After imposing a deadly blockade on the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip for 11 years and launching three massive, genocidal attacks in the last seven years – aided by the complicity of the so-called international community and the silence of reactionary Arab regimes – last week, Israel has committed a new massacre against peaceful demonstrators commemorating Land Day and asserting their right of return.  

On Friday, March 30, Israeli soldiers killed 17 civilians and injured more than 1,400 others – mostly with live ammunition. According to the Israeli military, the massacre went according to plan. Their spokesperson tweeted – and later deleted – that “[On March 30] nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured. We know where every bullet landed”.

At the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000, I wrote the following:

Today, we have a sense of deja vu; we’ve been there before and we know that more of us will be killed in what BBC calls “clashes”! The Israeli military, or what the courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy calls “the Israel Massacre Forces”, are a gang of thugs indoctrinated by an ideology that dehumanises children and justifies the shooting of innocent civilians.

It is definitely not the right time for such grandiose philosophical questions, but what is the Palestinian to do when he or she lives such a crude political reality?

The question that is on every Gaza Palestinian mind is “why is this allowed to happen, 24 years after the fall of the apartheid regime of South Africa?” We do know why Israel is doing it; we are the unwanted “goyim”, the refugees whose very existence is a constant reminder of the original sin committed in 1948 – the premeditated crime of ethnic cleansing of two thirds of the Palestinian people. We have been cursed for simply having the “wrong” religion and “ethnicity”, for being born to non-Jewish mothers! The problem is that we are not dying quietly; we are making noise, a lot of noise; we are banging the walls of the Gaza tank – to use one of famed Palestinian intellectual and author Ghassan Kanafani’s metaphors.

I have been teaching one of Kanafani’s best novels called All That is Left to You to my students at Gaza’s Al-Aqsa University. In this novel, the hero, who happens to be a refugee living in Gaza, loses everything except his will to resist. Holding on to that will, and confronting the horror of Zionist colonialism requires a vision. A vision that could enable him to return to Jaffa, where he had lost his father at the hands of Zionist gangs in 1948. Most of my students relate to, and some even identify with him. They agree that no political solution can be achieved without the implementation of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, which calls for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the villages and cities from which they were ethnically cleansed back in 1948. No wonder, then, that most of my students are among the demonstrators on Gaza’s borders!

In Gaza, we know that Israel is going to get away with it, simply because it has never been held to account for any of the massacres it has committed; we also know that it is going to commit more and worse crimes.

Hasn’t the ESCWA report proven beyond any doubt that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against the indigenous people of Palestine? We also know that it would not have been able to carry out all these crimes without support from the United States and the so-called international community. We, therefore, have lost hope in official bodies such as the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Instead, we are counting on international civil society to put an end to this ongoing bloodbath committed by apartheid Israel in broad day light.

The tool? Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) until Israel complies with International Law. Forget about meaningless negotiations that have proven to be disastrous, as the late Edward Said had rightly predicted back in 1994; forget about the racist two state solution that has been shot in the head by Israel itself and which fails to deal with the core of the Palestinian question, namely, 6-7 million refugees insisting on asserting their UN-stipulated right of return. The only window of hope, in addition to our own mass mobilisation, lies in the growing BDS campaign supported by conscious people all over the world. They understand that our struggle is non-sectarian, one that is enshrined in the basic principles of the International Declaration of Human Rights, no matter how hard hypocritical Western Media tries to conceal the truth.

Source www.aljazeera.com