Suzanne Weiss
This speech was given on March 2, 2010, to a meeting of students at the University of Waterloo in Canada, held as part of the Israeli Apartheid Week. She, a holocaust survivor, is a member of Not in Our Name: Jewish Voices Against Zionism and of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto.
A year after a murderous Israel’s assault, the war on the people of Gaza continues. Gaza is still under siege – still surrounded by walls and checkpoints. Its people are denied the necessities of life and the right to rebuild and shape their future.
For me, as a survivor of the holocaust, the tragic situation in Gaza awakens memories of what I and my family experienced under Hitlerism – the ghetto walls, the killings, the systematic starvation and deprivation, the daily humiliations.
The tragedy of Palestine is, of course, different from the holocaust. Israel has no gas chambers. Its government does not strive to kill all the Palestinians. Israel’s intention is, instead, to take the Palestinians’ homeland and property and to deprive them of civil and human rights. Every case of oppression is unique, but the struggle for justice is indivisible. As we then fought for freedom for European Jews, we now call for freedom for the Palestinians.
The holocaust is linked to Palestine in another way. Many Jewish survivors of Hitler’s slaughter lost their families, homes and communities and sought a new life. There was a campaign to convince them that they needed a homeland – in Palestine. They were told lies that Palestine was an empty land, with few inhabitants. The Israeli government terrorised, brutalised and expelled Palestinians from their homelands. Palestine became a colonised settler state. Thus, the Palestinians were made to pay for Hitler’s crimes.
Like the Nazis, the Israel government enforces collective punishment. It aims to kill enough Palestinians, to punish them sufficiently, drive them out of their homeland, so they will disappear as a people. Israel seeks to remove Palestine from the world’s family of nations. That too is a form of genocide.
Israel was founded as a militarised state, and a partner of British and US imperialism, of the apartheid regime in South Africa and of murderous dictatorships in Latin America.
The crimes against the Palestinians inspire guilt in the Jewish settlers and breed fear that the Palestinians might carry out a supposed new “holocaust” against them. Once again, holocaust memories are being mobilised to justify maintaining Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.
As a child in France, I survived the holocaust because a strong resistance was organised. Thousands of people – Christians, Jews and Moslems – joined the fight for freedom against the French fascist Vichy government. They struck powerful blows against racism, whose impact endures in France today. They organised a network to save Jewish people. That’s why I am here today.
For me, as for many Jews today, the memory of the holocaust inspires us not to support war and oppression but to work for solidarity and freedom – in this case, freedom for the Palestinians. The Israel government claims its wars are waged on our behalf. That’s a lie. We say, “Not in our name”. And in increasing numbers, Jewish people join with our Palestinian brothers and sisters to demand justice for Palestine.
Israel – an apartheid state
We raise a simple demand, in the interests of all the peoples of the region: end Israeli apartheid.
The United Nations has defined the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”. The word apartheid, which means “separation”, was coined by the racist regime of South Africa, which denied civil and human rights to non-Europeans.
We know apartheid in our colonised country of Canada: the process through which Indigenous peoples were robbed of their lands and deprived of their livelihood, while every attempt was made to destroy their culture. The architects of South African apartheid studied Canada and took it as a model. The founders of Israel studied it too.
Today we see an apartheid state in the land of Palestine/Israel. It is symbolised by the so-called “separation wall” that confines Palestinians to segregated ghettos, by the checkpoints, the arbitrary killing and arrests, the systematic material deprivation.
How to fight Israel’s apartheid
Nelson Mandela, who led the campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against South African apartheid, has said that justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age”. He also has stated, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
On July 9, 2005, a unified call of Palestinian civil society organisations proposed a campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions as a central focus for efforts to end Israeli apartheid. Boycotts, divestment and sanctions was crucial in the victory over apartheid in South Africa. Now is the time to apply this method to the catastrophic situation in Palestine.
The Palestinian resistance and freedom struggle has three demands to gain justice: (1) their right to return to their land; (2) their right to equality as citizens in Israel; (3) an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Only an end to Israeli apartheid will permit Jews and Palestinians to forge new relations and to resolve the issue of state structures on the basis of equality.
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Israel’s apartheid: Making Palestinians pay for Hitler’s crimes
