The Writing on the Wall

Farid Esack, a muslim scholar, was a United Democratic Movment activist in the Cape in the struggle against apartheid in the eighties. In a long Open Letter he draws comparison between the experiences in South Africa and those of the Palestinians and writes: “We as South Africans resisting Apartheid understood the invaluable role of international solidarity in ending centuries of oppression. Today we have no choice but to make our contribution to the struggle of the Palestinians for freedom. We do so with the full awareness that your freedom will also contribute to the freedom of many Jews to be fully human in the same way that the end of Apartheid also signaled the liberation of White people in South Africa.”

The Dutch-Palestinian collaborative project Send-a-Message is currently spray-painting this 1,998-word open letter on a 3-kilometre stretch of the wall south of Ramallah, funded by internet donations, intending to complete it by 10 May. You can read about it in Arjan El Fassed’s article “The writing on the wall spells “freedom” in the Electronic Intifada from which we have borrowed the photo of the wall displayed here.