EDITORIAL

You can’t blockade Palestine solidarity

The international aid flotilla to Gaza represented a decade of solidarity with Palestinian resistance, and the desperate measures to sabotage it have further exposed Israeli Apartheid and its Western backers.
The past decade of Palestinian resistance and international solidarity is raising hopes for a free Palestine.

In 2000, the second Palestinian intifada inspired people around the world, from Egyptians who demanded dictator Hosni Mubarak end his complicity with Israel, to Western anti-globalization and anti-war movements challenging their own governments.

In 2003, the global movement against the Iraq War raised the politics of anti-imperialism and connected more people with the Palestine solidarity movement, and the next year Israeli Apartheid Week was launched in Toronto—which has since spread to more than 50 cities around the world.

In 2005, Palestinian civil society launched the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement—which has united Palestinians across the diaspora and exposed the corporate ties with Israeli Apartheid (IAW). The next year the people of Gaza democratically elected Hamas.

Stephen Harper led the world in cutting aid and imposing economic siege on the 1.5 million people of Gaza, and as Israel continued to divide Palestine geographically with an apartheid wall, the US worked to divide Palestine politically by backing Fatah against Hamas.

With Western support Israel launched the 2006 war on Lebanon (which Harper defended as a “measured response”) and the 2009 war on Gaza, but these failed to weaken resistance movements and instead sparked widespread protests around the world.

To defend Israel from increasing isolation, Western governments have intensified attacks on solidarity activists in their own countries—from motions against IAW and campus bans on its posters, to the banning of British anti-war MP George Galloway, to the defunding of the humanitarian NGO Kairos.

While these attacks have exposed the Western states on which Israel relies, they have failed to quell solidarity: IAW has continued to grow, and a free speech campaign struck down the ban on Galloway and organized a far greater speaking tour.

The attacks on flotillas delivering humanitarian aid—from Israel’s assassination of Turkish activists last year in international waters (while Harper was greeting Netanyahu) to the Greek government’s blockade of boats in its own waters—demonstrate both the cruelty of Israeli Apartheid and Western complicity.

This will only increase global solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, a key ingredient in the Arab Spring. Already the Egyptian Revolution has won the partial opening of the Rafah border, and if the revolutionary activity of the pan-Arab working class continues it could free the entire region.