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May 2021

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An Israeli member of the group "Good Neighbours of Abu Tor" handing out a piece of cake to a Palestinian resident of the Abu Tor, in a photo shared on the Israeli Police’s Facebook page.

A message from Palestinians in Jerusalem to our Jewish neighbors: We don’t need your cake, we need our rights.

UK based Pro-Palestinian activists group "Palestine Action" seized control of the Leicester based factory of Elbit subsidiary UAV Tactical Systems on Wednesday, May 19, 2021. Activists say that "the occupation is aiming to be as disruptive as possible; these activists are determined to prevent Elbit from resuming its business of bloodshed." (Photo by Vudi Xhymshiti)

Activists in the United Kingdom have been occupying a drone factory in Leicester for the last six days. The Elbit Systems factory produces weapons that have been used by Israel to attack Gaza. “We’re taking direct action because the UK is complicit in the colonization and ongoing occupation of Palestine,” an activist with the group Palestine Action explained.

Palestinian courage this spring has stunned people across the world. At home and abroad, the US and Israel can kill, and for the moment, this cannot be stopped. But they can also be made to lose the war of ideas that makes the killing sustainable. We have no right to ask that the Palestinians stand alone in this fight.

A Palestinian refugee holds the keys to the house he was forced from in 1948, in the Al Jalazoun refugee camp in the West Bank City of Ramallah on May 14 2012. (Photo: Issam Rimawi/APA Images)

Farrah Akbik learned the story of Palestine from a friend’s family who lived it firsthand when they were forced out of Safed in 1948, and still had the key to their house hanging on the wall of their small apartment in Damascus. “There is an ongoing system of Apartheid designed specifically to push more and more Palestinians out of their rightful homes and ancestral lands, and to populate them with settlers. More injustice, more people on the roads of exodus carrying yet more keys. The apathy I read, see and hear around me is baffling, but maybe if they had sat in that kitchen with Abu Khaldoon and heard him retell his journey I would like to think that even the most indifferent of hearts would have been stirred.”

The “apartheid” accusation against Israel from leading human rights groups had a very serious intention: to change the western understanding of what is taking place in Israel. There is only one state between the river and the sea, the occupation is 54 years old and Israeli leaders have no intention of reversing it, so Israel must grant equal rights to all under its governance. But western media and liberal Zionists are determined to make the charge disappear, as they cling to the fantasy that there can still be a Palestinian state in the land east of the green line, and a “Jewish democracy” to the west.