Israel vulnerable to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement: Pundit

Press TV has interviewed Mick Napier, with the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign from Edinburgh.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Please talk to us about the continued aggression and the violence of Israelis carried out against Palestinians on a day-to-day basis.

Napier: I think the main problem is a failure of imagination in many many people around the world to really understand what’s happening in Palestine. And if I can give a micro tiny tiny example I’ve seen Palestinians in Jerusalem forced out of their home by settlers from the USA. The Palestinians forced to live in a small piece of their garden in a tent in winter while the settlers from the USA live in their home and jeered at them and insult them and miss no opportunity to show their hostility and it’s a microcosm of Palestine that settlers are coming from around the world dispossessing the Palestinians with great violence, killing, shooting, burning, burning families, burning homes, burning farms, pumping sewage onto Palestinian communities, pumping sewage onto their farms and the situation is one of the extreme desperation.

And we in Europe are used to films of the French resistance opposing the Nazis and of course everyone on the site of those people who use violence against an illegal occupier of violent dispossessor. And it’s a failure of the imagination to realize the Palestinians are in a desperate straight as well and insult is piled onto injury when thousands of Palestinians are held as hostage in Israeli dungeons in a huge …, Tony Blair when he was the representative of the UN, the EU, Russia, the so-called Quartet, he called for the immediate release without conditions of a single Israeli invading soldier who had been captured by the Palestinian resistance and he was utterly silent on the agony of tens of thousands of Palestinians who had loved ones languishing in Israeli dungeons.

So it’s not just the Israelis are committing barbaric acts against the Palestinians on a daily basis, killing, shooting and so on; it’s the salt rubbed in the wounds by the so-called international community. And I think it’s terribly important in this situation that signals reach Palestine, signals reach Israel, from around the world that though this killing and crime is being committed against the Palestinians with seeming impunity, Israel is extremely vulnerable to the worldwide movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and they really fear on a roused world public opinion. But the Palestinians cannot win militarily given the balance of forces. They’re not just fighting a settler colonial regime that’s quite vicious, they’re fighting the EU, they’re fighting the USA, which just gave 38 billion dollars to the tormentors and the UN seems utterly useless in this situation.

So the balance of forces is massively against the Palestinians, but we can change that and it’s really beginning to change. We’re quite pleased that Israel was kept out of the biggest arts festival in the world as something tainted. And we are pleased that in California and around the world people are beginning to move against arms factories that supply the Israeli killers and to force their governments to begin to enforce sanctions on the Israelis. So, I think if somebody moved in to my home, speaking a foreign language and jeered at me and made me live me in the garden, I would fight them and it would be pathological and sick not to fight them and I would tell my children and my grandchildren to fight them, because this is the site of the oppressed and the site of justice and really decent people around the world have to join in order to shift the balance of power here.

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