Resisting 60 years of apartheid
Today, 15 May 2012, marks the 64th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the anniversary of the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. This was the harshest and most brutal ethnic cleansing in the world, and included systematic and deliberate killings and displacement. This culminated in a declaration of the State of Israel on the debris of Palestinian people, cities and villages.
15 May 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, the grave catastrophe of 1948 in which Zionist militant forces invaded and destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages through massacre and intimidation, causing not less than 700,000 Palestinians to become refugees. It is an account of human tragedy: the destruction of families, a civilization, culture and identity.
The Palestinian people are not only Muslims; the internally displaced population and that which has been displaced subsequent to the illegal formation of Israel is composed of a multi-religious and in some sense multi-racial population. It is a problem impacting all of humanity, not merely Jews and Muslims.
On this day, our hearts go out to all the Palestinians and we stand in solidarity with them in mourning the Nakba of 1948; we support their resistance of the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine; we strongly codemn the 1967 territorial expansion which continues to facilitate the expansion of the Zionist colonial agenda until today.
