Dublin mayor urges Eurovision boycott as Israel commits another massacre
Palestinians evacuate a wounded protester near al-Bureij refugee camp, as Israeli forces massacred dozens of people taking part in Great March of Return rallies on 14 May.
The Electronic Intifada
“The horrific ordeal of the Palestinian people needs to be highlighted,” Mícheál Mac Donncha stated. “There needs to be solidarity just as there was with the people of South Africa with the apartheid regime.”
Israel won the right to host the high-profile annual competition after Netta Barzilai won this year’s event on Saturday.
At the #PalestinianFreedom conference in Dublin: Jamal Juma’, Omar Barghouti, @LordMayorDublin and @haneenzoabii.
The Palestinian ordeal was on shocking display Monday as Israeli snipers once again opened fire on civilians massed along the boundaries of the besieged Gaza Strip for what has been billed as the climax of the Great March of Return.
#update: 18 Palestinians killed (including 14 & 16 year-old kids) & 918 injured during the protests in Gaza today - Gaza MoH. 448 Palestinians wounded by live Israeli ammo today - now over 2,500 shot with live ammo since the #GreatReturnMarch started pic.twitter.com/AUuoU50MoF
#update: 50 protesters are in serious condition in Gaza hospitals. There are 74 minors, 23 women and 8 journalists among the wounded - Gaza MoH pic.twitter.com/AJX5fjTbIy
By afternoon in Gaza, the health ministry reported that the rapidly rising death toll had exceeded 40 Palestinians. Hundreds had been injured with live ammunition and tear gas.
This makes Monday the bloodiest single day since the rallies began on 30 March calling for an end to Israel’s lethal siege of Gaza and the right of refugees – two-thirds of Gaza’s two million residents – to return to homes from which they were expelled and barred from returning by Israel because they are not Jewish.
In previous weeks, Israel had killed a total of more than 50 Palestinians and injured thousands more as part of a deliberate shoot-to-kill-and-maim policy that the International Criminal Court prosecutor has warned could lead to war crimes trials for Israeli leaders.
Monday’s rallies were timed to mark the annual commemoration of the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
“The ongoing Nakba is why I participate in the Great Return March and support the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement,” Abdulrahman Abunahel, an organizer with the Palestinian BDS National Committee in Gaza explained. “I simply want the right to live in the land where I am from, in freedom, in peace and with dignity. I was born a refugee, I do not want to die as one.”
The massacre in Gaza also coincided with the planned ceremony to open the US embassy in Jerusalem.
Dublin mayor Mac Donncha’s calls on Ireland to boycott Eurovision came a day after he opened the Palestinian Freedom Conference, organized by Palestine solidarity groups in Ireland.
At the conference, attended by hundreds, Mac Donncha reiterated his and Dublin City Council’s full support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.
Last month Israel announced that it had banned Mac Donncha from entering any territory it controls, but the mayor got into the occupied West Bank anyway as Israeli authorities had misspelled his name on the banning order.
Mac Donncha criticized the Irish government for failing to take any action to hold Israel accountable, contrasting this with the alacrity with which it expelled a Russian diplomat over British claims Russia had been involved in the poisoning of a former double agent.
Mac Donncha told the conference that he soon looked forward to visiting a free and liberated Palestine.
