Is It an Intifada if it isn’t Globalised?

This  speech by the author was a keynote at the Opening of the Global Sumud Congress in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,  on October 10 2026,  setting the tone on the interconnectedness of all our global struggles with the Palestinian struggle

Firstly, let me start by saying that in the last 24 hours, the Nobel Peace Prize has attempted to sanitise the reputation of the Global Minority leaders by giving a South African, the excellent jurist and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 for decades of work promoting peace, human rights, and international law, including prosecuting Palestinian genocide and war crimes. Just as they did with Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984, as they ignored South African townships and villages burning while they continued to do business with apartheid South Africa and as they did in1960 when they gave the award to Chief Albert Luthuli after the massacre of protestors in Sharpeville and Langa.  These three Nobel laureates are excellent people, and I am proud to share a South African heritage with them; we can acknowledge this without celebrating, because as South Africans, we can only celebrate when Palestine is free from the river to the sea.

The genocidal apartheid settler colony of Israel started to exist after massacring many Palestinians in 1948. The same year that a genocidal political party in South Africa, the National Party, won elections where only pale people voted and chose a system called apartheid to make crueller a settler colonialism that had harmed the Africans and other darker people brought to the tip of the African continent as slaves and indentured labourers from Southeast Asia and South Asia. 

In 1961, at the United Nations,  the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, was incensed at Israel’s decision to vote to censure apartheid in South Africa  after the Sharpeville and Langa massacres, saying, “Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude.” Noting that the Zionists took the land away from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. He went on to say that Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.

One of the decisions of the South African apartheid state was to banish native South Africans to 13 % of the land in ethnonationalist pseudo-states called Bantustans. Because my grandmother’s generation had been Natives,  my father’s were Bantus, and these were supposedly their homes. Zionist Ariel Sharon would see these Bantustans and decide that they were the perfect solution to the Palestinian problem. 

This is what has been sold to the world as a two-state solution. 

It is a system that the world dismissed from 1948 as a form of independence for the Natives of South Africa.  A system that, during the negotiations for South Africa called CODESA in 1991 and 1992, resulted in a lame document that wasn’t even considered, called the CODESA agreement, a sanitisation of the document we were being handed. This led to a joint Nobel Peace Prize in 1993  for the freedom fighter Nelson Mandela and his oppressor Frederik de Klerk.  

Two-state solution. Rejected by South African Natives since 1948 

The two-state solution was manufactured and forced on Palestinian natives as part of a peace plan during the Oslo Accord in 1993, leading to a joint Nobel Peace Prize for freedom fighter Yasser Arafat and his oppressor, Yitzhak  Rabin. 

Two apartheid states with a bloodlust for eliminating the natives or only keeping them as menial labourers while colonising their lands –  one in Africa, one in West Asia –  sharing secrets of subjugation of the Natives. Apartheid South Africa was the biggest weapons buyer from apartheid Israel. The two nations showed other neo-imperialist states the effectiveness of their weapons by proving the number of native dead bodies. There was an Israeli fence in South Africa with razor wire that was put around neighbourhoods before raids, or people were killed. It’s nicknamed “stop nonsense” in South Africa, and we last saw it in use when the alleged democratic state, now middlemen for capitalism, put it around mineworkers fighting for better wages and killed 34 of them in  Marikana, North West Province in 2012. 

Palestinians have long had their skin taken for skin banks in Israel.  That struggle has gone beyond there. Between 2001 and 2003, in Durban, South Africa, there were hundreds of illegal kidney transplants involving donors trafficked from Brazil and Romania with wealthy Israelis as recipients.

Last year, German media house Deutsche Welle exposed illegal kidney trade in Kenya by an Israeli for wealthy German clients. 

This year, the Ghanaian President revealed that he had refused to sign some health aid from Israel’s biggest ally because it entailed ceding medical records of all Ghanaians,  allowing drugs to be tested on Ghanaians and not getting clearance from the Ghanaian Food & Drug Admin before testing anything. Ghana said no. But Nigeria, Zambia and Malawi said yes because the middlemen for capital who lead them don’t have people’s interests at heart. 

On 29 September,  Haitian billionaire Gilbert Bigio died. Bigio was an honorary consul to Israel and was sanctioned by Canada for arms trade and human rights violations in Haiti. Haiti doesn’t make weapons and has enough developmental issues to need their money on other things, but has the second-largest reserves of a rare mineral called iridium, and where the late brother of a certain Hillary Rodham Clinton just seemed to have some business interests.

For the last 30 years, one of the richest men in the DRC,  an Israeli called Dan Gertler, has been mining diamonds and cobalt, resulting in the killing and displacement of many, as well as extensive environmental damage. Also, mining cobalt in the DRC is Glencore. Glencore was a big donor to the Clintons and is also exploiting mineworkers in South Africa while sending coal to light up a genocide in Palestine. This is how we see that the enemy is the same; how we are connected as members of the family of humanity. 

But how do we keep pushing for Palestinian freedom soon and very soon? Should we leave it to the Palestinians alone? Of course not. Which is why we are here. Which is why some of us marched, and some others sailed. We do whatever we can. And we learn from some previous actions. 

South Africa achieved universal suffrage in 1994 because in the 60s, Global Majority countries like Malaysia refused to participate in sports with the apartheid state. 

Because nations like Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Tanzania, Zambia, China, and Russia hosted and trained freedom fighters battling to undo the shackles of colonialism. 

Because internationalists like Castro had no qualms in sending some of their best people to assist in the Namibians, Congolese, and South African struggles. 

Because Mary Manning, a 21-year-old Irish woman, refused to handle fruit from apartheid South Africa in a shop in Dublin.

Individual and civilian actions put pressure on governments to act towards the will of the people.  

Yet somewhere along the way, we allowed ourselves to be divided. We started believing that supporting Palestine need not be Ground Zero for collective oppression everywhere. That a free Palestine can be achieved without fighting against the wave of right-wing presidents in Latin America replacing the pro-Palestinian leaders;  that Palestine can be free and yet Cuba is under siege for supporting Palestine.

That we can fight for Palestine but ignore elections  being rigged in Brazil because Lula supports Palestine;

That we can support Palestine while ignoring Venezuela, now a US vassal state, because they kidnapped Maduro, who supported Palestinian freedom;

That we can support Palestine while ignoring Global Minority governments’ harassment and arrest of their citizens  who speak up for Palestine, who refuse to have factories in their countries make weapons to send to kill Palestinians; 

That we can talk of Palestinian freedom and ignore that the weapons tested on our Palestinian siblings for market effectiveness, destroying entire family lines, are the same ones sold to kill our other brothers and sisters in Haiti,  in Sudan, in Pakistan,  to kill the Tamils; that the men and women killing Palestinians are the same ones training the police in Brazil, in the US and more recently in Zionist Cape Town too. 

Palestine is Ground Zero, but we fail Palestine and each other if we ignore the US dumping criminals in countries surrounding South Africa, training and funding internal disruptions leading to loss of lives and manufacturing a fake white genocide because South Africa dared to not be vague and took apartheid Israel to the Hague for an actual genocide.

Isolating the Palestinian struggle from all other struggles asks us to ignore our brothers languishing in a Tunisian prison without trial for t speaking up for Palestinian freedom. The one per cent, the Zionists, the imperialists,  the capitalists want to distract us by telling us to ignore our neighbour, but in South Africa we have something that we call Ubuntu. It says “I am because you are.” I have seen it too in Palestine, even as people are under the boot of an evil oppressor, sharing what they have, laughing, living, crying and holding space for each other under very trying circumstances. Palestine is Ground Zero for all our oppression.  But we fail every man, woman, child, Comrade who has been martyred in Palestine if we work for a free Palestine while the rest of the world is oppressed. Who is to say the one per cent won’t end up oppressing that very free Palestine? Comrades. I ask that each child from Palestine to the Congo to Bolivia to Sri Lanka to Yemen to Iran is allowed to live in a space where they can just be a child, have access to food, water, education and healthcare instead of a few individuals hoarding billions while the majority of the world is killed. That we fight for this alongside our fight for Palestinian freedom because freedom should never be either/or. Palestine will be free, soon and very soon, Insha’Allah; I believe this. But we cause the bones of the Palestinians and Lebanese massacred in Sabra and Shatila to rattle at our lack of humanity if we are not equally outraged that there has been much needless loss of life in Libya because the empire wanted oil control;  it seems wrong if we don’t speak up against the false charges dumped on Allesandra Moja for fighting against the destruction of favela do Moinho in Sao Paulo for gentrification. After all, is this not, in essence, what’s also planned by the one per cent after the razing of Gaza? We disrespect the memory of Hind Rajab if we ignore the death of children buried in the mines in the Congo or trafficked anywhere in the world. We dishonour the memory of Dr Marwan al Sultan if we say nothing about the medicide of health workers killed in Sudanese hospitals by the UAE-sponsored RSF. We debase Anas el Cherif if we keep silent while Hajar Awadi is imprisoned for exposing a truth in Tunisia.  Palestine is Ground Zero for our oppression. Palestinian freedom makes the most sense if it comes with our collective freedom and a pledge that it should never again happen for anyone anywhere, and if it does, those responsible should be held to account and pay restitution before reconciliation can happen. May our continual fight for a free Palestine also mean that our humanity, as the 99 per cent, is as borderless as the one per cent’s profits.