While the world looks on at the proxy war between Russia and the United States taking place in Ukraine, in which the Russian and Ukrainian people suffer, the continuing ethnic cleansing takes place in occupied Palestine.
The Ukrainian flag is ubiquitous in the West; what are the colours of the Palestinian flag? or in fact the flags of Yemen, Somalia, etc.? Even a summary of some tragic events in September should draw attention within the international community to the Palestinians’ plight.
On 20 September, Israeli forces plugged with cement two underground wells in the occupied West Bank, making them useless, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. The wells were providing drinking-water for residents in the villages of Al-Ras and Kafr ‘Abbush, south of Tulkarm. The head of Al-Ras village council, Muhammad Majdub, told WAFA that the occupation forces plugged a well in the eastern area of the village with concrete, without a warning.
On Tuesday 20 September, Jewish extremist settlers attacked Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Old City, injuring at least twenty-one of them, including children, the newspaper Al-Resalah reported. According to eyewitnesses, Jewish settlers attacked people in the Old City market, including children and the elderly, spraying them with gas.
On Thursday 22 September a young Palestinian man was killed by occupation forces outside the village of Bayt Sira, to the west of Ramallah, WAFA reported.
On Saturday 24 September a young Palestinian man, Sa‘ed al-Kuni, was killed and three others wounded in an Israeli army raid on Nablus, north of the occupied West Bank. He was shot dead by an undercover Israeli force that broke into the neighbourhood of Al-Taawon in Nablus. At least three Palestinians were injured in the raid.
Last February an Amnesty International report said that the Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians. Their investigation described how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights. This includes Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as displaced refugees in other countries.
The secretary-general of Amnesty International, Dr Agnès Callamard, stated: “Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights. We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act.”
But essentially nothing has changed, and in fact the situation has become worse, as now the Zionist state pays no attention to world opinion. Its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, stated it for all to hear in June 1938—“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it”—as they planned the ethic cleansing of an Arab people from their “Red House.”
And if one thinks this is not something that so-called learned people would say in the modern era, then Arnon Soffer, a professor of geography, emphasised the point on 10 May 2004 in the Jerusalem Post, where he stated: “So, if we want to remain alive, we have to kill and kill and kill. All day every day . . . If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist . . .”
Dáil Éireann has discussed at length the plight of the Palestinian people and their suffering. The time has now come to act, and to call it what it is: that Israel is an apartheid state, and that sanctions must be implemented immediately against the Israel killing machine.
