Thabo Mashego

Dear South Africans, The world knows you are right. It is a fact you should hold onto, because the question now is not whether your case is just. It is whether you will be ready when being right - while under sanctions - becomes painfully expensive. Washington does not care whether your position on Palestine or the Land Question is morally correct or legally justified. It will sanction you no matter how loudly you object, how carefully you quote international law, or how many times you prove that history is on your side. The rest of the world, and here I mean the Global South, ordinary Europeans, and a growing number of Americans, knows that you are not only correct but consistent with the deepest traditions of anti-colonial struggle and human dignity. That is precisely why the punishment is coming. American policy is not a seminar on justice; it is a machine of interest, and that machine is still oiled by racism - a hierarchy that places the Caucasian above the black African, the settler above the native, and the empire above the colonised. On Palestine and Israel, your principled position is the wrong side for Washington, not because you are wrong but because justice and fairness are not its concerns. Influence is. Control is. The preservation of a world order it still believes it owns. They will not applaud your consistency. They will punish it, and they will dress that punishment in the language of extremism, antisemitism, ingratitude, and irresponsibility. They will freeze accounts, squeeze trade, threaten loans, isolate leaders, and fund friendly voices to tell you that surrender is sophistication and silence is maturity. If you do not intend to change course on the Land Question and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then you had better begin working seriously on sanctions-busting - not as a slogan, not as a conference resolution, but as a national project. That means trade in other currencies and barter where the dollar is a weapon. It means banks, payment systems, and supply chains that do not kneel to Washington. It means deepening ties with BRICS, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world. It means securing food, fuel, medicine, and technology before the screws tighten. It means manufacturing at home what you can no longer import. It means treating sanctions not as a surprise but as a forecast. So do not wait for the storm to pass. Build the ark now. Because when the sanctions bite, they will not ask whether you were right. They will only ask whether you were ready. And history will not remember the comfortable. It will remember those who stood their ground and built a future that no empire could strangle. The world knows you are right. Now show them you are ready. Your concerned Zimbabwean Brother, Dereck R Goto