Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
10 October
SCOTTISH GREENS CONDEMN ISRAELI SETTLER COLONIALISM
On this day in 2016, the Scottish Green Party voted overwhelmingly to recognise the settler-colonial nature of the Zionist project in Israel/Palestine and to oppose Israeli state-directed racism, i.e. apartheid, and dispossession of the Palestinian people. The party condemned the concept of Israel as a 'Jewish State' as inherently racist, and noted the UK’s role in the genesis and maintenance of the crisis in Israel/Palestine. The SGP thus became the first party in Europe to include all the demands of the Palestinian people.
حزب الخضر الاسكتلندي يدين الاستيطان الاستعماري الاسرائيلي
10 أكتوبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2016، صوت حزب الخضرالأسكوتلندي بأغلبية ساحقة للاعتراف بالطبيعة الاستعمارية للمشروع الصهيوني في فلسطين ومعارضة العنصرية الإسرائيلية الموجهة من قبل الدولة، أي الفصل العنصري، ونزع ملكية الشعب الفلسطيني. أدان الحزب مفهوم إسرائيل باعتبارها "دولة يهودية" واعتبارها عنصرية في جوهرها، وأشار إلى دور المملكة المتحدة في خلق الأزمة في فلسطين والحفاظ عليها. وهكذا أصبح حزب الخضر الإسكوتلندي أول حزب في أوروبا يؤيد جميع مطالب الشعب الفلسطيني.
Israel is a settler colony - annexing native land is what it does.
Since its early days of colonising Palestine, the Zionist movement has always aimed to establish a Greater Israel. Simply put: all settler colonies constitute a continuous process of land annexation, whereby native inhabitants are removed and settlers from elsewhere are brought to occupy the land.
To be sure, all modern nation-states have annexed land in certain respects, but the settler-colonial state’s distinguishing feature is that it does not come into being and cannot continue to exist without claiming sovereignty over land that is forcefully taken from its native inhabitants. In short, the settler colony can only claim its sovereignty through the eradication and erasure of native sovereignty.
Israeli state-enforced racism, i.e. apartheid
The occupation and the apartheid policies that Israel practices today were not borne of unforeseen circumstances or ‘Arab hostility’; they are the necessary development of an ethnocratic state that doesn’t recognise the right of self-determination of the indigenous population.
The land usurped by the Israeli State, the refusal of the right to return for Palestinians, the formation of an economy that was exclusive to Jewish labour and the domination of natural resources were very much planned, deliberately institutionalised in the Oslo peace process and are the inherent features of Israel that make it the apartheid state it is today.
Education in Israel is segregated with Arab and Jewish students taught in separate schools at both elementary and secondary level, under the administration of the Ministry of Education.
“They want to teach our children that Jews are the rightful owners of this land, and that we are here as guests, that as Arabs they do not have the right to live in equality with Jews,” said Jihad Abu Rayya, a lawyer and political activist in Haifa, whose children will have to study the law.
Dispossession ongoing:
The more than three million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem face home demolitions,