Portside

On 15 May, many South Africans fasted in solidarity with more than 1,300 Palestinian prisoners who have been on hunger strike in Israeli prisons to demand their basic rights.

Hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners are now approaching their critical sixth week on hunger strike, and they have made an urgent appeal for international solidarity. The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) calls for immediate international action towards implementing a comprehensive military embargo on Israel, similar to that imposed against apartheid South Africa in the past.

`It's exactly what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go: they could drink from that fountain, they couldn't go over there, they couldn't eat in that place,' the American actor tells an Israeli TV station during a tour of the segregated West Bank city.

They undertook secret missions against South Africa's apartheid regime. Sensational story hidden for over 40 years. In the 1960s, a group of leftists risked everything to revive the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. These international activists who embraced a working-class radicalism that was internationalist, cosmopolitan, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist - and most important, steadfastly opposed to legalized racial oppression in South Africa.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, signed an executive order essentially creating a blacklist of entities that boycott or divest from Israel or encourage others to do so, banning those companies from receiving taxpayer funding. The movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, known as B.D.S., is a strategy intended to combat Israel's nearly 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, a situation akin to apartheid if allowed to continue.

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Israel is not a liberal democracy that supports the flourishing of its citizenry. Democracy requires consent of the governed, and Israel controls, directly and indirectly, millions of Palestinians without their consent. There is a progressive, liberal, civil rights movement in Israel - the third largest list in the Knesset. The awful crisis of the right's victory is an unprecedented opportunity for us to learn from our mistakes and create a new mass movement.

Johannesburg’s inner city has seen dramatic change in the past 20 years. As apartheid began to collapse, laws that kept the black majority out of cities were first disregarded and then repealed. As black people moved in, whites fled to suburbs. The inner city dramatically degraded, with neglected buildings, fewer services and crime. Now this image of downtown Johannesburg is beginning to shift, with the arrival of property developers who are creating affluent enclaves.

Prohibition on Palestinian appeals to military court decisions confiscating their property embodies the essence of occupation. Returning the legal situation to the narrow province of military law harms the rights of the Palestinian residents, and the removal of judicial oversight for the proceedings against them allows these rights to be harmed arbitrarily, in violation of international law and the basic rules of justice.

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