Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
A banner was hung in front of the building where Mélanie Joly’s office is (225 Chabanel O., Montreal). Red paint was poured, and the list of the names of the Palestinians killed by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (produced by Palestine’s Health ministry) was left in front of the door of the building.
Statement follows.
Canada, yet again guilty of genocide
It is said by some that Gaza is the biggest prison in the world. We fully agree with such a description, although it is obviously now a euphemism, since Gaza has become an extermination camp. Blocking water, food, medicine, electricity, fuel and internet to a population wholly dependent on imports and international aid, while carpet bombing them, can only produce one outcome. You can avoid the word as much as you please, but the reality is this : the Israeli government is committing a genocide, in full view and with your full support, Mélanie Joly, Justin Trudeau and the rest of the parasitic invertebrates that supposedly represent our will and our interests.
The international network of complicity
By the time this statement is released the latest phase of the genocide will have killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. This number includes entire families, teachers, doctors, journalists, students, drivers, nurses, street vendors, artists and so on. The colonial Israeli state tests the world’s threshold on crimes against humanity with every passing day. Canada might not be the one who is dropping a thousand bombs daily in Gaza, or handing out assault rifles to settlers bent on annexation and shooting families. However, Israel wouldn’t be able to do so without the unrelenting support of the imperialist states of the “global north”. Israel wouldn’t even exist today if it wasn’t continually armed, financed, and legitimized by the imperialist powers of Europe, some of their former colonies like Canada and Australia, and the hegemonic empire of the US.
Bound together militarily by NATO, and economically through trade agreements and forums like the G7, this imperial coalition fosters its alliance with the fascist state of Israel as a way to keep a military fortress in this historically strategic region. This alliance is crucial to the destabilization strategy put forward by the US, which seeks to prevent the peoples and the states of the region that are hostile to US hegemony from uniting themselves in an anti-imperialist struggle. Israel is vital to the US empire, which is essential to Canadian power. Mainstream medias, held by capitalist conglomerates or states, work hand in hand with this coalition to legitimize the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by disseminating the dehumanizing fascist discourse of the Israeli government.
International solidarity : Act here and now!
We salute those who have marched through the streets, blocked governmental offices and weapons manufacturers, and expressed their solidarity on the walls and windows of this sad, sad, sad fucken city built on stolen lands. However, we are convinced that we are not the only ones who are disappointed and frustrated with the passivity and tardiness of our fellow comrades of the far left in taking transformative actions against the ongoing genocide. We also deplore the statements that were issued by leftist organizations like [redacted] that equalized the violence of the colonized with that of the colonizers like.
While we understand the threat of violence that activists face by the strong international Zionist forces, we draw our courage from our comrades in Palestine who are at the front line of this genocidal and colonial violence. They are calling for us to be in solidarity. Now is the time to respond to their calls for action without hesitation. Solidarity is not a slogan nor a hashtag. Solidarity materializes itself through action. To abstain from answering swiftly and with force to the calls to strike, to protest, to sabotage and to boycott coming from Palestine is to give a free pass to “our” governments in their unconditional support to Israel.
Colonial peace or liberation struggle?
Peace is not the absence of conflict; peace is the presence of justice. Justice in Palestine, just as in Canada, means decolonization. This material process implies that the colonized get their lands back, that they can enjoy the right to return and that they obtain reparations, all of which, sadly for our self-appointed liberal allies, mean that violence will inevitably be part of the process. Of course, gunning down Israeli “non-combatants” can be criticized from a humanistic and a strategic perspective. Nonetheless, we have to keep in mind that Israel is a settler colonial state in which every citizen has to go through military training and service. The “civilians” of Israel are literally born to serve an ethnic cleansing enterprise. A population subjected daily to humiliation, state and settler repression, manufactured poverty, apartheid and dispossession of land, cannot be held to a higher moral standard than that of the Israeli fascist state. A ceasefire, while immediately needed, is not in itself any kind of long-term solution for the people of Gaza or Palestine.
We stand with a liberated Palestine, from the river to the sea
As citizens of the settler colonial state of Canada, our immediate task is not to deliberate on the legitimacy of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, but rather to help the Palestinian struggle for self-determination by striking Israel’s international network of complicity. It implies overturning our own imperialist states, attacking our governments and blocking the capitalist production and exportation of goods to Israel. Weapons manufacturers supplying Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people must be blocked, trashed and shamed. You can find the ones closest to you on Worldbeyondwar.org (see their “Canada: Stop Arming Israel” campaign).
Calling for the enforcement of international or humanitarian law is an hopeless endeavor. As long as the US and it’s lackeys like “Canada” remain the dominant powers of an international order based on capitalism and imperialism, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians will go on, no matter how many millions decry it. This is not an opinion but simply a description of the actual situation. Only a popular and international uprising, employing militant means and defiant methods, has the potential to overturn the international network of complicity. That is our solidarity.
Solidarity forever, intifada everywhere.