Une initiative d’éducation populaire faisant suite à la proposition de soutien à la campagne internationale de boycott, désinvestissement et sanctions contre l’apartheid israélien adoptée par l’ASSÉ. L’ASSÉ a été la première association étudiante d’envergure au Canada à appuyer la campagne internationale contre l’apartheid israélien et pour l’égalité en Palestine.
Photo: Hundreds gathered at Concordia University for Territories by Mary-Ellen Davis.
Within the framework of the weekly film screening series, Cinema Politica, to watch striking cinematic works that examine the critical role of media within the context of the reality of Israeli apartheid. Including a striking documentary from filmmaker Mary-Ellen Davis on photojournalist Larry Towell, from Mexico to Palestine, with the globally celebrated Magnum photo agency and a striking documentary film from Germany that portrays the life and work of a Palestinian journalist with Aljazeera.
Mohammed Mansour is a resident of Biddu, a village near Ramallah in the West Bank of Palestine. A former organizer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), he now works as a service (taxi) driver to support his family. As someone who makes his living on the roads of the West Bank, Mansour is all too familiar with Israel’s complex settler road system, which Israel has unilaterally separated into roads for Palestinian use, and other roads as Israeli only. We sat down with Mohammed at his home in Biddu, after he took us on a long tour around the apartheid roads circling the village. Mansour spoke to us about Road 443, a new Israeli settler road badly affecting transportation for Palestinians in the area, and his views on the peace process.
Photo: Active Stills. Palestinian worshippers trying to reach Jerusalem in Ramadan.
In the 2007 publication “Hollow Land“, Eyal Weizman, the Israeli-born, London-based architect, reconceptualized geopolitics in the Occupied Territories. The political space created by Israeli apartheid is a web of total domination and control over Palestinians. The architecture and urban planning inside the territories demonstrate a late-modern colonial occupation. Israel owns the subterranean aquifers beneath Gaza and the West Bank, controls the airspace above, and has weaved a web of Israeli only settlements, highways, and security perimeters throughout the West Bank, while turning Gaza into an open-air prison.
According to Weizman, the natural and built features of the landscape function as weapons and ammunition for the conflict. The Occupied Territories have become a series of layers and territories, each manipulated by the Israeli authorities. Borders are porous for Israelis but solid for Palestinians. Checkpoints are a source of humiliation.
Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, recently delivered his report to the General Assembly.
He cited continued “abuse of international humanitarian law” associated with the “separation wall”, “children fatalities due to Israeli use of excessive force” to quell nonviolent demonstrations, and abuses at border crossings.
Hundreds of tunnels under the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt are keeping many of the Palestinian territory’s 1.5 million impoverished residents supplied with food and fuel.
Photo: Anne Paq. Palestinian worshipers trying to reach Jerusalem during Ramadan.
The strategic value of international solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, refugees in the Diaspora and Palestinians in Israel raises some fundamental questions. The most immediate and urgent are: what the nature of international solidarity should be and how it can best support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination?
International solidarity needs, first and foremost, to address the ways in which colonial Zionism has followed and continues to follow the Bantustanization policy of apartheid South Africa. There is also an imperative to address the severe damage that the Oslo Accords have caused to the Palestinian struggle, given the degree of confusion that these accords have created in the international arena.
