Chief Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, has joined the Freedom Flotilla now preparing in Turkey to sail to Gaza, while being delayed by multiple sabotage efforts from Israel and the U.S.. Dmitri Lascaris, a Canadian lawyer and peace activist who has attended several IPC meetings (and participated in two earlier Freedom Flotillas to Gaza), sent a video from Ankara which included a presentation given by Mandela to the approximately 200 people now getting non-violence training in preparation for the journey.
Mandela started by emphasizing the importance of the Palestinian struggle to his grandfather, both while he was in prison and after his liberation and the South African defeat of apartheid. “It is not what we are doing for Palestine,” Nelson said, “but what Palestine is doing for us.” He drew strength from the decades and decades of Palestinian struggle against the Israeli version of apartheid. Chief Mandla said that all South Africans know what it means to have people like you (the people going on the Flotilla). Nelson also said that “Our freedom is not complete without the freedom of the Palestinian people.” He referred to the Palestinian issue as “the greatest moral issue of our time.”
