Israel’s assault on Gaza and its Palestinian residents stretches into its 11th month this week, despite the United Nations Security Council’s belated call for a ceasefire resolution this summer. Independent UN experts have called on all General Assembly states to “follow the example of 146 United Nations Member States and recognize the State of Palestine,” underscoring global support for Palestinian self-determination and the possibility of a two-state solution.

Despite President Joe Biden’s demand for a ceasefire deal and his acknowledgement of Palestinian solidarity protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday, the U.S. government recently approved a $20 billion weapons deal to augment Israel’s already robust military capabilities, which works against these internationally agreed upon goals. For the U.S. to continue arming Israel without ceasefire assurances and commitments to end the occupation not only reinforces the violent status quo, but further implicates our government as accomplices in the crime of apartheid, a charge that has been levied by reputable human rights organizations.

While a ceasefire will bring an end to the onslaught of violence, there can be no peace in the region so long as Israel’s occupation of Palestine persists through colonialism and apartheid.

Black and third world activists transformed anti-apartheid thinking into a global politics by deepening the meaning of apartheid, applying it to all governments that were practicing various forms of systematic racist and colonial oppression. By their logic, it included the political movement of Zionism.

Apartheid, meaning “separateness” in Afrikaans, was originally a system of White-only governance in South Africa, which started in 1948 and ended in 1994 shortly before a newly enfranchised Black majority helped elect Nelson Mandela to president. 

The original policy of apartheid was more than segregation, but makes up an entire system of anti-Black oppression, including its racist, sexist, segregationist, exploitative, setter-colonial, and carceral dimensions. Over the course of the 20th century, apartheid evolved as a sprawling social engineering project designed to protect capitalist interests and White minority rule.

To Black people across the world, apartheid has been a racist affront since its inception. The global movement, led by Black South African exiles and their international allies fought against apartheid by organizing trade, cultural, and sport boycotts, calling for divestment and pressuring Western governments to sanction the regime throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Across these decades, Black and third world activists transformed anti-apartheid thinking into a global politics by deepening the meaning of apartheid, applying it to all governments that were practicing various forms of systematic racist and colonial oppression. By their logic, it included the political movement of Zionism.

Segregated entrance in apartheid South Africa, April 22, 1985. Credit: Ilan Ossendriver / Wikimedia Commons
Palestinian women queued up at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank, just outside the Palestinian city of Ramallah, August 2004. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Anti-apartheid activists equated both Zionism and apartheid to colonialism, a claim strengthened by Israel and South Africa’s ongoing collaboration and encouragement of each other’s respective colonialist projects. From 1967 until 1987, the Israeli government was the lone developed nation to maintain strong relations with South Africa. South Africa’s Prime Minister John Vorster, a former Nazi sympathizer, noted in 1976 that “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

In the decades since Israel’s initial occupation of Palestine, condemnation of its link with South Africa’s racialized segregation was forged intergenerationally in anticolonial organizing spaces that hosted African, Asian, Caribbean, and Palestinian delegations who were seeking self-determination. It began with the 1955 African Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which resolved to support both Black South African and Palestinian self-determination. When they advanced a resolution in favor of Palestinian statehood, Israel rebuked them.

In 1967, two years after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee took part in the protest against Chase Manhattan Bank’s financial ties to apartheid South Africa in New York, the organization labeled Israel an “illegal state” and argued that “the Palestinian problem” affected the lives of all Africans, Asians, and Arabs.

This continued organizing spurred the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution in 1975 determining that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” consistent with apartheid South Africa. After these resolutions, the UN declared apartheid a crime under international law, a move that formally universalized its application.

Calling Israel’s occupation “apartheid” continued into the 21st century when organizations attending the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, drew parallels between South Africa’s apartheid past and Israel’s current occupation, including its policies of forced removal and settlement and its segregation, surveillance, and confinement practices. When Israel erected a border wall during the early 2000s, many Palestinians and international onlookers referred to it as the “Apartheid Wall.”

A separation wall under construction in the West Bank, occupied Palestine, April 2, 2012. Credit: Jasmine Halki

If history reminds us that European colonialism, Nazism, Jim Crowism, and South African apartheid were among the 20th century’s most morally repugnant regimes, then surely we can agree that the continued occupation of Palestine is just as iniquitous.

These traditions of anticolonialism and antiracist activism call on Americans to support Palestinian self-determination and refuse complicity in Israel’s genocide, even if it means casting votes of conscience this fall against both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates who met with Israeli Prime Mnister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to the U.S. last month and have pledged their financial and rhetorical support to an apartheid regime.

Moral leadership can be found with third-party candidates such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware, who are running on an anti-genocide platform, as well as Cornel West and Melina Abdullah’s anti-imperialist platform. Historically, working-class African Americans, Black radicals, and progressives have looked beyond the two-party system and supported third-party candidates at critical political moments, such as Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party in 1948 and Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party in 1964.

In this moment, we must remember that these stances of courage and conscience were first piloted by the U.S. students who occupied their campuses to express solidarity with Gaza last spring. They reinvigorated the capacious anti-apartheid politics of the previous century — pairing support for Palestinian statehood with demands to shut down Atlanta’s Cop City and end U.S. interference in Haiti, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their vision reminds us that anti-apartheid, at its best, is a politics that demands a better world.

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Amanda Joyce Hall is a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. She is a professor and a scholar of African American and African diaspora history who writes on the global movement against South African apartheid.