Alexis Deswaef: demanding respect for international law

[As sound recording at a demonstration is tricky, here is the transcript of this interview]

Hello, Mr Deswaef. 

Hello.

Can you tell me why it is still important today to keep demonstrating when there has been a ceasefire? Why are we still here?

Well, the ceasefire was important, it was urgent for the people of Gaza, but it does not solve anything.

There are still deaths, people killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, which keeps breaking the ceasefire. There is still a glaring lack of humanitarian aid. They are living in tent camps while winter is coming.  

The humanitarian emergency is still there. Moreover, there is still the Israeli colonisation policy occupying Palestine, this apartheid policy. In the West Bank, too, we see settlers who are increasingly aggressive, who are driving out Palestinians. And so we must keep fighting for the rights of the Palestinian people. We in the West cannot support the two-state solution without demanding respect for international law, calling for an end to the occupation, an end to colonisation. And so a country like Belgium and the European Union have a responsibility to do everything we can to support the rights of the Palestinian people.

And what can we say to those people who say that these accusations of genocide are false because there are more Palestinians today than there were twenty years ago?

If it were not so serious and so tragic, one could laugh about it. All remotely serious jurists in the world reach the same conclusion. The constituent elements of genocide are unfortunately all there. I am one of those who would very much like to say that there is no genocide under way in Gaza.

Unfortunately, there is a genocide under way and it is not over.  And so international human rights organisations say so, the United Nations says so. A commission of independent UN experts, university professors, in other words; those who still deny the genocide today are those who repeat the Israeli government’s narrative, or are even complicit in the ongoing genocide, because there will come a time when the perpetrators of the genocide will have to be tried, but also the accomplices to the genocide.

And in the West, there are countries that are complicit in the ongoing genocide, there are companies that are complicit in the genocide. And so we at the FIDH, the International Federation for Human Rights, believe that we absolutely must work to end impunity, because it is impunity that feeds the next crimes. And so those responsible for the genocide and their accomplices must be tried.

So, we are in two thousand and twenty-five, and colonisation has already been taking place in Palestine for a hundred and fifty years.  How could this anachronistic colonisation project, which is still going on today and seems set to go all the way, be stopped?

The only possible way out is to ensure that the rights of the Palestinian people are respected and to apply international law.

Our common compass, in Europe in particular, must be the application of international law, as we want for Ukraine with regard to Russia, with the sanctions against Russia, well, for Palestine too.

We must call for respect for international law and demand that Israel respects international law. Since they do not do so voluntarily, we must force them through sanctions, just as we took sanctions against Russia. We cannot have double standards [that] is unacceptable, intolerable. We cannot have this double standard in the application of international law. Our own credibility is at stake/ Our international consistency, our international credibility is at stake, and so let us apply international law.

Thank you, Mr Deswaef

Thank you very much.

Réginald de Potesta de Waleffe for BAM!

The demonstration was organised by the Association Belgo-Palestinienne, the C.N.C.D., the F.G.T.B. and C.S.C. trade unions, and the Beitna association (an association of Palestinians in Belgium). It brought together 15,000 people (6,000 according to the police), joined by members of the U.P.J.B., to march from the Gare du Nord to Place Jean Ray and denounce the illusion of a ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank, where more than 250 Palestinians have already been killed since the end of hostilities.

Photo/video report of the demonstration of 16 November