I was stunned to read the South African Rugby Union is to host a rugby tour in March by a team representing the apartheid state of Israel in the 2023 Currie Cup competition. The Tel Aviv Heat have been invited to play four games in South Africa next month.
From New Zealand it seems utterly incomprehensible that a country which experienced first-hand the brutality and degradation associated with apartheid could, after liberation, agree to host a team representing another racist apartheid state.
How could this be possible? Which part of South African history has the rugby union missed?
Just to be clear, every major international human rights organisation now recognises Israel as an apartheid state. Palestinians have always known this as spelt out recently by Palestinian human rights organisation Al Haq in a comprehensive report.
Israel is a settler colonial regime denying human rights to Palestinians – doesn’t that sound familiar to the South African Rugby Union? Wasn’t it another European settler colonial regime which denied civil, political and human rights to black South Africans just as Israel denies the same to Palestinians today?
UK based Amnesty International, US based Human Rights Watch and the largest and most respected human rights organisation in Israel, B’Tselem have all condemned Israel as an apartheid state.
B’Tselem’s sums up the situation eloquently in the title of their 2021 report “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”
Didn’t the world, New Zealand included, support the boycott of apartheid South Africa? Didn’t we disrupt rugby games played by racist South African teams to help bring international pressure for change and human rights to black South Africans?
So how is it comprehensible that in 2023 the South African Rugby Union could ignore human rights for others living under apartheid and refuse to respect Palestinian calls for international boycotts of Israel to bring pressure for change?
South African friends tell me the problem is that rugby was never transformed from its old apartheid structures into a truly democratic, representative organisation – the name in the door changed from South African Rugby Board to South African Rugby Union and a few black faces sat at the table but the deep-seated attitudes embedded in the old apartheid structures were never transformed. As soon as it had undermined and side-lined the non-racial sports bodies in SACOS (South African Council on Sport) it was pretty much business as usual for South African rugby.
This is the only reason which makes sense to me. The job was never finished.
We must also remember this same state of Israel, which wants to tour South Africa and help whitewash its vicious apartheid regime, worked hand in glove with the old South African apartheid regime to undermine sanctions on South Africa and provide arms to bolster the old racist state.
How many black South Africans were killed by Israeli arms supplied to the old apartheid state?
The South African Rugby Union must reverse this decision and close the door to representatives from this apartheid state of Israel.
Palestinians are asking South Africa for the same international solidarity given to South Africans struggling under apartheid – boycott, divestment and sanctions – and the South African Rugby Union must give it.
I’m always reluctant to give advice where I’m not able to be part of the action myself but were I in South Africa I would be helping organise and taking part in disruption of these proposed games.
We’ve done it before to good effect and we should do it again.
John Minto
National Chair
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa
New Zealand 0220850161
John Minto is also former National Organiser for HART (Halt All Racist Tours) which successfully campaigned to stop rugby contact between New Zealand and apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
