WHY AFRICANS UNDERSTAND PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE

Award-winning journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke out against Israel's 'segregationist apartheid regime,' based on his experiences earlier this year visiting the occupied West Bank.

In this excerpt from his 2 November interview with US news outlet Democracy Now, he described his experience going through an Israeli checkpoint and how the guards would determine if you were able to pass, based on your ethnicity and religion.

He drew comparisons between the segregation and apartheid in Israel to that of discriminatory 'Jim Crow' policies in the United States and said that the matter was not as complicated as laid out in mainstream media. It is instead a clear form of injustice and racism.

The author is not the first to be shocked at the situation in the occupied West Bank. Human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as UN experts have all called the Israeli status quo in the occupied Palestinian territories an apartheid system of governance. Today, as the people of Gaza witness what has been called by many a genocide, the people of the Occupied West Bank are also suffering.

The Israeli military, as well as extremist settlers, have attacked Palestinians in the West Bank, killing more than 170 Palestinians and displacing hundreds from their homes since 7 October. This, on top of the more than 10,000 people Israel has killed in the Gaza Strip.

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