Thirty plus years and South Africa viscerally understands the Palestinian cause and, unlike the cowardly Arab states who continue to kiss the shoes of the Anglo-Americans and ignore the plight of the Palestinians, South Africa has taken the boldstep of charging Israel with genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC), once dubbed a terrorist organization by the apartheid white supremacist South African regime and its American ally, was a companion of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which was also tagged with being a terrorist organization by the Americans. Just like Black South Africans exhibited forgiveness toward the white South African settlers after the end of a[partheid rule, the Palestinians forgave the Jewish settlers by recognizing Israel's right to exist side by side with a free Palestinian state. But the Jewish white supremacist Israeli regime reneged on its pledges and continued to rape Palestine, steal more land, expel more people from their homes and build separation walls.
“We have stood with the Palestinians and we will continue to stand with our Palestinian brothers and sisters,” Mandela's grandson, Mandla Mandela, said at a pro-Palestinian rally in Cape Town in October, days after the Hamas attack in southern Israel spurred the war on Gaza. Mandla Mandela, an ANC lawmaker, wore a black and white Palestinian keffiyeh around his neck as he spoke to a large crowd.
Nelson Mandela always raised the plight of the Palestinians to international audiences. Three years after apartheid and white supremacist rule was dismantled in South Africa and Mandela was elected president in historic all-race elections in 1994, he thanked the international community for its help. He added: “But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Mandela and South African leaders have never ceased to compare the restrictions Israel placed on Palestinians by Israel with the treatment of Black South Africans during apartheid, framing the two issues as fundamentally about people oppressed in their colonized homelands. The hypocrite Israel continued to provide weapons systems to South Africa’s apartheid government even after publicly pretending to denounce apartheid.
The ANC has consistently criticized Israel as an “apartheid state," even before the current war. International rights groups have also accused Israel of the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and that “resonates strongly with South Africa,” said Thamsanqa Malusi, a South African human rights lawyer.
Israel adamantly rejects that characterization, saying its Arab minority enjoys full civil rights. It views Gaza, from which it withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005, as a hostile entity ruled by the Islamic militant group Hamas, and it considers the West Bank to be disputed territory subject to peace negotiations — which collapsed more than a decade ago.
Malusi said many in the South African government experienced the oppression of apartheid and that could help explain its decision to lodge the case against Israel at the U.N.'s top court.
While Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning statesman, also reached out to Israel in an attempt to foster a peaceful solution, anti-Israeli rhetoric in South Africa has strengthened over the years, sometimes seeping into everyday life. For example, the ANC's youth wing pressured South African grocery store chains to drop Israeli products and threatened to forcibly shut them down if they didn't.
Israel's assault on Gaza sparked renewed solidarity with the Palestinian cause in South Africa. Thousands have marched in support of Gaza in Cape Town and Johannesburg. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa — the current leader of the ANC — has criticized both Israel and Hamas for what he calls atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict. But he also appeared in public wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag, even as he offered condolences to Israel over the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, leaving little doubt where South Africa's sympathies lie.
On Wednesday, the eve of the court proceedings, Palestinians in the West Bank city of Ramallah crowded around another statue of Mandela, waving Palestinian and South African flags and holding signs that read: “Thank You South Africa.”
South Africa's ANC-led government says it is taking a moral stance in its genocide case against Israel, first seeking an order for Israel to stop the assaults in Gaza that have killed more than 23,300 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel vehemently disputes the genocide claims, saying it is fighting a war of self-defense, which is an excuse for continuing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that Jewish Zionist foreign invaders began in 1948 with their founding of the Anglo-American colony of Israel.
Israel's historic trajectory has been one of gradual incremental seizure of Palestinian land and explusion of Palestinians from their lands, a slow simmering dehumanization of the Palestinians with denial of access to their lands, denial of building homes, the demolition of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of millennial olive tree orchards, and the amalgamation of the Palestinian liberation movement with Islamic terrorism. According to the Israeli narrative which has been shoved down the throats of the dumb American population, all Palestinians are terrorists.
No comments:
Post a Comment