The Bronx Stands With Palestine

“You reap what you sow" ~ proverb from Hebrew Bible’s Book of Hosea

The Bronx Antiwar Coalition expresses our deepest sympathy for all the innocent lives lost in the latest military conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. We cannot in good conscience blame the ultimate victims of this conflict, the Palestinian people. The latest violence is decisively the fault of Israel and its enabler, the United States.

For 75 years, the Palestinians have been oppressed by the colonial, supremacist racist ideology of Zionism. Since the Nakba, they have been subjected to the cruelty of ethnic cleansing – routinely massacred, driven from their homes and land. Every peaceful avenue they have attempted to obtain justice, including the recent Great March of Return, has been ignored by the World Community and met with harsh Israeli suppression be it by kidnapping and imprisonment, bombing, deprivation, or at the end of an Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) sniper’s gun.

The right-wing Israeli government has openly stated that their eventual aim was the total expulsion and elimination of all Palestinians for a “Greater Israel”. Left with little choice, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip prison took up arms to break out of the World's largest concentration camp to fight for their dignity and their children's lives.

For the past year, the building of new illegal Israeli settlements has escalated, along with the daily threat of violence from both settlers and Israeli soldiers. Farms, mosques, churches, and cultural icons are in perpetual danger of destruction by Zionist fanatics.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip especially have to deal with the constant fear of being unable to escape their imprisonment where there is insufficient food, water, or electricity. Infrastructure to address sanitary conditions or to maintain health has been destroyed. In addition, their movements are continuously monitored with the added danger of being assassinated by their jailers, the IOF.

No human being should have to live in such inhumane conditions. Who can blame them for trying to escape in a last-ditch effort for freedom, dignity and their very survival?

For the U.S. government and the mainstream media to represent the situation as an unprovoked attack is a lie. Israel could not afford its occupation if it were not for United States taxpayers' money and the U.S. shielding Israel from International Law. Otherwise, Israel would have to address its immoral and inexcusable crimes against humanity. But then, as the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

It is up to the world community and the people in the U.S. to stand up to the politicians, the corporations, and the oligarchs. They're the ones who make it possible for the Zionist state to commit countless criminal acts on a daily basis. All of Israel's crimes, which include every human rights violation in the book, from discrimination to the murder of children and the use of war crime weapons such as the use of white phosphorus bombs, can be wrapped up in one word GENOCIDE. As always, the Israeli government will never admit its crimes against the Palestinians provoked the current escalation. They will pretend to be the victims, and send in the slaughter teams - whether Israeli or US.

The Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. They have to resist, in the same way the Jews resisted the Nazis during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. For every Palestinian man, woman and child, this is a matter of life or death.

Peace requires change and restitution. Palestinians have a right to demand basic justice in the form of: land back, the complete return of ancestral homeland and the return of its people to this land, and criminal charges brought in the International Court against any/all Israeli government officials and IOF soldiers credibly accused of war crimes. The Bronx Antiwar Coalition demands that all US aid to Israel immediately cease, and all Israeli assets be frozen.

“Never again” means exactly that “Never Again!” Not in defense of just one group, but all. Now is the time we must condemn the racist, colonial ideology of Zionism (and any/all of its political soulmates.) If we don’t, Palestinians will not be the only victims. Such reckless disregard for human life never stays contained. Left to grow, it sows the seeds for WW3 – a conflict that will kill us all.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” ~ Nelson Mandela