A Clarion Call From Mr. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi

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It is not very often that a 10 minute speech can pierce through the thick cloud of obfuscation, bickering and endless essays and debates with laser sharp clarity. This video is a must watch for anyone interested in the Israel/Palestine conflict and in how to emerge from it.

Unlike Zionist Jews who have taken the lessons of the Holocaust and used it to create their own exclusionary, oppressive state based on discriminatory laws, ethnic cleansing and militarization, in S. Africa, among former victims of Apartheid, sympathy for the Palestinian plight runs high. They know what we have known all along: Israel, the twin sister of Apartheid S. Africa and its closest ally, has created a system whose evils by far eclipse those of its S. African counterpart and has already lasted for longer.

The fight against Israeli Apartheid is a formidable one. Despite trumping the eternal victim card, Zionists are hardly the besieged and persecuted little victims they claim to be. Zionism is arguably the most powerful force in world politics today, commanding the very pinnacle of power throughout the West. In America they have managed to virtually ban from discourse Israel’s criminality and Apartheid and America’s support for it, using accusations of antisemitism to level any opposition and to disarm their opponents. Mighty Zionism has influence and connections far beyond what the Boers in S. Africa could have ever dreamed of.

Despite all this, if we focus our attention on what Mr. Ndlozi calls for, namely Justice, Freedom and Equality, we will be victorious. Let me just highlight a few of Mr. Ndlozi’s words, as he cuts the Israel/Palestine Gordian knot with the sharp sword of his insight:

Boycott supporters should not be dragged into endless legal hair splitting arguments whether Israel is exactly like S. Africa’s Apartheid or not. Apartheid, being the ideology of political separatism and exclusivity on the expense of the native population, is already there.

With crystal clear precision Mr. Ndlozi points to another aspect of Israel’s ideology of exclusivity: the idea that a state of colonial immigrants can prevent the indigenous population of refugees from returning to their homes in order to achieve a demographic objective and maintain its exclusivity makes Israel’s Apartheid a far greater evil than any of what White Nationalist S. Africa ever hoped to achieve.

The drive to boycott Israel should be a grass root movement with the power in the hands of activists, not government officials.

Mr. Ndlozi rightfully calls the Palestinian leadership appeal to the UN “a dangerous move”. As I elaborated in this blog, the Palestinian leadership is foolishly pursuing a policy of UN Recognition in a move that can potentially seal the Palestinian sordid fate for generations. By appealing to the UN, they are in essence relegating their destiny to a body whose very structure legitimizes force, rather than justice, thus allowing Israel’s system of oppression and ethnic cleansing to continue for decades without any sanctions. It is also worth reminding that long before Abbas, Arafat’s ‘momentous’ speech at the UN took place almost 40 years ago and yet the Palestinians are in a worse plight and farther from achieving freedom and justice than they have ever been. Continuing this disastrous trajectory is a grave danger to the Palestinian cause, bordering on criminality.

The call for Freedom, Justice and Equality is a call against which there is no defense. Any other paradigm, attempt at negotiations, debates, appeals to the Israeli public or the UN or solutions that fall short of achieving Freedom, Justice and Equality and which allow the political ideology of separatism at the expense of the indigenous population to prevail, are doomed to fail. I may also add that any state that requires continued violation of basic human rights, race laws and discrimination in order to survive is a state that should not exist in the first place.