Published on behalf of Servizio Civile Internazionale Italia

?? As Servizio Civile Internazionale Italia we join the collective appeal to the international community to stop the escalation of violence that the Palestinian territory is experiencing.

? We appeal to the international community to stop the violence and to remove all obstacles that are preventing free elections in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

❌ Two days before the anniversary of the Nakba, we join the collective voices denouncing Israel’s apartheid. We reject the definition of “conflict”, too often used by the media that speak of “violence on both sides” and “war against terrorism” because behind these definitions, behind the space given only to the rockets over Tel Aviv, lies the erasure of people, of biographies, and the justification of Zionist structural and systemic violence.

We denounce what is happening today in East Jerusalem’s neighbourhood, in Sheikh Jarrah, where 200 Palestinians have been expelled from their homes – clear example of 73 years of Israeli colonial policy, evictions, ethnic cleansing and daily abuses on Palestinian bodies, under the silence and complicity of the international community, the media and our institutions.

This violence, as Ilan Pappe teaches us in his 2006 text “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, has nothing to do with Judaism, if not its exploitation as a justification for the systemic violence and use of power of a state.

Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness – Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character (p.260)

? We need to go beyond the “conflict” narrative, which, simplifying an extremely complex situation, does’t allow us to analyse what’s happening in the local context, as an expression of global dynamics, which requires us to take an immediate position.

✊? For pacifism, for internationalism and for nonviolence, for a profound and permanent cultural revolution to end all types of oppression and discrimination, we express our solidarity with the Palestinian people who exist and resist.

READ THE ORIGINAL VERSION IN ITALIAN