Palestine: SA’s guiding principles

• Published date: 15 July 2022
• Publication title: Star, The (Johannesburg, South Africa)

The evidence for such was that her identifiable media outfit, beyond any doubt, distinguished her and her team from others. Abu Akleh’s death was not ordinary, but the 51-year-old was callously gunned down with a head shot, and her blood flowed on the soil of occupied Palestine, where she worked despite her American citizenship

A complete human with a beautiful soul regrettably died not as the first journalist killed by Israeli forces but as the 45th Al Jazeera journalist since 2000. We knew Abu Akleh’s face from her many broadcasts, and her death rallied support from across the globe. If her death were bare evidence of naked brutality, her funeral would show the despicable and inhumane character of the IDF.

Shall I say the Israeli forces’ ungodly brutality, who were determined to show their brute power, as they on this solemn occasion would fight with mourners? I, along with billions, watched as her remains, in a traditional and cultural sense, held aloft by mourners, on at least two instances, almost dropped to the floor.

Live news feeds showed Israeli police setting off stun grenades and beating mourners with batons. The tussle for the Palestinian flag, which IDF members desperately and forcefully sought to remove from the mourners, involuntarily mirrored a time in apartheid – South Africa in 1987.

On this specific day, July 20, 1987, the apartheid SADF, with similar brutality, employed vicious means to tear the ANC flag from mourners at the funeral of an MK soldier, Ashley Kriel, who also gallantly died in a hail of bullets in Bonteheuwel, Cape Town.

Abu Akleh, born to a Christian Palestinian family, whose first interest was civil engineering, abandoned the latter for what we now know as her life vocation, a sense of calling, to bring into homes the actual conditions of occupied Palestine as a daily reality.

The spontaneous outpouring of grief that showed no respect for all manufactured boundaries such as religion, gender, and economic status remains a true sign of humanity’s beauty. Her death and subsequent burial only galvanised support for the Cause of Palestine.

This support is necessarily the antithesis of the one who pulled the trigger that ended her life. In the aftermath of her death, the spin doctors of Zionist interest, as was expected, began shifting blame for her death to Palestinians while offering an investigation that suggested the US participates in such. We have hitherto seen a lacklustre statement from the US administration, nothing...