PRESS STATEMENT: Trump administration’s final desperate attack on BDS

25 November 2020

The human rights organization #Africa4Palestine is shocked by Donald Trump’s outgoing USA Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s desperate last attempts to protect Apartheid Israel.

Pompeo, the self confessed “liar, cheat and thief”, speaking at a press conference last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has termed the BDS boycott of Israel movement as a “cancer” and has announced that the USA “will recognise the global BDS campaign as antisemitic…the time is right…”

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. A few years back, Israeli activists wrote: “After many years of trying to change our society from within, we have come to the conclusion that an international campaign, such as the boycott against apartheid South Africa, is necessary to change the situation here.”

Amnesty International has commented that it is “hypocritical and deceitful,” for the Trump administration to attack BDS, “a form of non-violent advocacy and of free expression.”

We reiterate our long standing position that attempts by the Israeli lobby to falsely smear our principled opposition to Israeli Apartheid as anti-Semitism is not only false and disingenuous, but a feeble attempt at obfuscating the obvious, that Israel is indeed an Apartheid State that is undertaking a vile project of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. It is self-evident that the BDS movement is not against people of Jewish descent, rather, it is a campaign against the State of Israel and that regime’s well documented record of violations of international law. 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.

Boycotts are an age-old strategy used the world over by oppressed peoples to hold oppressive regimes accountable.

We reject Trump and Pompeo’s final attempts for relevance and their clamour for legacy, with the contempt it deserves!

ISSUED BY TISETSO MAGAMA ON BEHALF OF #AFRICA4Palestine (FORMERLY BDS)

Spokesperson, Tisetso Magama: +27 (0) 61 414 6348
Director, Muhammed Desai: +27 (0) 84 211 9988