John Pilger on Palestine solidarity

Recent protests against an Israeli tennis player competing in New Zealand’s top tennis tournament has bought the issue of Palestine to public attention once again. Like the struggle against South African apartheid the campaign has already provoked controversy over the links between politics and sport, the right to protest and police attempts to suppress it. In the following article, John Pilger looks at the international campaign for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

Photo from Aotearoa Indymedia

For Israel, a reckoning By John Pilger The farce of the climate change summit in Copenhagen affirmed a world war waged by the rich against most of humanity. It also illuminated a resistance growing perhaps as never before: an internationalism linking justice for the planet earth with universal human rights, and criminal justice for those who invade and dispossess with impunity. And the best news comes from Palestine. Palestinian resistance to the theft of their country reached a critical moment in 2001 when Israel was identified as an apartheid state at a United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. To Nelson Mandela, justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of our time”. The Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS), was issued on 9 July 2005, effectively reconvening the great non-violent movement that swept the world and brought the scaffolding of African apartheid crashing down. “Through decades of occupation and dispossession,” wrote Mustafa Barghouti, a wise voice of Palestinian politics, “90 per cent of the Palestinian struggle has been non-violent... A new generation of Palestinian leaders [now speaks] to the world precisely as Martin Luther King did. The same world that rejects all use of Palestinian violence, even clear self-defence, surely ought not begrudge us the non-violence employed by men such as King and Gandhi.”

Keep reading