Apartheid: My (very small) part in its downfall

Tribune, April 2, 2010
Ian Williams

Forty years ago, an event in Liverpool tied together Tribune, Peter Hain, Jack Straw and Eric Heffer, Jon Snow and among others, myself.

On March 19 1970, a mass meeting of students decided to occupy the Liverpool University Senate House and stayed there for three weeks, flaunting a red flag on its roof. That really upset the University’s establishment, which had always been profoundly reactionary, in contrast to the radical reputation of its surrounding city.

The Chancellor was Lord Salisbury, an outspoken leader of the Monday Club, supporter of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, whose capital was named after his family. It seemed that significant proportions of the University’s endowment were held in South African stocks. The Apartheid connection was the main target of the protest.

To the baying applause of Tory bankbenchers, the University staged a kangaroo trial and expelled one and suspended for two years most of the committee of ten elected to run the occupation of the city. In lieu of leniency, it suspended a couple for only one year. At the time, it was the harshest repression of the wave of student protest against Apartheid, the war in Vietnam and similar repressions.

At the time, Liverpool Trades Council made the university’s harsh sentences one of the issues of its traditional May Day strike. Indeed, a keen palaeographer can still discern “All Out May Day” painted opposite the old Senate House entrance. Eric Heffer moved an early day motion, Tribune carried an article by Richard Davies, one of the ten, while Peter Hain and Jack Straw, then head of the NUS, came to speak in solidarity.

Last month, survivors of the sit-in assembled in the University’s Victorian core to celebrate the fortieth anniversary. Times have changed, even for Liverpool University. The new Vice Chancellor Sir Howard Newby is actually offering University premises for the re-union, in welcome contrast with previous reactionary vindictiveness. In fact, ITN’s Jon Snow, one of the ten, had previously refused an honorary degree because of that. Sir Howard even expressed his personal regrets to Peter Cresswell, the sole expellee.

Cautiously, the establishment has moved to a cautious acceptance that maybe having had a Chancellor who championed Apartheid was not the most ethical move.


Looking over the roster of those directly involved, it was certainly a formative experience: the sentences may have redirected, but certainly did not blight careers. Many of us were from the first generation of our families to go to university, and we did not forget our origins nor did we forget that our education was a privilege hard-fought for.


From a motley collection of young Liberals, Labour, assorted Communists, Trotskyists and Maoists, emerged over the years a body of socially concerned citizens whose politics have collectively gravitated, I would hazard, to somewhere near Tribune’s rational left. Many were in the forefront of resisting the antics of the Hattonistas and Militant in Liverpool – but did not succumb to New Labour’s vacuous evasions.

Many years later I discovered that the Economic League had also put all ten of us on their blacklist – I even interviewed the guy who did it! But then I remember one of the local Special Branch, an ex Boxer, coming up to me at a rally, saying “I hear you’re having difficulty finding a job,” and reciting a list of all my unsuccessful applications for the previous six weeks. At the time it seemed almost a badge of honour to be considered such a threat. Then Alexei Sayle’s dad, a railwayman, volunteered that British Rail was so short of staff that the interview consisted of taking your pulse. If you had one, you were on. And so I became a British Rail guard and member of the National Union of Railwaymen.

I had already been to China, argued English Literature with Chiang Ching, drank with Chou En Lai, and the railways gave a PhD in the university of life. I coped with so many suicides that the joke was that Samaritans told callers what train I was on, so they would get a sympathetic hearing. I read book after book while stuck between trains, and rose through the NUR to the National Executive, only to go head to head with Sid Weighall, the autocratic General Secretary, who, to my sense of déjà vu all over again, tried to have me expelled. I began to write for Tribune, happy that my articles upset him even more.

I spent much of 1984 in India on a Nuffield Fellowship studying Indian unions and discovering that there were indeed places worse off than Liverpool and that was when I began full time writing, including some of the first dissections of the sordid reality beneath Militant’s rhetoric. After working on Neil Kinnock’s election team in 1987, I finished the first of four books and moved to New York, where I was for a while President of the UN Correspondents Association and am now on my fourth Secretary General.

It was there it all came full circle. Desperately busy, I got a call from South African newspaper –could I cover the visit of the newly released Nelson Mandela to the UN? I had the sense of history circling round and ambushing me. It was indeed a profound pleasure to meet him and tell him about the long strange road his courageous struggle had led to for lesser characters like the Liverpool 10, who his victory – and subsequent statesmanship - had vindicated.

Full Writing on the Wall

Here is the full text of my Guardian "Comment is Free" piece on Carter which I can now post here.

Writing on the wall

The manufactured row over Jimmy Carter's criticism of Israel risks obscuring a real chance for peace.
Ian Williams


January 26, 2007 04:01 PM

The fuss over Jimmy Carter and his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, gained new momentum this week as the former president spoke at Brandeis University, near Boston.

Carter's critics - of whom there are many - demanded that he use his speaking engagement to debate Alan Dershowitz, the prominent defender of torture and Israel. I look forward to similar demands that every time Dershowitz speaks, he give space to one of his opponents - Noam Chomsky, say, or Al Sharpton - and lets them counter his arguments.

Dershowitz, writing in the Jerusalem Post, claimed he just wanted "a real dialogue." But when overtly racist Israeli minister for strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, who has advocated mass killings of Arabs, let alone apartheid, came to the US to speak at the Brookings Institute's Saban Center, did Dershowitz call for his remarks to be balanced by a riposte from a speaker from Peace Now, let alone Palestinian Envoy Afif Safieh?

This manufactured furor against Carter's book could not happen in any other country except the USA - and it has certainly not happened in Israel, where many clear-sighted Israelis would agree entirely with the book's message. More to the point, those with intimate experience of apartheid in South Africa, ranging from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in this space, to 200 prominent South African Jews in a letter last year, make much more explicit comparisons.

Carter has been called bigoted and anti-Semitic. In his book, however, he comes across as rather mealy-mouthed. In his speech at Brandeis he re-emphasized what he says in his book: that his warnings are against Apartheid to the territories, when the discrimination faced by Bedouin and Arab citizens in Israel on, for example land ownership, or access to social services, bears some very critical examination.

"I realize that this has caused great concern in the Jewish community," he said. "The title makes it clear that the book is about conditions and events in the Palestinian territories and not in Israel."

In fact, the word apartheid appears only three times in the entire text of his book - and always in the context of the Occupied Territories. The one time that he mentions it most explicitly, he is quoting an Israeli who feared that "we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship," in the context of describing future options for the Occupied Territories.

This is doubly interesting; because of course the Israeli press often makes the comparison with apartheid, since Israelis have to live with the consequences of their policies. It is only in the US that the legions of front-line fund-raiser banqueteers brandish their silverware in horror at the description.

Another time, Carter uses the word is in his description of the effect of the Separation Wall, "imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories." But he adds: "The driving force of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa - not racism but the acquisition of land." This is somewhat inaccurate, since apartheid in South Africa involved massive confiscations of the best land and corralling the dispossessed into small areas.

His third use of the A-word is the most interesting. Rabin had just returned from the apartheid state, and described to Carter "the close relationship Israel had with South Africa in the diamond trade ... but commented that the South African system of apartheid could not long survive."

Israel's sanctions-busting trade with the racist state helped it to survive longer than it would otherwise have done. And Israeli collaboration on arms programs may have gone beyond missiles and planes as far a joint nuclear test, with a pariah regime whose antecedents were Nazi sympathizers. If apartheid is such dreadful concept that we can't use it about Israeli polices, where were Carter's critics when Israel was the mainstay of the apartheid regime in South Africa?

I cannot recall that one of the shrill denouncers of President Carter's book ever taking exception to this conspiracy. Did one of them ever protest Israeli support for South Africa, or the hobnobbing of Israeli leaders with men who had been interned as Nazi sympathizers during the second world war? In contrast, the State Department told Carter not to talk to Hamas during his visits.

Apartheid is both understandable and abhorrent; it is the truth of the analogy that hurts. Clearly, the row about Carter's use of the word is a cynically contrived effort to detract from the book's plain and irrefutable message, accepted by the whole world community and much of Israel, and indeed by many American Jews: that the road to peace involves implementation of the UN resolutions, and a return to the 1967 borders, with some adjustments mutually agreed.

Dershowitz himself admits this, but still looks for straws to beat at Carter. After Brandeis he depicted one sentence, which Carter himself admits was sloppily phrased, as an endorsement of suicide bombing. Carter wrote that the Arabs "make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." Dershowitz knows that Carter does not support terrorism. This is a manifestation of an intellectual pogrom of the most distasteful kind.

As the engineer of the most successful peace agreement in the region - the settlement between Egypt and Israel, for which he was vilified for decades across the Arab world - Carter's claim that obstruction from expansionists in Israel, and their friends in the US, is the main obstacle to a peace has particular authority.

That, of course, is why the settlers and their American supporters would prefer you not to read his book or hear from him. Still, we should push the comparison further: the architects of South Africa's apartheid saw the writing on the wall, and came to a settlement before it was too late. It has left their country the most successful and prosperous on the continent.

We already have the wall; Carter has now provided some of the writing. Will Israel have the courage to follow his advice? jimmy carter apartheid south africa israel united states alan dershowitz