Western complicity in apartheid Israel’s brutal violence heightens Palestinian resistance and international solidarity

Oct. 7, 2023

By Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC)

Israel’s far-right government, the most racist, fundamentalist and fanatic ever, has been ruthlessly escalating its ethnic cleansing, siege, killings, incarceration, and daily humiliation of millions of Indigenous Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.  It believed that its unmasked brutality would force Palestinians to simply surrender and accept oppression as fate. 

The BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement strongly condemns the governments of the colonial West for, once again, hypocritically standing with apartheid Israel and duly adopting its deceptive timeline of the current “violence” as if it all began this morning with the powerful armed reaction of the oppressed Palestinians in Gaza. This skewed timeline is meant to hide the initial and escalating decades-long colonial violence of the oppressor.

Drunk with power and impunity as a result of unconditional U.S. and European collusion, funding and arming — as well as the shameful normalization and military alliances with Arab dictatorships, with the Palestinian Authority’s complicity — the Netanyahu regime felt it was time to bury the “question of Palestine” once and for all. 

Ignoring this crucial context, the Western choir is, again, decrying the Palestinian “violent attacks” on Israel. 

Regardless of how people around the world view armed resistance and how international law regulates it, they cannot but agree with the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire who says: “With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. … Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons — not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.” 

Since oppression is the root cause of violence, to end all violence — the initial and ongoing violence of the oppressor and the reactive resistance of the oppressed — we must act to end oppression. As proven in the South African struggle that dismantled apartheid there, exposing and ending state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid — especially through BDS tactics — are the most ethical and strategic forms of international solidarity to end all oppression and all violence. Only thus can we achieve freedom, justice, equality and dignity.