Posted by OPGAI on Mon, 02/02/2009 – 09:23

(Read the Statement in Catalan) — The Israeli occupation army is committing a new massacre in Gaza. At the moment the result of this new act of barbarism has produced five hundred Palestinian deaths, a lot of them unarmed civil population.

This last bloodbath, although being the most severe, it”s not the first and it doesn”t mean a logic”s change in the apartheid and Israeli colonization”s strategy. In fact, it culminates the long Gaza”s siege, that has deserved, on one hand, different non-binding statements from different international organizations and, on the other, and this should be highlighted, that the binding decisions have been systematically ignored by the Israeli governments. Palestinian people in Gaza have been living since months ago in a completely unsustainable situation, imprisoned in a real concentration camp, without resources, elementary food or mobility and surrounded by the Israeli army and with the Egyptian borders closed.

In front of this situation, we can not be standing on the sidelines. Our inaction feeds the complicity with the European Union governments. Instead of putting pressure on the Israel Government for its serious and systematic human rights violations, war crimes and systematic non-fulfillments of the international law, the last 9th of December, European governments decided to strengthen their commercial relationships with Israel, without conditioning this agreement to the adoption of measures in order to achieve a fair peace in the region, respecting the democracy and the human rights values. The Israeli government, encouraged also for the lack of north-American criticism, has understood the message of approval and acts accordingly. Even in our government, the Vice President Department and the Innovation, University and Companies Department have taken part these last weeks in various visits to Israel with the aim to “promote the economic relationships with Israel”, avoiding the UN reiterative reports that compare the Israeli occupation regime with the South-African apartheid, and at the same time are claiming to the international community to increase the political and economic pressure against the Israel State.

The organizations and individuals signing this manifesto refuse the dishonest and immoral exercise of comparing the two parts of the conflict because Israel is the occupying force and Palestine the occupied country and because the disparity of victims is overwhelming. We refuse to be accomplice to the occupation and the massacre against the Palestinian people. For this reason we ask our governments and to all the civil society to joint the compromise with the culture of peace, as though widely reiterated and expressed by the citizenry of Catalunya. In this present moment, this compromise includes the immediate breaking-off of all the cooperation and commercial association deals with the Israel State in all the levels- European, Spanish and Catalan-, and for that we demand:

To the Spanish State, to stop trading weapons with the Israel State.

To the Catalan citizens not to buy Israeli products.

To the General Government to stop the promotion of commercial dealings with Israel boosted by the Innovation and University Department.

Endorsed by:
– more than 370 organizations
– more than 340 university professors