“I am Black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa.”
—-Bishop Desmond Tutu, speaking in Jerusalem, Dec. 25, 1989
“There is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”
—-Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, speaking to the Tsomet Party, Nov. 15, 1998
These two quotes, coming from opposite viewpoints, show the similarities between the racist and exclusionary state of Israel and the bygone apartheid regime in South Africa.
 Washington gives Israel $15 million a day, funding the occupation of Palestine and Israeli aggression against its Arab neighbors. Photo: Denis Sinyakov/AFP/Getty Images |
Today, growing numbers of activists and progressive-minded people are drawing these parallels. They are also drawing lessons from the tactics that contributed to ending apartheid in South Africa in 1994.
There were many components to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Most important was the organized resistance of Black South Africans. That resistance earned international solidarity throughout the world that took political, economic and material forms.
In the United States and around the world, a divestment campaign gathered steam in the 1980s demanding that companies, universities, unions and governmental bodies not invest either directly or indirectly in companies or investment funds that did business with South Africa. The scope and strength of this campaign labeled the apartheid regime as an outlaw state. It became an international pariah in terms of trade, as well as academic and cultural exchange.
The 1980s anti-apartheid divestment movement accomplished several things. It exposed the super-profits earned by big corporations as a result of the apartheid system in South Africa. It educated millions of people about the reality of the racist South African system and motivated thousands of people into action against the racist state. It ultimately played a modest role in expediting the end of apartheid.
Israel: an apartheid state
Under South African apartheid, the entire political, legal and economic system was designed to enforce white privilege on the majority Black population. Many Black South Africans were forced to live in impoverished areas known as Bantustans. They were forced to carry passes to enter designated “white-only” areas of the country.
The parallels with Israel as a Jewish-only state based on Zionist ideology are remarkable. In Israel, over 90 percent of the land in the boundary that defines 1948 Israel is reserved for Jewish citizens only. Both in law and practice, entitlements are distributed based on religious lines. Jewish citizens enjoy a European lifestyle of benefits, while Palestinians endure a colonized standard of living.
License plates in the West Bank are color-coded to religious or ethnic identity. Palestinians must carry identification cards at all times.
The occupied territory of the West Bank has been under Israeli military administration for 39 years.
A wall is being built around and through Palestinian communities. Along with the hundreds of illegal Zionist settlements, military checkpoints and the Jewish-only roads in the West Bank, this situation has created a series of Bantustan-like Palestinian communities.
The economic embargo of the Gaza Strip has created such a humanitarian crisis that hospitals can no longer help the sick.
Israel routinely violates international law of an occupying power by moving prisoners from the occupied territories to Israel, displacing the indigenous population and destroying the civilian infrastructure.
Since 1948, the Zionists have justified the existence of a “Jewish state” by appealing to people’s horror at the Nazi genocidal crimes against the Jewish people in World War II. That propaganda is only designed to confuse progressive-minded people by equating the interests of Jewish people with the interests of U.S. imperialism—Israel’s sponsor state.
 Israeli bulldozers in Ramallah produced by U.S. corporations like Caterpillar. Photo: AlFREd/SIPA |
Zionism was always counterposed to socialist-oriented Jews who wanted to fight anti-Semitism through multi-national working-class unity—not just against anti-Semitism but all forms of chauvinism, racism and xenophobia.
The founding fathers of Israel made a calculated decision to appeal to the victorious imperialist powers after World War I—the United States and Britain—to back their racist colonial project. In return, Israel would act as a defender of the sponsoring imperialists’ interests in the Middle East. Israel has dutifully fulfilled that role.
Call for divestment and boycott
The current campaigns for divestment from companies doing business in Israel have been sparked by those exclusionary practices, Israeli repression and never-ending Palestinian resistance. The campaigns are international in scope. They also include calls for academic and cultural boycotts of Israel.
Local campaigns for divestment have taken place around the world for a number of years. However, the movement picked up steam with the 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague finding Israel in violation of international law based on its construction of a wall in the West Bank. This wall is designed to marginalize and divide the Palestinian community, subjecting Palestinians to a collective incarceration and intensive harassment.
On July 9, 2005, the one-year anniversary of the ICJ ruling, over 170 Palestinian political parties, trade unions, professional associations and other civil society organizations issued a “Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until it fully complies with international law and the universal principles of human rights.”
The call states, “We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.”
The specific demands are: “Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in U.N. Resolution 194.”
The world responds
Not surprisingly, some of the strongest support and action for this call has come from South Africa. Organizations and trade unions, including the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the Landless People’s Movement, the South African NGO Coalition, the Anti-War Coalition and Physicians for Human Rights have come out in support of the call.
On July 11, COSATU called on the South African government to end diplomatic relations with Israel. The union federation endorsed a boycott of all Israeli products and called for imposing economic sanctions.
In May, at the convention of the Ontario region of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Canada’s largest union, delegates passed Resolution 50. The resolution calls for the union to “support the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in U.N. Resolution 194.”
On May 29, delegates of the 69,000-member National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education in Britain voted to boycott Israeli academia. The motion called for union members to refuse to cooperate with Israeli academics or research journals that do not “dissociate themselves” with racist Israeli practices.
In December 2005, the Norwegian provincial parliament of the Soer-Trondeleim district, representing about 7 percent of the population of Norway, voted to “completely and totally” prohibit the purchase or sale of Israeli products by all provincial government bodies and to launch an awareness campaign calling upon the populace to do the same.
The divestment movement has also gained support from religious institutions. The Church of England divested from Caterpillar, on the grounds that the company’s armored D9 bulldozers are used to demolish Palestinian houses. The U.S. Presbyterian Church Assembly endorsed investigating divestment. The World Council of Churches passed an executive resolution encouraging divestment, the U.S. Episcopal Church passed a similar resolution, as did the Kenyan Anglican Church and the United Methodist Church New England.
Widening support across United States
Across the United States, students have played a key role in advocating for divestment. The U.S. campaign is especially important since U.S. funding and backing for the Zionist state is what enables Israel to continue its policies in the face of world public opposition.
Divestment campaigns have been conducted at many universities across the country, including Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, MIT, New York University, University of North Carolina, Oberlin College, Ohio State, Rutgers, Tufts, University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of California. In February, over 400 students attended the Fifth Annual Divestment Conference at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity Movement.
While none of these student campaigns have yet led to a university’s divestment, they have been important in challenging and educating students, faculty and workers across the country on how the billions of dollars in retirement funds and endowments along with academic collaboration buttresses a society that enforces separate and unequal educational systems.
In addition to universities, unions invest billions of dollars of workers’ retirement funds in companies that do business with Israel. Many also buy Israeli bonds. This is a result of the acquiescence of broad sectors of the leadership of the U.S. labor movement to U.S. foreign policy towards Israel.
Some union locals and a few labor councils have taken small and symbolic steps in expressing opposition to the actions of the Israeli government that are destroying the Palestinian economy and making it impossible for workers and their families to survive.
The advances in the divestment and boycott campaigns have come despite the efforts of the Israeli propaganda machine, which spends tens of millions of dollars annually to thwart any effort to condemn Israel for racism and suffer as a consequence.
There is a gradually growing worldwide movement working to isolate the Israeli regime for its crimes against the Palestinian people.
What the Zionists in Tel Aviv and their masters in Washington fear is that the people of the United States will learn the truth about the nature of the Israeli regime. The result will spark a grassroots movement that supports the just aspirations of the Palestinian people to end colonial occupation of their country. To the extent that the divestment and boycott campaign contributes to that goal, it deserves the support of the whole working class.
