The South African government might consider supporting sanctions against Israel as it explores a variety of peaceful methods to step up support for the Palestinians’ fight for freedom and independence.

“We want to step up our support of the Palestinians and are investigating a number of peaceful ways to upgrade this support. We have no problem with supporting the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aganist Israel,” Minister of Arts and Culture Paul Mashatile told The New Age.

Mashatile was addressing a press conference in Pretoria yesterday at the Department of Arts and Culture, during the signing of a cultural agreement between South Africa and Palestine.

During the signing Palestnian Arts and Culture Minister Siham Barghouti and Palestinian Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture Musa Abu Ghreibeh, exchanged gifts with their South African counterparts, Minister Mashatile and deputy minister Joe Pehle. 

Later on in the year the Palestinians will host South Africa’s Arts and Culture Week, where South African artists and cultural entrepreneurs will present cultural exhibitions from their country.

Mashatile’s statement presents a considerable upping of the ante in South Africa’s long-standing support for the Palestinians and the cementing of a relationship that goes back decades, to when the ANC was struggling against the former apartheid government.

“Your Excellency, we count the people of Palestine among those patriots who stood by us in our struggle for national liberation,” Mashatile told the Palestinian delegation as he recalled former President Nelson Mandela’s 1997 speech to honor the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

“Having achieved our freedom we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face. Yet we would be less human if we do so,” said Mandela in 1997.

BDS supporters argue that Israel’s continued illegal occupation of the Palestinians territories and expropriation of Palestinians land, water and other resources can only be stopped when sanctions against Israel begin to bite economically

“We are grateful for South Africa’s support for our efforts to become members of the international community and look towards you for guidance in our continued struggle,” said Barghouti.

The two delegations agreed that future cooperation would include language development, heritage preservation, literature exchanges and exhibitions.

COSATU, South Africa`s largest trade union confederation, wishes to send solidarity and fraternal greetings to our Palestinian comrades in struggle as they meet for the important trade union conference that will include the establishment of the Palestinian Coalition of Trade Unions for BDS.

Those of us that have had the chance to visit Palestine have witnessed that in front of the Apartheid Wall, the siege on Gaza and the repeated massacres of the Palestinian people that in many ways South Africa`s apartheid regime pales. Faced with the growing brutality of the racist Israeli apartheid regime, trade union action is of utter urgency. We cannot stay idle in front of the daily humiliation and dispossession of any people, including our Palestinian comrades.

Boycotts played a vital role in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa. We wholeheartedly share the sentiment of our comrades in Palestine that boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is already showing its potential to play a key part in overthrowing Israeli apartheid.

We believe that trade union solidarity needs to be clear and principled. We support and will further the position that as long as the Israeli trade union federation, Histadrut, does not clearly stand up against Israeli apartheid and occupation, it cannot be exempt from the call to boycott Israel and its institutions.

As COSATU we have fully endorsed the Palestinian call for BDS. Indeed, there have been several concrete steps in this direction by our member unions, these include: SATAWU has been at the forefront of dockworker actions blockading Israeli ships; another member union, SAMWU, is currently campaigning for the nationwide establishment of Israeli-apartheid-free municipalities; finally, NEHAWU fully-backed and supported the recent (and successful) campaign for the University of Johannesburg to boycott Israel`s Ben-Gurion University. As COSATU we are committed to continue these efforts, we will also work with Palestinian and international comrades to establish BDS as a policy within the ITUC. We are looking forward to take direction and to work together with the Palestinian Coalition of Trade Unions for BDS to promote BDS locally, nationally and internationally.

Few revolutions have been more inspiring. After years of reporting uprisings and conflicts driven by ideology, factional interests or warlords soaked in blood — from El Salvador to Somalia, Congo and Liberia – Libya’s uprising seems to me more akin to South Africa’s liberation from apartheid. For a start, the once pervasive fear of a hated regime is gone.

From the first days, scores of enthusiastic young revolutionaries, high on the prospect of looming victory, indulged the newfound freedom to finally say what they thought. They churned out screeds listing the dictator’s crimes and posters caricaturing Gaddafi as a common thief and agent of Mossad. Some posters imagined him on trial before the international criminal court or strung up on one of the gallows used for public hangings to terrorise the Libyan population.

Revolutionary committees sprang up. Among them was one charged with getting the message to the outside world that Libya 2011 was not Tehran 1979. The savvy revolutionary activists watching CNN and news websites were not slow in recognising the fearmongering in parts of the US media and Congress over what kind of revolution this was.

Almost the only foreigners in Benghazi during the early days of the revolution were journalists. We were feted with free coffee in cafés and regularly stopped on the street and thanked for coming. But reporters were also quizzed by Libyans who picked up on the talk about Islamic extremists hijacking the revolution. Where, they wondered, did the idea of al-Qaeda in Libya come from? Couldn’t people see what kind of revolution this is?

It is hard not to notice how desperate the core of revolutionaries is to be accepted by the west. It is common enough to run into accountants, oil executives and engineers on the frontline who have studied in Nottingham, Manchester and Brighton. They say they admire Britain and the US. Denunciations of America are noticeably absent, at least on the rebel side of the line. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is a hero in rebel-held areas for recognising the revolutionary administration.

Yet it is also not hard to see why the outside world was uncertain about the revolutionaries. No other country in the Middle East is quite so defined by its leader.

And Ronald Reagan loved apartheid South Africa.

It’s coming:

While intensively engaged in illegal settlement expansion, the government of Israel is also seeking to deal with two problems: a global campaign of what it perceives as “delegitimation” – that is, objections to its crimes and withdrawal of participation in them – and a parallel campaign of legitimation of Palestine.

The “delegitimation,” which is progressing rapidly, was carried forward in December by a Human Rights Watch call on the U.S. “to suspend financing to Israel in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel’s spending in support of settlements,” and to monitor contributions to Israel from tax-exempt U.S. organizations that violate international law, “including prohibitions against discrimination” – which would cast a wide net. Amnesty International had already called for an arms embargo on Israel. The legitimation process also took a long step forward in December, when Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil recognized the State of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), bringing the number of supporting nations to more than 100.

International lawyer John Whitbeck estimates that 80-90 percent of the world’s population live in states that recognize Palestine, while 10-20 percent recognize the Republic of Kosovo. The U.S. recognizes Kosovo but not Palestine. Accordingly, as Whitbeck writes in Counterpunch, media “act as though Kosovo’s independence were an accomplished fact while Palestine’s independence is only an aspiration which can never be realized without Israeli-American consent,” reflecting the normal workings of power in the international arena.

Given the scale of Israeli settlement of the West Bank, it has been argued for more a decade that the international consensus on a two-state settlement is dead, or mistaken (though evidently most of the world does not agree). Therefore those concerned with Palestinian rights should call for Israeli takeover of the entire West Bank, followed by an anti-apartheid struggle of the South African variety that would lead to full citizenship for the Arab population there.

The argument assumes that Israel would agree to the takeover. It is far more likely that Israel will instead continue the programs leading to annexation of the parts of the West Bank that it is developing, roughly half the area, and take no responsibility for the rest, thus defending itself from the “demographic problem” – too many non-Jews in a Jewish state – and meanwhile severing besieged Gaza from the rest of Palestine.

…

When President Reagan took office in 1981, he lent full support to South Africa’s domestic crimes and its murderous depredations in neighboring countries. The policies were justified in the framework of the war on terror that Reagan had declared on coming into office. In 1988, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was designated one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups” (Mandela himself was only removed from Washington’s “terrorist list” in 2008). South Africa was defiant, and even triumphant, with its internal enemies crushed, and enjoying solid support from the one state that mattered in the global system.

Shortly after, U.S. policy shifted. U.S. and South African business interests very likely realized they would be better off by ending the apartheid burden. And apartheid soon collapsed. South Africa is not the only recent case where ending U.S. support for crimes has led to significant progress. Can such a transformative shift happen in Israel’s case, clearing the way to a diplomatic settlement? Among the barriers firmly in place are the very close military and intelligence ties between the U.S. and Israel.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Unisa vice-chancellor Barney Pityana and author Breyten Breytenbach have added their voices to calls for the University of Johannesburg to sever academic ties with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The cooperation between the two universities dates from the 1980s, when the local partner was called Rand Afrikaans University. The agreement now under fire involves scientific interaction and was signed in August last year, renewing a controversial apartheid-era collaboration, its critics say.

On Wednesday next week UJ’s senate will hear recommendations on the future of the university’s ties with Ben-Gurion.

The Mail & Guardian reported in May that the senate had debated the matter then and had asked a senate subcommittee headed by deputy vice-chancellor Adam Habib to make recommendations within three months.

“We have concluded our deliberations and arrived at recommendations,” Habib told the M&G. “It has taken a long time because the matter is highly contested. And I can’t say what our senate will decide.”

Tutu, Pityana and Breytenbach are recent signatories to an online petition launched after the May senate meeting. It calls for “the suspension of UJ’s agreement with Ben-Gurion” and this week had notched up nearly 200 signatories.

Law professor John Dugard, theologian Allan Boesak, ANC stalwart Kader Asmal, struggle veteran and language-rights expert Neville Alexander, poet Antjie Krog, former Freedom of Expression Institute director Jane Duncan and Wits University sociologist Ran Greenstein are among other recent additions to the petition.

Leading the fight to retain ties with Ben-Gurion is the South African Associates of Ben-Gurion University, whose chairperson, Herby Rosenberg, told the M&G he had thought the senate meeting in question would be held late in October and he would “need to make inquiries” before commenting.

His organisation’s president, Bertie Lubner, was on a plane and unavailable, he said. The associates arranged that local advocate David Unter-halter and Ben-Gurion professor Ilan Troen argue in the May senate meeting for retaining ties with UJ, the M&G
reported at the time.
The petition’s signatories come from a range of local universities and identify themselves as “the academic community of South Africa, a country with a history of brute racism on the one hand and both academic acquiescence and resistance to it on the other”.

“The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has had disastrous effects on access to education for Palestinians,” the petition reads.

“While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintainingthe occupation.”

By virtue of its ties with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and the arms industry, Ben-Gurion “structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation”, the petition says.

One example of its “complicity is its agreement with the IDF to provide full university qualification to army pilots within a special [Ben-Gurion] programme,” it says.

The petition calls on UJ’s senate to suspend the relationship with Ben-Gurion until, “as a minimum”, Israel “adheres to international law and … as did some South African universities during the struggle against South African apartheid, openly declares itself against the occupation and withdraws all privileges for the soldiers who enforce it”.

The “discipline” of China’s authoritarian political system should be considered as a potential recipe for economic growth in Africa and other developing regions, South African President Jacob Zuma says.

Mr. Zuma, on a four-day official visit to China, criticized the West and lavished praise on his Chinese hosts as he described a world where dynamism is “shifting from North to South and from West to East.”

His unexpected praise for the authoritarian Chinese system, coming from the leader of one of Africa’s biggest democracies, is further evidence of Beijing’s growing influence in Africa. Within the space of a few years, China has emerged to become Africa’s second-biggest trading partner and a key source of support for its governments.

Last year, China overtook the United States to become the biggest trading partner of South Africa, the richest economy on the continent.

Mr. Zuma made it clear that he is tired of hearing advice from Western governments that demand Western-style democratic systems. Instead, he suggested, the developing world is ready to learn political lessons from the dramatic rise of China, where opposition is muzzled and dissent is crushed.

“In the past, economists from the developed countries told the developing countries that they should behave more like the developed countries,” Mr. Zuma said on Wednesday in a lecture at Renmin University in Beijing.

“The developing world was told that if it did not Westernize and change its political systems to mirror those of the West, they could forget about achieving economic growth and development. Now we are asking what we could learn from other political systems and cultures. Is the political discipline in China a recipe for economic success, for example?”

Royal sex scandals rarely come riper. A government minister is caught in bed with the king’s wife – in fact, one of the king’s 14 wives. Ndumiso Mamba, justice minister in Swaziland, is forced to resign and could yet face much worse from King Mswati III.

But just about the last people to read this story were those in Swaziland itself. The censorious atmosphere in the tiny, impoverished kingdom contrasts with South Africa, where newspapers had a field day.

Such freedom is the envy of much of the continent. South African papers have repeatedly exposed bribery and corruption in high places, including a tainted multibillion pound arms deal investigated by the Mail & Guardian. President Jacob Zuma‘s business and romantic relationships do not escape scrutiny either.

But now South African journalists are facing their most serious threat since the persecution of the apartheid regime. The governing African National Congress is proposing new laws that would make it illegal to leak or publish information deemed classified by the government, with the offence punishable by up to 25 years in jail. The ANC wants to create a media tribunal to regulate journalists’ work.

Given that the Dutch are former colonial masters and their descendants instigated the harsh racial policies of apartheid, one might think that many South Africans, blacks especially, would not cheer for the Netherlands against Spain on Sunday in the World Cup final.

In truth, many will not, but mostly for reasons involving the aesthetics of soccer, not a half-century of state-mandated oppression of blacks.

“Loads of us favor Spain, but it is because they have a flair, a quality,” said Lucas Radebe, a black South African who was captain of World Cup teams in 1998 and 2002. “This is all about football. History is history.”

On the other hand, many black and mixed-race South Africans are rooting for the Netherlands, along with white Afrikaners, who are of Dutch descent. Radebe said that 16 years after the fall of apartheid, this represented a sign of progress, a recognition of deep historical and cultural connections, and a confirmation of Nelson Mandela’s belief in the healing power of sports.

In 1995, a year after being voted president, Mandela famously wore the jersey of the Springboks, the national rugby team largely supported by whites and resented by blacks, as South Africa won the world rugby championship here.

“We forgive and forget,” Radebe said. “You’ve got to live in the world and you want to do it in peace. Mandela said we had to tolerate each other. Somebody has to give in so we can make our way forward. Sport has the power to unite people and change individuals.”

An apartheid-era cabinet minister carried a “nuclear trigger” to South Africa from Israel as part of Pretoria’s efforts to build an atom bomb, according to a report in a Johannesburg newspaper.

Two renowned South African journalists have revealed that Eschel Rhoodie, the apartheid government’s information minister who played a central role in establishing military ties to Israel, privately described in 1979 how he had transported “the trigger” as hand luggage on a flight from Tel Aviv. But they say they were unable to publish the account at the time because of censorship and the former minister’s concerns for his safety.

Allister Sparks – who in the 70s was editor of the influential but now defunct Rand Daily Mail – said he decided to go public with Rhoodie’s admission, despite previous guarantees of secrecy, following last week’s revelations in the Guardian and in a new book, The Unspoken Alliance, that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to apartheid South Africa.