For the 131st day in a row, “Israel” continues to carry out an unprecedented genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, which not only included the direct killing of civilians through continuous land, sea and air bombardment and premeditated killing, but also used clear policies to kill civic life in The Gaza Strip by targeting all civic sectors (health, education, cultural, historical) by bombing facilities and targeting the main cadres of these sectors.
One of the main causes of the ongoing genocide was the siege policies, in which “Israel” used the borders and fence around Gaza to stop the flow of life’s necessities (food, water, fuel, and medicines), as well as the exit of the wounded and injured, in light of continuous disruption of communications and the Internet. While Israel continues to escalate its policies and practices of siege and starvation, carrying out premeditated murders and extrajudicial executions, and practicing open terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and inside the 1948 occupied territories.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documented, that 15 days after the International Court of Justice’s decision that ordered Israel to take preventable measures of committing the crime of genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army killed more than 1,864 Palestinians, including 690 children and 441 women, in addition to more than 1,864 Palestinians. There are 2,933 casualties since the court’s decision was issued, which brings the number of deceased victims of the ongoing genocide to 36,671 killed, including 14,031 children and 8,122 women, according to “The Euro-Med” for the period from October 7, 2023, to February 13, 2024.
While writing this report, The occupation army is preparing a land invasion while committing new massacres in Rafh against the Palestinians, where they were forcefully displaced after repeated forced displacement between what the Israeli forces called “safe zones”. Rafah has turned into a tent city and contains more than a million and a half displaced people without a safe place to go. Egypt continued its closure of the Rafah crossing and the heaviness of the construction of separation walls. Western powers’ complicity in supporting, funding, and promoting political coverage of genocide. Came as a vital fact that, the silence of European organizations and groups concerned about the people on move rights, enabled and empowered the genocide. In addition, some of them participated in disseminating the occupation’s propaganda. Their doings can’t be described except as normalization with the occupation, complicity in crimes through silence or inaction, and allowing criminals to escape punishment by sharing the narrative of the aggressor with all the fabricated propaganda and fake news it contains. All those actions deliberately ignore the narrative and testimonies of survivors and victims and all the calls for the formation of independent international investigation committees to determine the truth of the stories promoted by the occupation.
European organizations and groups concerned with people on move rights adopt opponent borders slogans, such as “Borders kill,” “No to borders,” and “Unity of struggle against the border regime.” They supposedly adopt narratives related to the right of people to freedom of movement, and that this right is not associated by anyhow to nationality, or the type of passport that people hold, and it always emphasizes that there is no difference or discrimination between people.
However, when it comes to the Palestinians, in Gaza or in the occupied territories, we observe that these fundamentals, which should be obvious and crucial to any human rights, political and social movement opposing the border regime, turn into a “need to be rediscussed” slogans and narratives. This response comes as if the Palestinians are not human beings, therefore any basic rules like demanding a “ceasefire” or “ending the genocide” are not applied to them. Making no entitlement of the international joint responsibility to ensure the protection of border crossings and the access of humanitarian aid to besieged civilians.
Testimonies documented by the Refugees Platform in Egypt (RPE) indicate that since the beginning of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, European groups and organizations working on immigration issues and against racist border systems had many debates (within itself or with its alliance) to reach an agreement to state condemnation of atrocities happening there as well as actual counter-action affecting EU policies supporting and participating in genocide.
Most of these discussions stripped the Palestinians of their humanity and considered them to be different groups from others, to the point of thinking that humanitarian rules did not apply to them. By taking such a position, they don’t oppose the violations committed against them, or support their rights, thereby demonstrating clear racism in dealing with issues of the Global South. In addition to double racism against the Palestinians, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are not far from what is happening.
There are many layers of suffering the Palestinians endure such; as being refugees in their own land – that has been forcibly taken from them-, a continuous violation against them for generations, and attempts of ethnic cleansing. Adding to the exceptional position of Palestinians, the ongoing extermination genocide entered its fifth month successively and without stopping. Many of those European organizations concerned with defending refugees’ and migrants’ rights, are still committed to complete silence, while some of them timidly came late with condemning statements with fragile descriptions that never reflect the living reality of Gazans.
Highlighting that statistics do not reflect the reality of victims but over the past years, the Mediterranean Sea has been described as “the largest human mass grave in modern history”, as statistics indicate that the number of people killed in the Mediterranean Sea has reached 28,918 people since 2014. This description was issued, while in Gaza and in light of the continued aggression, the extermination machine killed (36,671) Palestinians, including nearly 7 thousand missing or under rubble for more than 14 days.
Most of these organizations have put the concepts of intersectionality at work in their discourse of decolonization, radical progressivism, and presenting stakeholders from the Global South, which have succeeded in attracting many people to support them over the past years. However, now they demonstrate a lack of credibility in practice, as they do not confront the Israeli role in selling equipment of apartheid and militarizing the borders that kill thousands of people annually on the land and sea border axes.
“Israel” was able to promote and sell weapons and technologies to all parts of the world, after it turned the lives, souls, homes, fields, and villages of Palestinians into a testing field for its tools and technologies. It would not have succeeded or marketing them except the global silence and turning a blind eye to that. Israel continues to send surveillance equipment – which is produced and tested on the bodies and movements of Palestinians – to border control agencies in Western countries that are complicit in the human rights violations these technologies entail.
The surveillance technology that was developed in Israel, and tested in the cities and towns of the West Bank, was sold to the United States – which has always obsessed with building a separation wall on its southern border similar to the one in Palestine – in the form of watchtowers extending along the Mexican border, and to the European Union to militarize and extend its borders, as its border agency “Frontex” used the technology of the Israeli “Heron” drones to monitor the refugees, after Israel “succeeded.” in testing it in Gaza.
From sensors to drones and other AI-powered systems, border control tools have been shown to push people toward more dangerous and deadly routes, stripping them of their basic privacy rights and unjustifiably harming their claims for immigration or asylum status. These technologies are also known to criminalize and racialize people on the move and facilitate illegal deportations that violate humanitarian protection principles.
Israel plays this main role in supplying, sustaining, and normalizing the arming-based border industrial complex imported by Europe, the United States, Australia, and the West. Entrenching the fear of others, acceptance of divisive demagoguery, in a blame of others and presenting the victims as “crisis makers,” and their moral and practical complicity in the impoverishment of millions under occupation and oppression, causing millions of people to roam the earth in search of a haven.
Some in Europe may say that “Israel” may have lost its way, but countries that once claimed to be “civilized” confirm that they follow it and support its open terrorism unconditionally, and more than that. However, it cannot be forgotten that the ideology of Zionism and anti-Semitism originally emanated from the heart of Europe, and the occupation continued and enabled to commit the most heinous crimes with impunity and establish itself above the law due to those countries’ legitimization of it.
This silence did not stop only at the crimes committed against the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories. Rather, this silence extended to the violations that were carried against the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, from targeting activists and groups advocating for Palestinian rights, and criminalizing demonstrations to criminalizing their presence in the countries. All the ways to propose draft laws against refugees and migrants in Europe are in the same context, including targeting Palestinian supporters by suing them or home invasion.
Therefore, European organizations and groups concerned with the rights of people on the move must abandon discrimination and double standards in their demands of “no borders” and “no illegal person”, and include in the foundations of their work the fight against the Israeli apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territories and putting effort to break the siege of the Gaza Strip that has been ongoing for 17 years, which represent the absolute violence of the borders and illegal basic conditions that led to the occurrence and enabling of genocide in Gaza, which could not only have been stopped but also prevented from occurring.
Putting pressure on European governments and the European Union by all possible means to stop dealing with Israeli army’s companies or the export and import of Israeli weapons and technologies. Those weapons are used to either kill Palestinians in the occupied territories or kill immigrants around the Mediterranean and contribute to serious human rights violations on the migration routes in the southern Mediterranean and eastern Europe which is a part of the racist policies of extending and militarizing European borders.
European organizations and groups must also provide the necessary support to the solidarity movement with the Palestinian people in Europe and stand firmly against policies and laws that criminalize solidarity activities, and suppress voices that criticize “Israel,”. Not allowing the rights of migrants and refugees participating in solidarity actions to be violated through assault, imprisonment, or sometimes arbitrary deportation decisions, or otherwise.
