In a week’s time, on June 27th, the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise, the world's largest international maritime warfare exercise, will begin. It will last for 5 weeks and is hosted and administered by the United States Navy's “Indo-Pacific” Command in and around the Hawaiian Islands and involves 29 states, including Israel. For years, indigenous, climate and anti-militarism groups have opposed this exercise for its role in advancing US imperialism and European colonial interests across the Indian and Pacific oceans, along with entrenching militarism and the destruction of indigenous lands and natural habitat of this sensitive region.
Despite its ongoing live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, which has killed over 37,000 Palestinians in just over eight months, apartheid Israel will participate in RIMPAC 2024 joining other Western powers in this exercise. Over the months, Israel’s impunity and defiance of international law have risen to new levels, including ignoring orders by the International Court of Justice, which has recognized Israel’s war on Gaza as ‘plausible genocide’, and demands by the UN Security Council and General Assembly for an immediate ceasefire.
The UNHRC, international human rights organizations, a growing number of states, as well as UN human rights experts have called for a military embargo against Israel. This is a legal obligation under international to bring to an end Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as its underlying system of settler-colonial apartheid and military occupation.
Israel is only able to carry on for decades its atrocity crimes against Indigenous Palestinians because of the support it receives from Western powers led by the US. Its participation in RIMPAC 2024, while it is charged with plausible genocide, exemplifies this complicity.
From Hawaiian Islands to Jeju Islands, from Okinawa to Guam, grassroots organizations have been challenging RIMPAC, a feature of US-led imperialist hegemony in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Unfortunately, global south nations like Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and others are also participating in this exercise. The control of the “Indo-Pacific” has been the colonial pipedream for centuries, and by dragging other nations into its arms race, the US-led global north forces are creating hostilities for the region while reinforcing patriarchal and militarist ideologies that mainly benefit the military industries, oil companies and financial powers.
US bases in several Pacific islands (Okinawa, Hawaii Islands, Guam and more) have destroyed the delicate habitat, polluted the resources, militarized the communities. US servicemen have been notoriously involved in sexual and other forms of violence. Grassroots groups have exposed the destruction done by US naval and military bases and war exercises to aquifers in Oahu, Hawaii, the endangerment of coral reef and the vulnerable species of dugong in Henoko, Okinawa, among other instances.
In Latin America, US military imperialism has been causing major havoc for more than a century, enabling coups d'états and dictatorships, financing and distributing military equipment for death squads and paramilitary groups that invade land and massacre indigenous and traditional communities. In Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, civil society groups have been protesting against the exercise and asking for the governments in the region not to participate.
Nations that are still recovering from the devastation of colonialism and imperial wars are participating in their own disempowerment by joining this project, which is also rewarding Israel for its genocide against Palestinian people.
We join these feminist, indigenous, climate and anti-militarism groups all over the world in opposing RIMPAC 2024. Participation in RIMPAC 2024 is complicity in the US- Israel criminal axis. We call on movements of all participating states, especially those claiming to defend Palestinian rights, to pressure their governments to withdraw from it. States that have already imposed a military embargo or diplomatic sanctions on Israel should never participate in RIMPAC 2024 alongside this genocidal regime.
Together we can prevail for our peoples’ self-determination.