William Hanna, 29/12/2021
William Hanna is a London-based freelance writer on democracy and human rights and author of The Grim Reaper and The Broken Promise Of A Promised Land. Further information including books, reviews, articles, sample chapters, videos, and contact details at: https://www.williamhannaauthor.com
In 2014, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu wrote an exclusive article for Haaretz in which he called for a global boycott of Israel and urged Israelis and Palestinians to look beyond their leaders for a sustainable solution to the crisis in the Holy Land. The following is an excerpt:
The past weeks have witnessed unprecedented action by members of civil society across the world against the injustice of Israel’s disproportionately brutal response to the firing of missiles from Palestine.
If you add together all the people who gathered over the past weekend to demand justice in Israel and Palestine – in Cape Town, Washington, D.C., New York, New Delhi, London, Dublin and Sydney, and all the other cities – this was arguably the largest active outcry by citizens around a single cause ever in the history of the world.
A quarter of a century ago, I participated in some well-attended demonstrations against apartheid. I never imagined we’d see demonstrations of that size again, but last Saturday’s turnout in Cape Town was as big if not bigger. Participants included young and old, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, blacks, whites, reds and greens ... as one would expect from a vibrant, tolerant, multicultural nation.
I asked the crowd to chant with me: “We are opposed to against the injustice of the illegal occupation of Palestine. We are opposed to the indiscriminate killing in Gaza. We are opposed to the indignity meted out to Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks. We are opposed to violence perpetrated by all parties. But we are not opposed to Jews.
Unlike the majority — if not all — of his fellow Christian bishops and archbishops, Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu was not a cowardly hypocrite who shied away from his Christian duty to condemn Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people because as was declared by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “To stand with Palestine is to stand with Humanity.” Christian religious and political leaders, however — the same despicable breed who with hypocritical moral indignation condemned Apartheid in South Africa — have continued to subserviently go along with Israel’s asinine assertion that its terrifying transgressions against Palestinians represents “a right to defend itself.
