Why I march for Palestine every week
Is a member of Te Tau Ihu Palestine Solidarity which has been holding rallies every Saturday in Nelson for the past six months. She explains her motivation.
The answer on an intellectual level is simple, and forms two sides of the same coin: I refuse to be part of normalising the mass slaughter of children, ethnic cleansing, and disregard for international law, and I stand with the people of Palestine, and their struggle for universal human rights, justice, and liberation.
The answer on an emotional level is also simple.
I can imagine being that woman in Gaza who leaves early in the morning in search of flour, only to return to her home and find it flattened by a bomb, with all of her children killed, trapped and buried under the rubble. I can feel her rage, her loss, her disbelief.
Her cry rings in my ears. How can the world stand by and let this happen?
Well, I won’t stand by. I will do everything I can to stop this, and one of those things is turning up to the protest rallies every Saturday morning here in Whakatū Nelson.
Thankfully, I am not alone. Te Tau Ihu Palestine Solidarity is composed of around 400 people of all ages and backgrounds who stand together with our Palestinian whānau here in Whakatū Nelson, and we are part of the nation-wide Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa.
Protest rallies are being held each week at over 20 locations throughout the country. Globally, millions of people are taking to the streets, urging their governments to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
To understand what’s happening in Gaza today, historical context is necessary.
Hopefully you will be familiar with the series of maps from 1917 to the present, which illustrates the expansion of the State of Israel at the expense of the land ownership, freedom, and rights of the indigenous Palestinians.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the West Bank and Gaza, notes that “since the violent history of the very birth of the State of Israel, to its oppressive occupation since 1967, the crippling closure of Gaza since 1993, and its military assaults on Gaza since 2007…The State of Israel has oppressed the Palestinians as a people in every way imaginable”.
The current military actions in Gaza, as well as the expansion of the illegal Israeli settlements within the West Bank, have been publicly pronounced by senior Israeli government officials (including Netanyahu, Gallant, Vaturi, Eliyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir) as part of Israel’s ongoing campaign of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
The State of Israel has been condemned in over 40 resolutions by the United Nations Human Rights Council and has been identified as an apartheid regime by Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch.
In the last six months in Gaza, an area of only 365 km², containing 2.3 million people, Israel has dropped the explosive equivalent of 1.5 times the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined.
Thirty-five thousand Palestinians have been killed, including 15,000 children, along with 77,000 people injured, and 19,000 children orphaned.
More children have been killed in Gaza than have been killed in all armed conflicts globally every year over the past four years.
The blockading of humanitarian aid into Gaza by Israel has resulted in one million children being forcibly starved. According to Unicef, in this war on children, “the depth of horror surpasses our ability to describe it”.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its landmark decision in January decided there was a plausible case for genocide, and ordered the State of Israel to comply with its obligations under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide via six provisional measures, including for "Israel to take all measures to prevent genocidal acts" and to "ensure the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza".
Israel has ignored the ICJ, the UN ceasefire resolution of March 25, and calls for a ceasefire from many world leaders, including our own.
Let’s be clear. Israel is in the end stage of the settler-colonial process of the erasure of the Palestinians.
For 76 years, the world has allowed
Israel to act with impunity, and this is the result.
According to the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borell, “Gaza was, before the war, the greatest open-air prison. Today, it is the greatest open-air graveyard. A graveyard for tens of thousands of people, and also the graveyard for many of the most important principals of humanitarian law”.
This violation of international law, including the laws of armed conflict, and humanitarian laws, weakens and erodes
them, and puts all of us at risk, even those of us living in small, far-flung cities such as Whakatū Nelson.
As we know from history, genocides happen because the people outside of them make the wilful decision to live normally.
Until there is an end to this horrific war on children, and a true solution and a real peace, achieved through the reversal of injustice and the liberation of all Palestinians, I will continue to rally for a Free Palestine.