BDS Quebec endorses “Yes to BDS” campaign at Concordia University
This summer, the world witnessed yet another massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza: men, women and children who are occupied, besieged and, since 2007, subject to a total blockade by the armed forces of Israel, the occupying power. This blockade is illegal, immoral and inhuman.
But the immorality of the collective punishment Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian people goes well beyond the borders of Gaza. Israel is an apartheid state, as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Suppression of the Crime of Apartheid. Israeli apartheid is based on the same three pillars as South African apartheid:
different rights for different groups
discriminatory access to land and population separation in different geographical zones,
total control of the population and military repression.
Palestinian citizens of Israel suffer legalized and institutionalized discrimination at the hands of the Israeli state, simply because they are Palestinian. Like South Africa before 1994, Israel is a “democratic” State for its Jewish population – though certain categories of this population face injustice – but a profoundly anti-democratic one for Palestinians.
Israel is the only state in the world which benefits from total impunity before the international community. The states of this community have woefully failed in their duty to hold Israel responsible for the constant violations of rights of the Palestinian people, leaving Israel free to continue its occupation, its colonization and its dispossession with total impunity.
Where the international community has failed to hold Israel to account, it is up to civil society to lay the grounds for change by supporting and engaging in the world wide campaign to Boycott, Divest and Sanction the State of Israel.
In the coming days, Concordia students will be asked to join this large international movement in favor of human rights, justice and equality for all. On behalf of the Québec BDS Coalition, we want to praise Concordia students for, once again, standing on the right side of history. Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israeli Apartheid!
Steering committee of the Québec BDS Coalition
(which counts over 30 organizations including major labour unions and community organizations across the province).
Rushdia Mehreen
Member of the steering committee of BDS Quebec
I don’t know how Israel is apartheid when all its citizens have equal rights under the law. Saudi Arabia is the most apartheid nation on the planet. Is there any movement to boycott and demonize it. They don’t even pretend to be democratic with their beheadings, stonings and total lack of democracy. It is the muslim countries that practice apartheid but nobody gives a damn what Muslims do. The world and especially Muslim world is obsessed with Jews and Israel to the exclusion of other nation who commit human rights abuses a thousand times worse.
And let us not forget another noted ‘anti-Semite’ and his uttering of the verboten A-word:
“As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic,” Barak said. “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” Ehud Barak, Israeli Defense Minister, Feb. 2010
“We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one – progressive, liberal – in Israel; and the other – cruel, injurious – in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”
Excerpt from “The war’s seventh day”, written by Michael Ben-Yair, Attorney General of Israel from 1993-96. Published in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, March 3, 2002.