Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
INTERNATIONAL
IPB/METO/IPPNW Joint Statement on the Recent Israel-Palestine Escalation
The International Peace Bureau (IPB), Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) are deeply concerned over the unprecedented Israeli-Palestinian violent escalation launched in the morning of Saturday, 7th October, which has already resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives. The resulting fear, panic, and uncertainty that the Israeli and Palestinian people feel in these moments demand our compassion and understanding, even as the extent to which the conflict will escalate remains unclear.
The death toll cannot continue to rise. The signatories to this statement therefore call for immediate global attention to de-escalate the conflict and provide on-the-ground humanitarian assistance. Furthermore, we call on the international community to support the immediate cessation of attacks and abductions of civilians and attacks on non-military infrastructure. The UNSC must live up to its charter-mandated responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. It should urgently demand all parties to stop violence and respect and protect the lives of civilians, especially children.
There is no military solution to the multifaceted and complex crisis between Israel and Palestine; we acknowledge the deep suffering of Palestinians and Israelis even under the status quo, including settler violence, terrorist attacks, economic violence, and a constant environment of fear under violation of international law. The root causes of the conflict are deep and can only be addressed when immediate and direct violence is not present.
Therefore, together we call for:
• An immediate cessation of violence–in particular the targeting of civilian infrastructure;
• The immediate exchange of hostages and prisoners under humanitarian concerns;
• The establishment of a humanitarian corridor for safe passage of emergency services and aid;
• The international community, in particular the League of Arab States, to engage in negotiations based on the Arab Peace Initiative (API), the only comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict in the Middle East.
10 October 2023
The International Peace Bureau (IPB), Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)
• https://www.ipb.org/ipb-meto-ippnw-joint-statement-on-the-recent-israel-palestine-escalation/
Israel/Palestine: FIDH condemns the escalation of violence and double standards
Jerusalem, Ramallah, Paris, 11 October 2023. The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) is deeply concerned about the current hostilities, which have resulted in thousands of civilian casualties and widespread destruction. More than ever, the international community must uphold its moral and legal responsibilities to break this endless cycle of violence. To ensure accountability for these heinous crimes, international law must apply to all parties to the conflict without discrimination or double standards, in recognition that all human lives are equal.
Hamas’ recent indiscriminate attack in Israel, that may amount to war crimes, has led to immense violence and retaliatory attacks on Palestinians. The situation on the ground is extremely worrying, especially following the total closure imposed by Israel against two million Palestinians in Gaza, who now have no access to food, water, electricity, petrol or medicine. Indiscriminate airstrikes, the closure, and the starvation of Gaza’s civilian population are clearly prohibited by international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes. War crimes committed by one can never justify atrocities committed by another. It is urgent to do everything possible to obtain an immediate ceasefire from all parties, to take concrete measures to free civilian hostages and to protect the Palestinian people from disproportionate Israeli retaliatory measures, and ensure the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
The cycle of violence is a predictable result of Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime that has lasted too long despite calls and warnings issued by human rights organizations and United Nations mechanisms. In a time marked by extreme tension, the radicalization of discourse and unconditional support to Israel, it is important to call for de-escalation and an immediate ceasefire to protect the civilian populations, who are the main victims.
FIDH recalls that as long as the international community refuses to address the root causes of the ongoing hostilities, no just and lasting peace will ever be achieved. The blockade and closure of Gaza has been going on for 16 years, caging two million Palestinians in an open-air prison which was declared ‘unlivable’ by the The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The closure of Gaza is not an isolated issue, but an integral part of Israel’s apartheid against the Palestinian people. Israel’s apartheid regime, established and maintained through maintaining a system of inherently discriminatory laws, policies and practices, is premised on the perpetual denial of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to self-determination and return.
Despite these grave violations, no genuine domestic investigations or prosecutions of these crimes have ever occurred. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been investigating the situation in Palestine since 2021. Notably, the ongoing atrocities also fall within the ICC’s jurisdiction. An active ICC investigation holds profound significance for victims and survivors, offering the prospect of accountability, redress, and global recognition of their suffering. It reinforces the principle that impunity for grave crimes (no matter where they are committed) is unacceptable, fostering hope and paving the path to a just and lasting peace. Yet, this investigation has alarmingly not been prioritized nor properly resourced, compared to other active ICC investigations.
The International Federation for Human Rights :
• Calls an immediate ceasefire from all parties;
• Calls on the international community to take responsibility and not further fuel the ongoing illegal situation and take concrete measures to ensure the protection of civilians in the face of Israel’s indiscriminate attacks;
• Demands the protection and unconditional release of civilian Israeli hostages captured by Palestinian armed groups and demands that the Israeli authorities refrain from any form of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza and immediately lift the blockade and closure of Gaza;
• Urges the international community to enforce UN resolutions, and to demand total, immediate and unconditional withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, and the realization of the right of return of Palestinian refugees as enshrined in the UN General Assembly Resolution 194;
• Calls on the ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan, to expedite the investigation into the situation in Palestine, and to proactively inform all parties to the Israel-Palestine conflict that the investigation of international crimes in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 (namely, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem) is ongoing and includes any and all continuing crimes;
• Calls on States Parties to the ICC to unequivocally and unconditionally support the work of the Office of the Prosecutor in its independent investigation of international crimes committed in Palestine -It is essential to ensure that the ICC as a whole is adequately resourced to carry out this mandate effectively;
• Calls on Israel to end the colonisation, apartheid regime and annexation policies imposed on Palestinian people,which are the root causes underlying the continuing waves of conflict in the territory.
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
• 11/10/2023 PRESS RELEASE :
https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/israel-palestine-the-international-federation-for-human-rights
CANADA
IJV Calls for a Ceasefire and Systemic Change in Palestine-Israel
With over 1,000 Israeli and more than 700 Palestinian casualties so far, the pain felt by those of us both in the region and connected to it cannot be overstated. The lives cut short in the past 48 hours are a tragedy, evidence of the need for an immediate ceasefire, not an escalation of violence.
Attacks against civilians are in violation of international law, regardless of the perpetrator and whether by immediate violent force or by long-term structural oppression. The civilian deaths caused by the Hamas offensive are an unacceptable consequence of 75 years of unacceptable conditions, part of an attack that is neither unprovoked nor justifiable. Israel needs to be held accountable for its decades of crimes against humanity, crimes that have put Palestinians in a position where violent retribution and death feels like justice.
For decades, civilians in Gaza have been subjected to routine massacres, restrictions on electricity, medical attention and water, faced bombings and lived under a suffocating blockade. In the past year, Palestinians have been targeted by Israel’s most right-wing government in its history, which has escalated its attacks against them.
Now, Israeli civilians are being abducted and killed in the deadliest attack on the state in years.
IJV calls on Canada to demand a ceasefire immediately. But that is not enough to guarantee a more hopeful future for everyone in occupied Palestine – Israeli apartheid, occupation and settler colonialism are the underlying issues that must be addressed in order to move towards a future for the region where all can thrive. If these issues remain unaddressed, we fear that Israel will not be satisfied until it has satisfied a bottomless desire for disproportionate revenge, as has been proven time and time again.
The Canadian government has opposed Palestinian attempts at non-violent resistance, whether through efforts to boycott, divest and impose sanctions or through appeals to international courts and the UN. When non-violent resistance is seen as unacceptable, labelled antisemitic or terroristic, Palestinians are thus stripped of the tools to advocate for their lives, liberties and livelihoods.
The conditions under which Palestinians have been forced to live in the Gaza Strip are unconscionable. The only solution to this ongoing violence is to address its root causes, and that requires supporting Palestinian-led movements to confront and resist Israeli apartheid, as well as pushing governments like Canada to oppose Israeli crimes against humanity.
Canada’s ritual and vacuous endorsement of Israel’s “right to self-defence” gives the right-wing Israeli government cover to continue destroying Gaza, committing further violence against Palestinians under occupation. We must remind everyone that Palestinians, like any occupied people, ultimately have the right, by international law, to resort to armed violence to resist their occupation – so long as that violence distinguishes between civilians and combatants.
Canada must call for a ceasefire, condemn Israeli apartheid and work towards a peaceful resolution that upholds the rights to life and freedom of both Palestinians and Israelis.
October 8, 2023
Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV)
• https://www.ijvcanada.org/ijv-calls-for-a-ceasefire-and-systemic-change-in-palestine-israel/
ITALY
Arci: Stop the massacre
LAND, LIFE, FREEDOM FOR TWO PEOPLES AND TWO STATES
In these terrible hours, images of the new Israeli-Palestinian war enter our homes, arousing the anguish for the fate of the civilian population once again involved, in spite of themselves, in the fighting.
Our Association has always been mobilized for a just and lasting peace in Palestine and Israel, and what is happening now creates anger and pain among our people working in national and international networks, together with Palestinian civil society in solidarity campaigns and cooperation projects, and with Israeli pacifist and democratic civil society for peace and rights.
Arci expresses its closeness to those who are suffering, to the families of all the victims, the wounded, the kidnapped, and the bombed, remembering that this suffering is not new but has been going on for decades from generation to generation, and that there are millions of people in that land who have never known peace, the peace that is a universal right of the human being. The number of civilian casualties from the fighting is rising and will add to the hundreds of casualties that the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and the cruel siege of the Gaza Strip causes every year.
This war, with its bearer of horror, awakens consciences from a guilty sleep of the international community. The guilty sleep that has caused the stop of the peace process for "two peoples and two states”, that has in recent years justified the siege of Gaza, the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, the unstoppable spread of colonies in the West Bank, illegal arrests, unpunished deaths and violence to be erased.
Cultivating anger, misery, violence, restriction of freedoms and rights in millions of innocent people does not lead to peace and security: on the contrary, it nurtures barbarism, violence, insecurity. And it produces poisoned fruits.
And although Hamas has never represented all Palestinians, now everyone and everyone especially in Gaza risks paying a very high price in Israeli retaliation, trapped as they are in a siege with no way out. On the other hand, the Israeli government has in recent months been challenged by the majority of the population, which has taken to the streets every week for months as never before in the country’s history. And now instead, with the emergency, it will be able to unleash its firepower on a tremendously weaker people.
The fate of two peoples and the entire Middle East, a crucial area for the entire world, is at stake.
Arci calls on the international community, the Italian government, and all political and social forces to do the impossible so that they silence their weapons immediately, to avoid new civilian casualties, to prevent the escalation of the conflict and its internationalization, all the more so since the foreign interests working for the war are evident.
We demand that the international community commit itself, after decades, to restart real negotiations for a true peace process based on the inalienable rights of the two peoples to land, life, and freedom. And that associations, human rights movements, that rich civil society that also collaborates with Arci circles and committees in so many solidarity actions be included in the negotiations. For peace to be lasting, it is necessary that first of all it be just, and that the processes of pacification, even in the most tragic moments, be imagined participatory by the communities.
And it is necessary for the international community to finally become aware that without compliance with U.N. resolutions no peace is possible, and that it is not permissible for limitations to be placed on the actions of international agencies and the people working under their mandate. Let no one oppose their work; let corridors be opened to allow their relief action toward the unarmed population. Let the ceasefire be imposed and the violence cease. And let everyone finally engage in the construction of a just peace.
Arci
Traduit de l’italien
• https://www.arci.it/fermare-il-massacro/
UNITED STATES
Naomi Klein : In Gaza and Israel, Side With the Child Over the Gun
Some continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians - this only fuels militant Zionism. What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines.
I spent the evening in candlelight and tears with a dear friend who just learned that a close family member was among those massacred in Israel. I won’t name the kibbutz to protect her privacy but yes, it was unequivocally a massacre.
We tried to explain the killing of this family member – a civilian with two kids – to our kids. We tried to do it in a way that would not fill their young hearts with fear and hatred for the people who committed the crime. That was hard enough, but possible. Harder for us adults is the fact that, in their desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza — which occupied people have every right to do — some of our supposed comrades on the left continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them.
In fact these callous displays are a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will – look, even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.
For Zionist believers (I’m not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, antisemitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.
The Israeli state’s current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days. The responsibility for these crimes of collective punishment rests solely with their perpetrators and their financial and military backers abroad. But we all have to figure out how to make it stop.
So how do we confront this violent ideology? For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as antisemitism by a great many Jews. And antisemitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.
What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.
It’s certainly worth a try. In these difficult times, I’d like to be part of a left like that.
Naomi Klein
October 12, 2023 THE GUARDIAN
• Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World was published in September.
• This article was edited at the request of the author to reflect the fact that celebrations of the deaths were rare, and many leading figures on the anti-colonial left, in Palestine and outside of it, clearly denounced the targeting of civilians.
• Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series III
ESSF (article 68220 Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series III
• Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series I
ESSF (article 68144), Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series I
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