Backed by the United States, Israel has systematically dismantled the prospects for a sovereign Palestinian state. It formally annexed occupied East Jerusalem in 1980, has de facto annexed the occupied West Bank by illegally transferring over 750,000 Jewish Israeli settlers there, and has openly declared its intention to settle Jewish Israelis in the occupied Gaza Strip after forcibly displacing its Palestinian population into concentrated zones in the south.
For 58 years, approximately five million Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) have lived under Israeli rule and control without basic civil or human rights. They are subjected to a regime of domination, segregation, and dispossession that multiple international and Israeli human rights organizations recognize as apartheid.
Canada has failed to prevent Israel’s full annexation of Palestinian land. As a signatory to the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, Canada has a legal and moral obligation to act. It must now call for the dismantling of Israeli apartheid and impose targeted military and trade sanctions until Israel recognizes and grants full and equal citizenship rights to all Palestinians living under its rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Silence is complicity. Action is overdue.
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Khaled Mouammar is a Christian-Palestinian-Canadian who was forced to flee his hometown Nazareth in 1948. He is one of the founders of the Canadian Arab Federation and a former member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. He received the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Award from the Governor General of Canada in 1977. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Separation wall between Israel and the West Bank near Jerusalem. Photo by Mazur Travel/Shutterstock.
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