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Foreign protests and eventually sanctions didn’t really kill apartheid. The South Africans could have held on and non-aligned countries (Israel, amusingly, being a central example) would have continued doing business with them. The main reason apartheid failed was that it never had buy-in from the non-Afrikaner (largely Anglo, in some cases Jewish) white elite in South Africa who actually ran the economy and who had repeatedly chafed with the Afrikaners who controlled the entire politics of the country for fifty years via the national party (which was for much of its history not merely white nationalist but Afrikaner Calvinist ethnonationalist). Young whites, particularly urban, particularly in the middle and upper middle classes, increasingly and ever more earnestly opposed apartheid. The system lost the will to function, the older Afrikaners (who had steadfastly opposed non-Dutch European immigration well into the 1950s) no longer had the a popular support to maintain the system as it was. That process began in the 1970s, long before the US and UK implemented major sanctions (which were themselves not comprehensive in practice and which were - as you note - strongly opposed by Reagan and Thatcher at the time).
Rhodesia is a better example of a country that was more crippled by sanctions, but Rhodesia peaked at 300,000 whites while South Africa had 5.2 million, a number much more capable of maintaining autarky with high living standards and extensive domestic industry. In Israel, the domestic economic and social elite is much more aligned with ethnonationalism than was ever the case in South Africa, where Anglos never really cared for apartheid (which, pointedly, was never strictly implemented in Anglo-majority African colonies even if they had some segregation; even Rhodesia did not actually have codified apartheid like South Africa did).
The fall of apartheid was as much about domestic politics in SA after centuries of conflict between the Anglos and the Boers as it was about international pressure. If all white South Africans had been firmly aligned behind Afrikaner ethnonationalism it’s quite possible they would still be in charge today, but of course they were not.
Not to mention, of course, whites were something on the order of 10% of SA's population at the end of apartheid- total. Jews are 60% of Israel's population.
Spot on. And when South Africa became one of the dominions of the British Empire in 1912, her population was already less than 1/3 White. Racial minorities have never practiced settler colonialism with success. Apartheid was never going to work long-term.
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