Call on UCT to break academic ties with Israel

Allan Wolman, Johannesburg

If it’s the occupation that seems to be the main reason for this call by the BDS and Palestinian solidarity groups, surely, they need to apply the proposed sanctions equally among rogue countries such as China who has been occupying Tibet since the early 1950s and has executed 2 700 people this year alone. Israel has only executed one person in its 70-year history.

Then there is the Russian occupation of Ukraine and of course UCT should cut her ties with Turkey for not only occupying parts of Cyprus, but denying Turkey’s 25 million Kurdish citizens an independent state.

But UCT and her BDS-sponsored call to break off ties with Israeli institutions, should be more honest. There are a host of countries guilty of genuine genocide, such as Syria and her Russian backers; don’t forget it was those Russian jets which raised hospitals and schools in Aleppo not long ago, accounting for the deaths of thousands of children, including many Palestinians.

Why is there no call to cut academic ties with Russia, China, Syria, or Lebanon, where apartheid practices against the Palestinians far surpass anything that Israel had done under that system? Why are these groups so silent about the almost half a million Rohingya Muslims being forced out of Myanmar – just another human tragedy happening right under their noses – but BDS and Co, being the humanitarians they purport to be, are oblivious to all these tragedies, and more, around the world, as their focus is only on getting rid of Israel (read Jews).

Despite our president’s call and support recently at the UN General Assembly for a two-state solution, BDS and its friends will have nothing of that – the total destruction of Israel is all they will settle for – not a negotiated peace, not a two-state solution, not a regime change, no, the total destruction of the Jewish State and one must wonder why.

Would they be accused of anti-Semitism? No, this is denied emphatically and supported by a handful of token Jews supporting their call for Israel’s destruction. This unfortunately does not wash with any thinking person.

To target only one country for the sanctions proposed in the face of a host of other human rights abusers, tells a significant story