Misunderstanding the Word ‘Apartheid’
By McKenna Bates, 2019–2020 CAMERA Fellow at George Mason University
Africans for Peace is an organization made up of student activists, many South African, who have experienced apartheid and adversity in their own countries and strive to make a difference in others. Their goal is to provide “an African lens to the global debate on peace and stability on our continent and around the world,” as stated on their website.
From speaking engagements on the current state in Venezuela to strongly worded petitions to end ongoing slavery in Libya. My Israel club, the George Mason University Israel Student Association, was going to host a talk featuring Africans for Peace with the support of CAMERA on Campus during our university’s annual International Week, dedicated to celebrating the diversity of the student body, before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
Africans for Peace is known for being active in speaking up for the rights of the oppressed in many fields. Their mission is to “be a force for independent civil dialogue and conflict resolution,” and their work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has done just that. Many of their activists travel the globe discussing how problematic and offensive it is to compare the situation in Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories to apartheid South Africa, and how the BDS movement actively silences constructive conflict resolution.
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