No food, medicine, water, or tents have entered the Gaza Strip for over 10 weeks while hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians are once again forcibly displaced and confined to increasingly shrinking spaces. A few meager distributions are organized for appearances by an organization close to Israel and the USA... distributions during which several Gazans were shot!
As the tormented Gaza Strip faces a growing risk of famine, with 2 million people starving, and over 52,000 people killed—including nearly 15,000 children —the Netanyahu government has launched its plan for the total conquest of the Gaza Strip, at the cost of accelerating civilian massacres.This operation is intended to complete the destruction of the enclave, which began two years earlier, and plans to pile up the population in the south before deporting them to other third countries.
In defiance of the three orders issued against Israel in February, March, and then May 2024 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—during which this body declared that Gaza was on the brink of genocide— Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government has, since May 5th, been writing, organizing, and carrying out the extermination and deportation of the Palestinian people.
The ICJ procedure was triggered by South Africa. In Europe, only Spain and Ireland supported Pretoria's complaint.France, however, remained silent. The executive's silence and prevarication in the face of the proven risk of ongoing genocide in Gaza exposes our country to breaches of our international obligations to intervene and prevent the ongoing massacre.
The absence of diplomatic, commercial, or military actions against the Israeli state amounts to political complicity.The French authorities cannot be so rightly concerned by the fate of the Ukrainian people, only to then sink into such indifference regarding the fate of millions of Palestinians.
Yet, it is in this context—the transformation of an Israeli occupation war into a genocidal war— that the President of the Senate's Committee on Foreign Affairs and Armed Forces, Cédric Perrin (Les Républicains), has consciously decided to invite Israeli ambassador Joshua Zarka to the Senate on June 11th to explain and justify the unjustifiable: the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Granting such a platform to the official representative of the Israeli state in France amounts to a form of normalization of the ongoing mass crimes.For instance, the Russian ambassador to France was not heard by the national assembly to justify his country's aggression against Ukraine. This is, once again, an unbearable double standard.
The Israeli ambassador's place in France is not in Parliament but on a plane heading to Tel-Aviv.Just as the numerous French-Israeli dual nationals who have participated in the massacres of the past two years should be brought before the International Criminal Court, similar to Hamas officials for their crimes on October 7, 2023.
The concrete fight against the ongoing genocide in Gaza also involves France. As with the South African apartheid regime in its time, the moment for institutional dialogue is over.Because diplomatic communiqués are no longer enough, the government must take strong and immediate actions aimed at isolating, sanctioning, and neutralizing Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government.
Let's support and participate in all initiatives from social, political, and union movements calling for the immediate expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, and more broadly, for the fight against the ongoing genocide!
Illustration image: « Sénat, le pavillon de l’entrée nord depuis la rue de Vaugirard », photograph from March 25, 2019, by Soleil1409 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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