In the past year, Israel has sparred no resources to continue with its systematic intent to render Palestine a land uninhabitable for the Palestinian people. More than 43,000 Palestinian were killed; Gaza was destroyed in its infrastructure and all possibilities of livelihood; war was extended in Lebanon with the same intent and effort. Today, Israel has also passed a law preventing UNRWA from providing life-saving support across Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank. There is much more to all of this, but all points to the genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of the State of Israel.
I continue to be part of student and academic-led organising in Italy, aimed at fighting this violence and the wider relationship between the University and the Military sector in this country and beyond. But beyond direct action, there is the need to remind and reaffirm where responsibilities lie. To do so with clarity and urgency because the scale of the violence brought to the fore by Israel (and its Western allies) is so vast that reality seems to twist, and things get lost and blurred.
Two recent resources in this sense are:
- The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, has written a new report on the situation in Palestine. “Genocide as Colonial Erasure” is available here: https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/279/68/pdf/n2427968.pdf
- A collective of geographers, architects, and urban planners committed to the study of Palestine – coming from the Arab Urbanism platform – has released a series of resources to study and teach about the genocide. “Palestine: Spaces and Politics” is available here: https://palestine.araburbanism.com/
Israel must be stopped. Free Palestine.