Good afternoon, distinguished guests, comrades, and friends.
Molweni – Sanibonani – Dumelang.
I am deeply honoured and humbled to stand here – on the soil that gave us Nelson Mandela and one of the greatest examples of liberation of modern history.
I thank the Nelson Mandela Foundation for keeping alive not only the memory of a man, but the movement he embodied – the struggle for justice and human dignity, whose legacy we celebrate today.
I am deeply honoured by your invitation to South Africa to deliver this prestigious lecture, reflecting on how Mandela’s belief in the indivisibility of freedom, and his courage to confront power, can guide us through the cruellest injustice of our time.
Honouring Mandela
After meeting so many of you in the struggle for justice for Falasteen over the years – some of whom are in this room this afternoon – and after spending a few, yet profoundly intense and inspiring days among you, I feel it deeply: Mandela could not have been born anywhere else. He was – fully, truly, beautifully – South African. And there is so much of him in so many of you, that it cannot be a coincidence.
To invoke Mandela’s name is not to canonise him, but to awaken his unfinished struggle within each of us.
- His legacy invites to embrace memory not as nostalgia but as awareness and resistance;
- His life, not a statue of memory, but a living compass pointing us towards justice;
- And his lesson endures: the struggle for freedom is never the burden of one person alone, not even one people alone.
When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, he did more than free himself.
He and his comrades rewrote the grammar of power, turning domination into dignity, marking a decisive and historic step in the decolonisation of this continent.
His life, as well as his words, teaches that justice knows no borders, and our freedom is bound to the freedom of those still denied theirs.
That conviction remains our moral compass today – carried by South Africa, by others in the Global South (we should call Global Majority), and by the young voices rising from America to Europe and other parts of the Global North (the Global Minority), demanding a freer world.
So let’s start.
Setting the context
In this moment, as the world witnesses the ongoing attempt to erase an entire people in Falasteen: from the fleeting ceasefire in shattered Gaza to the accelerated colonisation of the West Bank, history is pressing upon us.
Standing on this sacred soil, at the roots of Mother Africa – a continent so rich, so nurturing, despite centuries of violence inflicted upon it – feels deeply symbolic.
South Africa and Falasteen share deep historic ties, forged in the fires of resistance to colonial rule and the quest for liberation.
The indomitable spirit of the South African people – who overcame centuries of European colonialism dismantling the criminal system of apartheid – continues to resonate far beyond these shores, inspiring all who still dare to believe in the possibility of justice.
This reminds us that the Palestinian people, too, with the solidarity of those who stand beside them, can one day break the chains of oppression.
In this time of utter diplomatic hypocrisy, political cowardice and self-interest, the words of Nelson Mandela resonate louder than ever. In 1997, he said:
“Having achieved our own freedom, we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face. Yet we would be less than human if we did so.”
The situation in Falasteen
And this moment calls on all of us not to wash our hands of the hell into which Israel has plunged Falasteen.
Two years after the beginning of the genocide, and despite “the ceasefire”, the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory remains nothing short of APOCALYPTIC.
I use the term deliberately.
Gaza is a wasteland of rubble, refuse, and human remains, where survivors cling to life amid disease, deprivation and the relentless weight of violence unseen anywhere this century.
Over 240,000 killed or injured; surely many more – say the experts – and the numbers rise daily. Entire neighborhoods obliterated.
Families returning to ruins only to uncover bodies of loved ones beneath the rubble.
City blocks lying in dust.
Clean water is scarce, food nearly nonexistent, medicine and electricity critically short. Prisoners tortured and raped; bodies mangled, desecrated and left in streets. Homes and memories destroyed.
Intimate lives violated.
Populations forcibly displaced time and time again across a territory rendered uninhabitable. With nowhere to flee and nothing to return to.
Excruciating suffering is widespread, systematic, and by design. Even during the fragile ceasefire, it continues. Over 100 Palestinians have been killed since Israel committed to cease fire on 10 October.
For two years Israel has waged a war on a civilian population, while Palestinians have no army, no tanks, and security forces that cannot protect them. And while in Gaza it had the excuse of “wanting to eradicate Hamas”, this does not explain the escalation of violence and acceleration of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
There, over the past two years, Palestinians have experienced the largest wave of ethnic cleansing since 1967.
More than 40,000 people have been driven from their homes – made homeless in the little that remains of their homeland.
Over 1,000 killed, more than 200 children, 10,000 injured, and 10,000 detained – many as young as 14, simply to have joined peaceful demonstrations or having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Armed settlers, protected by soldiers, roam with impunity – burning homes, destroying olive trees, attacking families who have farmed for generations.
During the olive harvest – once a season of sustenance and joy – farmers now face assault and arson, their trees uprooted, their soil fenced off by guns.
What was once life has become resistance.
The century-long slow colonisation of Falasteen has accelerated into a vicious campaign of destruction, where the erasure of the indigenous people is the end goal.
Euphemisms like “conflict” or “clashes” conceal the stark reality of horror that continues unchecked.
Instead, this is a textbook case of genocide.
Genocide – the intentional destruction of a group “as such” – is rarely a single act. It unfolds piece by piece, decade by decade, crime after crime.
The ongoing genocide in Falasteen – visible in the totality of Israeli criminal actions against the totality of Palestinians across the totality of the lands slated for annexation – has been meticulously prepared over decades, and enabled by long-standing violations, impunity and international complicity.
Genocide, it seems, is the dormant gene of an apartheid regime rooted in settler-colonialism.
But “apocalypse”, deriving from the Greek ἀπο-κάλυψις, originally means “to uncover” or “to reveal”.
And the current moment is fundamentally one of profound revelation – of truth, reality beyond ordinary perception.
The sacrifice of Gaza, happening under our watch, forces us to confront the system we live in; the horrid, brutal reality we are all part of, the truth of who we are, as individuals, communities, states and institutions – and compels us to choose between courage through principles or cowardice through acceptance.
And these are some of the lessons of this revelation.
First, the genocide in Falasteen has pierced the veil of Maya, showing the underlying geopolitical calculation of the world’s most powerful nations.
As I came to realise, studying the maps of “Greater Israel”, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates – a vision that many Israeli leaders shamelessly brandish in international fora – the occupation of Falasteen must be understood as part of a broader project of domination.
This is not merely about physical borders and historical Falasteen.
It is a systematic assertion of permanent supremacy that knows no border: one people controlling land, resources and even the very existence of another, or others, often without needing full physical presence or formal annexation.
Palestinians are brutalised, dispossessed, yet they resist.
Their défiance is why they remain the thorn in the side – not only of an occupying power, but of a wider system, where Israel acts together with and often as a proxy for the US, destabilising the region to weaken societies, making them easier to dominate.
This project is already happening, and the wars and conflicts that have been brought by the US, its Western allies and some Arab allies against peoples in the region, speak to that.
Falasteen’s struggle is the stubborn heartbeat of a region fighting for its soul, and the resistance that refuses to be tamed.
Second, The Gaza genocide has turned Falasteen as the epicentre of a global reckoning, exposing how racial, colonial, capitalistic structures make war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide a profitable business. This resonates with the experience of colonised populations worldwide for centuries.
For generations Palestinians have been turned into a testing ground for weapons and surveillance techniques, providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability.
Too many influential corporate entities have profited freely.
This explains how, while Palestinians have been killed and maimed in the thousands every fortnight for the past two years, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange kept soaring, growing 213% and amassing $226-billion in market gains in the first 18 months of the genocide.
Arms companies have turned over near-record profits by equipping Israel with cutting-edge weaponry that has obliterated a virtually defenceless civilian population in Gaza.
Tech companies have provided dual-use infrastructure that enabled mass targeting and mass killing.
The machinery of global construction giants is razing Gaza to the ground.
Major international banks have underwritten and purchased Israeli treasury bonds, financing this devastation even as deficits grew and credit ratings fell.
This is no ordinary occupation sustained by exploitation; it is a longstanding economy of occupation turned genocidal.
Third, the meaning of what this genocide means for all of us. For our collective understanding of politics, of solidarity, of humanity.
Today, we know Gaza. We see Gaza. Hospitals bombed, parents gathering the limbs of their children, journalists and medics torn apart. This horror is visible to us in real time, on our phones, all day long – if we dare to look.
This is bringing social and political awakening, everywhere. It is shaping the conscience especially of the new generations.
Not long ago, my sister-in-arms from South Africa, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, told me “the wounds inflicted on the innocent ripple through every nation’s soul”. She was reflecting on the children from Gaza, from her own experience as a child of apartheid South Africa.
And this is true for every young soul beyond Gaza. For the youngest in this hyperconnected world, this genocide is not history but memory in the making.
Those in Europe will not have the distance my generation had, reading about the Holocaust and imagining we would have stopped it.
Nor can we hide behind the excuse of ignorance, as some did in Rwanda or Bosnia.
Or as we in the West have done cocooning ourselves into collective amnesia vis-à-vis our history of 500 years of colonial crimes.
The Palestinian struggle has not only exposed the suffering of the Palestinians since the creation of the State of Israel, and the complicity of our political systems.
Today the world knows the meaning of Nakba as it has never done, and it will not forget it.
And this is increasingly recognised as interconnected with injustices across the world – in the global majority, where economic structures of dispossession remain intact long after colonial powers were expelled, and in the global minority, where those protesting genocide face fierce repression, because the profiteers of the Gaza genocide (who are the same who keep seeding misery here in South Africa, as in Congo, and in Sudan and increasingly across Europe and the US as well) are those who want to keep operating without disruption.
Perhaps this explains why across Europe and beyond, people march with banners that read: “We wanted to save Palestine, but Palestine is saving us.” Because Falasteen has awakened us.
Now, with all this knowledge and awareness, the question is simple, but urgent: what shall we do?
We seem suspended between hope and the abyss, when “the old (world) dying, the new struggling to breathe.”
I do not know how this will end.
But what I do know is that we will not come out of this genocide as we entered it. This is precisely where international law must act.
Supporting Palestinian self-determination is indeed not an act of charity, it is a binding obligation on all states.
The International Court of Justice has affirmed that Israel’s occupation is illegal, a violation amounting to racial segregation and apartheid that must end. Troops must be withdrawn, colonies dismantled, resources given back, offer concrete reparations and realise the right to return.
When South Africa brought the genocide in Gaza before the International Court of Justice – while much of the West looked away or defended and armed the assailant – you, South Africa, did more than filing a case; you opened the door for other countries to act.
Above all, this is the first settler-colonial genocide ever brought before an international court – a moment of historic resonance, echoing not only through Falasteen, but through every land where Indigenous peoples have barely survived genocide.
This act has rekindled faith in international law – a symbolic restoration, a quiet revolution in the history of international law.
In doing so, you proved again who you are – heirs to Mandela’s conviction that justice must be lived, not merely spoken.
In a few days I will have the privilege to present my last to the United Nations General Assembly called “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime”, from Cape Town.
How symbolic. While the US has banned me, and with it my analysis and recommendations, I am in the country that once again stands at the cusp of what can be the beginning of a new multilateralism, challenging once more colonial, or imperial, power structures.
BUT as history has taught us, law on paper is never enough.
Law is only as strong as the will of states to enforce it – and enforcing it today requires principled choices and courage.
What if states fail to act? What if South Africa and others does not do what it is obliged to do:
- Impose an arms embargo, suspend trade;
- Investigate and, where warranted, prosecute nationals who have fought in the Israeli army;
- Prevent businesses from operating in Israel;
- Stop pro-genocide forces from dehumanising Palestinians and harassing those who stand in solidarity.
Facing Gaza’s devastation, we are called to choose justice over silence, action over apathy. And each of us must also act.
Make ethical choices – as consumers, teachers, students, civil servants – now more than ever called to be civil before servants.
Stop buying products that sustain the illegal occupation and genocide.
Hold governments, banks, pension funds, and universities accountable.
Boycott Israeli products and those linked to Israeli crimes, as the BDS movement teaches.
Mobilise unions, coordinate with global solidarity movements, demand divestment from universities and institutions.
As Dr Naledi Pandor once said, if the workers worldwide struck for a month, the genocidal assault on Gaza would stop immediately. It is not too late.
And go and visit Falasteen! While Gaza is still under full blockade, so much can only be learned and understood of occupation by witnessing the daily struggles the Palestinians face in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and what remains of Historical Palestine. As well as the beauty that permeates that land.
Finally, we must demand the liberation of all Palestinian hostages, especially Marwan Barghouti, whose voice has been silenced for far too long.
In a world where powerful states and corporations seem to perpetually advance greed-driven interests at our expense (we who do not hold unlimited wealth, who do not control weapons and algorithms), we can still find new ways forward.
South Africa’s legacy shows us that no system of oppression can endure forever. Against all odds, the people united can truly change the course of history.
Taking a step back, through the centuries, humanity has always had to fiercly fight for the affirmation of human rights: from the slave trade, to racial segregation, women’s rights, indigenous people’s rights, minority rights, persons with disabilities, LGBTQI+, and so forth. Together with the enduring battle against apartheid, colonialism, illegal occupation.
None of these struggles is a finished business.
But we do not have the luxury to give up.
True change and transformation demand courage – and yes, sacrifice – but it is through such steadfastness that humanity is reminded of its shared responsibility and its capacity for renewal.
These days, while visiting the archives of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, I held in my hands a poignant script in which Mandela wrote that men and women come and go; some leave absolutely no trace, others are remembered for the evil they caused – and some for what they tried to do in the name of justice.
These words echo from South Africa to Italy, from Falasteen to Sudan, from Australia to the United States – a nation built on land taken through centuries of genocide.
We should ask ourselves: what do we want to leave on our passage on this Earth, that we do not receive from our parents but borrow from our children?
Personally, I never imagined that my path would lead me to confront power in this way.
I was born in a small mountain town in southern Italy, a place that seems ordinary, yet whose lessons were extraordinary.
My early years were shaped not by fame or privilege, but by an education that, I believe, sought to teach us history with honesty.
I learned of the Holocaust as a benchmark of human depravity, and of Italy’s survival through 20 brutal years of dictatorship under Mussolini and his fascist brigades – a struggle whose sacrifices freed us from tyranny and gave us a constitution grounded in justice, equality and human dignity.
However, what my European education DID NOT teach me was how the horrors of the Holocaust built upon what Germany had done to the Herero and Nama in Namibia. They DID NOT teach me how the dehumanisation the Jews were subjected to, is the same colonised societies had to endure for decades, if not centuries. Indeed, as rz says, the idea of a superior race was neither born nor died with the Nazi regime, and in fact continues to fester in the world today.
Only later in life did I come to understand the centuries of racism, suprematism and patriarchy that had erased entire communities across Europe before and while expanding into the settler colonialism that would scar millions across Africa, Latin America and Asia.
By exceptionalising the Holocaust as the only aberration in OUR history, we (the Europeans) have concealed the many other crimes and injustices our ancestors committed, and in doing so, undermined our capacity to see the structural and eruptive forms of violence that permeate our societies and the international community up until today, a process which finds in the ongoing endorsement in Gaza by too many Western states, its monstrous culmination.
In this moment in history my commitment to justice also includes undoing such legacy by carrying forward the voices of my nation’s humanist legal tradition into this global chorus for justice.
Thinking of Mandela, I can’t avoid mentioning Antonio Gramsci, politician and philosopher arrested by the Fascist regime in 1926, leading to his death a decade after. He said that “indifference is the deadweight of history”. Which I find echoed in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s words: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Such historical figures left in the world sparkles of light and justice, embodied a commitment to justice and humanity that shall inspire us moving forward.
Freedom, justice, and human dignity can never be taken for granted. They must be defended every day, or they risk quietly disappearing.
As I reflect on my ordinary story beside your extraordinary one, I try to fully grasp the depth of Ubuntu – “I am because you are.”
This reaches me as a truth forged in pain and resilience.
The steadfastness of the Palestinian people – sumud – is the sister of your own Ubuntu. In Arabic, sumud means steadfastness – resilience that becomes a way of being.
It is the grandmother in Gaza who gathers her orphaned grandchildren amid rubble and whispers, “remember”.
It is the farmer in the West Bank who replants his olive sapling each time settlers uproot the old tree, refusing to give up his bond to the soil.
It is the children studying in tents after their schools are destroyed.
Sumud is resilience with grace, defiance with dignity – the quiet, unyielding courage to keep living, hoping and loving amid the hardest adversity.
Sumud, like Ubuntu, is not merely a word, it is the moral DNA of survival, a profound expression of faith in our shared interdependence – a powerful antidote to the isolation and fear that conflictuality sows, at every level and in every domain.
Together, they define an “ethics of coexistence”, and perhaps, what Nelson Mandela envisioned: a world in which empathy becomes the language of politics – and politics is rooted in justice, the recognition of our shared humanity.
They remind us that no one is truly free until we are all free, and that our dignity is inseparable from the dignity of others. Both teach us that we are bound together in each other’s suffering and hope.
And to the Palestinians, I say: whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter – not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, against colonialism, and today more than ever against neoliberal tyranny.
If there is one thing I would like you to take from this lecture, it is this: whether recognised or not, accepted or not by those in power, the Palestinian struggle for freedom stands at the heart of the movement towards a truly decolonial world order.
In other words, a world in which international law is applied universally, and the crimes of colonialism – for which Mandela and his comrades spent 27 years in prison, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have in theirs – are finally accounted for. Otherwise, it will be remembered as the greatest moral failure of our time. And that is why, no matter the repression we face, Falasteen will increasingly stand at the centre of all struggles for justice worldwide.
Therefore, as we reflect on peace and cooperation, let’s appreciate this: a pause in the bombing – a so-called ceasefire – is not peace.
In this atrocity that some have the audacity to call peace. The Israeli army maintains control over more than half of Gaza, continuing to kill everywhere it can and rapaciously steal land and resources across the West Bank, continuing to hold and torment thousands of Palestinian hostages.
The self-determination of the Palestinian people appears still as far as it’s ever been.
The pressure must continue if the Palestinians are to achieve the same justice that everyone deserves.
Millions of ordinary people are crying out for moral clarity and principled leadership. For an end to complicity – in my beautiful country, and in yours, South Africa.
They long for a vision that places human life above conquest, dignity above convenience, community above self interest.
They demand an international order rooted in our shared humanity. This is the new multilateralism we must build – not for the few, but for the many. Where solidarity, as the political declination of love, can be fully realised in each and every society. Your leadership lights a path for others to follow.
South Africa can and must continue to stand at the forefront, continuing to open doors and compelling others to follow.
Many today hesitate to stand up to power.
Fear is human – but as someone who comes from a place that has been long plagued by the mafia, where the logic of intimidation could smear, torment and even kill those who stood for justice, I tell you from my heart: what defeats us is not the blow, but refusing to rise again. Fear cannot withstand the power of ordinary people uniting their struggles in a just cause.
Today, in many ways, I stand before you in a place of vulnerability, but also of great strength, empowered by the resilience of the Palestinian people and everyone standing for humanity.
By doing the right thing, we find allies, and through solidarity we will find strength.
Yes, we have a long way to go, but we have begun. And in that beginning, I find hope. I believe we can lay the foundation not only for a more just global order, but for a new way of being as a global community. The realisation of the principles of Ubuntu and Sumud. A world that finally embraces humanity, solidarity, justice and equality for all.
Alone, we are fragile, like butterfly wings, but when we flap those wings all together, that’s when we can make a storm. And may justice be our storm.
Enkosi, Siyabonga, Shukran, Grazie. DM