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Join Israeli Apartheid Week 2020: United Against Racism

Advocating for Palestinian rights in the context of global struggles against racial oppression, IAW 2020 will take place between 16 March and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on 21 March

In March, we will launch Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) 2020 under the theme, “United againt Racism,” advocating for Palestinian rights in the context of global struggles against racial oppression. It is more urgent than ever to join together our struggles for freedom, justice, equality and dignity and to recognize that Israel’s far-right regime is a key partner of authoritarian and even genocidal regimes worldwide, supplying them with deadly military and security technologies. 

Israeli apartheid poses a serious threat not just to the indigenous Palestinians but also to oppressed communities worldwide. For example:

  • Through Israeli-US exchange programs, Israeli soldiers, police, border agents, are sharing worst practices of racialized and repressive policing with US police, ICE, border patrol and the FBI to criminalize asylum seekers and immigrant communities.
  • Israel has been a key supplier of weapons and security systems to genocidal regimes from Rwanda to Myanmar, and its security/espionage technology has played a crucial role in grave human rights violations perpetrated by rogue regimes like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, among others.
  • Israeli “field-tested” military and surveillance doctrines and products, including drones, are used by the US and EU for the creation of militarized borders that prevent entry of refugees and migrants from the Global South fleeing armed conflicts, climate devastation and poverty
  • Israel sells India an average of $1 billion in arms per year, fueling India’s militarization and repression in Kashmir, training Indian police, and serving as a model for the Hindu nationalist government’s increasingly repressive measures targeting its Muslim population and other minoritie
  • In Brazil, Israeli weapons and population control technologies fuel more militarization and racist police violence by the fanatic Bolsonaro government against blacks, indigenous communities and residents of the favelas.

Palestinians and progressives worldwide are resisting the Trump-Netanyahu “deal of the century” not only because it is designed to entrench Israeli apartheid and liquidate Palestinian rights. It also embodies a trend of undermining international law and, with it, world peace. 

In this context, resisting anti-democratic attempts to silence and demonize advocacy of Palestinian rights, especially in western states, becomes crucial in defending universal civic and democratic rights, including freedom of expression. 

From Palestine and other Arab countries, and across wider Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America, IAW 2020 will take place primarily between 16 March and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on 21 March. This latter day commemorates the massacre committed in Sharpeville in 1960 by the South African apartheid regime.

IAW activities will raise public awareness and take to the streets to convey the message that what was unacceptable in South Africa under apartheid must not be accepted in Palestine today. Israel’s regime of racial superiority and segregation, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and expropriation of the indigenous Palestinian people, underpinned and “legalized” by a system of racist Israeli laws and military orders, is a regime of apartheid as defined in international law.  

Governments worldwide and the United Nations have defined apartheid as a crime against humanity that must be suppressed and punished wherever it is perpetrated. Joining the Palestinian civil society-led BDS movement in global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns is a moral duty of citizens, and it is the most effective means for building pressure on governments to eventually impose sanctions on Israeli apartheid similar to those that helped end apartheid in South Africa.  

IAW 2020 calls on progressive movements, groups and organizations fighting all forms of racism, racial discrimination, marginalization and oppression to join forces. 

Join IAW 2020!

United against Israeli apartheid

United against all forms of racism and racial discrimination

 

The IAW 2020 Coordinating Committee

February 14, 2020


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