Statement carried in AlMayadeen English: Canadian Palestinian Association condemns global complicity in Gaza | Al Mayadeen English
Recently, there has been a flood of mainstream officials finally claiming to recognize the genocide in Gaza. To Bernie Sanders, to those UN officials and other Western politicians and personalities who recently discovered their morality…we acknowledge your late support but our souls are shrieking inside us, why didn’t you speak out sooner? What motivates you now, when there’s less risk? How many of our kids have died during your silence?
Do you think we will ever forgive any of you? And even when you finally “do the right thing”, do you feel remorse for the harm you created before? We are waiting for an acknowledgement of how your prior silence gave licence to genocide.
You still tiptoe around the Palestinian right to armed resistance, as if our very survival is a minefield for you. We remember how you held us responsible to convince you that we deserved your support, even as our people were being massacred. How the onus was on Palestinians to “justify” that we were worthy to be heard and to have dignity. Even at that, our voices were consistently sidetracked for the first celebrity or progressive Jewish person that finally spoke out.
Yes, we are bitter. Bitter that you still give more credence to everyone except the actual people who have survived 77 years of dispossession and Zionist brutality.
Now you want us to applaud your Oslo 2.0, this phoney recognition of a “Zionist Palestinian state”. For months, we have been warning of the dangers of this insipid plan that aims to distract and deflect from the ongoing genocide. Western regimes want us to believe that their conditional recognition of a demilitarized and gutted “Palestinian Authority” (with no authority) somehow compensates for their complicity in the massacre of Palestinians. These governments, including the Canadian government, are recklessly endangering the strategic interests of their own countries and peoples; their support for genocide and the vicious state repression of pro-Palestine advocacy will haunt them for centuries.
We are also bitter about the Arab regimes and their empty slogans, thinking they can still deceive their own people. Egypt signs a $35 billion deal with Israel for gas, the Gulf regimes give the US billions of dollars (and a free jet), and then they all want us to believe they don’t have immediate means at their disposal to change the trajectory of this US-Israeli genocide and massacre.
Yes, we are bitter, in ways that run deeper than you will ever understand. But our time is coming and the sun will rise over Palestine. As surely as the monstrosity of Zionism will be booted to the dustbin of history.