If it’s war, Mr. Netanyahu, the IVe Geneva Convention prohibits the occupying power that you are from transferring its population into the occupied territory: 700,000 Israeli settlers live today in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in 279 colonies illegal under international law. With complete impunity. Although not a single country recognizes them, although the United Nations (UN) reports, year after year, that the flagrant cause of the violence is the occupation, the whole world turns away from it, trade happily with Israel, instead of sanctioning it.
In Canada, this nauseating complicity is called CIFTA: Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement. In Quebec, its embarrassing version is called “Martine Biron opens an office in Tel Aviv”. In the midst of a far-right coalition coming to power.
If it’s war, the IVe Convention obliges the occupying power to protect the occupied population. Not to bomb it. No collapsing its homes on the heads of its inhabitants. On his children’s schools. On his patients’ hospitals. No razing its cities. No cutting off water, electricity, food and fuel to a besieged population of 2.3 million: Gaza.
Since it is war, then the right of peoples to use “all available means, including armed struggle”, to free themselves from the colonial yoke, must be defended: it is imprescriptible (resolution A / RES / 37 / 43 of the United Nations General Assembly). You and your allies know this, you who only have this worn-out refrain of terrorism to deny this right.
Now, if it is war, then it cannot be terrorism. But if it’s terrorism, then let’s talk about your state terrorism: your extrajudicial killings. Of your nightly raids on sleeping families. Of the incarceration and torture of children. “Blind terror”, inflicted by your colonists, says your general, Yehuda Fuchs. Let’s talk about your pogroms: in Huwara. In Turmus Ayya. Let’s talk about your terrifying incursions into the refugee camps – that of Jenin, martyred three times this year 2023 alone.
Among the international reactions to the armed operation carried out by the Palestinians since October 7 against Israel, there is that which we hear every time the Palestinians resist – that is to say, every time they refuse to consent to die silently. Although routine, this reaction is no less astonishing, proclaiming “Israel’s right to defend itself”. But Israel is an apartheid state and apartheid is defined in international law as a crime against humanity.
Does Israel have the right to defend this formidable architecture of oppression, does it have a “right to crime”? How does he defend himself when he occupies another people? The answer is found in its fundamental law of 2018: racist and openly colonial, the latter affirms, literally, Jewish supremacism and proclaims its pillar: colonization, defined as a “national value”.
What a Trumpist warmonger like Nikki Haley publishes on finish them all “, is not surprising: it regurgitates the genocidal slogan of the fascist masters of thought of the American republican generation. Itamar Ben Gvir, Israeli Minister of Public Security, is a fan of the slogan “death to the Arabs”. Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance, recommended “wiping Huwara” from the map during the pogrom that occurred in this city. As for Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, it is against “human animals” that he says he is fighting.
But when a François Legault affirms that “there is absolutely no justification for such horrible actions”, speaking of the Palestinian attack in Israel, and we are reminded of the irresponsible denial governing in Quebec: the one who refuses to commemorate the Nakba; which ignores 75 years of apartheid, 56 years of occupation, 17 years of blockade of Gaza; the carnage of the phosphorus bombings of Operation “Cast Lead” (2008-2009), of the bombings of Operation “Pillar of Defense” (2012), of Operation “Protective Edge” (2014), of 2021, of the Great Return March… and until the current carnage.
And what can we say about the contemptuous remarks of the member for Ville-Marie for the hundreds of citizens of Montreal, gathered yesterday in solidarity with the Palestinians, towards whom he says he feels “disgust”, “shame”? That with the resignation for incompetence of the man who is also Minister of Refugees, it is an international protection force for the largest refugee population in the world that must be urgently demanded.
From Gaza, declared “unlivable” by the UN in 2020, Ahmad Yasin, founder of Hamas, proposed a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders 20 years ago. Three rocket attacks silenced him forever , while Israel rushed to erect its wall in the West Bank, and convert the coastal enclave into a concentration camp.