Each year during the month of Ramadhan, the last Friday is dedicated to raising awareness on the illegal dispossession, occupation and ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the apartheid Israel regime.
Quds Day, as it was called for by the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Imam Khomeini, has galvanised civil rights movements across the world to support and sustain action programmes to free Palestine from the yoke of Zionist colonialism.
For more than 70 years, the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Zionists who occupied their land, creating the State of Israel. Ethnic cleansing, the crime of apartheid, war crimes and defiance of international conventions are parts of a catalogue of horrors that for decades have become synonymous with Israel.
The situation has been tense for years, with much of the country annexed as the nation of Israel, and Palestinians relegated to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The dream of an independent Palestinian state has not seen the light of day amid symbolic international solidarity that has failed to give the Palestinian people their rights, while Israel occupies most of the land of historical Palestine. New York-based Human Rights Watch recently released a detailed legal report declaring that the Israeli government is committing crimes of apartheid.
This serious charge is groundbreaking for it is the first official use of the term by the HRW.
Comprehensive and extremely well researched, the 213-page report titled ‘A Threshold Crossed’, makes damning allegations of decades of persecution of Palestinians. It cites Israel’s “intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians” and dismisses the oft-repeated propaganda by Israel about so-called “security”.
At the core of its report, the HRW found the Israeli government systematically discriminates against non-Jews in all areas under its control — including the nearly 2 million Arab citizens within the state’s 1948 borders — but that an additional layer of severe human rights abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza amounts to the crime of apartheid.
The US is in many ways responsible for the situation of the Palestinians. The situation in Palestine can only be ended through a process of dialogue and discussion among all the groups involved. But first, Israel has to end its inhumane blockades.
