South Feminist Futures denounces the normalised tsunami of anti-Palestinian racist rhetoric, hate speech and inflammatory misinformation in response to Palestinian resistance against the illegal Israeli occupation.

The racist dehumanisation of the Palestinian people has always been a means for the apartheid state of Israel to pursue its settler colonial project, and justify atrocities committed to that end.
Normalising, defending or trivialising speech with genocidal intent towards Palestinians endorses the continuation of an illegal settler colonial apartheid regime and enables mass killings in full view of the world with impunity.

The profoundly racist and genocidal statement by Israel’s defence minister, “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly” has gone without censure not just by Israel’s allies but also officials of the UN.
Western media plays its part in enthusiastically repeating unsubstantiated reports of rapes, beheading of children–all colonial tropes designating indigenous and colonised people as less than human, and thus deserving of occupation, apartheid and settler-colonial violence.

Despite the deployment of racist colonial tropes against the indigenous people of Palestine to frame them as the aggressors, the facts are incontrovertible: the settler colonial apartheid Israeli regime has throughout its history committed egregious breaches of the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions and multiple international treaties and conventions that lay out the duties and obligations of States in international law.

This has included illegal annexations, forced evictions and displacement, land confiscation, collective punishment, excessive use of force and torture, targeting of activists and journalists, detention of children, economic deprivation, arbitrary detention, all designed to enforce and maintain a system of apartheid. Above all, the Israeli occupation has meant the denial of the right of Palestinian self-determination.

Under imperialism, colonialism and apartheid, dehumanisation has been the basis to justify the worst atrocities including slavery and genocide. As was the case with apartheid South Africa, the Palestinian struggle is a struggle against racism and imperialism, apartheid, settler colonialism and occupation which calls for transnational solidarity from all anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist movements, as ours is a common cause.

We will resist in solidarity with Palestine. In our lifetime, Palestine will be free.

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