from PACBI -As Palestinian Students based in Gaza we are alarmed to see yet another group ‘Al Tariq’[1] presenting solutions for us Palestinians, as if two equal parties were locked in a stalemate. According to the group website “both sides” need to “learn from each other through reconciliation, forgiveness, and dialogue”. For us young people among the 1.5 million languishing in Gaza open-air prison, (800,000 children) the 4 year-long medieval blockade of land, air and sea and 2 years on from the most devastating of massacres that killed over 1400 of us and over 350 of our children, this is quite an insult.
We ask: can we forget the ongoing ethnic cleansing? How can we forget the brutal killing of 350 of our children and 1400 citizens, while more shootings of farmers and rock collectors continue along the border? How can we forget the ongoing medieval siege of the whole of the Gaza Strip which still deprives sick patients from treatment abroad and allows no concrete in for reconstruction?
The dialogue promoted is a diversion from addressing the wrongs and route to justice for a clearly racist and colonial subjugation of an entire people such as that imposed by Israel on us Palestinians languishing in besieged Gaza or in the Bantustans of the West Bank. Israeli oppression has traditionally followed the sequence of, ‘murder, steal and colonize first, then dialogue on our terms later’.
This applied to South African Apartheid, and the white Afrikaner regime and its allies and supporters steadily felt their hold was threatened only when civil resistance grew among South African blacks and the global Anti-Apartheid Movement. The right to resist illegal military occupation and racist domination is enshrined in international law, yet like us they branded the African National Congress as one of the more ‘notorious terrorist organisations’ – Nelson Mandela was on the US terror watch list until 2008.
Anti-Apartheid heroes Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Kasrils have said that the situation here is worse than apartheid. So we ask again, would we have asked for White South African youth to discuss with Black youth under Apartheid telling them that, “the path that both parties walk only after they learn from each other through reconciliation, forgiveness, and dialogue?”
For South Africa, there was no discussion, there was no debate, the racist oppression had only one answer: BOYCOTT.
Acknowledging the one-way nature of the oppression, Al Tariq should introduce to Palestinian youth, Israeli groups that endorse the 2005 Boycott Divestment and Sanction call[2] by over 170 Palestinian civil society groups, such as Boycott! and Boycott from Within. Not as in one of al Tariq’s workshops, hearing from an Israeli youth leader who “gave the Palestinian participants the opportunity to see the Israeli liberation movement in another light and recognize the similarities between both nations in their struggle for freedom, security and peace.”
What kind of liberation movement required as a prerequisite the violent ethnic cleansing of 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods destroyed or emptied by force by the nascent Israeli army – all belonging to us Palestinians, the indigenous population. Over two thirds of us in Gaza are UN registered refugees, still expecting justice like any other human being would.
Dialogue groups such as Al Tariq are nothing but a cover for the status quo of Israeli domination – the illegal occupation, the forced exile of 6 million Palestinian refugees, systematic discrimination and an illegal blockade of Gaza, and the increasing number of discriminatory laws against the indigenous population of 1948. In fact, by maintaining the myth of parity between the sides, the lives of Palestinians become progressively worse due to the settler colonial nature of Israeli oppression with incremental land theft and continuous ethnic cleansing and genocide.
We say enough to equating the colonizer with the colonized, enough to the false parity between the “two sides” presented by this utterly false vision of the Middle East. We ask Al Tariq to continue the rising international isolation of Israel’s colonial enterprise instead of feeding the myth that the colonizer and colonized require dialogue, the likes of which has done nothing more than mask Israel’s increasing domination of Palestinian lives based on a racism at the core of their expansionist and apartheid policies. We call on the Palestinian participants in this project to withdraw immediately and act in accordance with Palestinian consensus by boycotting such projects of normalization.
Besieged Gaza, Palestine
Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel
University Teachers’ Association
[1] http://altariq.wordpress.com
[2] http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52
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