GORDIMER, Nadine. Literature Nobel & anti-Apartheid activist: "The way people are treated in the occupied territories is exactly the way the blacks were treated in South Africa"

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was a famed South African writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 and was a vigorous anti-apartheid activist (see: http://www.newstatesman.com/africa/2010/06/interview-life-world-vote ).

Nadine Gordimer in 2008 controversially broke the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and attended a writers’ conference there on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the invasion-, dispossession-, race- and genocide-based apartheid state. Nadine Gordimer commented “I decided to come under a lot of pain, which I felt due to the fact that friends, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, told me not to come”. Asked about use of the term “apartheid” for the race-based state and its appalling treatment of Indigenous Palestinians, Nadine Gordimer and replied: “To me, it is accurate in one sense. The way people are treated in the occupied territories is exactly the way the blacks were treated in South Africa” [1].

[1]. Nadine Gordimer quoted in Samira Shackle, “Interview with Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)”, New Statesman, 4 June 2014: http://www.newstatesman.com/africa/2010/06/interview-life-world-vote .