VIDEO: IPS Experts Address the UN About Palestine
This May, the United Nations convened the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. The assembly marked the anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) — the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Palestinian American human rights attorney and IPS board member Noura Erakat spoke at the opening ceremony, arguing that Israel’s war on Gaza amounts to a genocide — a view shared by the International Court of Justice and other international authorities. “Israel has destroyed 92 percent of Gaza’s residential buildings, incapacitated its 36 hospitals, and prevented the entry of food and basic goods,” Noura said. “In doing so, it is not only killing Palestinians now, but threatening the possibility of a Palestinian future.”
IPS Middle East expert Phyllis Bennis then joined a panel of civil society activists on the subject. “We need to make the killing impossible,” she said, calling for an arms embargo. “We cannot stand by and watch the first globally broadcast, globally visible genocide to take place and say ‘we are doing all we can within the parameters that the U.S. government will allow us to do,’ because they will allow nothing if we demand nothing.”
Watch Noura’s remarks starting from about the 26-minute mark below:
And watch Phyllis’s remarks here:
