Thank you for your solidarity and support during the last few weeks as we watched with horror Israel’s aggression and genocidal policies in Gaza, and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem.
The tide is turning! We have seen this in the overwhelming number of people who marched with us in all major cities around the country. Tens of thousands gathered to express solidarity and to assure us that despite all of the silencing and attempts at erasure we have faced from the media and other power structures, our voices today are louder than ever.
At its core, the Palestinian cause is an anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle. We fight to dismantle the oppressive structures of settler colonialism imposed on Palestinians, including the system of apartheid in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the illegal and punitive blockade on Gaza, and the discriminatory laws that sustain and protect these structures. We fully recognise that our struggle is interconnected with other campaigns for decolonisation and justice both here in Australia and around the world, and we stand in proud solidarity with First Nations peoples.
As our movement continues to expand and grow, we urge everyone to continue to stand up against all forms of racism and xenophobia, including Islamophobia, antisemitism, and Zionism.
We have achieved a lot in the past few weeks, but sadly our struggle is far from over. While the ceasefire is a welcome step and a much needed reprieve for Palestinians in Gaza, they still suffer collective punishment in the form of a cruel and illegal blockade. In Jerusalem, plans to ethnically cleanse the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood are still underway. Palestinians in Israel endure a myriad of social, legislative and other challenges that Jewish citizens do not face, while Palestinians in the occupied West Bank face daily humiliation in the creeping theft of their land through forced evictions, demolition of homes, and restrictions upon their freedom of movement. Meanwhile, six million Palestinian refugees remain unable to exercise their inalienable right to return to their ancestral lands.
We must continue to demand an immediate and urgent end to the ongoing war crimes, human rights abuses, and violations of international law that Israel conducts on a daily basis with full impunity. We also demand that our federal and state governments suspend all ties with Israel until a just solution is achieved, and the Palestinians are able to live in peace and equality in their ancestral lands.
We will continue to demand freedom, justice, and equality for all Palestinians, from the river to the sea!
Best regards
Salam,
Organising Committee
Let’s act to stop another attack on the people of Gaza. Sign this petition and share it with your family and friends. We know that together we can do this! To sign the petition go to https://www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/petition/EN2715 Closing date: 23 June 2021
All human beings, like all living beings on this earth, deserve respect! It’s a basic fundamental right of life that cannot be denied at the peril of all of humanity and the earth!
Just as George Floyd once couldn’t breathe until he died gasping under the knee of an American Minneapolis policeman so, too, now, as they have been suffering since the Nakba Catastrophe in 1948, the Palestinians slowly continue to die under the oppressive boot of Benjamin Netanyahu, his IDF Forces and every Jewish bully-who follows their lead; pressing down ever harder, listening with gleeful anticipation for those last dying Arab gasps they long to hear.
Like the American policeman who didn’t respect George Floyd’s human rights, as so many other mean-spirited Americans over the course of time have done with Black-Brown-Asian-Native Americans they likewise have denied the same right to live as they would, so, too, the Jewish settlers in Occupied Palestine willingly and quite happily now march through the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the West Bank or wherever else a vulnerable Palestinian family is to be found, knowing full-well that they have the protected right to chant, ”Death to the Arabs!”. Jewish gang rage, its members bound by a common religion, race and place of residency, know they have the full protection of Israeli politicians and military forces to rage against whatever unsuspecting Palestinian they may find. In the end, another ugly ‘Rodney King’ bashing, Jewish-style, gets played out on live TV.
What an abomination! What an outrage! Is this what the United States and the rest of the so-called ‘free’ Western World once fought a second world over, and so selflessly died while trying to save the whole human race, especially Jewish people, from the Nazi gas chambers of the Holocaust?
Now, with U.S. President Biden’s blatantly-unshakable and unequivocal allegiance, along with every Democrat and Republican politician or American voter who have aligned themselves with Israeli PM Netanyahu and the Likud Party’s racist, apartheid debacle in Occupied Palestine, doesn’t that equally make them all terrorist partners-in-crimes against humanity? Don’t they all, equally, have blood on their hands, no different from the crimes the Nazi and their allies once committed? Shouldn’t they hate the Israeli fascists and defend the world against them as much as they once did against the hated Nazi fascists? Shouldn’t President Biden be choking on his own words when he once declared, “If Israel hadn’t ever existed we would have had to create one”? Or when Biden declares, “Israel has an inherent right to protect ourselves”, yet says nothing about the Palestinian people’s same right to defend themselves? Aren’t their rights the same as all the Brown-Black-Yellow-Red peoples of America whose same inherent human rights and entitlements have been violated for so long?
The ugly racist violence now wending its way throughout Occupied Palestine, busting into dwellings of innocent Palestinians, violating men, women and children, evicting them from their homes with no place to live other than the rubble of the streets and wastelands of their former spiritual homelands, continues unabated; while Israel’s apartheid regime and a hamstrung, if not blind or indifferent United Nations Security Council, is repeatedly blocked from doing anything by Biden and America’s racist veto powers that continue to deny Palestinians any remote guarantee of common, basic human justice and equality.
The on-going human indignities occurring in Israel in 2021 are no different than so many other ugly scenes from a century or two ago, up to the present day, in the United States where Black, Brown Asian Americans and Native Americans still find themselves in the same predicament. As in American history, it’s now Israel’s turn, as America’s proxy in the Middle East, to act as yet another giddy apartheid regime that has gone berserk over its power to achieve near total control of the entire area between the Jordon River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Heartbreaking, terrifying, reprehensible violence, intended to unequivocally assert Jewish Zionist-American Christian supremacy in the region, reigns supreme as: airstrikes employing the latest in tactical aerial bombardment payloads, courtesy of American taxpayer monies, are strategically dropped in residential areas on buildings that house Hamas political leaders or Arab and world media outlets alike; and journalists who attempt to tell the world the truth of what actually is going on in their midst in Gaza, or the West Bank are blocked at every turn; while stun grenades, again courtesy of American taxpayers monies and American arms manufacturers, continue to be hurled into crowds of protesting Palestinian youth or those praying in their mosque; Israeli citizen-soldiers supremely confident that their Israeli commanders and Likud Party henchmen-bureaucrats will cover for them to continue to uphold an apartheid system that remains all but invisible to the outside world.
In the end, after all the latest violence has subsided, and Palestinians can crawl from out of the rubble of their lives, if one can call their existence ‘lives’ that shouldn’t be wished upon one’s worst enemies, the Jews will return, virtually unscathed, to reclaim their white privileged lifestyles in neighborhoods formerly inhabited by Palestinians, who instead will have now been even further reduced to homeless refugees in their own lands, forced to take up residency in one of the Jews new ‘stalag compounds’, forever pinned down by the jackboots of their oppressors.
Yet, once upon a time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed, in 1948, that “It is essential, if man is not compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, their human rights should be protected”.
But who exactly is it who will now ensure justice and quality of life for the Palestinians, with the same rights as the Jews to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, with the freedom to learn, dream and love as is the desire in life for every human being? Will it be U.S. President Biden a Cheshire Cat politician whose alliance with Israeli Zionism goes back to the beginning of his political career? Or will it be a re-elected PM Benjamin Netanyahu, a former elite IDF commando, resolute hard-liner, who is about to stand trial in a Jerusalem District Court for bribery, fraud and breach of trust or, with luck, may even stand trial for apartheid by the United Nation’s International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC)? Or perhaps Israel’s new leader will be Ben-Gvir, a lawyer notorious for his anti-Palestinian rhetoric, who is a disciple of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, a violent anti-Arab once considered so repugnant that even Israel banned him from parliament and the U.S. listed his party as a terrorist group? Or maybe it will be Moshe Ya’alon, a staunch opponent of the two-state solution, much beloved in what some call the right-wing Likud Party and Israel’s Sudentenland in Occupied Palestine, where Palestinians are forever targeted?
Meanwhile, the results of any vote may have to await the outcome of an Israeli-Palestinian Civil War bloodbath that presciently seems just around the corner.
Bio Note:
Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer who once upon a time in university was a Criminology student while working in one of America’s local police departments. For decades, Irwin has especially sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by a host of environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting world philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America that has led to numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & the U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; the many violations constantly being waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul
An essay from the Emory International Law Review journal.
“On July 8, 2014, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that they had launched “Operation Protective Edge,” a military intervention into the Gaza territory. The IDF stated that the goals of Protective Edge were “aimed to retrieve stability to the residents of southern Israel, eliminate Hamas’ capabilities and destroy terror infrastructure operating against the State of Israel and its civilians.” Less than two months later, at least 2,131 Palestinians had been killed, 1,473 of whom were civilians and 501 children.”
