Here is an important and timely statement by our Palestine-led partner organisation the One Democratic State Campaign.
October 15, 2023
The Palestinian people in Gaza are undergoing a campaign of genocide by their Israeli jailers. Confining two and half million people to a tiny area (made even smaller by the Israeli army’s order that half of Gaza’s inhabitants move south), cutting off all food, water, electricity and medicines, leaving hospital patients and the elderly to die, declaring that “all Gazans are Hamas,” thus making even children legitimate targets, carpet bombing for days to "soften" the terrain, and then invading with an army of 360,000 soldiers – all this fits precisely the UN definition of genocide: “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.”
As of this moment, Israel has dropped an estimated 8,000 bombs on Gaza, more than the US dropped in Afghanistan in a year! It has destroyed some 4,000 targets, flattening entire residential areas, hospitals and schools. Over 2.500 Gazans have been killed, a third of them children. A million Palestinians, most of them refugees from the 1948, have been made refugees once again, displaced by force but with no safe haven in which to take shelter. And we await the worst at any moment: Israel’s massive ground invasion. “We are only at the beginning,” said Netanyahu menacingly. We are watching the destruction of a people occur before our eyes, with massive military and diplomatic support of the United States, Canada and Europe. The world is run by war criminals.
The brutal Israeli offensive is not merely an act of sheer vengeance against Hamas, but a genocidal campaign aimed at nothing less than displacing the people of Gaza so as to perpetuate its colonization of the entirety of Palestine. It is a campaign to liquidate any form of resistance. Israel has opposed any attempt to reach a just, inclusive and democratic settlement between our peoples. It has only endeavored, systematically and relentlessly, to extend its regime of apartheid from the River to the Sea.
The Palestinians have never been at war with Jews; they have been resisting a unilateral settler colonial project whose declared aim is the take-over of their homeland, the transformation of Palestine into Israel and the erasure of the Palestinian people, its culture and heritage. As in the liberation struggle of other colonized peoples, Palestinians have been forced by Zionism/Israel to fight for their national rights and freedom.
We, the peoples of the world, must speak out now in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. Let’s not forget, however, Palestinians throughout historic Palestine who at this moment are also facing ethnic cleansing and ruthless repression; 50 Palestinians have been killed, mainly by settlers, in the past week alone.
Most urgently, we must appeal in our masses to our governments, complicit as they are in these crimes against humanity:
STOP THE ISRAELI GROUND ATTACK ON GAZA!
STOP THE EXPULSION OF THE GAZANS, THE SECOND NAKBA!
BRING IN IMMEDIATE HUMANITARIAN AID!
END ISRAELI COLONIZATION & APARTHEID!
FOR PALESTINIAN FREEDOM! FOR A DEMOCRATIC STATE FOR ALL!