8 October 2023
The SA BDS Coalition along with South African activists, trade unions and civil society will be taking actions on Wednesday to demonstrate our support for the Palestine people in their struggle for justice, equality, the right to resist and achieve liberation from Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid and the right of all Palestinians to return to their land.
Wednesday 11th October
Johannesburg
16h30
Picket outside US Consulate,
1 Sandton Drive, Sandringham, Sandton
Cape Town:
15h00
Picket outside Israel Centre
87 Hatfield Street, Cape Town
Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid in South Africa, declared in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state”. Israel collaborated on military and nuclear weapons with apartheid South Africa, acting as a sanction-busting state. At the same time, our liberation movements in Africa worked together with the Palestinian liberation movements for our common just cause against racism, apartheid, colonialism, oppression and exploitation.
Our struggles remain interconnected. In our ongoing fight against racism, inequality, corruption and to ensure access to basic needs, human rights, economic, gender and climate justice for everyone in South Africa we stand side-by-side with the Palestinian struggle. In the words of Madiba: “we know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
South Africa has a political and moral responsibility to support the Palestinian people, to stand up to all countries that are normalising with Apartheid Israel, colonial powers and imperialists in Europe and the US who continue to enable the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The US – a settler colonial country, founded on white supremacy, slavery and anti-Black racism that came into being on the genocide of Indigenous people – is once again complicit in the impending genocide by Netanyahu’s fascist regime of Indigenous people in Gaza. The US consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment – unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the U.S. enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime. The Biden administration has just agreed to give US $8 billion to apartheid Israel.
The Palestinian people have called on the world to isolate apartheid Israel through boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS). This is the very same call we made on the international community to support our liberation movements, workers and communities in South Africa fighting apartheid. We therefore demand that our government:
• End sports, cultural, academic and other links with apartheid Israel and corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid.
• Declare the Israeli Ambassador in Pretoria persona non grata and sever diplomatic relations.
• Prosecute South Africans joining the Israeli occupation forces in total contravention of our Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act.
• Act within the UN to reinstate the Special Committee Against Apartheid towards international sanctions and institute an international protection force against apartheid Israel’s barbarism towards the Palestinians.
We will be updating on many more actions being planned across South Africa to demonstrate our solidarity with the Palestinian peoples’ resistance.
For more information please contact:
Roshan Dadoo: 082 816 2799
Usuf Chikte: 082 877 9522
