#Nakba76: Demand action and accountability to end #GazaGenocide and #DismantleApartheid
As we commemorate Nakba Day, we refuse to stand idly by as mere witnesses to injustice. We demand action, accountability, and transformative change to ensure a future of dignity, justice and liberation for the Palestinian people.
The forced expulsion of approximately 750,000 Indigenous Palestinians from their homes marked the formal beginning of a regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, military occupation, and now genocide that persists to this day. We call out the complicity of states, corporations and institutions that have enabled Israel’s ongoing Nakba and shielded it from accountability for 76 years. The BDS movement reiterates the unyielding spirit of the Palestinian people in our legitimate struggle for freedom, return, justice, and self-determination, at a time when our people are experiencing the world’s first live-streamed genocide.
As Israel pounds Rafah with bombs supplied by the US and Europe, we draw urgent attention to an imminent catastrophe against the 1.4 million Palestinians seeking refuge there. We call for urgent international intervention in the form of sanctions and an arms embargo to stop the ongoing indiscriminate killings and the destruction of Gaza’s last remaining health facilities.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of Israeli atrocities and massacres perpetrated, despite the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide, many states, particularly the US and across Europe, have consistently failed to fulfill their obligation under international law and under the Genocide Convention particularly. Despite dozens of UN human rights experts and the UN Human Rights Council directly calling for an end to "the sale, transfer and diversion of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel, the occupying Power…to prevent further violations of international humanitarian law and violations and abuses of human rights”, the US and Europe continue to provide weapons and diplomatic cover to Israel, enabling it to carry on its unspeakable genocide. This makes them complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide, betraying the very principles of justice and human rights they ostensibly profess to uphold.
After 7 months of relentless genocide, the Israeli strategy is crystal clear: to forcibly expel as many Palestinians as possible from Gaza, most of them already Nakba refugees. The methods employed are both direct and indirect, ranging from rolling massacres, to siege, to the systematic destruction of infrastructure essential for life—water supplies, hospitals, schools, universities, farms, and homes are all targeted to make existence untenable. Human rights organizations have also condemned Israel’s use of starvation against Palestinians as a weapon of war. This calculated obliteration of the very foundations of life is a brutal strategy aimed at causing irreparable harm and creating a coercive environment for the Palestinians to leave their lands, largely mirroring the ethnic cleansing during the 1948 Nakba.
We applaud the creativity, principles, and bravery of the global solidarity movement, particularly the student-led uprising aimed at divestment from companies enabling Israel’s crimes and ending academic relations with its deeply complicit universities. The courage of conscientious students and supportive faculty and workers in the face of violence and repression inspires hope in the struggle to end Israel’s #GazaGenocide and its underlying regime of settler-colonial apartheid.
We highlight the ongoing steadfastness of Palestinians in the face of adversity. Despite decades of oppression, the Palestinian people continue to resist Israel’s denial of freedom, justice, self-determination and our inherent and UN-stipulated right of refugees to return.
As we commemorate Nakba Day, we refuse to stand idly by as mere witnesses to injustice. We demand action, accountability, and transformative change to ensure a future of dignity, justice, and liberation for the Palestinian people.
The BDS movement calls for:
- Pressuring the ICC to immediately issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders and members of the military complicit in genocide to prevent Israel from committing further mass atrocities.
- Street protests and peaceful disruptions of business as usual targeting complicit governments, companies and institutions.
- Pressuring governments to impose immediate unilateral and multilateral lawful sanctions against Israel, starting with a military-security embargo, as called for by the UN Human Rights Council and dozens of UN human rights experts.
- Expelling Israel from the UNGA and other international fora, including the International Olympics Committee, FIFA, Eurovision, etc.
Every day of impunity granted to apartheid Israel brings further devastating consequences to Indigenous Palestinians and to what’s left of international law’s credibility.