I'd recommend looking at the comparative case of Zimbabwe, where the former settler colony of Rhodesia was liquidated more thoroughly than that of the case of South Africa in dismantling apartheid. This included a process of land reform that, while nowhere as successful and comprehensive as that in socialist states, still managed to touch on, what I'd call, the fundamental bottom line of Western imperialism in a way that was largely unprecedented in the whole African decolonial experience with just a few exceptions like Gaddafi's Libya and Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal.
In South Africa, the end of that obscenely vile system was a victory, but the issue I've come to realize over the years is that Western imperialism is an onion where there's layers and layers of "fluff" as defence before you peel back a layer that really touches the ultimate bottom line. It's like the Ukraine War where the West makes a stand right in the former heartland of the Soviet Union and plays it up as "existential" to them to obfuscate that there are so many layers of their defence that one could peel away before anyone reaches a fundamental bottom line for the Western existence, like the decolonization of Turtle Island. This is the real substance that 500 years of Western imperialism have accomplished.
To put it plainly, South African apartheid was a "nice to have" in terms of sustaining the interests of Afrikaaner settler colonialism but not a genuine "must have." That latter is the multi-generational socioeconomic entitlements they've carved out for themselves during the period of overt settler colonialism that the ANC largely have left untouched but which retains a significant amount of the Afrikaaner asymmetric power in South Africa. The portrayal in the West of the South African experience as an achievement that the Global South should be "satisfied with" to use as a role model serves to obfuscates that there needs to be socioeconomic redistribution and land reform to actually cross a genuine Afrikaaner red line.
In a sense it's like conceding that I can longer beat the shit out of you, but you still have to live out on the street while I occupy your former house. And even if I eventually let you in your former house, you can't go upstairs. And even if I eventually let you go upstairs, I still have the sole name on the property deed. And even if I eventually let you have your name on the property deed, I still control the finances. On and on, etc, until you reach the bottom line of finally being able to kick out the occupier from your house entirely.
Through this, the South African model is that you get to make out giving up some perversely lopsided entitlement like "I can't beat the shit out of you" as some great equalizer when there's still so much more to go before you genuinely are affected. The intent is to pile endless layers of extraneous concessions (and act like each one is existential) so that the real concession is impenetrable to reach. Even if reaching it is impossible, however, it should be still conceptualized in decolonial efforts what is truly the bottom line.
Land Reform in Zimbabwe
"Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myth and Realities" by Ian Scoones et al. (a neoliberal work which, while hilariously playing up the World Bank's support for land reform as "good-intentioned" and not disengenuous, is still overall useful) illustrates how the much maligned Zimbabwe government through its land reform process "highlighted one potential path for countries unable or unwilling to deal with the unequal inheritance of apartheid or colonialism." At first, there was the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement drafted with Britain, lasting for 10 years, which was played up as a "crucial capitulation" even though "no major agrarian reforms was on the cards; this was all going to be 'carefully planned,' designed to increase 'farming efficiency.'"
This was the song and dance of the endlessly layered "onion" of "concessions" put into practice, where there was a "all (i.e. 'including' Britain) acknowledged that land reform had to be a central plank of post-Independence policy, but options were severely constrained" 'c'est la vie-style' shrugging of shoulders skit by Britain. During this period, "the new government played by the rules, keen to gain international confidence and encourage 'reconciliation' with the white farming community" and "white farmers were seen as a 'protected species' for much of the early 1980s." At the end of the 80s when the Lancaster Agreement was set to expire, it was already clear "by the mid-1980s that the great plans for mass resettlement were not going to happen" and that there was "every sign that the British government is striving behind the scenes to perpetuate Lancaster House beyond April 1990 and so prevent significant land reform from taking place."
By 1998, the Mugabe government signed off the acquisition of 2m ha which, despite following 'fair market values' for compensation, "sent shockwaves through the diplomatic and aid communities," who "saw this as an aggressive act" and the typical "IMF threatened to withhold a tranche of new payments due in 1999" gimmick routine. This kicked off the "Jambanja" period of generally spontaneous and largely decentralized "land invasions" in a 2 year period of radical land reform by locals and war veterans, which the West is still unable to pin as either a "peasant-led movement" or "orchestrated by the top."
Even here, however, as of their report in 2010, the process in the large commercial agriculture sector went from, in 1980, "6000 farmers, nearly all of them white" to "2300 white-owned commercial farmers still operating." So, even Zimbabwe's land reform, which has been commonly portrayed as apocalyptic chaos in Western media and scholarship to dissuade other Global South countries from emulating it, still retained a significant legacy of settler colonial control after its most volatile phase. As such, the framing of such a narrative in the West for a country which, after 20 years of the British "we support your struggle, but it's complicated" pantomime act, decided to largely cut through to near the core of the concessional "onion" is therefore deliberate.
As such, the cause of Palestinian liberation is one that will need to contend with the same trap which South Africa was ensnared by and which the Zimbabwe example shows the agonizingly long process of both misdirection and slander involved in combatting it.
Scones, I. et al. 2010. "Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myth and Realities."
This is not a great argument. Land reform is a necessary step towards socioeconomic sovereignty but it does not guarantee economic prosperity. This is akin to blaming the hardships of Cuba's heroic revolutionary struggle to its own decision of committing to socialist land reform rather than the economic blockade by American imperialism in response to its national liberation. Ian Scoones et al.'s work, in fact, explicitly challenges the "myth" that "Zimbabwean land reform has been a total failure."
I don't disagree that such a line of argumentation is definitely the predominant narrative regarding Zimbabwe nor with the depiction of its current socioeconomic conditions, but such an assessment needs to contend with the question of the chicken and the egg.
It's a question of whether Zimbabwe's contemporary problems (as much as it can be attributed to its land reforms) dialectically come principally from its non-socialist and rather haphazard land reform process and the Mugabe government's mishandling or whether there is a predominant issue of the Western sanctions, foreign and IMF/World Bank divestment and economic ostracization that Zimbabwe faced following its decision to uphold the Jambanja period 'land invasions' which are the primary contradiction in determining its contemporary struggles.
The historical and contemporary severe poverty of Haiti is also not "a myth," but the source of its material conditions principally stemmed from the counter-revolutionary reaction from Europe who sought to punish and make an example of the first independent black state in the New World and the only successful enslaved uprising in recorded history. The Haitian state was not recognized by any 19th century world power and France, following the Bourbon Restoration, imposed a huge indemnity that made destitute any possibility of Haitian prosperity.
This is what happened to Zimbabwe, which was punished just as Haiti was two centuries ago, for demonstrating a model towards sovereignty by an independent black state:
The concluding tangent about China is wildly off the mark, however. China's own socialist land reform process was the largest redistribution of wealth in human history and the foundation of China's success stems from its near total eradication of imperialist influence under Mao, which was imperative to the success of Deng's Reform and Opening Up. As Zhou Enlai famously articulated:
As such, the outcome of Zimbabwe's national process does not invalidate the example it demonstrated, as Ian Scoones et al. note, which was that it "highlighted one potential path for countries unable or unwilling to deal with the unequal inheritance of apartheid or colonialism" in the form of settler expropriation and land reform. There is no world where you can have your cake and eat it too in the context of land reform: no settler is going to shake your hand and give you a smile when you kick them off your land and write a glowing letter back to the European metropole about you.
Thus, by nature of the Western reaction, this could not be a clean or thorough process and it did not end in economic success, but such is precisely the "fait accompli" which committing the ultimate form of property re-appropriation from legacy settler colonialism is made to perform and designed to suffer under in the contemporary global conditions of Western hegemony.