© Rajesh Jantilal/AFP/Getty Images
Pro-Palestinian supporters hold placards reading ‘Boycott Apartheid Israel’ during a protest to condemn the ongoing Israeli air strikes on Gaza, in Durban, South Africa, this week.
Pro-Palestinian supporters hold placards reading ‘Boycott Apartheid Israel’ during a protest to condemn the ongoing Israeli air strikes on Gaza, in Durban, South Africa, this week.
After that, South Africa was excluded from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison 22 years later. The D'Oliveira affair, as it became known, proved a watershed in drumming up popular support for the sporting boycott that eventually saw the country excluded from most international competition including rugby, the great passion of the white Afrikaners who were the base of the ruling Nationalist party and who bitterly resented being cast out.
For others, the moment of reckoning came years later, in 1985 when foreign banks called in South Africa's loans. It was a clear sign that the country's economy was going to pay an ever higher price for apartheid.
Comment: The BDS ("Boycott, Divest, Sanction") movement has Israel far more worried than it lets on. Why the push at the state and even local level to entrench its particular definition of 'anti-semiticism'? Zionism apparently wants its ability to threaten to extend to every individual.