Now is the time for U.S. church leaders to raise their collective moral voice — as they did during the civil right movement, the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid — against Israel’s settler colonial apartheid.

Ran Greenstein argues that Palestinians will not be able to challenge Israel as an oppressive ethnonational state in the same manner that South Africans did.

What took the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa decades to achieve was carried out against Russia in a matter of hours and days– including FIFA adopting measures to punish Russian teams and athletes. Palestinians are baffled, since they have been informed by FIFA, time and again, that “sports and politics don’t mix”. Not only are Israeli athletes welcomed in all international sports events, the mere attempt by individual athletes to register a moral stance in support of Palestinians, by refusing to compete against Israelis, can be very costly.

Israelis hope that their comprehensive military and economic alliance with the apartheid regime in South Africa is forgotten now that Amnesty International is leveling the apartheid accusation against Israel. But in 1976 Israelis were willing to ignore South African Premier John Vorster’s support for the Third Reich during World War II, which earned him imprisonment in Britain.

Brian J. Brown, a Methodist minister who was banned in his native South Africa in 1977 for anti-apartheid work, writes that apartheid in Israel/Palestine is in many ways more brutal than it was in his country, including checkpoints and barriers and expulsions. His new book says that recognition of that apartheid and total opposition to it is mandatory for any person or church that claims to follow Christian teachings.

Witnessing a wave of public calls for action, western governments and institutions have enacted sweeping boycotts and cancellations of Russian artists and Russian products over the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. But for many years the Palestinian BDS call has been rejected by European governments and U.S. states despite public support and the reports of human rights groups. If supermarkets removed Israeli products and theaters canceled performances by those who vocally support Israeli actions, we would hear the actions denounced as antisemitic for “singling out the Jewish state.”

“Nobody ever invited me to tell the story in any other way but that we must live by the sword,” Yuli Novak says of her upbringing in the Israeli elite. In a new memoir excerpted by Haaretz in Hebrew this weekend Novak says that the moment she ceased to be obedient, “the system turned against me.” She came to the understanding that a South Africa style political struggle is necessary to bring peace and equality to Israel and Palestine.

The western leaders who praise Desmond Tutu are ignoring a central legacy. His brief tours of Palestinian communities aching under the weight of Israeli tyranny quickly led him to condemn Israeli apartheid. His understanding of the essence of the Christian message as one that actively sides with the downtrodden drove him to support the Palestinian boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu used his moral stature to call out and oppose Israeli apartheid, but the U.S. media seem embarrassed about this information. NPR completely leaves it out, while the New York Times and Washington Post and PBS News Hour bury it.

An important difference between apartheid in South Africa and Israel is that South Africans openly embraced white supremacy as law and apartheid. In the case of Zionism, the untruth of inequality is anything but transparent. It has been disguised and denied by a relentless barrage of shifting alibis, exculpations, mitigations, as well as heavy demonization of critics.