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200+ Luminaries Back Demand for Israel to Free Marwan Barghouti
The Israelis want the Palestinian leadership weak and divided, and they have succeeded in arranging for this outcome.
Dec 03, 2025
Two hundred prominent literary, cultural and political figures have signed an open letter demanding the release from Israeli prison of Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti 66, is widely thought to be one of the few figures who could unite the Palestinians and lead them to statehood. Israel has imprisoned him for 23 years after a trial most observers consider extremely flawed to say the least. Israel is apparently preparing to go on an execution spree against Palestinian prisoners, some of whom are held without charges or trial for indefinite periods of time.
The star-studded list of signatories includes Margaret Atwood of “The Handmaid’s Tale” fame; Mark Ruffalo a.k.a. the Incredible Hulk, Philip Pullman, author of “His Dark Materials;” Paul Simon, who knows a thing or two about bridges over troubled waters; Benedict Cumberbatch a.k.a. Dr. Strange; Sting, who knows when someone’s watching you; artist Ai Weiwei (who was once arrested and held without charges for 81 days himself); television personality and author Stephen Fry; billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson; and other prominent writers and culture figures.
The campaign is being likened to the effort to free Nelson Mandela from the prisons of Apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s, which presaged the end of Apartheid itself.
Palestinian leadership is a mess, though this is largely the fault of Israel and the United States. Occupied people are often divided and ruled by outsiders, who bribe and spy and set honey traps. They turn any successful indigenous leader into either a collaborator or a terrorist. They damage the local economy and so set the stage for societal failure. The Oslo Accords of 1993 turned the Palestine Liberation Organization, which gave up its chief bargaining chip by recognizing Israel, into a tool for policing Palestinians to keep them from rising up over being brutally occupied. As a result, the PLO is now widely hated. Not to mention that the Israeli refusal to allow elections to be held after 2006 has ensured that the Palestine Authority leaders became a corrupt gerontocracy.
Hamas was alternatively bankrolled by the Israelis or at their behest and cooped up in a large open air concentration camp, a combination that made them dangerous rather than complacent and as a result they committed the horrors of October 7, 2023, ensuring that no Israeli or American government could deal with them ever after.
The Israelis want the Palestinian leadership weak and divided, and they have succeeded in arranging for this outcome.
Bargouti has none of the taint of corruption and collaborator status that now clings to the PLO, since although he is a member of Fateh he has been in prison for the bad old days. He has from his youth been opposed to Hamas.
Barghouti was born in 1959 in the hamlet of Kober in Ramallah governorate. His wife Nadwa is an attorney and women’s rights activist.
Barghouti in his teens joined the Communist Party and participated in peaceful demonstrations. As historian Joel Beinin showed in his Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Eqypt and Israel 1948-1965, the Communist Party was one of the few political vehicles in Israel and Palestine that had both Israeli and Palestinian members, since Marxism rejects nationalist chauvinism.
The Israeli-Palestine problem, however, did not seem to him likely to be resolved by sitting around the campfire singing the Marxist equivalent of Kumbaya, and he gravitated to Fateh, the leading group within the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat. In 1978, the Israelis arrested Barghouti when he was around 19, apparently just for being associated with the PLO. They imprisoned him for four years. He finished up his high school degree at Prince Hassan High School in Bir Zeit by completing correspondence courses from prison.
After he was released in 1982, when he must have been about 23, he went to Bir Zeit University and did a BA in History and Political Science. Then he did an MA at Bir Zeit in International Relations. During the 1980s he was active in campus politics and was elected head of the Bir Zeit University student council.
In 1987, the Israelis expelled him to Jordan, which is a war crime. That is, an occupying power is forbidden in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 of displacing members of the occupied population. He had to remain in forced exile until 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO and the latter recognized Israel, ending the state of conflict between the two in principle.
On his return to his homeland, Barghouti landed a teaching position at the main Abu Dis campus of al-Quds University in Jerusalem. In the 1990s, Barghouti was known for having good relationships with Israelis. He rose to become secretary-general of Fateh in the Palestinian West Bank, and then was elected to the Palestinian parliament established after Oslo. He established the secular Tanzim paramilitary to combat rising fundamentalist Hamas militants. He was seen as a young comer in Palestinian politics, as someone on whom the old guard like Yasser Arafat depended. But he was also critical of the corruption that arose in the Palestine Authority.
But during the Second Uprising (Intifada), the relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians again turned violent. In 2002, Barghouti wrote an op ed for the Washington Post entitled “Want Security? End the Occupation.” He said,
- “Over the past 15 months, Israel has killed more than 900 Palestinian civilians, 25 percent of them under the age of 18.”
He added,
- “I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated — the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else. This principle may well lead to my assassination.”
Thereafter, a militant Fateh wing committed violence in Israel, killing dozens of Israelis and the Israeli authorities tagged Barghouti as involved, though they never made public what evidence they had of his involvement. In 2004 he was sentenced to five life sentences.
I am a severe critic of terrorism in the sense of targeting civilians for political purposes. But in the real world of politics, people who deploy that tactic sometimes do have a political comeback. Menahem Begin, who boasted of machine-gunning down innocent Palestinian women and children at Deir Yassin in 1948, became prime minister of Israel and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ahmed al-Shara, formerly head of an al-Qaeda offshoot, who was imprisoned by US marines in Iraq, and who certainly committed a ton more terrorism than Begin, was just recently an honored guest in the Trump White House. Nelson Mandela himself committed political violence in his youth, for which he was imprisoned; he was no pacifist. Released from prison, he became president of South Africa and urged reconciliation.
In prison Barghouti finished a doctorate in political science in 2010 and is known for having argued for restraint and against violence to his Palestinian audience on the outside.
His advice to the Israelis in 2002, which, to say the least they haven’t heeded, is still the best advice. If you want security, end the occupation. If Barghouti could help do that, it might save Israel from its own most self-destructive instincts — which are at the moment sinking it.
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FIFA Can No Longer Be Silent on Israel's Human Rights Atrocities in Gaza
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Jun 26, 2025
Although you might not know it from reading mainstream media in the U.S., Gaza continues to be under siege. Israel has installed a blockade of humanitarian aid, weaponizing food for everyday Gazans who desperately need it, while the Gaza Humanitarian Organization—a shadowy, Israeli-backed organization that relies on private US security contractors—continues to slow-roll the delivery of food. Securing basic foodstuffs has become akin to “a perverted Squid Games” where all too often death is the outcome, according to Dr. Mark Braunner, a volunteer at Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
With U.S. media attention swiveling away from Gaza and toward Iran, this is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Enter a gaggle of leading legal experts and scholars who this week ramped up pressure on FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, demanding that its Governance Audit and Compliance Committee address a well-documented complaint against Israel for holding matches in settlements inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
FIFA has long demonstrated a conspicuous deference toward Israel. FIFA has consistently looked the other way when it comes to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, even when doing so means ignoring its own stated commitments to human rights.
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Let’s be absolutely clear: Israel is carrying out human-rights atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, bombing hospitals, killing Palestinians as they attempt to collect aid, barring doctors from entering Gaza, green-lighting the most aggressive expansion of West Bank settlements in decades. It’s no wonder that Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently characterized Israeli actions as “war crimes.”
On the football front, the Israeli Football Association (IFA) has staged matches in occupied Palestinian territory. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian players and coaches while engaging in the systematic destruction of sport facilities, even converting Gaza’s storied Yarmouk stadium into a temporary interrogation site. These actions violate numerous FIFA Statutes.
FIFA’s response? One might say crickets, but crickets actually make noise. For more than a decade it has foot-dragged investigating good-faith claims against Israel. As Fair Square, the London-based rights group, asserted, “FIFA’s ongoing failure to enforce sanctions against the Israeli Football Association despite long-standing and irrefutable evidence that the IFA is in violation of FIFA Statutes is further evidence of the organisation’s ad hoc and selective enforcement of its rules.”
FIFA’s inaction is a grim example of what Henry Giroux calls “The violence of organized forgetting.”
FIFA’s free pass for Israel is deeply hypocritical. In February 2022, only a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, both FIFA and UEFA, Europe’s governing body for soccer, moved swiftly to suspend Russian football clubs and national teams from all competition. In a joint statement, FIFA and UEFA insisted that “Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine.” And yet, no such solidarity has been forthcoming for Palestinians.
The main reason FIFA and UEFA stood up in the face of Ukraine’s invasion was that numerous European countries refused to take the field against Russia in World Cup qualifying matches. Leaders from places Poland, Sweden, England and the Czech Republic insisted that the powerbrokers of soccer take principled action, forcing FIFA and UEFA’s hand. The president of France’s football association stated, “The world of sport, and in particular football, cannot remain neutral.”
This brings us back to Israel. It’s not too late for soccer barons to take action. And it turns out that UEFA is actually a key player. The Israeli Football Association was originally part of the Asian Football Confederation, given its geographical location in the Middle East. But after Indonesia, Sudan, and Turkey all refused to play 1958 World Cup qualifying matches against Israel, and other countries applied political pressure, the IFA was eventually expelled in 1974. This placed Israel in the soccer wilderness until, in the early 1990s, UEFA invited the Israeli national team to participate in its competitions. In 1994, Israel became a full member of UEFA.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, UEFA halted all matches in Israel for the foreseeable future. This meant that Israel was forced to play recent World Cup qualifying “home” matches in Hungary.
Rights groups—from Human Rights Watch to Fair Square to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner—insist that Israel has openly violated FIFA Statutes. Therefore, individual Football Associations from around the world need to stand up and press FIFA to follow its own rules.
Norwegian Football Federation President Lise Klaveness moved in the right direction recently when she stated, “None of us can remain indifferent to the disproportionate attacks that Israel has subjected the civilian population in Gaza to.” When Susan Shalabi, the vice president of the Palestinian Football Association, urged FIFA to take action against Israel at its recent meetings in Paraguay, the Norwegian Football Federation issued a statement that it “stands in solidarity with the Palestinian Football Association and supports their right to have this long-standing issue properly addressed by FIFA.” We need more of this sort of political courage.
Sport should not be allowed to supersede human rights. For too long, FIFA has executed behind-the-scenes maneuverings that have allowed it to avoid reckoning with Israel’s human-rights violations. As FIFA whistleblower Bonita Mersiades put it, “True reform demands more than new systems—it requires new values.” At the very least, football honchos and fans alike must align their stated values with principled actions.
With authoritarianism on the march globally, now is the time to fix the limit on human-rights abuses, using sports as a way to immobilize the jackboots. As Nelson Mandela put it, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”
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Trump’s South Africa Executive Order Reflects the Global History of White Supremacy
The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition.
Feb 23, 2025
On February 7, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order “to address serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.” The order charged “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against because of their race as refugees.” His actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Analysts in South Africa quickly pointed out the many factual errors in Trump’s diatribe. Even Afrikaners, who he alleges are persecuted, are unlikely to accept being refugees since South Africa is their home country. The post-apartheid constitution of 1997, echoing the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter of 1955, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it.” But Trump’s misunderstanding is an example of the transnational scope of white racist nostalgia.
An essential component of opposing the MAGA offensive against human rights in the United States has been new understandings of U.S. history, as reflected in the 1619 Project and a host of other publications. Most often, however, this discussion has focused on the United States in isolation. Scholars such as Ana Lucia Araújo, in Humans in Shackles, and Howard French, in Born of Blackness, have pioneered wider global histories. But however influential this trend is among historians, it has not been matched by attention in the media or public debate.
The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest.
In the global history of white supremacy, the close relationship between the United States and South Africa stands out for centuries of interaction between the two settler colonies, with both ideological and material links from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Significant links between Black resistance movements in the two countries also date back at least to the early 20th century. But until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest bonds were between white America and white South Africa.
In a short history of the Boer War written by eight-year-old future CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1901, and published by his grandfather, Dulles noted that the Boers landed at the Cape in 1652, “finding no people but a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the British to come in because the Boers had the first right to the land.” For Dulles, as for other U.S. policymakers until almost the end of the 20th century, it was axiomatic that only whites had rights.
The parallels between these two settler colonies were significant. Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to university students in Cape Town in June 1966, put it like this:
I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.
The parallels were matched by a long history of interaction. The concept for the African reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa was modeled on American Indian reservations. As noted by historian John W. Cell, Americans and South Africans debated how to shape “segregation” in urbanizing societies in the mid-20th century. The Carnegie Corporation of New York financed both the classic study of the situation of “poor whites° in South Africa and Gunnar Myrdal´s The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.
In the early 20th century, mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later U.S. president) was the founder and director of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, which shipped some 50.000 Chinese laborers to South Africa to work in South African mines. The scheme was abandoned in 1911. Mention of it was recently deleted from Wikipedia, most likely in 2018.
Both countries were united during the Cold War through anti-communism. South African officials studied McCarthyist legislation in the United States and applied it at home through the Suppression of Communism Act. In both countries, “anti-communism” became a way to defy demands for civil rights. Although white racism in South Africa became the focus of international condemnation after the official adoption of apartheid in 1948, the United States and other Western countries systematically opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades until the rise of the international anti-apartheid movement resulted in the congressional override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
That success came after decades of campaigning in the United States and around the world, with heightened international attention coming in response to resistance in South Africa itself. The Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961, in which Nelson Mandela and 135 other leaders of the African National Congress were charged, evoked widespread anti-apartheid actions in the United Kingdom and other countries. The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and the Soweto Youth Uprising in 1976 precipitated even larger waves of protest, fueled by new media options. Resistance reached a new peak after the formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983.
Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and the first non-racial election that brought him into office, there was worldwide celebration at the end of political apartheid. In later years, it became clear that only a minority of Black South Africans had joined the elite at the top of a still sharply unequal society. Disillusionment and discontent over high rates of unemployment and poverty arose among the majority of Black South Africans.
But that is a very different sentiment than the nostalgia for the old apartheid order among white South Africans who left the country as well as many who stayed in South Africa.
The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition. The global anti-apartheid movement unleashed unprecedented demands by citizens to rein in corporate activity that supported apartheid. In the same way that climate activists studied divestment, so too have conservative lobbying groups studied how to block divestment groups. The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest. Trump’s Executive Order can only be understood in that context.
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Peace Is Just as Possible as War
On International Peace Day this September 21, imagine an unstoppable wave of peace actions sweeping across our country.
Sep 01, 2023
I am heartened each time I come across a study affirming that waging war is not an innate part of human nature, that we humans are just as likely to be peaceful as we are to be violent. To quote the revered anthropologist Margaret Mead, “warfare is only an invention—not a biological necessity.”
And why do I cherish findings by historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and others that we are not doomed inevitably to human conflict; that, in the words of President John F. Kennedy “our problems are man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man.”
In my lifetime, there has been barely a year that my government has not been at war overtly or covertly. By some calculations the United States has been involved in more than 100 wars since 1776—early on with Native Americans to steal their land, claim their natural resources, and imprison them on reservations. Between 1945 and 1989 the U.S. attempted to change other (many democratic) countries’ governments overtly and covertly 72 times. More than 4.5 million people have died in the more than two decades of post-9/11 U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Libya.
Recent landmark research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan of movements from 1900 through 2006 to overthrow dictatorships, expel foreign occupations, or achieve self-determination reveal that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as successful as violent insurrections with the same goals.
But war is relatively new in the more than 200,000-year history of us homo sapiens: Evidence of war dates back to 10-12,000 years ago, especially with the emergence of more settled communities. Further, societies that were once extremely warlike are now peaceful: the countries of Scandinavia, for example, and the tribes of the Iroquois from around 1600. Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland are neutral Western European countries, not members of NATO; and Costa Rica has eliminated its military in a hemispheric region where conflict has been rife. All undercut the notion of war being a deeply ingrained, inevitable biological behavior
Moreover, experts who have studied the history of violent and non-violent responses to conflict have found that violence is not the most effective nor successful way to resolve country-level disputes. Recent landmark research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan of movements from 1900 through 2006 to overthrow dictatorships, expel foreign occupations, or achieve self-determination reveal that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as successful as violent insurrections with the same goals. Elsewhere Chenoweth found that when women have leadership roles, they are “more likely to maintain nonviolent discipline… in resistance campaigns against repressive regimes.”
Especially uplifting, too, are the multitudinous creative individuals and movements in recent decades at work for peace in their countries. In 2005, 1,000 outstanding women peacemakers from 150 countries were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Why 1,000 women? Because “creating peace requires a culture of peace practiced by millions in our daily life,” explained their Nobel prize sponsors. Their slogan, “I am not a wall that divides—I am a crack in that wall” conjures up the lyrics of singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen: “There are cracks in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”
A final piece of wisdom about the necessity of sustaining peace following violent conflict comes from Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, who brought Christian and Muslim women together in her West African country to end Liberia’s brutal 14-year-long civil war in 2003. According to Gbowee, “Stopping a war does not bring lasting peace.” Peace persists through peacebuilding, using community organizing and expressing dissent; teaching peace and nonviolence; and prioritizing the basic issues of women’s, racial and social equality, and environmental protection.
Few of us have imagined forgiveness as a crucial element of peace that can enable peace to endure. In 1995, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years as a political prisoner before emerging as South Africa’s first Black president, called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that offered amnesty to “those responsible for atrocities during the long nightmare of white-minority rule,” provided they publicly confess all the brutalities they had committed and request amnesty. The Commission intended to refrain from revenge and to reconcile the peoples of a deeply unjust, deeply racist society in order to inaugurate social healing that would last. Knowing that forgiveness would not assure perfect justice for all, Desmond Tutu realistically stated that simply punishing their oppressors with prison sentences may have resulted in a civil war ending with “a South Africa lying in ashes.”
There were shortcomings, though. Some of the worst unrepentant war criminals escaped prosecution; some citizens grievously harmed by apartheid citizens felt that amnesty was too easily given; and the country is still ridden with vast inequities. Elsewhere, others believe that peace without accountability for violence is a peace without justice, including Gbowee and other advocating for a war crimes court to ensure accountability for Liberian war criminals.
On International Peace Day this September 21, imagine an unstoppable wave of peace actions sweeping across our country, like that of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. That day Congress closed so its members could attend environmental teach-ins; 20 million citizens and politicians (one-fifth of the population) came out for marches, rallies, and concerts; and 10 million children participated in peace teach-ins in their schools. A surge of environmental legislation and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by President Richard Nixon followed in the next years.
May we be part of finding our country’s lost path to peace: by peace education and active bystander programs in every school; by interracial and interfaith collaborations; by reparations for the historical injustices of slavery and theft of land from Native Americans; by ensuring women’s full equality, including restoring women’s reproductive rights; by beating warheads into windmills through shifting our government’s priorities from militarism to renewable technologies; and by demanding that our lawmakers have a real democratic debate on war, peace, and the military budget.
As Eleanor Roosevelt asked, “When will our conscience grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
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South African Parliament Votes to Downgrade Embassy Over Israeli Crimes in Palestine
"As South Africans, we refuse to stand by while apartheid is being perpetrated again," the resolution's author asserted.
Mar 08, 2023
South African lawmakers voted Tuesday to downgrade the country's embassy in Israel in response to its apartheid, illegal occupation, and other crimes against Palestinians—a move welcomed by human rights advocates around the world.
The resolution to downgrade the status of South Africa's embassy in Ramat Gan, just east of Tel Aviv, to a liaison office was introduced by the center-left National Freedom Party (NFP), which hailed the measure's passage as "a historic moment for our country and a demonstration of our unwavering commitment to justice, human rights, and freedom."
Holding just two seats in the Parliament, the NFP secured the resolution's passage with the support of parties including the dominant African National Congress (ANC), Economic Freedom Fighters, United Democratic Movement, African Independent Congress, Al-Jama-ah, and Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.
"We can no longer stand by while Palestinian human rights are being trampled on."
While Israel's Foreign Ministry called the vote "shameful and disgraceful," NFP Member of Parliament Ahmed Munzoor Shaik Emam, who introduced the resolution, said after its passage that "this is a moment Madiba would be proud of."
Emam was referring to former South African president and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, who advocated for Palestinian rights and for Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
"He always said our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians," Emam said of Mandela, who died in 2013. "Today we took a step closer to the attainment of that freedom for Palestinians."
"We can no longer stand by while Palestinian human rights are being trampled on," Emam asserted. "By passing this resolution, we are sending a powerful message to the world that South Africa remains a beacon of hope and a shining example of what is possible when we come together in pursuit of a more just and equitable world."
Emam continued:
This resolution demands accountability from Israel. It is a courageous move that demonstrates our commitment as a country to justice, human rights, and freedom. The state of Israel was built through the displacement, murder, and maiming of Palestinians. And to maintain their grip on power, they have instituted apartheid to control and manage Palestinians. This institution of apartheid by the state of Israel contravenes international law and is a violation of the human rights of Palestinians.
"As South Africans," he added, "we refuse to stand by while apartheid is being perpetrated again."
Israel—like the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western democracies—supported South Africa's apartheid regime and even helped it develop nuclear weapons. After the fall of South African apartheid and the return to majority rule, the ruling ANC has vocally opposed Israeli crimes against Palestine.
For example, in May 2018 the party responded to Israeli forces' killing of scores of Palestinian protesters by excoriating the actions of "people who continuously remind us all about the hate and prejudice Jews went through during Hitler's anti-Semitism reign [and yet] exhibit the same cruelty less than a century later."
More recently, the ANC last month cheered the expulsion of a senior Israeli diplomat from the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Senior South African officials have consistently condemned Israeli apartheid, which is being acknowledged by a growing number of human rights groups around the world, including in Israel.
Echoing former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Baleka Mbete—who served as South Africa's deputy president, National Assembly speaker, and head of the ANC—in 2012 called Israel "far worse than apartheid South Africa."
Like Carter and other Nobel Peace laureates including Mairead Maguire, Rigoberta Menchú, Jody Williams, Betty Williams, and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the late South African anti-apartheid activist and religious leader Desmond Tutu condemned Israeli apartheid.
The new NFP-led resolution follows last year's call by the South African government for the United Nations General Assembly to declare Israel an apartheid state.
The measure was also passed on the same day that the Palestinian National Authority called on the world "to take immediate, concrete measures to hold Israeli officials accountable for their crimes and continual incitement and threats to commit crimes against the Palestinian people."
"Only the end of Israel's occupation and the dismantling of its apartheid regime will end this violence, racism, and fascism against the Palestinian people," the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates said in a statement.
"If not accompanied by action, statements of condemnation will not suffice," the ministry added. "Urgent international intervention is needed to curb Israel's dangerous aggressions against the Palestinian people and to provide necessary protection."
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Revealed: Big Pharma's Plot to Derail US Covid-19 Vaccine Waiver
The Intercept's Lee Fang has obtained confidential documents exposing the pharmaceutical lobby's attempts to recruit lawmakers for anti-TRIPS waiver effort.
May 14, 2021
While global health advocates applauded the Biden administration's recent decision to support waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines as "critical," "transformative," and "unquestionably the right thing to do," Big Pharma took a decidedly less optimistic view of the move and has been hard at work behind the scenes in a bid to thwart the policy, a report published Friday by The Intercept revealed.
In a bid to stymie U.S. support for a proposal by India and South Africa to enact a Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the pharmaceutical industry is "distributing talking points, organizing opposition, and even collecting congressional signatures in an attempt to reverse President Joe Biden's support for worldwide access to generic Covid-19 vaccines," according to The Intercept's Lee Fang.
Fang obtained an email from Jared Michaud, a lobbyist with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)--a trade group whose clients include vaccine developers AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer--describing how Big Pharma and sympathetic U.S. legislators are pushing lawmakers to oppose a TRIPS waiver.
The email explains that Reps. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) and Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) are leading an unreleased letter to Biden--which currently has 29 co-signers--"expressing concerns with the administration's support for waiving IP protections related to Covid-19 vaccines under the WTO TRIPS waiver."
"We urge you to contact offices and ask them to sign onto this letter," said Michaud's email.
The letter additionally claims that the TRIPS waiver would cost U.S. jobs and be a boon for China, which would "profit from our innovation."
Michaud's email contains talking points that paint the IP waiver as a national security threat that would "irreversibly damage American innovators" and the U.S. government's "strategic engagement," while a separate document marked "confidential" claims that "waiving intellectual property will undermine the global response to the pandemic and compromise vaccine safety."
According to Fang, "The metadata for the document shows that the PDF document was created by Megan Van Etten, an international public affairs specialist for PhRMA."
Fang notes that PhRMA spent $24 million on lobbying at the federal level last year "and is one of the biggest corporate players in election spending."
According to OpenSecrets, PhRMA has spent $8.7 million on lobbying so far this year. This, as client Pfizer has raked in $3.5 billion in profits from the sale of its Covid-19 vaccine in just the first three months of 2021.
"The group has long shaped drug policy not only domestically but also in the international arena," writes Fang. "PhRMA led the push in the late 1990s to pressure South African President Nelson Mandela to drop efforts to break patent laws and allow for the importation and manufacture of generic HIV/AIDS medications, which at the time cost an annual $10,000-$15,000 per patient."
Progressive U.S. lawmakers have taken Big Pharma and its lobbyists to task for their opposition to Covid-19 vaccine patent waivers.
"Amid a global pandemic, major pharmaceutical companies are lobbying to protect billions in profits," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in March following the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's dismissal of the proposed TRIPS waiver as "misguided."
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I Witnessed How Close South Africa Came to Civil War, 25 Years Ago Today
Twenty-five years after South Africa's miraculous first democratic elections, it's easy to forget just how close the county came to civil war.
I was working for the ANC (Western Cape) from 1992-4 and there were times - right up to Election Day itself - that, as Mandela said, it "seemed impossible until it was done."
With weeks to go, violence in KwaZulu-Natal was escalating with the Inkartha Freedom Party (IFP) boycotting the elections.
Tensions were mounting in the so-called "homelands" of Ciskei, QwaQwa & Bophuthatswana.
Apr 27, 2019
Twenty-five years after South Africa's miraculous first democratic elections, it's easy to forget just how close the county came to civil war.
I was working for the ANC (Western Cape) from 1992-4 and there were times - right up to Election Day itself - that, as Mandela said, it "seemed impossible until it was done."
With weeks to go, violence in KwaZulu-Natal was escalating with the Inkartha Freedom Party (IFP) boycotting the elections.
Tensions were mounting in the so-called "homelands" of Ciskei, QwaQwa & Bophuthatswana.
Well-armed conservative Afrikaner militias were mobilizing with Freedom Front leader, General Viljoen, admitting in 2001 up to 60,000 armed men had been mobilized. "My own followers started pushing hard: they wanted an end to all talks, they wanted the war to start," he told a newspaper.
Two days before the elections, a massive car bomb in Jo'burg killed 9 people including ANC candidate, Susan Keane, & injured 92. The next day, 12 people were killed by bombs targeting black people in Germiston & Pretoria.
All attacks bore the hallmarks of white separatist groups.
On 28 March, 55 people were killed & hundreds injured as violence erupted in Jo'burg as IFP supporters protested against the elections. 19 were killed as they marched on the ANCs HQ in what was called the Shell House Massacre.
With Inkatha boycotting the elections, more violence would be inevitable, but incredibly, after intense negotiations & with just a week to go, the IFP agreed to contest elections.
A year earlier, Mandela had pulled the country from the brink of civil war after the assassination of Chris Hani.
Ironically, his murder had the opposite effect of that intended, demonstrating that only the ANC could hold the country together.
On 10 March, another key moment occurred with the failed attempt by some 4,000 Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) members to prop up the puppet govt of Bophutatswana, whose leader was refusing to participate in the election.
Front page photos of the extrajudicial shooting at point blank range of three AWB members had a massive impact, helping to burst the myth of Afrikaner power.
At midnight on election eve, I watched as the new flag was raised above parliament in Cape Town, then slept for a few hours before heading back to the office.
After polls closed Mandela reportedly told a friend: "I should be jumping for joy but I just feel a stillness. There such a huge responsibility. So much to do."
Whilst a massive ANC majority was never in doubt, the declaration of the results was nevertheless eye-watering & emotional.
Thousands gathered on Grand Parade on the night of 1st May, our jubilation overshadowing any disappointment at the ANC's emphatic loss to the National Party in Western Cape.
On 10 May I was part of the crowd at Union Buildings as Mandela took the Oath of Office.
In his inaugural address, Madiba said. "We succeeded to take our last steps to freedom in conditions of relative peace. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace...The time for the healing of the wounds had come."
Just after Mandela was sworn in came a moment that still gives me goosebumps. Three jets flew low over the crowd followed by four helicopters, each towing the new flag.
Instinctively we flinched. But then it dawned...The military - and the State - were no longer enemies of the people: they now belonged to the people.
I came back home soon after that, but feel deeply privileged to have been in South Africa at this remarkable time and to have worked alongside so many courageous people who sacrificed so much so that their country could be free. As Wordsworth put it: "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be a part of it was very heaven."
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Winnie and MLK: Their Fight was Right -- and It's Not Over
The pursuit of racial equality in South Africa and the United States, begun decades ago, still resonates today.
Apr 08, 2018
Fifty years ago this week, the civil rights struggle of Martin Luther King Jr. ended tragically with his assassination on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn. As this was happening in 1968, the struggles of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in apartheid South Africa were only beginning.
The dramatic stories of their lives were being remembered this week in the world's media, but often in selective, self-serving ways. Largely lost in this haze of popular history was what linked them together.
Although living far from each other in distant worlds, these were two profoundly radical, even revolutionary leaders whose withering analyses of their societies' racism endure to this day.
With Martin Luther King, his life was celebrated in the U.S. on Wednesday's 50th anniversary of his death. But he was largely being recast as a widely loved non-violent moderate, instead of what he was at the time of his death: an increasingly unpopular critic of a corrupt and unequal economic system.
With Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who died Monday at the age of 81, she too was being selectively recast in the Western media. To many outside of South Africa, she was being remembered primarily as the former wife of South African icon Nelson Mandela -- and a puzzling figure who kept becoming embroiled in controversy and scandal.
But to many within South Africa, she was far more than that, and the widespread sadness at her passing was evidence of that.
While her husband was in jail -- and kept silent -- between 1964 and 1990, Winnie was the spirit of the resistance, the young mother who refused to be broken. By surviving decades of torture and cruelty by South African police, including long periods of internal exile and solitary confinement, she was an inspiration to generations of South Africans.
Charlene Smith, a South African biographer of Nelson Mandela, described Winnie as "the conscience of a nation" who deserves empathy: "When Mandela went to jail, he was comparatively safe compared with the perilous life she experienced. The apartheid state punished her because of him ... She was tortured beyond anything anyone should endure."
Winnie was also far more radical than her former husband, and was at times critical that Nelson Mandela didn't move more forcefully to eliminate poverty still suffered by black South Africans.
In a similar sense, Martin Luther King Jr. was also becoming more radical in the final years of life as he dwelled on America's inequality -- and was therefore increasingly unpopular among the American political establishment.
In fact, before his death in 1968, "King was well on the way to becoming a pariah," according to Gary Younge, author of a book about King and editor-at-large for The Guardian.
"By the long, hot summer of 1967," Younge writes, "King had, in the midst of the cold war, moved on to questioning capitalism." He quoted King as saying in August, 1967: "We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society."
None of that was recalled by America's leaders in the tribute to Martin Luther King on Wednesday.
In South Africa, there will be a memorial service and a state funeral for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela next week.
South African satirist Trevor Noah said that people haven't forgotten that, when Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders were in jail, the movement was held together by women, led by Winnie:
"I grew up in a world that was very matriarchal and where women were the most dangerous freedom fighters that existed. Nelson Mandela was an icon but the police in the country were afraid of Winnie Mandela. We had a phrase in South Africa that we still use today: ... 'You strike a woman, you strike a rock.' "
In the fullness of her life, Winnie was flawed and imperfect, more of a victim of apartheid than a victor over it. But for many, she was their "rock" during South Africa's darkest hours, and the outpouring of grief next week is expected to be enormous.
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Nelson Mandela's Inconvenient Appreciation for Cuba
Dec 13, 2013
President Obama traveled to Soweto, South Africa this week for the memorial service for former president and anti-apartheid movement leader Nelson Mandela. Over 60 heads of state also attended the services, but only five were invited to speak - among them Cuban president Raul Castro, with whom Obama shook hands - the first such greeting between the presidents of the United States and Cuba since President Bill Clinton shook hands with Fidel Castro on the sidelines of a U.N. summit in 2000. Obama's handshake with Castro was condemned by a number of Republican members of Congress. Senator John McCain likened it to Neville Chamberlain shaking hands with Hitler, while perennial Cuba-hater Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen - who in the past has openly called for Fidel Castro's assassination - called it "a propaganda coup for the tyrant [Castro]." Cruz made headlines for himself by walking out on Castro's speech at the ceremony, with a spokesperson saying that "Sen. Cruz very much hopes that Castro learns the lessons of Nelson Mandela."
But while Republicans have received attention for their criticism of the handshake - just as they did when Obama similarly greeted democratically-elected then-president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez in 2009 - Obama's speech at the event has been described by some as a rebuke of some foreign governments, including Cuba's. "There are too many of us who happily embrace Madiba's legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality," he said without apparent irony, while in Singapore a U.S. delegation was concluding (unsuccessfully) the latest round of efforts to get other countries to agree to a variety of controversial and potentially harmful measures in a proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. As we have described in a research paper, most U.S. workers would lose out from the planned TPP in the form of reduced wages.
As many analysts, historians and observers have pointed out, the condemnation of the Obama-Castro handshake is also ironic considering Mandela's long appreciation for the Cuban government and its unwavering opposition to apartheid and similar racist regimes in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Mozambique and South Africa. Most notably, Cuba provided 36,000 troops to beat back the efforts of the South African military to crush independence in Angola.
As the Huffington Post's Roque Planas points out, while Cuba provided Mandela, the African National Congress and South Africa with inspiration, guidance, resources, training and doctors, "The U.S. government, on the other hand, reportedly played a role in Mandela's 1962 arrest and subsequently branded him a terrorist -- a designation they only rescinded in 2008. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act." Then there's the small matter of U.S. and South African support for the counter-revolutionaries in Angola. As Piero Gleijeses, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of several books including Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 said yesterday in an interview with "Democracy Now": "...the role of the United States as a country, as a government, past governments, in the struggle for liberation of South Africa is a shameful role. In general, we were on the side of the apartheid government. And the role of Cuba is a splendid role in favor of the liberation."
The Republican members of Congress are not alone in attempting to rewrite history and remake Mandela in their image. Notably, various world leaders past and present who supported apartheid and Mandela's imprisonment have gushed over what a great man he was now that he's passed on. But Mandela maintained integrity in his outspoken criticism of the U.S., saying that "If there's a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care." Such sentiments are reminiscent of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s statement that the U.S. is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," and his outspoken condemnation of the war in Vietnam, which earned him the wrath of the foreign policy establishment and the media - when he was still alive.
In contrast, British Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg used the occasion of a Special Session honoring Nelson Mandela to call on the House of Commons to support human rights activists in Afghanistan and Honduras:
Right now, all over the world, there are millions of men, women and children still struggling to overcome poverty, violence and discrimination.
They do not have the fame or the standing of Nelson Mandela, but I'm sure that he would tell us that what they achieve and endure in their pursuit of a more open, equal and just society shapes all our lives.
Campaigners like Mary Akrami, who works to protect and empower the women of Afghanistan; Sima Samar, the Head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission; or organisations like the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras which works in the shadow of threats and intimidation.
They are just 3 examples of the individuals and organisations who deserve our loyalty and support just as much as the British campaigners in the Anti-Apartheid movement in London showed unfailing loyalty and support towards Nelson Mandela in his bleakest days, and here I also want to pay tribute to the Rt. Hon Member for Neath and his fellow campaigners for what they did at the time.
U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske also made remarks on human rights in Honduras, Tuesday, International Human Rights Day. She condemned campesinos and others resisting murder and brutality in the Aguan Valley, and indigenous Lenca communities fighting the imposition of development projects on their land over their objections. In Honduras' context of political repression and rampant impunity for security forces who commit abuses, such comments further imperil some of Honduras' most vulnerable and historically disenfranchised communities.
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Mandela: The Man and the Movement
Nelson Mandela's passing last week at the age of 95 has been met with a global outpouring of remembrance and reflection. A giant of modern human history has died. Mandela is rightly remembered for his remarkable ability to reconcile with his oppressors, and the political prescription his forgiveness entailed for the new South Africa. "Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another," Mandela said in his inaugural speech in Pretoria, on May 10, 1994.
Dec 11, 2013
Nelson Mandela's passing last week at the age of 95 has been met with a global outpouring of remembrance and reflection. A giant of modern human history has died. Mandela is rightly remembered for his remarkable ability to reconcile with his oppressors, and the political prescription his forgiveness entailed for the new South Africa. "Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another," Mandela said in his inaugural speech in Pretoria, on May 10, 1994. In the same speech, he pledged, going forward, "to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination." Mandela has passed, but what he has passed on to succeeding generations is his deep belief in the power of movements to make change.
He spent his early years in the African National Congress (ANC) organizing noncooperation, like the Defiance Campaign in 1952, when he was photographed burning his passbook, the dreaded photo documentation without which black South Africans could not travel within their own country. By 1960, following the Sharpeville Massacre, where the white government's police forces killed at least 69 people who were protesting the pass laws and the passbooks, the government banned the ANC. Mandela and others went underground, forming the ANC's armed wing, calling it Umkhonto we Sizwe, or "Spear of the Nation."
They led a campaign of sabotage, using crude bombs to damage and disrupt key elements in South Africa's infrastructure, from rail lines to power plants. In 1962, Mandela was picked up at a police roadblock, disguised as a chauffeur. The New York Times reported in 1990 that it was the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that provided the South African Special Branch with the specifics of Mandela's whereabouts and appearance. The report went on to say that the CIA spent more on surveillance of the ANC than the apartheid regime did itself. Mandela spent the next 27 years in prison.
At his trial for sabotage with nine others, known now as "The Rivonia Trial," Mandela spoke for the accused, defending their actions. "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities," he declared from the dock, facing the death penalty. "It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." To the surprise of many, and likely thanks to intense domestic and international attention to the trial, the activists were sentenced not to death, but to life imprisonment on South Africa's notorious Robben Island.
The international campaign to end apartheid began in earnest then. Campaigns to divest from companies doing business in South Africa became a central strategy. In 1970, Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, two African-American employees at Polaroid in Cambridge, Mass., noticed that their company was supplying the photo technology for the hated passbooks. Hunter and Williams organized a movement of Polaroid workers that forced it to withdraw all its involvement with South Africa.
Under increasing pressure, the apartheid regime cracked down even more on black South Africans, and the violence was broadcast globally, propelling students on campuses to action. A global movement formed, pressuring university boards to pull their endowment funds from South African investments. In Washington, D.C., Randall Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica, began a protest movement in front of the South African embassy. He told us on "Democracy Now!" "Three of us were arrested, followed by 5,000 Americans who came to the embassy over the following years to be arrested ... of course that helped to propel through the Congress the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. And then American investments in South Africa began to tumble."
Robinson was referring to the bill that California Congressman Ron Dellums introduced, which passed with bipartisan support. President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill, but, in a sign of the nation's determination to fight apartheid, both houses of Congress voted to override Reagan's veto, imposing crushing sanctions on the apartheid regime in Pretoria. "That, combined with the internal pressures in the country," Robinson continued, "produced the circumstances in the government there, the readiness to negotiate and to ultimately release Nelson Mandela."
President Barack Obama spoke at Mandela's memorial service in Soweto this week, and provoked a firestorm of criticism back in Washington for shaking the hand of Cuban President Raul Castro. Mandela was a devoted friend of Fidel Castro, who always supported the ANC. The U.S., on the other hand, did not remove Mandela from its "terrorist watch list" until 2008, 14 years after he was elected president of South Africa.
Nelson Mandela ended his autobiography by saying, "When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. ... The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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