AFRICAN nationalism and Zionism spring from the same source: the desire of oppressed people for freedom.

It begins in the mind: self-regard, to believe in yourself, to have confidence in yourself as a human being and thus to overcome the humiliation and debasement inflicted by others.

For Jews, Zionism is their national liberation movement. It emerged from the fiery ideas of freedom during the French Revolution of 1789.

It grew during the 19th century with the rise of nationalism in Europe and advanced in response to the rise of modern anti-Semitism.

It flourished during the 20th century alongside liberation movements in Africa and Asia.

It triumphed in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel in the era that saw dozens of countries achieve independence.

Zionism was the ultimate answer to the centuries of the persecution suffered by Jews, often through false accusations against them as “Christ-killers”.

Their oppression was at a peak in Russia during the late 19th century, ranging from quotas for universities and professions to mass expulsions and murders.

In 1882 hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from their rural homes. Out of the despair came the voice of Leon Pinsker. He had served as a doctor in Russia’s army in the Crimean War and had even been decorated by the emperor, the Tsar, an unusual distinction for a Jew.

Pinsker began, as did many Jewish intellectuals in Russia, by believing that their suffering could be ended by working with non-Jewish Russians.

But their Russian colleagues viciously turned on them and refused to help. Disillusioned, Pinsker argued that seeking emancipation – freedom – by others was a pipe-dream. Jews had to emancipate themselves through creation of a Jewish national home.

He used the phrase “auto-emancipation” and wrote: “The great ideas of the 18th and 19th centuries have not passed us by without leaving a trace. We feel not only as Jews; we feel as men.

“As men, we, too, wish to live and be a nation as the others. And if we seriously desire that, we must first of all extricate ourselves from the old yoke, and rise manfully to our full height. We must first of all desire to help ourselves and then the help of others is sure to follow. . . . “The lack of national self-respect and self-confidence of political initiative and of unity are the enemies of our national renaissance. . . . Help yourselves, and God will help you!”

Pinsker opened entirely new ways to overcome the centuries of oppression. He fed into the concept of Zionism which was developing in Eastern Europe at that time.

The Zionist aim was to create a homeland for the Jewish people. Various places in the world were considered but it soon came down to the Land of Israel, then part of the Ottoman Empire but the traditional territory from which the Romans had expelled Jews nearly 2000 years before.

Jews had never stopped viewing it as their God-given home.

The idea of self-liberation was as excitingly relevant for Jews then as it was for black people in the mid-20th century – and into the present time – and especially in the segregated United States, apartheid South Africa and colonised Africa.

It is known by other names – black power, African nationalism, black nationalism, and black consciousness. But auto-emancipation has been and is the starting point for blacks, as much as it has proved itself for Jews.

It was enunciated in specific terms for blacks by WEB du Bois in the United States and by Anton Lembede, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Steve Bantu Biko in South Africa as the way to achieve mental, and then physical, freedom.

In regard to securing freedom, Sobukwe got to the heart of it with these stirring words (on August 2, 1959, at a celebration of national heroes): “Now for over 300 years, the white, foreign, ruling minority has used its power to inculcate in the African a feeling of inferiority. This group has educated the African to accept the status quo of white supremacy and black inferiority as normal.

“It is our task to exorcise this slave mentality… It must clearly be understood that we are not begging the foreign minorities to treat our people courteously. We are calling on our people to assert their personality… We are reminding our people that acceptance of any indignity, any insult, any humiliation is acceptance of inferiority.

“They must first think of themselves as men and women before they can demand to be treated as such... Once white supremacy has become mentally untenable to our people, it will become physically untenable too, and will go… “

A signal difference between blacks and Jews is that while Jews had to struggle to return, blacks were already at home, in Africa (but not entirely, of course, because of the millions who had been carried as slaves to the Americas. Trinidadian-born Marcus Garvey began a “Return to Africa” movement in 1920 and some people still speak in those terms today).

Arising from this, blacks have had to overcome the oppression of colonial powers whereas Jews have had to counter accusations of colonialism.

This is easily refuted: Jews had no mother country for whose benefit they were working and they did not exploit local resources for an outside power. They initially bought land on the normal willing buyer-willing seller principle, then gained United Nations approval for their own state, and then had to fight for their right to it when the armies of neighbouring Arab states attacked.

There was no colonialism in the founding of the state of Israel.

Its occupation of the West Bank is a separate issue.

These differences apart, the basic story of Jews and blacks is identical: striving for freedom is universal and it begins with believing in yourself.

Benjamin Pogrund is a South African journalist who has lived in Israel for 16 years. This extract from Drawing Fire: Investigating the accusations of apartheid in Israel (Rowman & Littlefield, distributed in southern Africa by Juta)

Ran Greenstein, an Israeli-born associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, will respond in the Daily Dispatch on Monday. His most recent book is Zionism and its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine (Pluto Press)