A bill has been submitted to the United States congress calling for a full review of the country’s bilateral relationship with South Africa following the International Court of Justice ruling that found it plausible that Israel has committed acts of genocide against Gaza.
A large billboard has gone up in Johannesburg, South Africa – calling Israel out for what has been called by many its genocide, occupation and ethnic cleansing. South Africa has long been a stronghold of Palestinian solidarity within the African continent. The situation in Gaza and the West Bank resonates deeply with South Africans, who see parallels between Israeli military law and apartheid in South Africa. Many South African activists have participated in delegations to Palestinian territories and continue to raise their voices. From Nelson Mandela to Desmond Tutu to Julius Malema to Mandla Mandela – some of South Africa’s most prominent and admired figures have spoken out consistently against Zionism and Israeli settler-colonialism in Gaza and the West Bank.
In December 1982, following Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution A/RES/37/43 concerning the ‘[i]mportance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination’. It endorsed, without qualification, ‘the inalienable right’ of the Palestinian people to ‘self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference’, and reaffirmed the legitimacy of their struggle for those rights ‘by all available means, including armed struggle’. It also strongly condemned Israel’s ‘expansionist activities in the Middle East’ and ‘continual bombing of Palestinian civilians’, both said to ‘constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people’. In the four decades since then, Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people and its colonisation of their land has not ceased. Up to the present moment, all over historical Palestine, from the Gaza Strip to Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinians are still under that same occupation, subject to suffocating control over virtually every aspect of their lives – and the sadistic, unaccountable violence of the Zionist state.
For the second time this year, large numbers of armed Israeli settlers have rampaged through Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank terrorizing Palestinians in their homes.
In this new essay, John Pilger recalls the ‘electric’ opposition of writers and journalists to the coming war in the 1930s and investigates why today there is ‘a silence filled by a consensus of propaganda’ as the two greatest powers draw closer to conflict.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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