Earlier this year, John Minto, former National Organiser of HART (Halt All Racist Tours) and current National Chair of PSNA (Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa) embarked on a national tour to talk about the impact and legacy of the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour. Despite some positive outcomes, he sees parallels of that former South African apartheid regime playing out with the Israeli government.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1981 Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand.

Images of the passion and fury from the protests against the tour reverberated in South Africa and around the world. It was a traumatic event for New Zealand, as it was for South Africa, but looking back 40 years on, the protests left a positive impact on both countries.

The crunch point of the protest movement came with the second game of the tour due to be played at Hamilton’s Rugby Park. Police called the game off after 300 protestors invaded the field. The impact of the cancellation was dramatic.

On South Africa’s Robben Island, the penal colony off the coast of Cape Town, the long-term political prisoners quickly became aware of the situation as prison guards were tuned in to the game. Nelson Mandela was in his 18th year in prison (he would serve over 26 years in total) for his role in leading the anti-apartheid struggle. Mandela said that when the prisoners learned of the game being called off because of an anti-apartheid protest on the other side of the world, they grabbed the bars of their cell doors and rattled them around the prison; he said it was like the sun came out.

The tour helped tighten the international sports boycott and helped bring apartheid in South Africa to a quicker end. Meanwhile Māori activists had challenged the anti-tour movement asking how we could be so staunch on racism 6,000 miles away and ignore it in our own backyard?

Nine years earlier, groups like Ngā Tamatoa had confronted Pākehā about racism here and the debate was deepened and accelerated by the events of the tour and their aftermath.

A few years later, the Waitangi Tribunal was given authority to look at historic breaches of the Treaty (previously it had only been mandated to look at future breaches) and so began the Tribunal’s investigations into the history of iwi and their historic Tiriti o Waitangi grievances. This process has improved our democracy by bringing some acknowledgement and monetary compensation for the wrongs of colonisation that continue to resonate in the present.

2021 also marks the turning point in another struggle against apartheid, this time in Israel.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and South African Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, has described Israel’s policies towards Palestinians as worse than that suffered by black South Africans under apartheid.

Tutu says when it comes to Israel the world should, “Call it apartheid and boycott!” Human rights groups have begun delivering the same message.

In January this year, the larges and most respected Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem released a landmark report that says:

“…A regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime…”

Three months later B’Tselem was joined by the US-based, Nobel Peace Prize winning organisation, Human Rights Watch, which released a 213-page report detailing how Israeli policies constitute “crimes of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians.

Palestinian groups have long called for sanctions against Israel. It is time New Zealand tackled Israeli racism and apartheid head on, as we did with apartheid in South Africa.

As the tide turns strongly in support of the Palestinian struggle, the campaign against Israeli apartheid has become the anti-apartheid struggle of this generation.