In March 2023 at the annual Palestine lecture at the University of London’s School of Oriental African Studies,1 I said that while Israel has always been a settler-colonial apartheid state maintained through military rule, we needed to be very concerned that under the present Israeli government the situation would not just go from bad to worse but that, at a certain point, the quantitative change would become qualitative. This assessment was based on the makeup of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, which includes [Minister of National Security] Itamar Ben-Gvir, [Deputy Minister of National Jewish Identity] Avi Maoz, and [Minister of Finance] Bezalel Smotrich, who now have responsibilities for key areas, such as building settlements and security.
What has happened in the past nine (at the time of writing) months did not come as a surprise, even if Israel has been doing this from time to time over the past eight decades, for example when it facilitated the massacre of thousands of unarmed civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila or its regular bombing sprees (what the Israeli generals referred to as “mowing the lawn”) against the civilian population of Gaza over the past two decades.
But the present destruction of infrastructure, hospitals, universities and schools, and the killing of more than 40,000 men, women and children from a population of just 2.3 million is really staggering. The number of people murdered (over 70% of whom are children and women), those buried under the rubble and those maimed are the equivalent of over two million Canadians, excluding those who have died from starvation, illness and lack of medical treatment.
Growing international solidarity
Internationally, many of us feel that a tipping or inflection point has been reached. For a long time, Israel was allowed to act with impunity and without restraint. But we are starting to see changes we would not have thought possible a few years ago. Primarily in the U.S., but also in Germany and some other European countries, cracks are starting to show. For example, sanctions are now on the cards for many countries and even United Nation agencies. Malaysia has refused to allow Israeli-flagged cargo ships to dock in their ports. Namibia has sanctioned the sale of diamonds to Israel. So, things are changing.
Something similar happened with South Africa. The first call for a boycott campaign against apartheid was made as early as 1959. But it was only when dockworkers in Trinidad, Norway and Liverpool started refusing to load and unload South African goods in 1960 and waterside workers in Sydney refused to handle cargo on a ship that was believed to be carrying arms to South Africa in 1964; when shop workers in supermarkets in places such as Ireland started refusing to handle South African products; when people such as in New Zealand started to protest against touring South African sporting teams, that governments around the world started to change their positions.
Today, the hard work of activists throughout the world has enabled us to make very rapid gains. Of course, this has come at a huge price for Palestinians. And we still have much work to do. The reality today looks very grim—as it did in the ’80s in my country. But there is a well-known phrase that “the night is darkest just before dawn breaks.” Many Palestinians feel this current moment may be a moment of change. That is why we need to build on the momentum that exists and, among other things, push for more sanctions including pushing to stop Israel from participating in cultural events.
Building on South Africa’s legal case at the Hague we held a global gathering of solidarity organisations in Johannesburg on May 12, 2024. The conference was attended by over 400 participants from 32 countries, and adopted the ‘Johannesburg Declaration on Israel’s Settler-Colonialism, Apartheid and Genocide: Towards a Global Anti-Apartheid Movement for Palestine’. The Declaration urged people and organisations globally to expand, intensify and escalate actions in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s courageous liberation struggle to end genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid ‘from the River to the Sea’.
Conference attendees agreed to cooperate with other organisations working on the various issues and campaigns in this Programme of Action.
Since the Johannesburg conference, and despite the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on May 24, 2024 explicitly ordering Israel to halt its military offensive, Israel continues to relentlessly bomb civilians and Gaza’s infrastructure, increasingly making the territory unliveable. The ICJ also reiterated its order for Israel to immediately allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid, including food, water and medicines. Israel has ignored this and previous orders and is deliberately hastening the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians through disease and famine. Israel has also rejected United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions demanding a ceasefire, including one on June 11, 2024 that was supported by 14 of the 15 UNSC members (with one abstention).
International solidarity actions
Given that the genocidal war against Palestinians is being carried out with weapons supplied by Western powers—especially the U.S. but also Germany, Canada, Italy and England, among others—conference participants raised the need to pressure governments and parliaments to immediately impose a military embargo on Israel, as called for by the UN Human Rights Council and dozens of UN human rights experts. This embargo needs to include the sale and transfer of weapons, military equipment and dual-use technology, an end to military funding and a ban on importing Israeli arms and spyware, and on joint military and security projects. Another issue was attempting to identify Israel’s economic vulnerabilities. Israel’s economy is increasingly tottering on the edge. Given this, there was a strong belief that we need to identify its strategic weak points. The Palestinian BDS National Committee and the BDS movement globally have identified many such weak points. In this context, participants at the Conference vowed to support, strengthen and expand BDS actions.
We also identified and discussed issues such as Israel’s deliberate effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system—an action known as “scholasticide”. The term refers to the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of lecturers, teachers, students and staff, the destruction of educational infrastructure and the erosion of the intellectual and cultural fabric of Palestinian society. Thus far, 450 schools and all 12 universities in Gaza have been bombed, together with archives, libraries and printing presses. Israel’s destruction of this infrastructure leaves 625,000 school and 90,000 university students in Gaza without access to education. At the time of writing, 6,000 students, 381 educators, 98 professors and four university presidents have been killed, many with their families. Because of this, we need to step up our support for a comprehensive and consistent boycott of all academic institutions in Israel, as advocated by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
We discussed the Israeli regime’s reproductive genocide in Gaza, through systematic violence and the deliberate targeting of women and children, which has increased exponentially since October 2023. Imposing restrictions on access to vital resources such as food, water, electricity, and medical treatment results in women, particularly pregnant women, and children suffering the most. That is why, as a movement, we see the need to advance the fundamental rights of Palestinians to bodily autonomy, safety, and justice. It was also noted that Israel’s military onslaught has had enormous effects on Gaza’s ecosystems and biodiversity. Participants agreed that the scale and potential long-term impact of this damage amounts to ecocide and must be investigated as a war crime.
When you look at all this, you start to see why Palestine is such a key issue: it is capable of bringing together environmentalists, anti-racist activists, Indigenous peoples, anti-militarists, anti-capitalists, feminists and many others from all around the world in an intersectional way.
Another important aspect we see is Israel’s particular role in global capitalism. Palestinian Adam Haniah who spent time in Canada, was very clear on this many years ago when he said: “It is not merely the depth of suffering or length of exile that makes the Palestinian struggle an imperative of international solidarity in the current period. It is also the central location of the struggle within the broader context of global resistance to imperialism and neoliberalism.” Israel’s role is to make the region safe for oil companies in concert with despotic Arab regimes, but its role extends beyond that to supporting military dictatorships elsewhere and suppressing workers’ struggles around the world in very concrete ways. For example, Israel has carved out a niche market producing high-tech security essential for the day-to-day functioning of global capitalism, with the weaponry and technology it exports being field tested on the bodies of Palestinian men, women and children.
This is important in terms of the whataboutism we often encounter: “What about the Congo?” “What about Sudan?” “Why aren’t you boycotting other countries?” During apartheid in South Africa, the international boycott campaign faced the same issue. The period of apartheid overlapped with the period of Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia, during which many more people were killed than under apartheid. But the reality was that the West did not support Pol Pot in the way that it supported the South African regime, and the boycott campaign was, for us, a tactical weapon. The same is true with Israel today. Moreover, we see a direct connection between our struggle against Israeli apartheid and struggles such as those in the Congo and Sudan, because Israel is very much involved in funding and fuelling those conflicts, extracting minerals and supporting warlords. This has been well documented. So, for us, the campaign to boycott Israel does not undermine or reduce the importance of the other struggles; rather, we see a victory for Palestine as aiding those struggles.
The roots of South African solidarity
South Africans’ solidarity with Palestinians does not start with the ICJ initiative. The historical roots are fundamental to understanding contemporary times and the significance of the ICJ order. Many people see the latter as a government initiative, but actually it has come to this point as a result of a deeper history. Since 1994, after the ending of legal apartheid, the government has had to give rhetorical support to the Palestinian struggle because of the strong and visceral feelings of the majority of South Africans in support of the Palestinians—and it was social movements, trade unions, youth groups, feminist organisations, progressive faith-based organisations that pushed the government to take this particular stance.
South Africans’ identification with the struggle of Palestinians includes the recognition of Israel’s culpability in our own oppression. For instance, Israel was an important arms supplier to Apartheid South Africa despite the international arms embargo, and as late as 1980, 35% of Israel’s arms exports were destined for South Africa. Much has been written about the subsequent relationship between Apartheid South Africa and Israel. It will suffice here to say that Israel was loyal to the Apartheid state and clung to the friendship when almost all other relationships had dissolved. During the 1970s this affiliation extended into the field of nuclear weaponry when Israeli experts helped South Africa to develop at least six nuclear warheads and in the 1980s, when the global anti-Apartheid Movement had forced their states to impose sanctions on the Apartheid regime, Israel imported South African goods and re-exported them to the world as a form of inter-racist solidarity. Israeli companies, subsidised by the South African regime despite the pittance they paid workers were established in a number of Bantustans.
There are also clear similarities between the 65-odd pieces of discriminatory legislation in Israel that govern all aspects of everyday life, the fragmentation and theft of the land and the matrix of security laws with what existed in Apartheid South Africa. While the laws are similar they are not the same and actually apartheid in Israel is much more severe than what existed in South Africa. Other South Africans have also said this including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
There is one critical difference though. Apartheid South Africa depended on the super exploitation of the labour of Indigenous Black people. In Israel the Indigenous Palestinians are disposable.
Despite the genocide, we take succour from the fact that acts of defiance, determination and resistance often against seemingly overwhelming odds continue to support and encourage the will of Palestinians. Global solidarity activists need to be inspired and strengthened by the steadfastness and courage of Palestinians despite the abject obsequiousness of some ‘leaders.’ Despite 75 years of massacres and atrocities piled upon outrages and injustices the resistance on all fronts continue. It is an antidote to the all too human feeling of despair at the extent of the horror of the genocide.
We on the outside should be inspired by this resistance and we have a clear role to play. The most potent weapon we have learnt to rely on, forged through the tried and tested struggles of workers and oppressed people spanning time and space: solidarity. International solidarity in this sense in the words of the late Mozambican leader, Samora Machel is “not an act of charity but an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives.”
Editor’s note: Since this article was submitted, the number of casualties has increased exponentially. In an article in The Lancet, the number of deaths was estimated at 186,000. The majority were not caused by bombing or execution, but by other indirect health-related implications.
