IAW 2024: March for Palestine

This year, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) comes weeks after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) dealt apartheid Israel a historic defeat by finding that Israel is plausibly perpetrating genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. This decision triggers legal responsibilities for all states to end all complicity and to prevent genocide. Though the World Court has ordered Israel to stop all genocidal acts, including the killing and harming of Palestinians, apartheid Israel continues to massacre Palestinian civilians, destroy infrastructure, including the last functioning hospitals, and aggravate the encroaching famine and the spread of infectious diseases among Palestinians in Gaza, openly defying the Court’s orders.

Meanwhile, Israel’s allies in the colonial West are collectively punishing the entire Palestinian refugee community by cutting funding for UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for aid and assistance to Palestinian refugees. This will effectively prevent life-saving aid from reaching Gaza at a time of mass starvation as a result of Israel’s genocidal siege, thus constituting another form of Western complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide. 

As the South African delegation has presented to the ICJ, Israel’s genocide must be seen in the context of its root causes: Israel’s 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid. IAW has, since its inception in 2005, mobilized international education about and action against Israeli apartheid, and is therefore needed this year more than ever to grow global pressure to end the genocide and dismantle apartheid. Neither can continue without the complicity of states, corporations and institutions, particularly in the colonial West.

While Palestinians remain steadfast in the face of this genocide and persist with our liberation struggle, we take hope and strength from global solidarity expressed in mass demonstrations from Jakarta to Washington, Cape Town to London, and Rabat to Baghdad; trade union actions to stop arms shipments to Israel in Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere; hundreds of creative civil disobedience actions (sit-ins, peaceful occupations, walk-outs, strikes, etc.) worldwide; fast-growing grassroots BDS campaigns and calls for military embargo; strong declarations of solidarity by racial, Indigenous, climate, gender and social justice movements; high-profile statements by prominent artists, writers, academics, international experts in genocide, as well as by progressive Jewish groups, human rights and civil rights organizations; and a million local, grassroots solidarity actions and creative initiatives worldwide.

Not only Israeli apartheid is on trial at the World Court. All states, corporations and institutions that have aided and abetted its system of oppression that has culminated in the current genocide are also on trial. But international law mechanisms are only effective if we exercise our collective agency to make international law serve our struggle for justice. 

South Africa has recognized the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people through Israel’s colonization since 1948, which has systematically and forcibly dispossessed, displaced, and fragmented the Palestinian people, deliberately denying them their internationally recognized, inalienable right to self-determination, and their internationally recognized right of return as refugees to their towns and villages, in what is now the State of Israel.

- South Africa’s opening statement at the International Court of Justice, January 2024

With effective grassroots campaigning, we can build people power to end this genocide and dismantle its root causes – Israel’s regime of settler colonialism and apartheid. 

Join us by building campaign milestones or mobilizing for new campaigns! This IAW let’s not just educate about Israeli apartheid! Let’s escalate BDS campaigning in all fields and take meaningful steps towards supporting the ongoing Palestinian struggle to dismantle it.

This March, march for justice, freedom and equality, march for ending genocide and apartheid. 

Register your actions here.