World turning blind eye to Palestinians’ suffering: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Kamel Hawwash, vice chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Birmingham, to discuss the rising tension between Israeli regime forces and Palestinians.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Let’s talk about the recent spates of violence carried out against the Palestinians. Could it be that the Israeli regime is using the knife attacks against Israelis as an excuse to indiscriminately attack Palestinians?

Hawwash: It has a history of doing that because when those attacks by an Israeli terrorist on the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron (al-Khalil) rather than move the settlers out where he came from, they actually took over the Ibrahimi Mosque and divided it. So they have a history of punishing the Palestinians for being attacked by Israelis or by Israel itself.

They do not need a pretext to carry out violent attacks. It does not stop. You only have to look at the record that the United Nations special agency keeps of human rights abuses, that records daily abuses which are horrendous. They run into the thousands of abuses per year to see that that is exactly what Israel does. It continues the violence even when there is no violence coming from the Palestinian side.

Press TV: In a number of occasions, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called for protection for Palestinians against the Israeli regime and soldiers of the Israeli regime. He made a plea to the United Nations as well but so far all these requests have fallen on deaf ears.

Hawwash: Indeed. Not only is it the regime and the soldiers, it is also the illegal settlers who are really a bunch of settlers who come out of the settlements simply to make the lives of Palestinians miserable and in some cases to kill, to burn Palestinians alive.

He has called for this protection but it seems the international community is blind to the suffering of the Palestinians and considered it to be their fault, whereas as soon as an Israeli is attacked it becomes a huge issue and the Palestinians are asked to deal with it.

They are the occupied who are resisting the occupier and support should come to the Palestinians and indeed in the UK here we called on the British government to stand with the Palestinians and not with Israel which carries out so many illegal acts and it is in breach of so many international United Nations resolutions and so on.   

We will reach a turning point. Only yesterday or a couple of days ago a huge, the American Anthropological Association in America which has ten thousand members voted to boycott Israel and there are more that are coming that are isolating Israel. So even if governments won’t punish Israel, we the ordinary people around the world would put pressure on it until it ends its occupation.

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