Prominent South African Activist Detained on Gaza Women’s Flotilla
A well-known South African feminist activist is among the 13 women detained by Israeli authorities after they tried to use a boat to break the blockade of Gaza.
Leigh Ann Naidoo, a former Olympic volleyball star who is now a doctoral student at the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand, was reportedly detained along with a dozen others when Israeli naval forces boarded the boat and prevented it from landing in the Palestinian coastal enclave, the Mail & Guardian newspaper reported.
“I’m feeling really scared right now, because as we know the Israeli army is capable of a great number of human rights abuses and I’m not sure what’s happening with her,” Kelly Gillespie, Naidoo’s wife, told reporters
South African diplomats said they want to meet with Naidoo as soon as possible.
“Our embassy in Tel Aviv is liaising with Israeli authorities and requesting consular access to the detained South African national,” Nelson Kgwete, a South African spokesperson, told the paper.
Naidoo delivered the keynote address at the 2016 Ruth First Memorial lecture, where she spoke about intergenerational dialogue and activism. The lecture is named for First, a Jewish African National Congress heroine who was assassinated by the apartheid regime while living in exile.
She also participated in the 2004 Summer Olympics, playing volleyball for the South African team.
Israel recently paid $20 million in compensation to victims killed in the infamous Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
