When the Palestinian national football (soccer) team secured entry into the 2015 Asia Cup to be played next January in Australia, it won the right to play in an international tournament for the first time in its 86-year history.
Crowds gathered by the hundreds on the beaches in Gaza to dance, play music and watch the triumph of their national team on large movie-sized television screens on the beaches.
Israel
Ireland: Sports fans fly flags for Gaza
Dublin Gaelic Athletics Association fans unfurled a huge banner reading “Free Gaza” during the Leinster Senior Football Final on July 20, while Palestinian flags were flown by crowds at other sporting events across the country.
Citizen Strangers: Palestinians & the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State
Shira Robinson
Standford University Press, 2013
352pp, US$24.95
If anyone still believes that the apartheid label applies only to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and not to present-day Israel itself, they need only read Shira Robinson’s Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State to be disabused of the notion.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians marched across the West Bank on July 25, following large protests the day before that in with Israeli bullets.
The largest rallies in years in the occupied territory came as Israel's ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip killed at least 850 people, including hundreds of children.
Israel has fired on protesters, shooting at least nine dead, Electronic Intifada said that day.
Ecuador withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv on July 18 in protest at Israel's offensive, which has already killed more than 700 Palestinians. Middle East Monitor reported that Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patino said: “We condemn the Israeli military incursion into Palestinian territory, we require cessation of operations and indiscriminate attacks against civilians.”
If military victory and strength are measured by the number of civilians, especially children, that an army can deliberately target and slaughter with sophisticated machines, then there is no doubt that Israel is winning in Gaza — and has always been the winner in Palestine.
The United Nations Human Rights Council voted on July 23 to launch an international inquiry into allegations of human rights violations and war crimes committed by Israel during its latest bloody assault on the besieged Gaza Strip that began on July 7.
With tanks rolling through the outskirts of Gaza and the Israeli Defense Force organises new air strikes targeting hospitals and civilians playing football on the beach, almost 100 protests took place right across the world on July 19 and 20, calling for an end to the brutal occupation of Palestine and the bombing of Gaza.
Thousands of people in Sydney joined many demonstrations around the world in support of Palestine on July 20, staging an angry demonstration starting at Town Hall.
France bans pro-Palestine protests
“France's Socialist government provoked outrage today by becoming the first in the world to ban protests against Israeli action in Palestine,” the Daily Mail reported on July 18.
“In what is viewed as an outrageous attack on democracy, Socialist Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said mass demonstrations planned for the weekend should be halted … Thousands were set to march against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza.
In a September 2006 article for the Electronic Intifada, I defined the Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip as an incremental genocide.
Israel’s present assault on Gaza alas indicates that this policy continues unabated. The term is important since it appropriately locates Israel’s barbaric action ― then and now ― within a wider historical context.
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has launched an “SOS Palestine” campaign to demand an end to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Palestine’s Gaza strip, Venezuela Analysis said on July 12.
“Enough already, I’ve joined the campaign,” he told supporters during a televised broadcast. “#SOS Palestina, let’s launch it.”
Holding up a handwritten placard, he asked fellow citizens to join the campaign, stating, “The Palestinian people have the right to live in their ancestral lands in peace.”
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