It was Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, a person who knew a thing or two about apartheid, having been its chief architect, who first raised the analogy between South Africa and Israel.¹ Responding to a surprising Israeli vote to censure South Africa at the United Nations, he said: “Israel is not consistent in this new anti-apartheid attitude. Otherwise they would have been prepared to be swamped and destroyed by the Arabs around them. But they took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”²

Verwoerd used the analogy as praise, not a condemnation, but others deployed it to situate the Israeli regime in a context of colonial oppression and racial segregation, though it displayed some unique features. Already in the mid-1960s, these critical voices defined Israel as a colonial state of a special type, just like South Africa, and called for moves to subject it to international condemnation and isolation.³ These voices became louder after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that saw the occupation of Arab and Palestinian territories, and even more so with the 1973 war, in which Israel made incursions into Africa across the Suez Canal. They reached a peak with the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared that Zionism — the dominant ideology of the State of Israel — was “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” invoking previous resolutions by international bodies that linked Zionism to apartheid South Africa and colonialism.⁴ These developments posed a challenge not only to specific Israeli policies and the 1967 occupation but to the legitimacy of the regime and the state.

The 1975 resolution was revoked by the UN in 1991, and the following decade inspired hope of bringing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end with the Oslo Accords of 1993, but the situation reverted to a more intensely hostile conflict by the beginning of the twenty-first century. A Palestinian uprising in 2000 that became known as the Second Intifada followed a collapse of negotiations due to ongoing Israeli settlement activities in the occupied territories and the denial of the right of Palestinians to independent statehood. The failure of diplomacy to confront Israel’s staunch approach gave rise to new ideas about the way forward. These included the notion that the success of the South African anti-apartheid campaign could serve as a model for the Palestinian struggle. In that mold, a new solidarity campaign was formed twenty years ago, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, three core components of a strategy to condemn, isolate, and pressure Israel from the outside.⁵