The Bilbao Initiative: A Coordination Space for Justice for Palestine
Three presidents met in the North American city of Annapolis, claiming to advance the cause of peace between Palestinians and Israelis. This latest peace conference, like so many others, was like the staging of a bad play, with bad actors, whose ending deserves nothing more than international rejection and a response on the part of civil society. The Bilbao Initiative is therefore offered as a space to accompany an initiative in response to the present situation surrounding the 60th anniversary of the beginning of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
The Israeli Prime Minister promised his coalition government (in which some of its criminal members such as Matan Vilnai, Defense Vice Minister, openly threaten a Palestinian holocaust, while Avigdor Liberman, ex-Minister of Strategic Affairs, threatens permanent expulsion) that it would not accept anything except a vague declaration, devoid of content, and a timetable to violate on a daily basis. For President Bush, the Annapolis Conference was his chance to display, with a fake olive branch, some movement against the defeat he is suffering in his occupation of Iraq, and a West fed up with his militarism. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, went to Annapolis without a people and without a nation. His presidency presently sustains itself thanks to support from the United States and Israel. Abbas came to Annapolis knowing that the resulting farce wouldn’t be a step towards a just peace.
Outside of any dialogue, be it true or false, Gaza remains, isolated and penned in. The European Union, together with Israel, imposes an effective boycott on humanitarian aid that might allow the population of Gaza, increasingly close to a disaster or a final explosion, to live with a measure of dignity. The crime of the Palestinians, the reason why not just Israel but the combined international community has imposed a criminal siege upon them, has been to freely vote for a party that world leaders refuse to accept as such. Gaza will explode rather than die, and is being pushed towards an explosion in a slow cruel and concentrated manner, without any government of good faith raising its voice against the genocide. This is a mirror which reflects the shameful behavior of the international community against Israel’s crimes, which are to deny life to the Palestinians; prisoners of the largest open air concentration camp on the planet. Meanwhile, on the West Bank, new checkpoints are put up barely hours after others are dismantled, in a huge piece of international theatre, a show of peace, and prisoners are released who in reality have already completed their sentences, while an equal number are immediately seized (9750 prisoners in Israeli prisons). All this at the same time an apartheid wall is being constructed which makes the Berlin Wall look like a Lego block in comparison.
In parallel with the final crime against Gaza, the Israeli government openly expresses the ideology underlying the measures it is taking, announcing the continuation of the Judaization of Palestine through the addition of more than 10,000 homes which will constitute a new, illegal Jewish colony in Jerusalem. “We wish the Arabs a happy expulsion,” says a banner in the Israeli city of Jaffa, where 20,000 Palestinians live, making it clear that the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing in Palestine has evolved and perfected itself without interruption since 1948; and which should not be understood as part of the past, but rather, the basis of the present. The final crime comes slowly, but it’s on the way.
Palestinian civil society organizations have shown us that they see it clearly and have invited us to join their initiative, and use our most powerful tool, civil resistance in Europe, as a political denunciation and instrument of pressure against whoever develops a slow but steady ethnic cleansing. They have told us that they know how to fight against Israel and have also shown us the path that solidarity organizations in our countries can follow. We will try to concentrate our efforts and pressure in a clear direction indicated by the Palestinians themselves: a boycott of the Israeli apartheid state equal to the boycott of the South African apartheid state in its day.
We, of the Bilbao Initiative, wish to contribute, to the best of our ability; to take steps toward the coordination of this movement. Basque civil society and by extension, Spanish civil society, puts itself at the service of the legitimate demands of Palestinian civil society. The Bilbao Initiative, driven by the MEWANDO (Middle East Without Wars and Oppressions) Network to which we belong, will try to drive an increasingly effective coordinated effort by civil society – increasingly global in scope – towards the achievement of a legitimate and fair goal: justice for Palestine. Peace, yes, but a just and lasting one. To arrive at this goal we need the collaboration of those who still understand the meaning of liberty. We in Bilbao await everyone.
Signatories: Iñaki Markiegui, President, Mundubat; Rosa Temiño, President, BILADI Palestinian Cultural Center; Ana Arriola, Director, Nazioarteko Elkastasuna International Solidarity; Natxo Ribechini, Director of the Secretariat of Coordinated NGOs, the Basque Country; Felisa Piedra, Director of the Peace and Solidarity Foundation in the Basque Country, and Alfonso Roncero, Director, Doctors of the World, the Basque Country. Eugenio Pascual Coruña, President, Peace with Dignity Association. Isabel Portillo, President, SODEPAZ. ACSUR-Las Segovias.
