All out Saturday 13 April 2024, 12pm, St. Peter’s Square.
Britain’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is over 100 years too long. What started with Balfour giving away Palestine, a land that wasn’t theirs to give, continued through their active participation in the suppression, colonisation and death of Palestinians.
This cannot go on anymore.
Their own legal advice has said Britain would be complicit in Israel’s war crimes if we kept selling the weaponry used in Israel’s mass-murder of over 33000 Palestinians, a number that could be double when the 1000s more lying beneath the rubble are named.
It is obscene that for a 2-way arms embargo to be put on the British agenda we had to wait until Israeli drones had deliberately targetted and murdered 3 ex-army British Aid Workers in a convoy delivering food to a starving population.
It was even carried out by an Elbit Systems drone whose Engines were in all likelihood made here in Britain – in Elbit’s UAV Engines site in Shenstone, Staffordshire.
How could we still be pumping Israel full of weapons when over 13000 Palestinian children in 6 months have been blown up by Israel?
Not to mention the suffering and injustice throughout the decades of Israel’s illegal occupation and violent dispossession of all of Palestine.
In Gaza, the latest UN figures report that since October 2023 Israel has damaged or destroyed 275 schools, 84% of Health Facilities and nearly 300,000 housing units, leaving more than a million people homeless. Sanitation and water facilities are operating at 5٪ of output from before the bombing.
This is in a land that had already been suffocated by Israel’s 17-year land, air and sea blockade.
The world still just watched as Israel recently besieged and destroyed Gaza’s most important hospital – Al Shifa, massacring hundreds in the process.
These are all well-documented Israeli war crimes, and we must all make sure no more weapons are produced here for Israel, whether by British Arms companies who make the F35 jets like BAE Systems, or Israel’s own Elbit Systems arms factories diabolically operating on our shores and developing their weapons through the genocide of a population that is mostly children.
The call is now and the only moral choice is a two-way Arms Embargo with Israel and an end to all British complicity with Israel’s 75 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
We will be loud and clear on the streets of Manchester: We stand with the Palestinian people and we will struggle against the British profiteers of imperialism who are still facilitating Israel’s atrocities and doing everything to block Palestinian freedom and justice.
Join us on Saturday 13 April 2024, 12pm, St. Peter’s Square.