APPEAL: Palestine must live on its feet, not on its knees!

01/11/2023

It is with great sadness and a sense of horror that we are witnessing the thousands of Palestinians being killed by Israeli bombardments, particularly civilians, among them numerous children. We are fighters for peace, and so we know that there can be no peace in Palestine, as elsewhere, without justice and without an end to the illegal foreign occupation and colonisation of Palestine which, as the United Nations recalls, contributes to a system of apartheid privileging armed settlers who enjoy total impunity and the protection of an army that is at their exclusive service, whose rabid violence is the daily lot of millions of Palestinians. Seventy-five years later, we have reached the point of “enough is enough”. The refusal of the United States, Europe and other states to assume their responsibilities is the main cause of this dramatic situation. The mobilisation of all Palestinian resistance organizations, including Hamas, Fatah (Al Aqsa Brigades), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian People’s Party (Communist Party), is a response to Israel’s relentless attacks that have intensified in recent weeks, a fact that has been made clear by Israeli pacifists and many Jewish democratic groups in France, the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

This fact is also highlighted by the millions of demonstrators marching in solidarity with the Palestinian nation throughout the Arab world, as well as in New York and major US cities, in London, Berlin and Düsseldorf, Brussels, Rome and Milan, Paris and Geneva, Barcelona and Athens, Calcutta and Melbourne, but particularly in Tel Aviv, where thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to demand Netanyahu’s resignation.

The situation in illegally occupied Palestine and Gaza is alarming. Israel has pledged, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s words, to wipe off the map what is an open-air prison, Gaza. His murderous insanity does not stop there, it extends to the West Bank and Jerusalem, where Israeli far-right gangs are already terrorising, attacking, and killing anything that is Palestinian.

That is why we are launching this Appeal – it is urgent! A genocide is underway, with total impunity, that of the Palestinian people! It is a crime against humanity!

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is forcing on us a unilateral and monolithic vision that is accompanied by a growing repression of other opinions and analyses that would help in clarifying the source of the information provided and in finding the truth. They do not permit an understanding of the context. It shows that the ruling elites is panicking as it becomes increasingly clear that the global balance of power is shifting and the Palestinians are playing an important role in this shift. The time has come for us to rise to the challenge and say “No” to this psychological terror, and to demand our right to balanced and truly pluralistic information!

Let us have the courage to face the truth!

The Palestinian nation has been held hostage on a daily basis for 75 years, in violation of the United Nations Charter and international law, including the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, adopted by the United Nations in 1960.

It has been robbed of the land that the Palestinian people occupied for generations and generations. It has seen their villages and homes destroyed so that extremist settlers could drive them out and seize their property. It is a nation robbed, humiliated and savagely persecuted. The Palestinian nation has been subjected to apartheid and blatant racism by a state that has imprisoned over 5,000 Palestinians, including children, held for years behind bars, most of them without trial or access to lawyers. It represents a people forbidden to pray in their holy places, which are regularly defiled by Israeli soldiers. It is a people, who want to make a dignified living from their work, but are shamelessly exploited and abused. It is a people tortured, murdered in cold blood, and methodically slaughtered. It is a people under incessant bombardment, including phosphorus bombs. Since October 7, Israel has, in violation of international law, been denying the martyred population of Gaza access to water, forcing them to drink seawater, as well as access to electricity, fuel, food, and medical supplies for the thousands of wounded, reinforcing a blockade that was imposed in 2005 and intensified and made permanent since 2007, a blockade that in reality began in the early 1990s, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).[1]

The brutality of Netanyahu’s extremist regime, like that of Israel’s previous leaders, knows no bounds. He and his corrupt government bear responsibility for this tragedy. Netanyahu has reached a point of cruelty and barbaric insanity that he wants to eliminate all Palestinians, who in the eyes of his Defense Minister are “no longer human, but animals“. The executioners of the Palestinian people seem to have opted for a final solution to put an end to the Palestinian nation, which in their eyes is one nation too many.

In Gaza, the first building to be bombed deliberately and significantly was the one housing the international press. Israel has since killed and wounded several journalists, attacked United Nations agencies responsible for aiding Palestinian refugees, targeted hospitals, ambulances, schools, and places of worship, all of which are crimes against humanity. People are dying in Gaza and the West Bank amidst the guilty silence of the Western media, the on-set experts, the political cliques, and the hypocritical camarilla that seeks to reassure itself with its shameless lies. This duplicity of the elites, regardless of their political association, be they from the “left”, “right” or “far right”, united in a “sacred union” of sad memory, is intolerably hypocritical.

Netanyahu slaughters because he enjoys the “unconditional support” of the United States, the European Union, and France. At a time when the health situation in Gaza is turning into a nightmare and raises the worst fears, it is significant that Washington’s first move was to send its Navy’s largest aircraft carrier to Lebanon, along with shipments of arms for one of the best-equipped armies in the world, which moreover has nuclear weapons acquired in violation of international law.

In the official narrative of the USA and its allies, the aggressor is the aggressed, and the aggressed is the aggressor. This is unacceptable, but it is with such lies and with the help of the media that a climate of hysteria is being whipped up in France and elsewhere. This makes it possible to justify new liberticidal directives. Emmanuel Macron’s Minister of Justice has declared that it is necessary to criminalise the actions of those who criticize Israel, condemn its abuses, call for a boycott of Israeli products as was done against South Africa under apartheid, or even those who express themselves freely in university seminars. Showing compassion and solidarity with civilian victims would henceforth be equated with support for terrorism and anti-Semitism, and made punishable by heavy prison sentences, legal action, and expulsion from the country – which is already happening, and even proscription of representative political parties, and the lifting of parliamentary immunity of elected representatives. Thus, demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians are banned and violently repressed, and arbitrary arrests made. This bigotry has gone to the extent of death threats being made against members of parliament whose only guilt is to express views that do not conform to the single ideology imposed through coercion. In his public intervention, Emmanuel Macron cynically applied an outrageous “double standard”, with not a word of compassion for the inhabitants of Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, so as to comply with the orders issued from Washington!

The mainstream media forces upon us a caricatured interpretation of the situation geared exclusively to served Israel’s interests. Any different point of view is banned and stigmatised as support for terrorism. The aim is to hide the responsibility and role of the United States and its European vassals, particularly France, in thwarting the implementation of United Nations resolutions concerning the liberation of Palestine. Why was it possible yesterday to decolonize more than 80 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but impossible today to decolonize Palestine, to deny it application of the inalienable right of peoples to self-determination enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and in international law, a precondition for the realisation of all human rights?

That is why we are calling for a much-needed awakening to the gravity of a situation that could lead to a new conflagration in the Middle East. The USA and Israel, with the support of their allies, are making no secret of their intention to wage war against Lebanon, Syria and especially Iran. In this region of the world, once a cradle of humanity and birthplace of Mediterranean civilisation, Washington and Tel Aviv are intensifying their provocations. The USA has already transferred part of its armada across from Beirut, while Israel has already bombed Damascus, Aleppo and southern Lebanon. This expansion of the war will lead to widespread confrontation. It takes the zealotry of Israel and the USA to believe for a moment that the Arab nations of the region could remain indifferent.

It is always people who pay the price in terms of living and working conditions, but also in terms of freedom of expression, and the right to demonstrate and to organise. This is what the people of France and Europe, in particular, are experiencing with the price they are already paying for the war in Ukraine.

Everything possible must be done to encourage free debate, exchange, and sharing. We must demand that France exercises pressure on Netanyahu so that Israel respects and implements the 50 resolutions approved by the UN General Assembly and Security Council. Israel is now a lawless state, and its political consequences must be clearly drawn. Enough with the incantations from the United Nations and Western countries! It is time for greater mass mobilisation to exercise pressure on governments and force them to act.

It is urgent to end the bombardments, the continuing atrocities committed against the Palestinians, the massacres that Israel inflicts upon an entire people who, through their heroic resistance to years of blockade, terror and humiliation, have only reaffirmed their existence. Solely the recognition of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian nation to independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty, without external interference, will contribute to the achievement of the universal cause of peace and international cooperation, aims set out in the United Nations Charter. This requires as a precondition that the freedom of opinion and expression enshrined in international legal instruments relating to human rights are respected.

No one can ignore all that we owe to the Palestinian resistance as a whole, and to the Palestinian people in particular, for having exemplified for so many years courage, abnegation, and, above all, sacrifice! A people who refuse to live on its knees triumph in the end, because sovereignty is a principle that is non-negotiable. That is why all those who have chosen to emancipate themselves from neo-colonial tutelage, re-colonisation, foreign occupation, pillage, predation, violence, intolerance, and war share this principle. The Palestinian people, through their struggle, are participating in this great movement of nations for national liberation and emancipation.

The United Nations General Assembly, in its various resolutions on the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, reaffirms “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle“.[2]

We stand as one!

Initial signatories :

Murad Akacilar: internationalist activist (Lebanon)
Ismail Ali: Union of Syrian Patriots in France
Lucio Flavio de Almeida: editor of Lutas Socias magazine (Brazil)
Rita Awn: visual artist (Lebanon)
Castro Abdallah : President of the Trade Union Federation of Workers (Lebanon)
Khaled Abdelafiz: Palestinian writer
Mountaha Abs: Geographer (Lebanon)
Roger Akl: former officer in the Lebanese Navy (Lebanon)
Yves Alexis: FNPOS-CGT trade unionist
Odette Auzende: Retired lecturer, ARAC activist
Bernard Barré: member of the Auvergne- Rhône-Alpes Regional Political Council
Dominique Bathion: Sud-Solidaire trade unionist, ANC31 activist
Ana Bazac: Professor at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (Romania)Victoire Bech: CGT trade unionist, ANC activist
Elisabeth Beltramin: CGT pensioner
Mario Beltramin: CGT pensioner
Abdenour Benmansour : Retired Research Director
Sylvie Bertuit: CGT trade unionist
Pierre Bertoux: CGT trade unionist, ANC activist
Patrick Biondi: CGT trade unionist
Quim Boix: General Secretary of the WFTU International Union of Pensioners and Retired Persons (Spain)
Alain Borg: CGT trade unionist
Saïd Bouamama: Sociologist, Front Uni des immigrations et des quartiers populaires activist
Armelle Bruant: CGT trade unionist
Jacques-Marie Bourget: journalist
Jean Bricmont : Retired physicist (Belgium)
Gabriel Casadesus: PRCF nurse activist
Régis de Castelnau: Honorary lawyer
John Catalinotto: editor-in-chief of Workers Wold (USA)
Jean Chambon: retired, peace activist
Cherif Chamseddine: demographer (Lebanon)
Alain Chancogne: retired, ANC activist
Georges Chapuis: CGT trade unionist, retired
Catherine Chatard :
Michel Collon: Journalist, writer (Belgium)
Philippe Cordat: CGT trade unionist
Etienne Coste: trade unionist, CGT activist
Ghassan Diba: economist (Lebanon)
Boris Differ: Doctoral student in Contemporary History, Bordeaux Montaigne University
Louis Dilasser: CGT trade unionist
Peter Dontzow: CGT trade unionist, defender of undocumented migrants
Smygol Dorphy: independent cinema, Liège (Belgium)
Bruno Drweski: University professor, activist with the Association Nationale des Communistes (ANC) and the Association républicaine des anciens combattants (ARAC).
Michel Duchaine: retired CGT and PRCF activist
Alain Duray: Public Liberties Observatory(Maurice Rajus)
Bassam Elhachem: philosopher (Lebanon)
Ghada El Yafi: Doctor
Albert Ettinger: Writer, retired secondary and higher education teacher (Luxembourg)
André Fadda: CGT trade unionist
Laurent Faivre: ANC 13 activist
Françoise Fête: retired from civil aviation
Virginia Fontes : Historian (Brazil)
Isabelle Fouquay: Professor, retired
Roberto Frande: retired Air Liquide CGT trade unionist
Didier Frassin: trade unionist, CGT activist
Julio Gambina: University Professor, President of the Fundacion de Investigaciones Sociales y Politicas (Argentina)
Jean-Pierre Garnier: sociologist and libertarian town planner
Claude Gaucherand: Rear-Admiral (2S) (O.L.H)
Joel Gauvin: CGT trade unionist
Philippe Gendrault: Psychologist and psychoanalyst Bernard Gerbier: Retired university professor
Bernard Gensane: University professor, administrator of the Le Grand Soir website
Leone Goldstein: daughter of a deportee who died in Auschwitz
Renata Gonçalvez: Professor Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo (Brazil)
Hélene Gressin: retired from the French education system
Karl Grünberg: coordinator of the ACCOR- SOS Racisme anti-racism association
Vivien Guarino: publisher (Editions Critiques)
Bernard Guilleron: town planner, CGT trade unionist, French Communist Party activist
Kamal Hamdan: economist, Executive Director of the Consultation and Research Institute (Lebanon)
Hassan Hamdan: Sociologist (Lebanon)
Charles Hoareau: President of the National Association of Communists (ANC)
Fayez Hoche: Doctor
Johan Hoebeke: CNRS Research Director, retired
Lynda Husseyni: League of Retired Professors of the Lebanese University
Ali Ismaïl: activist with the Union of Syrian Patriots in France
Hasan Ismail: linguist (Lebanon)
Bernadette Feyereisen: citizen
Farid Jabbour : Law professor, writer (Lebanon)
Nazir Jahel: anthropologist (Lebanon)
Nicolas Janny: secondary school teacher
Faycal Jalloul: Researcher specialising in the Middle East
Fouad Khalil: sociologist (Lebanon)
Abdo Khater :
Dimitri Konstantakopoulos: editor-in-chief of Defend Democracy Press (Greece)
Halbo Kool: writer, painter
Tamara Kunanayakam: former Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations
Jean-Claude Lacombe: railway worker, CGT trade unionist
Jean-Claude Lacombe: CGT trade unionist
André Lacroix: teacher, trade unionist and anti-single thought activist (Belgium)
Monique Lambert: retired from the Ministry of Education
Jean-Pierre Lasserre: retired, ANC/LFI activist
Nicole Lasserre: retired
Georges Latrive: manager of a community radio station
Philippe Laure: CGT trade unionist
Jacqueline Lavy: retired teacher, CGT activist, 74 collective for the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah
Pierre Lenormand: geographer, retired, ANC
Antoine Lourdin: truck driver, Teamsters activist (USA)Laura Marks: Professor at Grant Strate University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Canada)
Christian Lourdin: Communist Party USA activist
Nines Maestro: Doctor, activist with the Coordinacion de Nucleos Communistas (Spain)
Elisabeth Martens: teacher, Sinologist, administrator of Tibetdoc.org and Chine-Ecologie.org
Elias Mattar: Sociologist (Lebanon)
Hasan Mnaymneh: former Minister, former Secretary General of the Lebanese University Teachers’ Committee (Lebanon)
Aldjia Moulai: feminist anti-racist activist
Moussawi Ali: sociologist (Lebanon)
Gilles Munier: freelance journalist, writer
Abdallah Namman: diplomat, writer (Lebanon)
Majed Nehmé: director of 2A magazine, the magazine of the Non-Aligned Movement
Mikael Nowicki: Polish worker, grandson of Kazimierz Nowicki, a prisoner in Auschwitz KL and Buchenwald KL.
Jérémie Ozog: economics and social sciences teacher, CGT and PRCF activist
Jean-Pierre Page: Trade unionist, former Head of the International Department of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT)
Dragan Pavlovic: Retired university professor
Jean Pénichon: member of the ANC national office
Berthe Poggiale Avidor: retired
Michel Raimbaud: former diplomat, writer
Pascal Raimbault: retired press employee, friend of the Resistance
Ali Rastbeen: President of the Paris Academy of Geopolitics
Phil Reuter: FI-PRCF activist
Jean-Pierre Richaudeau: activist with the Fédération Syndicale Unitaire
Danielle Riva: Utopie-Critique editorial staff
Jean-Pierre Robert: administrator of the Palestine-Solidarity website
Alain Rondeau: industrial designer, trade unionist
Olivier Rubens: trade unionist, essayist,
Thérese de Ruyt: retired teacher, literacy training for new arrivals, including Palestinians (Belgium)
Emir Saber : Philosopher, sociologist (Brazil)
Issa Sacko: Professor, University of Social Sciences and Management, Bamako (Mali)
Walid Sadaoui: anti-colonialist activist
Halima Sadki: language teacher
Nicole Sainz: Sud Solidaire-ANC31 trade unionist
Maria Elena Saludas: ATTAC activist (Argentina)
Luis Alberto Sanchi: CNRS-Paris researcher
Yannna Semrani: historian (Lebanon)
Givaldino Manoel da Silva-Giva: indigenous activist (Brazil)
Marie-Anne Toulouse-Noujaim: Honorary lawyer
Marc Vandepitte: Philosopher
Yves Vargas: philosopher, writer
Dominique Vastelle: retired teacher
Marie-Jeanne Vilette: teacher, trade unionist and activist with the PCF and the Association France Palestine Solidarité.
Maxime Vivas: former ATTAC representative, essayist, administrator of the Le Grand Soir website
Laurent de Wangen. Teacher, activist with the Association France Palestine Solidarité
Mohamed Ben Yakhlef: trade unionist, CGT and La France Insoumise (LFI) activist
Badr Zeinoun:
Robert Zimmer: Retired, CGT trade unionist, anti-colonialist activist