#BTSpeakingOut – Apartheid, not peace in Palestine

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Lalu Hanuman

I would like to respond to the letter in your December 7 edition, captioned You will never look at Gaza the same way again by Jonathan Ben-Cnaan, Barbados’ Honorary Consul based in Israel, which seeks to justify the current genocide in Palestine.

From the beginning, I want to make it pellucidly clear that I condemn all attacks on civilians any and everywhere, including the October 7 attacks by Hamas – some of which have subsequently turned out to have been the result of Israeli “friendly fire”, rather than by Hamas.

However, the issue of condemning attacks is rather one-sided, as the over 70 years of murderous attacks on Palestinian civilians by Israel are rarely interrogated by Western media. As the Jewish Holocaust survivor, Dr Gabor Mate said: “Think [of] the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.”

It is a “false equivalency” to compare the actions of a state actor like Israel, which has signed up to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various other international human rights treaty obligations, with that of a non-state actor, like Hamas, when it comes to international law obligations. Israel has blatantly breached numerous United Nations resolutions, ignored judgments of the International Court of Justice, and blatantly flouted the Geneva Conventions.

It continues to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with complete impunity, assisted by the United States’ UN Security Council vetoes. There can be no exceptionalism for any state.

The preamble to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”, What we saw on October 7, was a rebellion against tyranny, in the face of persistent gross human rights violations by Israel.

The renowned Trinidadian historian CLR James, in his seminal work The Black Jacobins makes mention of the massacring of French families including children in the Haitian Revolution of 1804. This was after the enslaved people had been subjected to horrendous oppression at their hands for several years. While the killing of the French families is reprehensible, it is absolutely understandable in the context of the oppression meted out to the enslaved Haitians.

The French created great hate amongst the Haitians. The same can be said for the events of October 7. Palestinians have been on the receiving end of years of Zionist oppression, with the expropriation of their lands, millions of displaced people, and the deaths of countless thousands of civilians, by a racist apartheid settler state called Israel (or as the UN Secretary- General António Guterres said, the October 7 attack “did not happen in a vacuum.”).

The apartheid policies of the Israeli State have been condemned by the likes of President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Jimmy Carter, who even wrote a book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Yet our Honorary Consul in Israel seeks to argue that placing a few tokens in certain positions, disproves the apartheid allegation.

In reality, this tokenism is the hallmark of a racist state. Racist Ian Smith in Rhodesia even appointed a black Prime Minister for public relations reasons. A cursory glance at Israel’s immigration policies which allows any Jew from anywhere in the world to live in Israel but prevents the millions of Palestinians who have been expelled from their stolen homeland from returning home speaks volumes. We have all heard the IDF spokespeople with their Scottish, French. or American accents on radio and television, being recent migrants into Israel.

Most of the one million illegal Zionist settlers in the West Bank are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe.
Jonathan Ben-Cnaan seeks to portray the situation in Palestine as a religious conflict between Muslim and Jew, choosing to forget the harmony that existed there between Christians, Jews, and Muslims for hundreds of years before the Balfour Declaration.

This Palestine situation is a naked, colonialist, racist, land grab.

Figuratively speaking, it is tantamount to a burglar entering your home, stealing it and all the contents, and then saying that you are being a warmonger and unreasonable because you refuse to accept the septic tank as a settlement.

He justifies the bombing of civilian targets in Gaza by saying that Hamas has hidden its military infrastructure in civilian areas. While this fails to address the over 300 civilian deaths in the West Bank in Israel’s military operations there in the last few weeks, given that there are no Hamas military infrastructures there, it also fails to acknowledge that Gaza which is some 26 square miles smaller than Barbados, with a population some ten times the Barbadian population, is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, hence the locating of any military infrastructures will inevitably have to be in a civilian area.

The Honourable Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Amor Mottley recently spoke about the “televised genocide” taking place in Gaza, where the current civilian death toll is approaching 20 000, half of whom are children. Whilst I appreciate the Prime Minister’s words, we know that actions are more meaningful than words.

We were in the vanguard of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, but we are in the distant rear when it comes to the struggle against apartheid in Palestine. Jonathan Ben-Cnaan ought to be immediately dismissed from his post for his support for genocide, diplomatic relations with the apartheid state of Israel should be immediately suspended, and the recognition of the State of Palestine should be expedited, otherwise statements by politicians about a “televised genocide” will be perceived as being mere hyperbole and hot air.

Lalu Hanuman, attorney-at-law and secretary of the Caribbean Against Apartheid in Palestine (CAAP).