Ronnie Kasrils

When African National Congress leader Chief Albert Luthuli made a call for the international community to support a boycott of apartheid South Africa in 1958, the response was a widespread and dedicated movement that played a significant role in ending apartheid. Ronnie Kasrils comments a new petition by South African academics aimed at supporting the boycott call of Israel.

When I came to learn of the fate that befell the Palestinians, I was shaken to the core and most particularly when I read eye-witness accounts of a massacre of Palestinian villagers that occurred a month before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence. This was at Deir Yassin, a quiet village just outside Jerusalem, which had the misfortune to lie by the road from Tel Aviv. South African minister Ronnie Kasrils recalls the massacre that happened there 60 years ago and observes that the killing of Palestinians has continued uninterrupted.

The parallels between the Palestinians’ 50 years of struggle for their own land and the anti-apartheid movement’s decades of military and civil campaigns for majority rule are seen as obvious in Southern Africa, where liberation wars successfully ended colonialism and racial oppression, write Ronnie Kasrils, a South African government minister and veteran of the ANC’s anti-apartheid struggle, and Victoria Brittain in The Guardian.