TEHRAN - South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) party said on Thursday that it would support a parliamentary motion calling for the Israeli embassy in South Africa to be closed and diplomatic relations to be suspended.

On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor called for an end to "this real crime against humanity", saying there were "very, very clear similarities" between Israel’s occupation and the former system of apartheid in South Africa.

The country's majority black population witnessed a very dark chapter in history when the minority white-ruled Nationalist Party committed a disturbing institutionalized system of racial segregation against the black population. 

South Africa's strong support for Palestinians dates back to former President Nelson Mandela's days, with South Africans likening the Palestinian struggle for freedom to their own before the end of the apartheid rule in 1994. 

The South African apartheid began in 1948 and came to an end in 1994, during which Madiba spent 27 years in prison. 

South Africa has been very vocal in its criticism of the Israeli war in Gaza.  The ANC as a social-democratic liberation movement has governed the country since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election resulted in Nelson Mandela being elected as President of South Africa.
Mandela’s famous quote that "we know too well, that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians" is just one of many that outlined his support for the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom. 
Yet until the very late 1980s, the United States deemed the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, as a terrorist organization. 
It took until 1988 for the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution that ended the characterization of the now-ruling ANC as a terrorist organization. 

This was only after a mass struggle especially in the 1980s on an international level - an anti-apartheid struggle - where the black majority population in South Africa became so powerful that the lawmakers in Washington were forced to change their position. 

Yet, the CIA helped in the arrest of Nelson Mandela, branding him a terrorist along with his organization. 

Everything that people in the West are hearing about the Palestinian resistance today was said about the ANC until the U.S. administration changed its position on South Africa. 

In a similar way that Apartheid in South Africa began in 1948, so did the establishment of a Zionist entity in Palestine in 1948. 

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, means it has an international obligation to give equal rights to everyone living under its occupation. 

But this is far from the case. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers have more rights than Palestinians. 

Zionism is a racist, genocidal ideology, and many critics and scholars have argued that this is the root cause of the problem. 

This movement has also taken control of Western media, officials, and culture and twisted the narrative of events on the ground 180 degrees to influence global public opinion. 

For many decades, the Israelis have fought hard to brainwash global public opinion about occupied Palestine and blindly supported its apartheid system against Palestinians. 

Zionism is a racist, genocidal ideology, and many critics and scholars have argued that this is the root cause of the problem. Human rights groups characterize the Israeli regime as an evil, racist, apartheid, and child-killing entity.

Yet Zionism in the West is not being presented in that way. 

For example, the rights group Amnesty International said last year that Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians in a strongly critical investigation. 

It detailed and documented how Israeli authorities enforce a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights.

This includes Palestinians living in post-1948 Palestine, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as displaced refugees in other countries.

Rather, the Western narrative is that the Zionist entity is a safe haven for Jews or that "Israel is the only democracy" in West Asia. 

And now that the Palestinians, whose land was stolen, are fighting back against decades of apartheid. However, they are being condemned and branded as terrorists or terrorist groups, in a similar way the ANC and other South African freedom movements were labeled as terrorists. 

This is despite the fact that foreign colonizers captured Palestinian land and enforced their strict apartheid, racist policies on the indigenous people of the land. 
As bad as South African apartheid was, the apartheid in occupied Palestine is worse. 

The Israeli regime is and has been committing deadly crimes, much worse, and on a much larger scale, on a daily basis, the classic example today being Gaza and the West Bank. 
Western societies are still questioning whether the Palestinians have a right to fight back and resist Israel's genocidal and apartheid measures. 

Western societies also questioned whether Black Africans had the right to fight back and resist a cruel, apartheid system of segregation. 

Just like the U.S. shamefully supported apartheid in South Africa it has supported apartheid in Palestine. 

Critics point out how comfortable the occupation feels in doing what it wants to do, how it wants to do it - regardless of what international law says and regardless of the overwhelming majority of countries and public opinion around the world that have condemned its apartheid rule. 

Yet, just like in South Africa, the Palestinians are gaining more and more public backing on a global scale. 

Millions around the world are waking up and marching on the streets in support of the Palestinian struggle for freedom.