COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi's address on the 11th International Israeli Apartheid Week, Cape Town, 5 March 2015
On behalf of COSATU I bring a message of support and solidarity with the 11th International Israeli Apartheid Week, that began on 2nd March 2015 and will continue until Sunday. Our aim is to raise awareness about Israel's apartheid policies towards the Palestinians and to build support for the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
I urge all COSATU members, workers and the people to South Africa to rally behind the struggle of the freedom of the Palestinians and to condemn the crimes committed daily by the Israeli Zionist regime.
The people of Gaza and West Bank are subjected to relentless blockades by the Israeli army in their ancestral land and still suffer from land and property dispossessions. We have a moral responsibility to condemn the Israeli government's apartheid practices and policies of and join efforts to force it to uphold the international law that condemns racial oppression.
We suffered state-sponsored injustices for more than 300 years in this country and so we have a special responsibility to support those fighting for tolerance, justice.
From our own experience, we know how painful and dehumanising is the system of segregation, known here as apartheid, a system based on the assumption that one group or race is superior to others and therefore has a right to all the privileges and virtues associated with that particular status. It has a right to run and determine the lives of others, excluding them from certain privileges, merely because they do not belong to the "chosen" group.
What other definition would so fittingly define a system based on different rights and privileges for Jews and Arabs in the Middle East? The bantustanisation of Palestine into pieces or strips - West Bank, Ramallah, and Gaza strip and so on - run by Israel and with no rights whatsoever for the Palestinians, is definitely an apartheid system.
Israel occupied the land of the Palestinian people and created settler communities of Jews who enjoy a different lifestyle and privileges than those experienced by Palestinians. Palestinians are packed like Sardines in a tin throughout the Bantustans, with Gaza being acknowledged as the world's biggest open-air prison.
The prime characteristics of apartheid in South Africa included segregation into highly developed whites-only areas co-existing with extremely under-developed black communities, where the majority lived with no or limited rights and access to basic facilities. The black majority had no rights to freely participate and determine their destiny without the supervision of the superior race, which made all the decisions and enforced them through a highly militarised state machinery.
The country was further balkanised into various Bantustans - Bophuthatswana, Kwangwane, Kwandebele, Venda, Transkei, KwaZulu, Ciskei, etc. - which were partitioned in such a way that within the same country you needed a passport to travel from one Bantustan to the other. In between these Bantustans was South Africa, a land foreign to all blacks but firmly in the hands of white supremacists.
What is the situation in Palestine today? The country is segregated into highly developed settler communities of Jews, on the one hand, and extremely poor and under-developed Arab communities, where the people have no or limited rights and access to basic facilities, with Gaza being the most evident of these.
The Palestinian people cannot freely determine their own affairs and run their own country, for it is occupied by a colonial power called Israel. The country is further balkanised into various Bantustans, amongst them, West Bank, Gaza, and Ramallah, which are connected through extremely restricted travel access over Israel. It is because of these similarities between today's Israel and our past that we call the Israeli state an apartheid state.
Ordinary people in the West Bank, and in the Gaza Strip, have suffered enough under Israeli occupation. The settlements, the separation wall, the hundreds of checkpoints and the detention of over 11,000 Palestinian people in Israeli jails are just some of unbearable conditions that prevail in Gaza.
It is our firm belief that, like all other suffering, colonised, oppressed and subjugated peoples all over the world, Palestinians are not naturally a violent people. They are not provocative, but they have the right to resist when provoked and subjected to the most cruel and barbaric forms of occupation and invasion. They need to restore their pride and dignity, and regain their disposed lands.
We support these claims unconditionally. We too suffered in defence of exactly the claims in the hands of ruthless sister forces to the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Resistance must never be equated to provocation. In the same way that the ANC-led liberation movement here in South Africa refused to submit to the most extreme form of invasion and subjugation, but fought with all means at our disposal, why should the Palestinian people be denied that right?
This is why the Palestinian people are right to fight for their freedom. However, in fighting for their freedom, they are called all sorts of names, just as we were also called all sorts of names, the best known of which is "terrorists".
Which freedom fighter has never had that label, even our own heroic son of the soil, Comrade Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela? It has become an honour for anyone fighting for freedom to be called a terrorist. Just next door to us in Swaziland, PUDEMO President, Mario Masuku, is seriously ill in jail on trumped-up charges of terrorism, merely for fighting for the rights of his people.
However, that should not lead to all sorts of distortions about the reality in the Middle East. The aggressor is the coloniser, in this case Israel, who forcefully invaded the land of other people and took it away. What other option was left for those disposed Palestinians than to resist and fight for their land? And that is what exactly the people of Palestine are doing.
The hypocritical apportionment of equal condemnation to both the aggressor and victim is dishonest and unfair. There is no neutrality in a struggle when basic rights are violated; the occupying and oppressive force is immoral and the resisting force has the moral responsibility to fight for freedom, though this does not mean there are no limits and responsibilities for those fighting freedom to observe, of course.
Israel however uses brute force to impose its illegal occupation of Palestine. Regular outbursts of direct military violence and response by Palestinians that have recurred at least once a year since 2002 ("Operation Defence Shield") multiply victims but do not change the basic fact of Israeli occupation and brutality.
And every man, woman, child or elderly person that manages to escape or hide from the predictably bloody assault will later be "hunted" so that the cleansing is complete and the commanders in charge of the operation can report to their superiors: "We've completed the mission."
And then, from up there above, they will write about the Palestinians' violent nature and they'll make declarations condemning that violence and they'll get back to discussing if it's Zionism or anti-Semitism.
We support and encourage the BDS campaign against Israel around the world. This is not only necessary but also a duty of international solidarity, which should be the priority action point among trade unions around the world.
We also call upon all and everyone to be an active player in raising funds and all the material resources to meet the bare necessities of food, medicine, and medical supplies for the people.
The utter disregard for international law by Israel and its contempt for United Nations resolutions further confirm the need for the restructuring and transformation of this super global governance institution to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Its relevance as a custodian of global peace and security is in question. So is its legitimacy to resolve disputes and set standards for global governance.
I urge all trade unions, social movements, NGOs, religious organisations and academics to support and actively participate in the BDS campaign against Israel, refusing to handle anything that comes from and that goes to Israel in order to isolate it until it submits to international law and withdraws from all the occupied territories.
We urge all companies and all shipping companies to refuse to carry any arms to Israel. Any shipping company who carries these weapons has the blood of the people of Gaza on its hands! We call upon all governments to enforce international law, by refusing to recognise a country that makes a mockery of international law and the pursuit of human dignity.
They must expel Israeli ambassadors and representatives in order to ensure that we isolate it throughout the world until it subscribes to the ideals of human dignity! We call upon media to expose the real truth and not to hide the real issues in the name of objectivity, by projecting an image of Israel as a state under siege by terrorists, thus discrediting the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people.
Balanced reporting does not mean massaging issues and diluting the truth even in the face of insurmountable evidence against the wrong side.
We acknowledge the progressive role of our government in relation to the situation in the Middle East, including its humanitarian support for the suffering people of Gaza, but we call on our government to speak out even more strongly against the oppression of Palestinians and express its disapproval of the ruthless actions of the Zionist state and its defenders.
We want to see the end of all trade relations with Israel and call on our government, business and civil society to work together with the progressive forces of South Africa towards real and biting sanctions against Israel if we are serious about peace in the Middle East.
The global solidarity movement must be intensified to support the cause of the suffering people of Palestine, even more so with the crisis in Gaza. A day more under occupation is a day of hell for the dispossessed people.
Issued by COSATU, March 5 2015
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
