The militant actions of the South African dock workers who refused to offload goods from Israeli ships during the Gaza massacre was an important boost for the international solidarity movement.
Salim Vally, a spokesperson for the South African Palestine Solidarity Committee, will bring the lesson of this struggle and others to Sydney in April when he attends "World at a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century".
The conference, hosted by Green Left Weekly and organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Resistance, affiliates of the Socialist Alliance, will be held April 10-12 at Sydney Girls High.
A tireless campaigner against South African apartheid since high school, today Vally is one of the leading international voices in the campaign against Israeli apartheid.
In 1976, he was a regional executive member of the South African Students' Movement until its banning in 1977. Two years later, he was forced to leave the country as a result of police repression, becoming a member of the exiled Black Consciousness Movement of Azania.
A delegate to the founding congress of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Vally worked from 1985 to 1993 as an educator for the Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union (CCAWUSA) and later at the COSATU affiliate SACCAWU as the national educator. He was also a member of COSATU's National Education Committee.
Since 1995, he has been a lecturer and senior researcher at the Education Policy Unit and the School of Education at Wits University in Johannesburg.
Apart from speaking about the realities of US imperialism's "war on terror", he will be hosting a discussion with activists from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in Australia.
[For more information or to register for the conference visit http://www.worldatacrossroads.org.]