Bashi asserted that this would not stop until activists “start from a place of dignity and demand from the dominant group a commitment to the same principle.” Moreover, Bashi argued that currently fractured activist groups should create more strategic messaging around their goals and collaborate better to make sure that Palestinian victims of human rights abuses do not shoulder the entire emotional burden of convincing Israelis to support the end to occupation.

Bashi asserted that in Israel-Palestine, “It’s the right time to be doing this work — building ourselves up as a movement, setting up our vision, building coalitions.” She argued that since the failure of the peace process put into effect by the Oslo Accords, Israel-Palestine has had a “human rights movement with no political process.” She added that she has met many activists who refuse to engage in politics, which she views as an untenable strategy. “We don’t have to know what [our] vision is” for a political solution in Israel-Palestine, she said, “but we have to have the principles to get there.”

Bashi suggested that engaging the oppressor could be not only tactical, but also “morally valuable” — that taking this strategy demonstrates “a very deep commitment to dismantling oppression” and demands that we practice radical empathy and do more than just state universal human rights values as though they should be followed without question. Bashi asked the audience, “Could that be a personal and spiritual transformation that guides us as we strive for political transformation?”