Growing up, I remember spending countless hours outside Lanarkshire supermarkets, playing games behind stall tables with the other kids as the adults around us clutched piles of soggy leaflets. My mother would explain to shoppers and passersby why they shouldn’t buy oranges with the Outspan sticker or Cape apples. The small act of boycotting was my family’s little contribution to raising awareness of our government’s complicity with an odious regime.

Being anti-apartheid was one of my earliest childhood political memories. But nowadays that term, apartheid, has become unsayable. Not because anyone denies the old South African regime was a contemptible racist state: even my mum’s old Thatcherite enemies reconciled to those realities long ago.

Instead, apartheid is taboo because so many people bristle at the potential comparison between South Africa’s racial order and Israel’s practices of land-grabbing, militarised policing and ethnic segregation.

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Yet the more they repress it, the more the comparison suggests itself. Certainly, it was obvious to South African leaders like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. “I have witnessed the systematic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security services,” observed Tutu, “and their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”

And you’d think his words would carry some weight. But perhaps Tutu was wrong; perhaps he was swayed by a mistaken sense of Third World solidarity and festering grievances over Israel’s support for the old White order in South Africa.

What are we to make, then, of the numerous Israeli liberals, intellectuals and human rights groups to whom the apartheid comparison suggests itself? Perhaps they have been deluded by leftist self-hatred, or party-political point scoring against Netanyahu.

But then, that would extend to Tamir Pardo, appointed to head Mossad – yes, that Mossad – by Netanyahu himself. “There is an apartheid state here,” Pardo recently observed. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

One might dismiss South Africans and the bulk of the Global South; they can dismiss a raft of Jewish people and Israeli liberals. But it’s surely harder to dismiss Mossad’s former top gun as a pro-Palestinian crank.

Consumer boycotts, the tactic my mother pursued, are another taboo comparison. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) was promoted by Palestinian civic groups, pursuing the path of peace via the South African model, as a non-violent mechanism for raising awareness of Western complicity in a hierarchical, militarised racial order.

It was roundly dismissed as an ancient form of anti-Semitic hatred. Those who condemn Palestinian violence, and who likewise condemn “cancel culture”, have actively sought to ban BDS activism and vilify all other forms of peaceful protest by or on behalf of the Palestinian cause.

BDS is no longer a route for non-violent resistance. Diplomatic routes via the Palestinian Authority are no longer routes to freedom. And the last time Palestinians demonstrated for justice, they were shot at by Israeli Security Forces with live ammunition, killing 189 Palestinians, 35 of whom were children.

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The UN Commission’s report into the massacre at the civilian-organised “Great March of Return” in 2018 states that the Israeli Security Forces injured 6,106 Palestinians with live ammunition at the protest sites; 3,098 Palestinians were injured by bullet fragmentation, rubber-coated metal bullets or by hits from tear gas canisters; 122 people had a limb amputated at the time the report’s findings were published in 2019. Twenty of these amputees are children.

For these reasons and more, I broke my own rule last Saturday. My intention was always to shield my baby from the messy, cruel world of politics. As an adult, I’ve seen and felt the ugliness of political life; its brutal realities are something I wanted to protect her from for as long as possible. But I felt compelled to bring my whole family to a demonstration for Palestine.

Above all, I was drawn by a sense of tradition: the experience of the Scottish anti-apartheid movement has stayed with me.

The intensity of fatalities and trauma over the last few weeks has been devastating. But if there was any momentary doubt that the violence would relent, the volley of dehumanising, cruel language issuing from Israeli politicians served to clarify the stakes. We were dealing, they said, with “human animals”, “children of darkness” operating according to the “law of the jungle”. Sometimes actions follow unavoidably from words.

Water, food and electricity, or schools, hospitals and churches – all were declared fair game. Messages of unconditional solidarity, a blank cheque for rage and revenge, duly followed from the Westminster parties, Biden’s America – but most of all from Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission, whose bloodlust topped even Netanyahu’s.

Should we be surprised? The reaction of world leaders after 9/11 was likewise zero reflection, all recrimination. The resulting temper tantrum of Western solidarity cost trillions of dollars, millions of lives, countless millions of displaced people and a succession of failed states: all for zero, no positive gains whatsoever.

Worst of all, nothing was learned from all those wasted lives and resources. Our leaders have almost implored Israel to behave as we did: without the remotest sense of reflection or moral agency. All brute emotion, blitzing helpless people with shock and awe. It would be almost churlish to complain. They’re following our lead.

On a positive note, last week I came home only to see a small, humble scarf, embroidered with the words “free Palestine” hung in a neighbours’ window. They aren’t students or bohemian layabouts, far less hate-mongering cranks. They are a normal, professional family with three young children, the littlest only months older than my own. Suddenly I didn’t feel so empty and hopeless anymore. Somebody else was rejecting Starmer and Sunak’s greenlight for genocide.

So, when Saturday came and we headed to the Glasgow demonstration, we all did so together, my family, my neighbours’ and friends. And the astonishing numbers on Saturday only served to fill us all with a bit of light that we thought had completely vanished: there are thousands of us who stand in solidarity with Palestine.

Faced with an immense sense of powerlessness, it matters, to me, to think of small things I can do against the world’s horrors. That might mean risking confrontation by wearing a Free Palestine badge. It might mean refusing to buy goods from illegal settlements. It might mean going to the demonstrations: especially when they are criminalised, and others might face silencing and prosecution. And it means passing on to my daughter what my mother passed on to me: the duty of internationalism, to stand up against oppressors operating with the complicity of our leaders.