Vigil for Palestine

The Dublin branch of the IPSC are holding a candlelight vigil to mourn the almost 20,000 people killed in Apartheid Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza.

They will be assembling at The GPO on Dublin’s O’Connell Street from 5.30pm on Friday 22nd December. Of those killed, more than two-thirds have been women and children. People are asked try to bring candles, or install a candlelight app on your phone, and wear dark clothing.

The following is a statement by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

For more than three quarters of a century, the Israeli state has held the Indigenous Palestinian people in a state of dispossession and subjugation, under a brutal settler-colonial Apartheid regime. It has forced millions of Palestinians into refugeehood and condemned them to live in enforced exile. It has stolen their lands, their resources, and their livelihoods.

It has imprisoned more than 800,000 people since 1967, and is the only state in the world that routinely prosecutes children in military courts. It has illegally annexed East Jerusalem and for more than fifty years has enforced its rule in the West Bank and Gaza via a murderous military occupation.

For almost two decades it has imposed a cruel and barbaric siege on the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, where residents are held in an open-air prison with polluted water and limited electricity, denied their freedom, their healthcare, and their most basic rights, and regularly subjected to massive military assaults.

Major international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and Al Haq, as well as numerous UN Special Rapporteurs, all agree that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people.

Since September 2000, Israel has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. Almost one quarter of these victims have been children.

All of these atrocities have been committed in full view of the world, and yet in all this time, the international community – the Irish government included – has taken precisely zero concrete actions to defend Palestinians or to help them win their freedom and self-determination.

Indeed, at a time when Israel’s far-right government – the most racist, fundamentalist and fanatical ever – has been ruthlessly escalating its ethnic cleansing, siege, killings, incarceration, provocations and daily humiliation of millions of Indigenous Palestinians, the response of the West has simply been to conduct ‘business as usual’.

Yet, as if history began yesterday, when Palestinian fighters engage in anti-colonial violence in retaliation against the endemic and systematic violence of the coloniser, the Western world rushes to offer both moral and material support to Israel; an apartheid state that has oppressed Palestinian for over seven decades, and which is now inflicting death and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza, and promising much worse to come.

The hypocrisy is astounding and disgusting.

It is precisely the continued rejection by Israel of a peaceful and ethical decolonisation process, and the failure by Western powers to force it to dismantle its regime of apartheid and to grant Palestinians their right to self-determination, that has paved the road to the present juncture.

Despite what Israel and its allies hope, and their best efforts to enforce a colonial pacification on the Indigenous Palestinians, oppressed peoples will always strive to achieve liberty by whatever means they can. Indeed, as enshrined in the Geneva Convention’s Additional Protocols, occupied peoples have the right to engage in “fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.”

Palestinians will never stop resisting their dispossession, and it is foolish and ahistorical to think otherwise; to paraphrase Irish freedom fighter Patrick Pearse, Palestine unfree will never be at peace.

Thus, if those Western states rushing to provide their ‘unwavering support’ to Israel are actually serious about peace – a genuine and just peace – in the region, then what really needs their ‘unwavering support’ is a process of decolonisation and the dismantling of Israel’s regime of apartheid.

There are a myriad ways to help achieve this. Ending all military-security cooperation and imposing a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel; banning trade with Israel’s illegal colonial settlements; promoting UN action to dismantle Israeli apartheid’s regime; and ending all aid and assistance that contributes to maintaining this regime; these are just some of the most obvious actions that can be taken.

For its part, instead of trying to promote trade and tourism with apartheid Israel, the Irish government must enact the Occupied Territories Bill and the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill, demand the lifting of the siege of Gaza, and publicly acknowledge Israeli apartheid and act to end it.

Palestinian civil society, as represented by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, has been clear in its demands for a just resolution based on international law; an end to the occupation, full rights for Palestinian citizens in Israel, and the implementation of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.

Until these demands are realised, the violence of Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime will continue; as will anti-colonial resistance to it.

For our part, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign remains steadfast in our support for the right to the Palestinian people to self-determination, and their struggle for freedom, justice, equality and return.

Finally, we reiterate the calls from the Palestinian BDS Movement for people of conscience to:

* Work with progressive networks to pressure parliaments and governments to (a) end all military-security cooperation and trade with apartheid Israel; (b) ban all goods/services of companies operating in Israel’s illegal colonial settlements; and (c) promote UN action to investigate and dismantle Israeli apartheid, as was done with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

* Mobilise institutional pressure campaigns (including boycotts or divestment) against Israeli and international companies and banks that are complicit in Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.

* Mobilise your community, trade union, association, church, social network, student government/union, city council, cultural centre, or other organisation to declare it an #ApartheidFreeZone (AFZ), ending all relations with apartheid Israel and companies/institutions that are complicit in its system of oppression.

* Initiate/support boycotts of all academic, cultural, sports, and tourism engagements taking place in/sponsored by apartheid Israel or its lobby groups and complicit institutions.

* Join a BDS campaign or a strategic Palestine solidarity group near you to act collectively and effectively, and join Palestine solidarity protests in your locality.

Urgent Appeal