By Neealm Rahim

Reverent Frank Chikane together with the delegation from the South African council of churches recently undertook a trip to Palestine. The delegation representatives from both the Palestinian leadership as well as the Israeli’s have now returned and share their thoughts on what they have observed.

Radio Islam speaks to Frank Chikane who is a former director general in the presidency also involved with the South African council of churches.

“The first objective was clear to me that we can’t have people occupied for many, many years without rights and protection, so we decided to go there and meet with both sides. On meeting community leaders and people who are threatened with forced evictions and removals we learned that there are people who are discriminated against as a Palestinian in terms of the law of 1972 that states you can’t claim your land if it is taken away from you, but if you are a Jewish or Arab Israeli you can do that which shows that we have apartheid with one group dominating another and not adhering to international law which is illegal,” says Frank.

Frank mentions that they approached the Palestinian State Leadership, reaching out to the Prime minister, Chief of Justice and the Foreign minister asking why is there no intervening in East Jerusalem where people are been brutalised. They said, we as the state of Palestine have to get permission from Israel to move from one place to another.  This indicates the worst kind of oppression. The apartheid convention of the UN must be acted upon to stop this apartheid in Israel Palestine which should not be seen as against the Jews. On meeting Jewish groups one of them stated that they do not want to be identified with this brutality committed against Palestinians, they suggest that only the international community can assist in ending this oppression.

There is a lot of talk that the South African government should shut down the Israeli embassy and relook their policy both as the ruling party of the ANC and the government.

“Our focus not just been on South Africa, from completing our report we are going to make recommendations to act with other faiths. We will approach the United Nations to say to them that they are the party responsible for handing over that land in 1948 which caused the issue at hand.” says Chikane.

The Palestinians requests South Africa not to abandon them as the rest of the world has.