THE
THE
FREE PALESTINE
PROJECT
created by Sami Awilé
PROJECT
Palestine has been under occupation for 73 years now. After yet another Israeli invasion to steal Palestinian land, Palestinians call for help in defending their land from their oppressors. While the international community does nothing against Israel's apartheid, demonstrations around the world erupt in support to the Palestinian cause.
This demonstration to support Palestinians took place at the square "du 14 juin" in Lausanne, Switzerland.
On May 6, 2021, following a decision by Israel's Supreme Court regarding the expulsion of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, to replace them with Jewish families, clashes broke out between Palestinian demonstrators and the israeli police.
The "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" is mostly presented as a religious war between Jews and Muslims. However, it is quite simply, territorial invasion and ethnic cleansing. Muslims, Jews and Christians have lived together for almost 1400 years without war.
Before 1917 Christians, Muslims and Jews lived peacefully. Christian and Muslim defined themselves in terms of religious communities. The Jewish population was divided into two communities: the old Yishuv, i.e. the long-established community in this territory, and the new Yishuv composed of Jews established since the 1880s and motivated mainly by Zionism.
In 1917 the British conquered Palestine, which they officially administered from 1920 under a League of Nations mandate. The conflict between the Yishuv and the Palestinians started mainly from the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
From 1920 to 1948, many Jews settled in Palestine while the United Kingdom exercised its mandate over Mandatory Palestine: the Jewish (zionist) population, which was estimated in 1917 at about 70'000, rose to more than 650'000 by the beginning of 1948. During this period (1917-1948) lot of Palestinian villages were taken by the Zionist militas.
As the war continues, Hamas is blamed for launching rockets on Israel, but the massacres and the crimes against humanity committed by Israel unfortunately never make the headlines of the newspapers. It is important to know that crimes against humanity commited by the state of Israel are nothing new. It began right away with the Deir Yassin massacre, which took place on 9 April 1948, when about 130 fighters from the far-right Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi killed at least 107 Palestinians, including women and children, in Deir Yassin, a village of about 600 people near Jerusalem.
Since 1948, every year, people have been evicted from their homes; killed (for throwing stones at Israeli police); had their water and electricity cut off; been deliberately blocked by Israeli forces at checkpoints when they needed to go to the hospital; had their crops taken or thrown away by Israeli forces. These are just a few of the oppressions that Palestinians experience each day. Unfortunately, this does not make the headlines in the various European media.
THE
FREE PALESTINE
PROJECT
A project dedicated to the oppresed people of Palestine.
© 2021 Sami Awilé
sami.awile@outlook.fr
