Diane Coetzer

It’s distressing how “non-white” has crept into reporting on the #USPresidentialElection. During #apartheid it was used to drive home the message of white superiority. It was the benchmark against which all other “races” were deemed “non”. 1

President @CyrilRamaphosa has appointed Justice Nambitha Dambuza and Justice Kate Savage as the new justices of the @ConCourtSA. With these appointments, South Africa becomes one of only 3 countries in the world that have a woman majority apex court.

Honestly, I feel a deep shock as I watch what is happening now. In Gaza, we lived for more than two and a half years under direct bombardment, with no real protection, no shelters to hide in, and no safe places to escape to. We lived every day between fear, hunger, and thirst, lacking food, water, and medicine, waiting each night simply hoping the next day would pass safely. And yet, we were always told to endure, to be patient, and to live with this reality as if it were something normal. But today, after just one week of war in other places, I see the level of fear and confusion. Despite the presence of a huge military arsenal, interceptor missiles, shelters, and advanced protection systems, anxiety is everywhere and the conversation has quickly turned to the urgent need to stop the war. And this is what truly leaves me stunned… How did we in Gaza manage to live like this for all those years under bombardment without any protection? How did we endure that constant fear, hunger, and uncertainty day after day, while the world simply asked us to be patient? How can human beings endure this for years, when others cannot bear even a few days despite all the protection and resources they have? This is something that leaves me in a state of shock and disbelief.

Make no mistake. The US/Israel war against Iran is a colonial war. Like the genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Iraq and Libya, the incineration of Vietnam and Laos, it is war to subjugate the people of the global South and annihilate their resistance. Colonialism has no place in humanity and it must be defeated.

The world's two rogue states, Israel and the USA, have started a war not against Iran but against the whole world. We stand with Iranians, with Humanity, against the notion that Israel and the US can bomb anyone their fancy takes them to bomb. aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/…

No, this is incorrect. The key isn't finding a balance between blissful ignorance and painful awareness, it’s learning to find happiness in sources that don’t depend on the delusional belief that everything is fine. It’s very possible to be both happy and well-informed. We live in an explosively beautiful universe, and getting to experience anything at all is amazing. The fact that our world is plagued by human butchery and degradation does not cancel out the majesty of a bird in the sky, or the ecstasy of the wind upon your skin. It is true that we live in a civilization of unfathomable cruelty. It is true that our biosphere is being strangled while human and non-human beings are subjected to horrific abuses in a society which elevates the worst art, the worst values, and the worst people to the highest levels of prominence. It is also true that getting to live even a single moment on this astonishing blue planet is a gift worthy of immense joy and gratitude. These things are both fully true at the same time. They do not negate each other. Don’t find your happiness in the belief that everything is okay, because everything is not okay. If you spend your life squirming around trying to avert your gaze from the truth and psychologically compartmentalizing away from reality, you will never know actual happiness. Instead, find your happiness in that which cannot be corrupted by this fraudulent dystopia. Your connections with your loved ones. That’s real and authentic. The radiance of the natural world. That’s real and authentic. The crackling aliveness of the senses. That’s real and authentic. The boundless peace deep down at the heart of your being which reveals itself if you listen closely enough. That’s real and authentic. These things can supply endless happiness, even as the world burns, and even as you weep at its burning. Because it is entirely possible to honor the grief and tragedy of this world while also delighting in its beauty. You can weep for the dying oceans while marveling at the stars. You can rage for Gaza while reveling in the earth beneath your bare feet. You can open your heart to all the suffering and to all the wonder. You can fall to your knees in both anguish and gratitude. You can do these things because feelings move through you if you don’t cling to them. You feel them fully without resistance, you invite them in to have their say, and then you let them leave when they are done. It usually doesn’t take long; a few minutes, maybe even seconds. Then you get up and go back to marveling at the miracle. Feelings are meant to be felt. If you simply feel them all the way through when they come up instead of repressing them or trying to manage them, they move through fairly quickly without setting up a permanent residence in your chest. But you’ve got to really let them have their say. You’ve got to give yourself fully over to them. This takes practice if you don’t know how to do it, and because of the way our culture conditions people it tends to be harder for men than for women. But it’s a skill like any other, and anyone can teach themselves how to do it. Appreciating the beauty of this terrestrial experience likewise takes practice. Everything is crackling with beauty all the time, but we don’t notice it because our attention gets wrapped up in mental stories. Just make a conscious practice of noticing beauty at every opportunity, and your aperture for appreciating beauty will get wider and wider. You can learn to live your whole life in this way, from moment to moment. If you can get the hang of these two skills—appreciating beauty and feeling your feelings all the way through—then there will be nothing stopping you from living a joyful and fulfilling life while also having an entirely truth-based relationship with reality.

Colonialism, in one photo.

What an insult to most South Africans

First they steal your history. Then they bomb what remains. Then they erase you.

If you've a problem with anybody expressing public sympathy with a people being slaughtered, then something is missing in your emotional make-up. Not your politics, but your wiring. This isn’t about agreeing with Pep on every detail. It’s about the grotesque instinct to police compassion. In todays @ExaminerSport

Bombing Venezuela while coordinating a genocide in Palestine while threatening to attack Iran (again) while destabillizing Somalia while carrying out a heist in the DRC... US imperialism is the greatest threat to peace and security in our world today and it's not even close.

My latest: The UN Embraces Colonialism: Unpacking the Security Council’s mandate for the U.S. colonial administration of Gaza mondoweiss.net/2025/11/the-un…

From our first interview immediately after he won his state assembly election in 2020 through profiles, op-eds, interviews, and speeches, Jacobin has closely covered Zohran Mamdani’s political career rooted in the socialist movement since its start. jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran…

It's official: A democratic socialist (and Jacobin contributor) will be the next mayor of America's largest city. It’s proof that organizing around universal programs and working-class demands can still win big in the heart of capitalism.

‘US will limit number of refugees to 7,500 and give priority to white South Africans’ The deranged racists are running the world! theguardian.com/us-news/2025/o…

The US commits another war crime last night and celebrates it online. No trial, no public information, evidence destroyed. An execution on the basis of "trust us we wouldn't lie" from a state led by a pathological liar. And silence from the media.

WATCH | “After meeting so many of you in the struggle for justice for Palestine, Mandela could not have been born anywhere else. He was fully, truly, beautifully South African” - Francesca Albanese @FranceskAlbs, a UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories speaking at the 23rd Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, brought to you by the @NelsonMandela Foundation, in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. Watch here: youtube.com/live/K_ulSC9PL… #NelsonMandelaAnnualLecture

It's literally not us but you!

South Africa's affection toward me is no doubt the reflex of their authentic unbreakable support to the Palestinian people. Yet as a European woman, the privilege is enormous.

Israeli forces are said to have dropped more explosives on Gaza than fell on London, Dresden and Hamburg combined in the Second World War. The level of destruction is hard to fathom as is the humanitarian suffering. Our Foreign Affairs Correspondent @SecKermani looks at the damage that’s been done and the challenges of now rebuilding if the ceasefire holds.

BDS is what would have made the difference, turning an empty gesture - the recognition of Palestine - into an ethical, useful, game changer. Hello, I am Yanis Varoufakis here to discuss the (hugely) belated recognition of the State of Palestine by a number of Western governments – Britain’s, France’s, Canada’s and Australia’s. If only they had done this many decades ago, maybe Israel’s ethnic cleansing of a people whose existence Israel did not recognise, on a land that Israel was keen to expropriate from these unrecognised people, maybe that ethnic cleansing project would have been halted - maybe it would not have morphed into the genocide that is unfolding with untold cruelty as we speak. Is it not a good thing that the governments of Britain, France, Canada and Australia were forced by public opinion, by sensational losses in voter support, to recognise the State of Palestine. I suppose it is a good thing. But, friends, make no mistake. I am very much afraid that Keir Starmer, Emanuel Macron, Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese did not recognise Palestine so as to ensure that it comes into existence as a real, a sovereign state for a people Israel has put on death row but only so that they do not actually do what they can to end the genocide and to make the Palestinian state a possibility. In a nutshell, these Western governments, after decades of complicity, are suddenly falling over themselves to perform a performative act in a manner that does nothing to bring about that which they proclaim: a functioning Palestinian State. So: Let us not applaud them. Let us not be fooled by them. Theirs is not an ethical awakening. It is merely the calculated management of a genocide they are doing nothing to stop. It is hypocrisy polished to a fine sheen, designed not to end the suffering in Gaza, but to sanitise their role in perpetuating it. On the one hand, we observe the grand theatre of great power diplomacy. The press conferences, the solemn declarations, the recognition of a state that exists on paper. Meanwhile, on the ground, the very foundation of such a state – its people and its institutions – are being systematically erased. These governments—the Starmer, the Macron, the Albanese, the Carney administrations—they want you to be distracted by their "brave" and "principled" stand while they remain complicit in the war crimes, in the ethnic cleansing, in the genocide. And why now? Why, after the tens of thousands dead, after the schools and hospitals turned to rubble, after thousands of wounded children were forced to survive alone, without their families who now lie buried under blocks of cement? Because global outrage has reached a boiling point that can no longer be contained by their usual pro-Israeli propaganda. Their recognition of Palestine is a pressure valve, designed precisely to defuse that outrage, to save Israel’s legitimacy, safe in the knowledge that Israel will continue, with their tacit support, to block each and every move toward a viable Palestinian state. They are recognising a Palestinian state while tacitly conniving with Israel's leaders to ensure it never comes into being. How? By actively refusing to take the one set of actions that has a proven historical record of ending oppression and Apartheid: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions on the perpetrator. Thankfully that’s not all. Mercifully, something else is going on. While Western leaders perform their diplomatic pantomime, hundreds of people are sailing right now in the Mediterranean Sea. The Global Sumud Flotilla. A flotilla of teachers, journalists, activists, dreamers, parliamentarians, carrying with them the global majority’s commitment that Israel’s Siege on Gaza, that the planned and meticulously implemented genocide of Palestinians will be terminated – that it will not continue in our name – that the impending acts of piracy by the Israeli state will be exposed for what they are: misanthropic violations of minimum ethical standards, of International Law. Israeli propaganda, echoed by its apologists, claims these brave souls are "choosing to enter a war zone, to violate prohibited security zones." This is a shameless lie. The flotilla's ships are not entering a war zone. They are heading towards a site of genocide on a land that Israel is illegally occupying—a fact confirmed by the International Court of Justice, which in June 2024 ordered Israel to vacate it. So, I ask you: if Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese really wanted to end the genocide, what would they do? They would not be issuing statements. They would be sending a naval vessel to protect the flotilla! They would be enforcing international law. But they will not. Because their recognition is an empty gesture, and actual solidarity requires a break with organised misanthropy and with the arms dealers who fund them and their political campaigns. This duality, this chasm between Western governments’ words and deeds, is the essence of their hypocrisy. They grant a piece of paper called ‘statehood’ with one hand, while with the other they continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield the very power that ensures this statehood remains a cruel fiction. They remind me of a monument I once saw in Canberra, Australia’s capital. Walking from the High Court to the National Library, you stumble in a unique monument — a monument celebrating a High Court of Australia judgment. On it are inscribed the magnificent words of Sir Gerard Brennan from the Mabo case: “The common law of this country will perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to persist in characterising the indigenous inhabitants of Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organisation to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land.” A magnificent sentiment. A legal revolution. But what followed? Words on a monument. The recognition of native title was granted, but the power structures, the economic dispossession, the systemic inequality—they were largely left intact. The recognition became a shield *against* more substantive justice. This is the playbook of imperialist white settlers. Recognise a right in theory to avoid implementing it in practice. This is what is on offer today for Palestine. A state recognised on an imaginary map in a European capital, while on the ground, the apartheid reality is reinforced with every bomb, every bullet, every checkpoint. The key, the only key that unlocks the door to freedom, is not recognition. It is BDS: boycott, divest and sanction. And its goal? Its goal must be to bring about equal political rights from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Recognition would have mattered at Oslo. It was the leverage that was squandered. Now, in the absence of any peace process, it is merely symbolic. And in its current form, it is worse than symbolic—it is a pacifier. We must understand the fundamental truth, so elegantly captured by that Mabo judgment but so tragically ignored in its aftermath: “Violent instability is baked into any system where one side has power and rights and the other has none.” You cannot have peace, you cannot have security, for anyone—Israeli or Palestinian—under a system of apartheid. The violence of the occupier begets resistance; the violence of the oppressed is then used to justify further, overwhelming state violence. It is a vicious cycle engineered by the powerful. So, when these Western leaders herald their recognition as a progressive move, ask them one question: Where are the sanctions? Where is the arms embargo? Where are the trade restrictions? Where is the protection for the flotillas? Until they answer you convincingly, their words are not just hollow. They are weapons. They are the grease for the machinery of genocide. They are the modern-day equivalent of the colonial administrator who acknowledges the humanity of the native in a London speech, while signing the order to clear their land. Let us not let them get away with it. See their recognition for what it is: a desperate attempt to save a crumbling system of oppression, not to end it. Our duty is clear. To amplify the call for BDS. To stand with the flotillas. To demand not words on paper, but justice on the ground. The Palestinian people do not need their hypocritical recognition. They need their freedom. And freedom only comes when the cost of oppression becomes too high for the oppressor to bear.