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The South African government was increasingly unable to control its own territory while adventurism in the near abroad was going much worse than it had been(not that it had ever been going particularly well). The ANC was an insurgent group that was actually literally fighting the apartheid government with weapons and the fighting was going more and more poorly for the government as time went on. The white population found itself unable to bring more into the coalition- the cape coloreds wanted racial equality- the way alawites could count on support from Syria’s Christians and other minorities and chose to negotiate as an alternative to losing the war, which would result in either an attempted great leap forwards or a massacre of the white population.
Apartheid was not long term sustainable without mass deaths among the black population, or importing several million additional whites. Neither of those were in the cards; Israel treats the Palestinians pretty badly, but not as badly as South Africa would have had to treat the Bantus to maintain apartheid. Being a majority of the population instead of a single digit percentage has its advantages.
If Afrikaners had managed to boost their birth rate in the 60’s and 70’s perhaps they would have been able to maintain apartheid. They couldn’t, because that’s a really hard problem to solve, so demographic reasons meant their system was going to unravel.
The Portuguese gave up after a military coup toppled the govt, they didn't lose on the battlefield. They were winning the war on the battlefield. Rhodesia was strangled by sanctions, as was South Africa. Without sanctions and with assistance, they could easily have survived. When Israel gets into spats with Lebanon or bomb their neighbours they enjoy the unconditional assistance of the US, who'll happily lend munitions and vehicles. South Africa was paying their own way: they had an arms embargo and had to design their own jet fighters to counter the Soviets. The cost of having to prepare for proxy wars against a superpower is too much for a small country by itself.
The South Africans could easily have copied Israel's notes and just expelled anyone they didn't like the look of to maintain their demography. Demography is mutable. It's only appearances that stopped them, they weren't fully committed to the settler-garrison state way of life and they knew the West would suppress them if they did.
Israel got away with the nakba in the 40s, and South Africa realized it had the choice of nakba or majority rule in the 80s. Yes, alawites rule Syria without being a much bigger minority, but they’re seen as preferable to the Sunni majority by most people who are neither, and also have Russian troops keeping them in power. Without an influx of several million more whites apartheid couldn’t stay.
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Israel is vastly more Jewish (even counting neighboring Palestinians) than South Africa was white. And I’m not sure your analysis of what happened in Portugal is entirely correct, Angola had a very small white population, many other Portuguese colonies had already been lost (eg in India) and the people in the metropole were tired of their tax money being spent and young men being sent off to die in the colonies. In addition, the regime limped along after Salazar’s death and his replacements were widely disliked within the military.
Hydro is correct that the primary reason apartheid was unsustainable is that the Afrikaners were utterly unable to offer anything much to the rest of the non-Bantu population. Not to the indigenous Khoisan, not to the Indians and Cape Colored (who were also officially lesser under apartheid), and not even to the Anglos and Jews, who dominated business but who were systematically discriminated against in government and had to deal with corruption and kickbacks to the Afrikaners (not to mention spurious lawsuits, fines and other harassment) who ran the National Party, all of which built up a huge amount of resentment.
So - unlike the Alawites in Syria - it was unclear to non-Afrikaners in South Africa that they were going to ‘get massacred’ if popular democracy was implemented. Remember also that this was in the early 90s, a decade before Mugabe started seizing white land, and when whites in Botswana, Namibia and so on appeared to be doing fine under black-majority rule.
None of this is to dispute the fact that, yes, a sufficiently motivated bloc of 4 million Afrikaners probably could have held South Africa indefinitely (even under sanctions, given the nation’s bountiful natural resources and the fact that the Israelis and others would have continued buying from them). But there was little popular desire for that, in part because the pressure valve of emigration back to the West was open.
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