Statement by the Ambassador of the State of Palestine to Azerbaijan Nassir Abdul Karim Abdul Rahim

To lose a loved one suddenly is dreadful, especially in an act of violence. In the last few days, horrifying images have been searingly radiating from Palestine, watching a heartbreaking tragedy recurring in repetitive appalling familiarity, except this time was the first when the penetrating immeasurable pain was shared on both sides. We are against targeting civilians by whoever and mourn all the lost innocent lives everywhere. And we know Palestinian innocent lives have been at the receiving end for decades and as precious as any other.  

Carpet bombing, wiping out neighborhoods, the biggest open-air prison in the world where people caged for seventeen years under wretched conditions, an act of collective punishment and, according to international law is a war crime, perpetrated by a nuclear state, Israel, with the blessing of its patrons, after receiving Card Blanche from some of the powers that be on the world stage, the purported gatekeepers of international law. These powers and their prejudiced media readily adopt and propagate unsubstantiated allegations concocted by Israel’s hasbara in an effort tinged by a supercilious orientalist mindset to dehumanize the Palestinian people and would like the world to believe that history started on Saturday, 7 October, deficient of any context.

The context is that for the first time ever, Israel experienced some of the pain that it had and continues to inflict on the Palestinians for the last 75 years.

Since 1967, Israel has been the enforcer of the lengthiest military occupation in human history with all the ruthless paraphernalia of an apartheid regime: ethnic cleansing, daily killings, Palestinian children are often targeted by the Israeli army, in the first six months only of this year fifty-six kids died from shot wounds; parents pray in the morning when their kids go to school will come back safely; Palestinian women give birth at Israeli military checkpoints of which 600 dotted across the West Bank; nightmarish pogroms by Israeli messianic extreme colonialist-settlers aided and abetted by Israel's security forces burning cars and houses while residents inside,  land theft, daily infringement on Al-Aqsa Mosque, harassing Muslim and Christians worshippers in East Jerusalem on a daily basis; segregated roads Palestinians can't use even within their cities; two different sets of laws, civilian for the colonialist-settlers and military for the Palestinian people. 

Yet, against all these relentless Israeli crimes that run against a plethora of hundreds of UN resolutions and International Humanitarian Laws, we have not heard the same outrage and sanctimonious grandstanding from those world powers. The opposite, they bankrolled Israel’s ruthless system of colonial apartheid with all the political, diplomatic, and military cover, the tools needed to maintain this perverse inhumane situation with total political impunity. However, the irony is these same powers give lip service to the two-state solution but refuse to recognize the occupied State of Palestine in contrast to the UN and more than two-thirds of the planet, a substantive and symbolic gesture whose only implication is to give impetus to a moribund peace process.

The Palestinian leadership, well-known commitment to peaceful resolution, has been warning for years that the status quo is unsustainable in the absence of any political horizon, as all peaceful avenues to achieve a just peace are blocked by Israel. A recipe for the continuation of this perennial conflict and the inevitable outbursts of violence it would entail.

The ongoing, tragic situation could've been avoided, and thousands of lives could've been saved by ending Israel's unending colonial occupation of Palestine and its apartheid regime through accountability and enforcement of the related UN resolutions. The Palestinian people, whose lives are of no less value than the Israelis, deserve and have all the right to live in dignity in their independent state with East Jerusalem (Al-Quds) as its capital, to live in peace on par with all peoples. 

The genuine address for peace is Palestine, not geopolitical somersaults.