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Israel’s apartheid across the occupied Palestinian territories is “far worse” than the apartheid perpetrated by white nationalists for decades in South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, said in remarks on Wednesday.
“Many of us that have visited the occupied territories in Palestine have only come back with one conclusion: that the Palestinians are experiencing a far worse form of apartheid than we ever experienced,” said Mandela. “These last two years, what you have been witnessing, is a testament to that.”
Mandela was speaking to Reuters at the Johannesburg airport before taking off to Tunisia to join a Gaza aid flotilla mission on Wednesday evening.
He noted the importance of global pressure in ending Israel’s siege of Gaza and apartheid regime.
“We believe that the global community has to continue supporting the Palestinians, just as they stood side-by-side with us,” Mandela said, noting the international campaign to end South Africa’s apartheid.
“They isolated apartheid South Africa and finally collapsed it. We believe that the time has come for that to be done for the Palestinians,” he went on.
Organizers, under the Global Sumud Flotilla, launched a fleet from Spain on Sunday, and are sailing to Tunisia to meet up with another convoy of boats to depart Thursday. From there, the group will set sail to Gaza, a journey expected to take a week or so, in hopes of breaking Israel’s near-total blockade on humanitarian aid and other goods.
With over 50 ships, the convoy is the largest yet to attempt to sail to Gaza and deliver desperately needed aid. Israel has seized and attacked every flotilla mission thus far, and Israeli officials are already threatening to seize the Global Sumud Flotilla’s boats and its activists.
At a rally in support of a part of the flotilla launching from Genoa, Italy, on Sunday, dockworkers said that they would work to block all shipments to Israel if Israel obstructs the flotilla once again.
“Around mid-September, these boats will arrive near the coast of Gaza. If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades, even for just 20 minutes, we will shut down all of Europe,” a dockworker said at the rally, per footage that circulated online.
“From this region 13 to 14,000 containers leave every year for Israel, not a single nail will leave anymore,” he went on.
Dockworkers in Genoa, one of Europe’s largest ports, have been reportedly gathering aid to send to Gaza for weeks. Similar dockworker activism has taken place throughout Israel’s genocide.
Dockworker activism also played a role in toppling South Africa’s apartheid regime. In 1984, San Francisco dockworkers, many of them Black, launched a 10-day protest in which they refused to unload cargo sent from South Africa, protesting the reelection of pro-apartheid President Ronald Reagan. The dockworkers were members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which had a long history of supporting independence movements and figures like Nelson Mandela.
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