The last stand in Rafah: We can’t say “we didn’t know” but history will say we aided and abetted the crimes of all crimes in occupied Palestine
The livestreaming of the genocide in Gaza has made it impossible for any political or military figure in Australia, America and other nations to claim “we didn’t know”., as many claimed after the holocaust of 6 million Jews in WWII.
The genocide proceeding in Palestine for nearly a century with periods of intensification has reached what threatens to be the end game with the unprecedented assault on the city of Rafah. Here the Zionist settler colonialist movement’s objective under Israel’s most right-wing government in history appears to have shifted from forced expulsions, pogroms and ethnic cleansing to clear the land of indigenous Palestinians, to the objective of genocide or what the ICJ ruled in January 2024 plausible genocide.
South Africa observed in its most recent application in May 2024 to the ICJ that Rafah is ‘the last stand’ and if it’s approximately 1.5 million inhabitants are destroyed, or occurs some mix of butchery and forced expulsion, it will be the end of Palestinian life in Palestine.
We must refuse complicity and demand the Federal Government immediately commence all reasonable measures to support the survival and recovery of the people of Palestine, half of whom are children and who have no army to protect them against one of the most powerful and ruthless state military’s militaries in the world.
This sub-branch calls on the Federal Government, and calls on ACT ALP Conference 2024 to call on the Federal Government, to immediately take all available measures to support the survival and human rights of Palestinian children, women and men in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in Israel, and in the diaspora, by:
1. Calling on Israel to immediately, permanently, and unconditionally cease its genocidal assault on approximately 1.5mill unarmed civilians and children in the city of Rafah, and to stop the genocide throughout Gaza; immediate and unconditional resumption of unhindered humanitarian aid and dramatically increasing aid so that it is proportionate to need as determined by independent international humanitarian organisations; and ending the blockade of Gaza, in reiteration and support of elements of the LFOP motion to conference;
2. Use Australia's leverage with the US to uncompromisingly advocate that the US immediately and completely stop supplying ammunitions, intelligence and other means by which Israel is perpetrating genocide
3. Use Australia's leverage with America, the United Kingdom, Germany and other Western states to call on them to accompany Australia in immediately ending all military, economic, diplomatic and rhetorical support for what the ICJ ruled in January 2024 Israel's plausible genocide against Palestinians in Gaza
4. Require that the Australian Government, as a member state of the United Nations and an ally of the United States, uses its influence to try to stop the US vetoing ceasefire resolutions when they go to the Security Council, the only UN mechanism that can ensure aid reaches civilians and which has enforcement powers to protect civilians
5. Advocate at the UN for urgent deployment of a well-resourced and mandated UN protection force with an ongoing mandate to protect all civilians from the river to the sea and with immediate deployment to to the city of Rafah and surrounds
6. That Australia, in accordance with their obligations as a member state of the United Nations and under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
- honour their "obligation to prevent genocide" (article I), an obligation which is extra-territorial in scope; and ensure respect for human rights by those states over which they have influence including the US and Israel;
- seek to influence Israel, directly and through the United States, to respect the Genocide Convention
7. Join the lawsuit filed by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice which accuses Israel of violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention
8. Call for Israeli political and military leaders to be held legally accountable under international human rights law for genocidal intentions and actions in:
i) repeatedly publicly expressing genocidal intention to destroy the Palestinian people and to erase Palestinian territories from 'the new Middle East' map (held up by Netanyahu at UN in NY, September 22);
ii) ii) genocidal actions including "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part"
9. Call for anyone all political and military leaders in any nation or territory found to have been be co-perpetrators or complicit, or to have aided and abetted, or to be complicit in the genocide to be prosecuted for individual criminal responsibility under the Rome Statute.
10. Honour the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and condemn racial segregation.
11. Advocate for an immediate termination of Israel's Apartheid policies and institutions within its pre-1967 borders and elsewhere
12. Influence the international community to oppose Israeli apartheid with economic, political and diplomatic actions, as were used in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s including by Bob Hawke to contribute to bringing down apartheid South Africa;
13. Support the immediate implementation of the right of Palestinian refugees to return (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194) and full compensation for all displaced Palestinians and their families
14. Call for a transitional justice process, comparable to the South African Truth and Reconciliation process, to ensure accountability for all perpetrators and redress for all victims
15. Muslim, Jewish, Christian, secular, Arab, European, black, white, one and all – from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!