Judge issues an arrest warrant against Israeli anti-Apartheid activist Neta Golan

For Immediate Release
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21.2.2022, Ashdod, Israel/Palestine. An arrest warrant was issued by the magistrate court in Ashdod against Neta Golan, an Israeli antizionist activist, following her refusal to appear before the Israeli court in solidarity with Palestinian administrative detainees.

Neta Golan, an Israeli citizen and anti-apartheid activist, wrote a letter to the court in which she stated: “I do not intend to appear at the hearing to which I have been summoned regarding an indictment against me. This act is in solidarity with the 500 Palestinian administrative detainees who are currently detained without a time limit, without an indictment and without their or their lawyer’s access to the suspicions against them, who have not attended the hearings about their cases since January 1st. I join the detainees’ demand that Israel stop its extensive and cynical use of administrative detention against Palestinians. The court that allows me rights as a Jew by virtue of my ethnic origin, and does not offer the same rights to indigenous people of another origin, is part of a discriminatory system that aims to encourage the preservation of a Jewish majority between the river and the sea. The same system commits criminal acts for the purpose of maintaining a regime of control by one racial group over another racial group and their systematic oppression. This is the definition of the crime of apartheid. And I’m not willing to cooperate with this crime.”

The Judge responded by issuing an arrest warrant for Golan’s arrest and set a new hearing date for 30.5.22

“If the court imposes a prison sentence against me, during the imprisonment no physical violence will be used against me and at the end of the detention period I will be released. Even these basic rights are not given to Palestinians; for example, the two million people imprisoned for the last fifteen years in the besieged Gaza Strip, including about a million children under the age of fifteen who were born and have lived all their lives under siege and under constant threat of deadly violence. Tragically, unlike me they cannot expect to be released soon,” Neta Golan wrote.

The court case is following Neta Golan’s peaceful protest at the Gaza border as part of “Return Solidarity”, a group of Israeli anti-Zionist activists that were demonstrating at the barrier fence besieging the Gaza strip in solidarity with the Great March of Return in 2020.

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