PALESTINE WILL BE FREE
31 October 2023
We, like many other members of South African civil society with a single-issue focus, have been ambivalent in meaningfully responding to the current massacre of Palestinian people by the Israeli occupation. In the past 3 weeks, Israel has killed more than 8300 people, damaged 183,000 homes and 221 educational facilities, killed more than 35 journalists, displaced 1.4 million people, destroyed a major hospital and ceased the functioning of 34% of hospitals in Gaza. Its war crimes include the cutting off of Gaza’s communication lines, dropping white phosphorous bombs on civilians, which burns human skin down to the bone, and using starvation as a weapon.
The Israeli occupation’s brutalisation of Palestinians has been routine for more than 75 years. Palestinians have been subjected to an illegal military occupation, settler colonialism, humiliating checkpoints, daily military raids, regular home demolitions, systematic displacement, regular massacres, and numerous other illegal apartheid practices.
We can no longer entertain debates about whether Israel is guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid or not. That was settled by the South African Human Sciences Research Council in 2009, the United Nations in 2017, Human Rights Watch in 2021, Amnesty International in 2022, and many Palestinian and Israeli NGOs and South African anti-apartheid activists.
Israel is an apartheid state.