It has become so predictable that it now only invokes dismissal amongst responsible people. The charge of anti-Semite against critiques of Israel.

Noble Peace Prize winner for his anti-apartheid activism, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has become a favorite target of American Zionist hoodlums seeking to silence all criticism of Israel’s occupation. Mind you, the criticism is directed against the occupation, Tutu is not an anti-Zionist in the sense that I am in rejecting Israel’s right to exist and calling for a one-state solution. But for American’s fanatical Zionists, any criticism of Israel is met by an effort to smear the messenger and thus deny Americans the opportunity to hear and appreciate his criticism. This effort has become so tired, that it will eventually provoke a backlash.

As a son of apartheid, Desmond Tutu knows injustice when he sees it. That is why he has made defending the Palestinians one of the passions in his life. After visiting the occupied West Bank and seeing the open-air prison that Palestinians live in, Tutu declared the occupation of Palestine worse than apartheid. And for that he has been attacked by, among others, the increasingly deranged Anti-Defamation League led by the self-caricature Abe Foxman. Tutu has written about his experiences under apartheid and how they relate to the Palestinians. Israel, it should be emphasized, was one of apartheid South Africa’s strongest allies. Menachem Begin once hosted a red carpet landing and state dinner for one of the white rules in South Africa.

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.

What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.

On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?

I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: “Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews.”

My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?

And Tutu has called for a boycott movement akin to the one that ended apartheid to end the occupation:

Divestment from apartheid South Africa was fought by ordinary people at the grassroots. Faith-based leaders informed their followers, union members pressured their companies’ stockholders and consumers questioned their store owners. Students played an especially important role by compelling universities to change their portfolios. Eventually, institutions pulled the financial plug, and the South African government thought twice about its policies.

Similar moral and financial pressures on Israel are being mustered one person at a time. Students on more than 40 US campuses are demanding a review of university investments in Israeli companies as well as in firms doing major business in Israel. From Berkeley to Ann Arbor, city councils have debated municipal divestment measures.

These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday’s South African township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel’s cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.

Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled “Not in My Name.” Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience.

Tutu is not controversial in every single country, not even Israel, expect America. Here in America, the parameters of debate are imposed by pro-Israel groups and you can imagine just how kind they are to critics.

It is incredible that someone like Tutu, so courageous. could ever be smeared so casually in America. But, alas, this is the way the Israel lobby works. In 2007, Tutu was banned from speaking at St. Thomas University in Minnesota after the Zionist Organization of America protested and actually accused him of anti-Semitism. The university was intimidated by the ZOA and uninvited Tutu.

And now Michigan State University is coming under a campaign after they invited Tutu to deliver the commencement address.

Two days later, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization, filed a protest.

In a letter to Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon, two ADL officials wrote that Tutu, whose opposition to apartheid in the 1980s won him the Nobel Peace Prize, had made statements about Israel that “conveyed outright bigotry against ... the Jewish people.”

They said a proposed cultural and academic boycott of Israel, which Tutu supports, was “based on ideas that are anti-Semitic and should be anathema to any institution of higher learning truly committed to academic freedom.”

The Israel lobby should really come up with new language. First, notice how they accuse Tutu of “bigotry against . . . Jewish people” when he has never been an anti-Semite.

And then they smear an boycott to end the occupation as anti-Semitic. What do these people want? That Israel pay no price for its illegal occupation. Tutu is not calling for an official, state-imposed boycott, but a grassroots driven one. If pressure in not put on Israel, it has less incentive to end the occupation. But for Zionist hoodlums, Israel is always rights and must never suffer any negative consequences no matter the injustice of its occupation.

And the end their letter in Orwellian language by have the temerity to state that banning Tutu would be a stand for “academic freedom.” Incredible!

But, don’t worry, the sun is setting on these fanatics and their shameless tactics of intimidation and suppression of dissent.