The Progressive March 3, 2025 by Nyki Duda quoting Zunes:
“Stephen Zunes, a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement in solidarity with Black South Africans in the 1980s and a regular contributor to The Progressive, sees parallels between that movement and the student movement in support of Palestine. Much like the Gaza solidarity encampments, Zunes told me, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against South Africa “included encampments, what we called shantytowns, modeled after the poor living conditions of South African Blacks” living under white rule. But while students in the 1980s were punished—Zunes was arrested for his activism—they were not targeted with bans from their campuses or harsh legal charges, as pro-Palestinian student protesters are now facing. “Where shantytowns were allowed to stay up for months during the anti-apartheid struggle, encampments [for Gaza] were torn down within hours at the same universities,” Zunes says. Vincent Boudreau, the City College of New York President who called police in against protesters, was Zunes’s classmate at Cornell, and was also arrested multiple times for his anti-apartheid activism. “And here he is,” Zunes says, “calling the cops to come in and attack people.”