Mbeki knew that, of course, and his real objective was not mediation at all but to carry out the groundwork for an international anti-Israel campaign closely modelled on the old anti-apartheid model, with mounting pressure for boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions. The ANC was still well connected to the old international anti-apartheid network and was able to use this array of generally left-wing organisations to popularise the new cause. The result has been the mushrooming growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The first fruit of this campaign was seen at Unesco’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. The ANC had always had particularly strong networks within UN agencies — during the struggle period it had been able to get the UN General Assembly to set up a Special Committee on Apartheid and to vote through a resolution denouncing apartheid as a “crime against humanity”. This latter was pushed through by the Soviet and Afro-Asian blocs despite the strong opposition of Western nations, which argued that the “crime against humanity” category referred to atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide and that,  appalling as apartheid might be, it was certainly not genocidal: South Africa’s black population soared under apartheid and millions of other Africans poured into the country looking for work.

The Durban conference quickly turned into a festival of anti-Israeli feeling. At the parallel NGO conference Israeli delegates agreed to allow all manner of anti-Israel motions provided that a motion was also passed condemning anti-Semitism. This was refused and Israel, the US and Canada walked out. Washington was furious that a major UN conference had been so one-sided and blamed the conference chair, Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, in the conference’s preparatory stages, had already shown her colours by adopting Muslim dress and agreeing to the exclusion of such distinguished human rights organisations as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Within South Africa the Communist Party has controlled BDS from the first, using it to give it an entrée into the large Muslim, Indian and Coloured minorities which are otherwise in danger of leaving the ANC-SACP fold. South Africa’s BDS has adopted a tribal approach, targeting the local Jewish community rather than Israel, and trying to enforce sanctions against any local Jews who do not declare for the Palestinian cause. Its favoured target has been the Woolworths chain of supermarkets, allegedly because it sells Israeli goods. The store retorts that such goods account for less than 1 per cent of its sales, that all goods are clearly marked by country of origin, allowing customers to choose, and that the company complies with all government trade laws. But the real point for BDS is that the Susman family, which controls Woolworths, is related both by marriage and commercially to Marks and Spencer in the UK — a company which has always strongly sympathised with the Zionist cause. BDS has aggressively picketed Woolworths stores, hassling customers until prevented by court order.

The BDS campaign then switched its focus to Jewish shops and moved the action to university campuses — where the SACP, via its Young Communist League, is influential. Some may see this, of course, as merely a sub-species of the more general anti-white racism which is now prevalent in South Africa. Predictably enough, as the failure of the ANC government becomes more palpable in one area after another, the rage of the younger generation — deprived of jobs and of hope — grows. This is altogether different from anything they were promised by Mandela. In fact, opinion polls in the past have often shown a distinct layer of black anti-Semitism, the result of the formidable influence of fundamentalist Christian sects (the Jews killed Jesus, etc), but it is doubtful if South Africa’s 70,000 Jews are a sufficiently large group to attract prolonged hostility — unless it is very deliberately stirred and stoked.