Nine governments just signed the new Hague Group’s Declaration. Hailing from Africa, Asia and Latin America, they represent the collective voice of the Global South but also a majority of the peoples of the Global North whose governments have been so shamelessly complicit in our generation’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. We salute these nine pioneering governments and encourage others to join them.

It is of particular significance that these are governments representing people who know from experience what it means to be victims of white supremacist colonisation. The people of the Global South understand better than anyone the real reason why the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are a people Israel placed, collectively, on death row. They know in their bones why the demand of the colonised for equality and justice spreads panic in the hearts of the colonisers.

In their heads, the occupiers translate demands for justice for the descendants or their victims as a challenge to the legitimacy of their property rights over stolen land they occupy. Knowing full well that they stole the indigenous people’s land after declaring it terra nullius (‘a land without a people’), the occupiers and their descendants live life steeped in insecurity. Dread grows daily in their soul and one thought keeps them up at night, causing them to support the continuation of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, even genocide: “If this is what we have done to them, offering them respite will empower them eventually to do the same to us!”

It is in this sense that the Hague Group’s Declaration is not merely a powerful act of solidarity with Palestinians but, also, it serves the purpose of liberating Israelis from a permanent insecurity that poisons their soul and makes a well-lived life impossible to erect on the ruins of another people’s civilisation.

The Hague Group’s Declaration is also of particular significance for us in Europe and North America. Look around this country, the Netherlands. Look around this continent, Europe. We are caught up in stagnation, deindustrialisation, perpetual austerity for the many who cannot make ends meet while living in the midst of extraordinary riches and spectacular demonstrations of wealth. And who reaps this harvest of discontent? The racist ultra-right is the major beneficiary. Other beneficiaries, who never miss a chance to exploit inhumanity, are the arms dealers and the warmongers whose power and bank accounts swell as they put us all, as they put Europe, on a war footing – in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, against China, not to mention their portrayal of wretched refugees crossing the Mediterranean as ‘invading armies’.

It is in this sense that the campaign for a just peace in the Middle East, which is the aim of the Hague Group, is not only a campaign to liberate Palestinians but also an opportunity to liberate Israelis from fear and the rest of us in the West from a precipitous descent into authoritarianism, stagnation and war. A free Palestine is a prerequisite for a free Europe, a free West, a world that begins to make sense again.

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