Palestine Update 575
_Opinion_
When will Tel Aviv yield to mounting calls for an end to apartheid?
The Episcopal Church, based in the United States with additional
dioceses elsewhere, is a member church of the worldwide Anglican
Communion has doggedly pursued the question of justice for Palestinians.
Four powerful resolutions have spelt out a pathway to be navigated to
get the church to gain authority to act more proactively on behalf of
Palestinians. That represents positive news in the solidarity movement
for Palestine.
On the other hand, the predictable has happened. Israel has resumed
settlement activity with revenge immediately after President Biden left
the region following his short visit. Did Biden know it would happen?
Almost certainly! Israel has declared steps to seize hundreds of dunums
of Palestinian in the occupied West Bank in order to build 30,000 new
settlement housing units.
Not directly pertaining to the Palestinian struggle, a blog by
Representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell, seems to have
accepted the painful truth that the West is losing what he termed “the
global battle of narratives”. Nothing new in this! Europe has eternally
played double games in the region. Josep Borrell lies to himself, the
EU, and the world when he pretends that Europe is playing by rules when,
in fact, it is not. Ramzy Baroud a writer-thinker on Palestine, points
to how “The immediate impression … is that the West is the global
vanguard of multilateralism and territorial sovereignty.” Ramzy argues
that “the opposite is true. The US-western military interventions [1]
in Iraq [2], Bosnia, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya [3] and many other
regions around the world have largely taken place without international
consent and without any regard for the sovereignty of nations. In the
case of the NATO war on Libya, a massively destructive military campaign
was initiated based on the intentional misinterpretation of United
Nations Security Council resolution 1973, which called [4] for the use
of “all means necessary to protect civilians”.
Palestine suffers from this two-faced political conduct of Europe.
The Western political establishment is firmly held under a vice-like
grip by the Zionist forces in Israel. At the same time, churches, human
rights groups, student unions, and trade unions in the West are drawing
up rock-solid lines of support to the Palestinian struggle. At the end
of the day, this will make the difference. As in the case of South
Africa, most western nations stubbornly held on to support the apartheid
regime. The streets were equally inflexible and when their numbers
extended hugely, governments started exerting pressure on the government
in Pretoria. Nelson Mandela was freed and apartheid ended. In
anticipation, we might ask in hope: “How long more will it take before
the regime in Tel Aviv is compelled to yield?”
Ranjan Solomon
21 July 2022
Source: palestineupdates.com