I feel that Israel is living the same conditions as those in the years that led up to the collapse of the South African apartheid regime. I have written several times about this issue, and the recent raid on the freedom flotilla has been speeding up the campaign to isolate Israel as a state that violates international law and disregards the most basic human values. The boycott of South Africa began among the peace groups and human rights organizations, including an academic boycott followed by an economic one. The regime in Pretoria ended up with no other allies in racism save for Israel, which murders Palestinians like the regime murdered blacks, and in the end, the apartheid regime collapsed like a house built on sand. Israel was founded on biblical myths and an ongoing banditry, murder, destruction and dispossession of the land's rightful owners. But Israel could not have survived this long, were it not for its exploitation of the Holocaust and the Christian West's guilt towards the Jews that it had murdered, and which then allowed the survivors to commit against the Palestinians, the same Nazi practices they have suffered. And so for years now, I have been following the academic boycott of Israel and the activism on every campus from Europe to the United States against Israeli visitors, including official delegations and public relations officers, whose sole aims are lying and distorting the facts. Although Israel depends on Christian evangelists similar to the fundamentalist extremists among us, other conscientious Christian churches became well aware of the Israeli crimes, and many American Protestant churches boycotted and divested from Israel, and called on their followers not to invest in Israel. Today, Israel is facing the BDS campaign, or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which is exactly the same kind of campaign that South Africa faced until the apartheid regime collapsed. It is no small thing that Unite, the largest trade union in Britain, the country that invented trade unions, voted unanimously to boycott Israel. The decision urged the union to divest from Israeli companies – this is similar to the union's boycott of South Africa before – and to host a conference of international trade unions aimed at promoting the boycott of Israel, and at the same time, to host the Palestine Conference in support for Palestinian rights. At the same time, the Union of British Universities and Colleges, the largest academic union of its kind in the country with a membership of 120 thousand, voted in favour of hosting the Palestine Conference in turn, and demanded that all relations be severed with the Histadrut, and urged all other trade unions to follow suit. According to Professor Tom Hickey from the University of Brighton who presented the resolution, the Histadrut supported the war on Gaza in 2008-2009, and hence does not deserve its name as a trade union. Israel's supporters attempted to thwart the resolution but they failed. In Australia, on the other side of the world, the writer John Passant urged the Australian Council of Trade Unions to boycott Israel. In Sweden, the port workers union announced that they will boycott Israeli ships and goods between the 15th and the 24th of this month. I also read news in the Israeli press that said that the strongest campaigns among trade unions against Israel are taking place in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. Moreover, the British Academic Union invited Bongani Masuku, the International Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, to explain the Congress's campaign against Israel. Israel's advocates in the British union protested strongly against this, but they failed despite the fact that Masuku campaigned against South African businessmen and companies that support Israel and demanded that Israel's supported be expelled from South Africa. The calls for the boycott of Israel, as I said in the beginning, have been around for years. However, the Israeli government's barbaric raid against the peace activists has led to further self-delegitimization, with the ensuing expansion of the campaign against the Israeli racist regime that succeeded its ally in South Africa as the last remaining apartheid regime in the world. In Israel, there is an economic magazine called ‘Marker' that rounded up the losses of the boycott. The magazine rebuked Eli Yishai, the Minister of Trade and Industry, after he requested that the Israeli army destroy a hundred homes in Gaza for every rocket fired against Israel. This stance by Yishai, the leader of Shas, is a Nazi stance at one hundred percent. The magazine said that the minister does not realize the magnitude of the damage caused to the producers and exporters as a result of the government's policies. The boycott included football teams, musicians and bands. But it must carry on in order for it to succeed. However, I do realize that Israel and its supporters, including the Likudniks, the lobby and the collaborationist media, have capabilities that were not available to the white regime in South Africa. [email protected]
