[Imc-newsroom] Israel Indy day at U of I, UC

[Urbana-Champaign Unity & Struggle]

To Members of the Media

What: Rally on the Quad to mark Israel's self-proclaimed Independence Day

Where: Union side of the U of I Quad

When: 12-1pm

Questions? Democratic Solidarity Committee <dsc at uofidivest.org >


Happy 54th Birthday Israel!
Keeping the Apartheid Dream Alive

We have witnessed more than an half century of Zionist racial Manifest 
Destiny.  As a new generation enters the helm of Palestinian solidarity 
around the world, from the United States to South Africa, from Egypt to 
Belgium, from England to Israel, from New Zealand to Japan, and from Uganda 
to Brazil, we are determined more than ever to challenge the 50 plus years 
of systematic oppression of the indigenous population in what is now called 
Israel/Palestine.

Dismantle the System of Oppression

We stand with the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza, the 
Palestinian Israeli citizens and the refugees living in their shanty towns 
of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.  We stand with the 
international Israel anti-apartheid movement in its call for the isolation 
of the regime, through divestment, as on this campus, embargo, end of tax 
funding, and boycott of goods, until the racist system of political, social, 
and economic disenfranchisement  is dismantled, including the legal and 
social discrimination against  Palestinian Israeli citizens who make up 20% 
and growing of the so called Jewish state, the squeezing of the indigenous 
population into smaller and smaller areas of land by Jewish only 
neighborhoods and roads, utterly unequal distribution of water, electricity 
and other daily necessities, and the maintenance of decades old squalid and 
overcrowded (most crowded places on earth) refugee shanty ghettos when many 
of them live only 10's of miles from their burned out or demolished homes in 
what is now called Israel where 54% of all the land is uninhabited.

Equal Rights for all People in Palestine/Israel

The powerful do not give up power, it must be taken.  We reject the Oslo 
"peace process" whereby the outsider Arafat and his cronies were imported 
from Tunisia and set up by the U.S. and Israel to police the first uprising 
of the Palestinian people.  We will not let Israel, the U.S., the European 
and the Middle Eastern states impose an international recognition of  
Israeli Apartheid with a Palestinian handshake.  When the powerful are 
forced to come to the table and negotiate as peers, not as conquerors, we 
will see true co-existence, peace, and equal rights for all the people of 
Palestine/Israel.  Finally, we are a democratic and anti-racist movement.  
No longer will we stand by while racism against the Palestinian people in 
particular and Arab people in general is accepted as normal.  If this is 
rejected here and around the world, it will have to be rejected in 
Israel/Palestine.




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