Occupied Palestine, 24 September 2024 – Israel is expanding its criminal aggression from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank and now to Lebanon, passing through Yemen, Iraq and Syria. In a matter of a few days, Israel has ferociously targeted hundreds of villages and towns in Lebanon, killing hundreds, wounding thousands, and inflicting massive damage to civilian homes and infrastructure.
Israel has perpetrated in Lebanon an unprecedented war crime causing mass horror by boobytrapping communication equipment in yet another outrageous violation of international law. Pushing the region closer than ever to an all-out war, Israel is desperately trying to cover up its Gaza genocide and its utter failure to achieve any of its declared political or military goals despite the savage obliteration of Gaza and its 2.3 million inhabitants.
Certainly, Israel could not have persisted in its war of extermination in Gaza and its brutal attacks across Palestine and the region without the arming, funding, and shielding from accountability of the US government and its allies in the colonial West. Aside from military, political and diplomatic support, they have enabled Israel’s genocide by engaging in the dehumanization and erasure of our people; denying the right of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples to resist foreign occupation and colonization, in accordance with international law; as well as waging unprecedented waves of intimidation and repression against the Palestine solidarity movement, particularly the student-led mobilizations.
Unlike the fraternal solidarity of peoples of the Arab region, the complicity of the unelected and unrepresentative Arab dictatorships, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf, has also played a pivotal role. These regimes have mobilized their air defense systems to help protect Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, and provide supplies to it via a shameful land corridor, passing from the UAE through Saudi Arabia and Jordan, at a time when Israel is inducing famine and the spread of infectious diseases among our people in Gaza!
The unbridled and livestreamed Israeli brutality we have witnessed over the last more than 11 months, and that stems from 76 years of an ongoing Nakba of settler-colonialism and apartheid, is ushering in an era of “might makes right” and the demise of international law. It is also reflective of the inherent, deep-seated racism of Israel’s settler-colonial ideology, Zionism, which has persistently strived to eliminate the Indigenous Palestinian people and steal as much land as possible, whenever the opportunity avails itself.
Moving from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon, Israel confirms that most of the countries and peoples of the Arab region are targets of its expansionist colonial ambitions. This is clearly evident in statements by Israeli leaders calling for “re-settling” the Gaza Strip, annexing the West Bank, cementing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, and even settling in South Lebanon!
In the face of this genocide and massacres, silence is complicity. We call for accumulating more intersectional people power worldwide through BDS campaigns and peaceful disruption of business-as-usual to further isolate apartheid Israel and the corporations and institutions that enable its genocide and underlying apartheid regime. We call for mass pressure on governments to enact the decisions of the International Court of Justice and the latest UN General Assembly resolution by imposing a comprehensive military embargo on Israel as well as lawful trade, financial, energy, academic, sports, and diplomatic sanctions. Israel must be expelled from the UN and from international and regional fora, including the Olympics, FIFA, etc., just as apartheid South Africa was.
The peoples of Palestine and Lebanon stand united today against Israel’s genocide and horrific aggression. We rely first and foremost on the meaningful solidarity of the people of conscience worldwide to do whatever they can to end all forms of state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s unspeakable crimes against humanity.