Johannesburg- Today, Friday, the activities of the World Conference against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine will begin in South Africa, which will be hosted by the city of Johannesburg during the period from 10 to 12 May this year.
This is the first international conference that calls for launching a global movement to dismantle the system of settler colonialism and Israeli apartheid, and more than 200 religious, political and partisan figures from all over the world will participate in it.
The conference comes in light of the continuation of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip since the seventh of last October, which left about 35,000 Palestinian martyrs, most of them children and women, in addition to the injury of about 79,000, according to data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Positions and statements
The conference will open with a speech by the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, Naledi Pandor, who in previous statements condemned the Israeli aggression against Gaza, and threatened to arrest her country’s citizens who served with the occupation army if they returned to the country.
An elite group of speakers will participate in the first session of the conference, including Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative, Mustafa Barghouti, member of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly, Declan Kearney, and Saleh Hijazi from the Boycott Israel Movement, in addition to lawyer and international law specialist Lamis Dick.
In this context, conference president Frank Chikane said – in a post on the conference website – “The Palestinian people are facing a genocidal attack by the Israeli apartheid regime on an unprecedented scale.”
Shikani said – in a previous interview with Tel Aviv Tribune Net – that what I see in Palestine is worse than the policy of apartheid that South Africa was subjected to. We did not have an occupation, and we did not have an army controlling our movements, but the Israeli regime practices more than that against Palestinians.
Conference objectives
This conference essentially aims to mobilize the global anti-apartheid movement to hold Israel accountable for the crime of apartheid it committed against the Palestinians, and to work to dismantle Israeli apartheid from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, according to the statement issued by the steering committee of this conference.
The idea of holding it appeared in 2022, when a Palestinian national conference was held against apartheid, organized by several organizations, official bodies, human rights councils, and civil organizations.
The conference produced a historic call for the establishment of a global front to dismantle the Israeli system of settler colonialism and apartheid.
Then the first response to this call came from South Africa, where the Steering Committee to Combat Apartheid in this African country was formed, and then it was agreed to organize the first international conference against Israeli apartheid.