Decades of mobilisation by the Palestinian people, coupled with endorsement from global civil society, faith-based organisations, international human rights organizations, UN experts, heads of states, parliamentarians, and diplomats, have made it clear that Israel is perpetrating apartheid, a crime against humanity, against the Palestinian people, as it is defined in the UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This compounds Israel’s decades-long occupation and settler-colonialism, which has oppressed Palestinians for close to eight decades, and is taking ever more brutal forms and with greater impunity under the current extreme-right racist government. Since October 2023, Israeli crimes have unashamedly included genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel’s perpetration of the world’s first live-streamed genocide demonstrates its doctrine of unaccountable, unmasked, and extreme violence and a blatant rejection of international law. Its western allies are guilty of complicity in Israel’s genocide and other human rights abuses, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The unprecedented collective efforts of the global solidarity movement have been inspiring – especially since the beginning of the genocide. Yet, we have not reached the point where we can stop the US-Israeli genocidal war, achieve justice for the indigenous people of Palestine, and dismantle Israel’s regime of Zionist occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid, as was done to the apartheid regime in South Africa. The dismantlement of apartheid in South Africa was a vital milestone in the global struggle against racism, discrimination and colonial oppression, but it remains ‘incomplete’, as Nelson Mandela said, as long as the Palestinians are not free.