The European Left greets the Palestinian people in commemoration of Land Day, in memory of March 30, 1976, when the Palestinian people called a general strike to protest the continued expropriation of their land by Israel. The Zionist army’s response was to assassinate seven young Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who were demonstrating against the confiscation of 21,000 dunums (2,100 hectares) of Palestinian land by Israel in order to build Jewish-only colonies and a military training ground. This stealing of land was the first colonization step in the West Bank leading towards the present state of apartheid.
Today the Palestinian people still suffer death, destruction, racism and apartheid imposed by Israel. This situation was worsened dramatically with the US President Trump’s “deal of the century” from January 2020, a US attempt to legitimise further Israeli annexations of Palestinian land, moving towards the creation of a greater Jewish Israel with a Palestinian Bantustan.
This was an overruling of the rights of the Palestinian people, their rights to self-determination, to their own state and their rights as human beings. This was a deal to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, worked out between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu only, a blatant US legimization of Israeli expansionism.
By refusing to lift the blockade Gaza has suffered for thirteen years, it does not allow the entry of medical aid to alleviate the COVID-19 pandemic. Israel denies the humanity of Palestinians and seizes their freedom and self-determination rights with total impunity.
In 2018, Israel approved the law of the “Jewish Nation-State”, which established that only Jewish people would enjoy a “special category” and would have the right to self-determination: political and social rights, etc. From then on, Hebrew became the only official language, thus excluding the Arabic language of the indigenous Palestinian people. The law also offers legal protection to the colonial expansion of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories that are illegally occupied under international law, the UN and the EU.
The approval of this Law, together with the blockade suffered by Gaza for years, made the Palestinian people call the Great March of Return on March 30, 2018.
We urge the EU and EU Member States to increase their political pressure on the Israeli government.
We call for a strengthening of the banning of goods from the Israeli settlements. We call for the recognition of the Palestinian state by the EU member states – and by as many countries and institutions as possible”.
The European Left supports a total Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories in keeping with UN resolutions. We reiterate our support for a just peace based on the UN resolutions with a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with east Jerusalem as its capital and with the return of the Palestinian refugees.
Inger V. Johansen
Member of the EL Political Secretariat
Coordinator of the EL Middle East WG
