sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Photo: dpa
Faizel Patel – 25/11/2020
Human rights organisation Africa4Palestine says it is shocked by outgoing US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s attempts to protect Israel.
During a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, Pompeo termed the BDS boycott of Israel movement as a “cancer” and announced that the USA would recognise the global BDS campaign as anti-Semitic.
In a statement, Africa4Palestine’s Muhammed Desai says equating the BDS movement with anti-Semitism ignores the fact that Jewish organizations, within Israel, the USA, South Africa and beyond, vocally support the BDS movement.
“We reiterate our long standing position that attempts by the Israeli lobby to falsely smear our principled opposition to Israeli Apartheid as anti-Semitism. It is not only false and disingenuous, but also a feeble desperate attempt at obfuscating the obvious which is that Israel is indeed an Apartheid State and is undertaking a well-documented form of oppression against the Palestinians.”
Desai says the BDS movement is not against people of Jewish descent, but rather a campaign against the State of Israel and that regime’s well documented record of violations of international law.
He says similarly, the boycott against Apartheid South Africa was not against White people or people of European decent, it was against White supremacy and the human rights violations committed by the Apartheid South African regime.
“As Africa4Palestine, we unequivocally reject Donald Trump and Pompeo’s final attempts for relevance and their clamour for legacy, with the contempt it deserves!”
Desai says boycotts are an age-old strategy used the world over by oppressed peoples to hold oppressive regimes accountable.
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