It should not be necessary to restate some foundational facts about Nelson Mandela. He supported the national liberation of oppressed peoples, equal rights, and international law. He opposed ethnic supremacy, permanent occupation, legal inequality based on identity, and ‘security’ arguments used to justify domination.
However, a recent letter by Helen Maisels, titled ‘The Destruction of Madiba’s Jewish Legacy’, makes such restatement unavoidable.
As noted in her letter, Maisels is the daughter of Israel A. Maisels, “leader of the defence team in the treason trial (1956–61). Among the defendants — all of whom were acquitted — were Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Albert Luthuli, Joe Slovo and, particularly relevant, ZK Matthews, Pandor’s grandfather”.
While we have no reason to doubt that Israel Maisels identified as a Zionist, we do not admire him because of his views on Israel. His stature derives from his role in the struggle against South African apartheid — from a commitment to liberation and justice grounded in lived political reality. The values for which he is remembered align most clearly with traditions of resistance that insist on confronting systems of domination, particularly where national narratives obscure crimes against — and the suffering of — specific populations.
Israel Maisels did not live to witness Israel’s sustained and repeated assaults on Gaza — assaults in which thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed and entire neighbourhoods have been levelled. These events have led many Jews to question narratives presenting Israel as benign. In such a context, any claim about what Israel Maisels’ views would be today is necessarily speculative. The same is true of Nelson Mandela. Attempts to recast Mandela as a Zionist — or to conscript his legacy in defence of contemporary Israeli policy — rely on conjecture rather than history, and collapse a moral life dedicated to equality and liberation into a political identity he never claimed.
Helen Maisels’ letter opens by referring to a recent protest organised by the South African Friends of Israel, and largely made up of Christian Zionists. According to Maisels, the demonstration was directed against what she describes as the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s (NMF) ‘virulent and unfounded stance against Israel and the Jewish community’.
The piece, however, conflates the two, collapsing Jewish identity — ‘the Jewish community’ — into a kind of foreign policy. If Jewish identity were Zionism, anti-Zionist Jews would be impossible — yet here we are. The most common response to this conundrum is to deny that we are Jews, by insisting that Zionism is inherent to Jewish identity. This matters because it prevents Jewish ethics — concepts such as tzedek, tzedakah and tikkun olam — from being used to ask the hardest questions: who holds power, who is harmed, and whose lives are treated as morally equal.
While Zionism cannot be collapsed into Jewish identity, it presents itself as the political fulfilment of Jewish history, marked by exile and catastrophe and articulated through scripture and liturgy. But history, however dire, cannot place a modern political ideology beyond ethical inquiry; nor can tradition or sacred texts. On the contrary, if Zionism claims to be the fulfilment of Judaism itself, it must also embody Jewish ethics in practice.
It is in this context that we need to look at Maisels’ central complaint: that ‘the present leadership of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’ has ‘conflated support for the state of Israel with a Zionist label’, and then, ‘by a neat piece of sophistry’, turned the term Zionist to embrace ‘the worst excesses of the war in Gaza’.
Maisels’ objection depends on the existence of a morally legitimate core of Zionism from which certain actions are said to ‘exceed’. Yet that core is never defined, nor are the boundaries that would allow one to distinguish excess from expression.
The question, then, is not whether confinement, deprivation, and destruction are “excesses”, but whether they are incidental to Zionism at all — or whether they arise from its ordinary operation. The word “excesses” has a secondary effect as well: it abstracts human suffering, smoothing away the texture of lived experience and rendering it tolerable for onlookers.
We remember Nelson Mandela with awe not because he maintained good relations with any particular demographic, but because he refused to accept that the subjugation of one people could ever be an acceptable cost for the comfort or security of another. His stature rests on the sacrifice he made to ensure that every person would be treated as an equal under South African law.
Maisels claims that the Nelson Mandela Foundation, under Naledi Pandor, seeks to rewrite history. On the contrary, the Foundation has remained faithful to Mandela’s actual legacy. Where Maisels would reduce him to a mere diplomat, the Foundation remembers him as he was: a fighter for justice and freedom.
Merlynn Edelstein, who has an LLB and teaches English, is a member of South African Jews for a Free Palestine and has published a volume of poetry called Bearing Witness: Beloved Maryam and Other Poems after the 2014 attack on Gaza.