Like apartheid South Africa, it must be replaced by a single democracy offering equal rights to all living between the River and the Sea

ICAHD Videos, Jul 31, 2024

Jeff Halper, ICAHD’s Director, posted this introduction to the interview that he did on 31st July 2024 with Salaamedia in South Africa about the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh:

This was a criminal act perpetuated by what even the international community is considering a criminal state, one being tried for genocide by the ICJ and whose Prime Minister and Defense Minister are awaiting arrest warrants by the ICC. Political assassinations are illegal in international law, as are any kind of extra-judicial killings; they are murder, pure and simple. Israel chooses to kill its political opponents rather than negotiate with them because its goals are not “peace,” but rather transforming all of Palestine into a Jewish state, which it readily admits. Indeed, any prospect of peace or compromise with the Palestinians is seen as an existential threat to the Zionism colonization project. Haniyeh, as a reasonable Palestinian leader willing to deal with Israel (Hamas accepted the two-state solution already back in 2006 in the Prisoners’ Document), poses a greater threat than Yahya Sinwar, whose military resistance can be defeated.

The assassination of Haniyeh reflects Israel’s strategic decision to reduce the Palestinians’ legitimate and just liberation struggle into mere “terrorism.” By criminalizing all those who resist its colonization, ethnic cleansing, land grabbing, occupation, mass killing and ultimately apartheid, Israel seeks to delegitimize the Palestinian cause and its leaders. It also seeks to generate such hatred between the two peoples that no dialogue will ever be possible. In so doing it knowingly and intentionally forecloses any possibility of a political settlement.

Since it believes it can defeat an entire people, oppress it forever and get away with apartheid – all dependent, of course, on US military and diplomatic support – it chooses to perpetuate “the conflict,” convinced that it can “win.” The price of “total victory” over an oppressed people and their erasure from the land and history has a name: genocide.

Israel has lost any legitimacy it had as a state. Like apartheid South Africa, it must be replaced by a single democracy offering equal rights to all living between the River and the Sea (including, of course, returning Palestinian refugees). As an Israeli Jew, it pains me to use this language, but Israel/Zionism has been a criminal regime since the 1948 Nakba, and its criminality has reached new genocidal heights. Only one democratic state is capable of decolonizing Palestine and bringing peace, justice and security to the tortured country’s peoples.

And so, I remember Ismail Haniyeh and his family, which I can do without supporting Hamas’ religious/political agenda. We must acknowledge yet another Palestinian leader killed in the struggle for liberation.