OCAP Statement of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

September 2006

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) is an anti-capitalist anti-poverty organization with a strong history of being in solidarity with poor and oppressed people both within our local areas and internationally. OCAP has a demonstrated history of solidarity with Indigenous peoples in their struggles against the pillage and plunder of European settler colonialism.

The struggle against the forces of capital and greed within the heart of Turtle Island is also the struggle against the forces that create and perpetuate war, imperialism, occupation, and apartheid against people around the globe. The governments and forces that keep us poor are the same governments and forces that invade, occupy, murder and commit ethnic cleansing and genocide.

We recognize that Israel is a settler-colonial apartheid state. The Israeli state was founded in 1948 on the ethnic cleansing of nearly one million indigenous Palestinians, the wholesale theft of these refugees’ land, and the establishment of a racist apartheid system of laws and policies targeting those Palestinians who were able to stay. The 1967 military invasion and occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights resulted in the further expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the formation of an even more brutal apartheid system on the territories occupied in 1967 This is a system in which Palestinians living under the daily brutality of military occupation have had their cities, towns and villages transformed into open air prisons akin to the Bantustans of the South African Apartheid regime.

With the daily killing of Palestinians by Israeli settlers and soldiers, the imprisonment of over 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, and the refusal of the Israeli state to allow the forcibly expelled refugees to return to their homes and lands, we choose to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle against the apartheid state of Israel. The role of OCAP in solidarity with the Palestinian people is to take leadership from their struggle in how we are to offer that solidarity. Now is a crucial moment in the struggle against Israeli apartheid. In July 2005, 171 Palestinian civil-society organizations - including labour unions, student groups, women's unions, peasant organizations, refugee committees and popular movements - came together to launch a call for a comprehensive Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) strategy as the center-piece of international solidarity efforts with the Palestinian people. OCAP is joining in this campaign and will aim to work with organizations and communities in Toronto around this campaign.

In its sixteen year history, OCAP has shown that a poor peoples' movement can shake those in power and contribute to the building of decisive social struggle. As a militant anti-capitalist anti-poverty organization, we see our struggle and that of the Palestinian people as intrinsically linked. As we fight against regressive and oppressive governments here, we aim to sever the links that prop up and feed Israeli brutality. Israel was created and is maintained as part of a broader imperialist strategy to dominate the Middle East. It is a garrison state that only exists because of the economic and military resources it receives from North America. OCAP will work to mobilize the support in our communities that can weaken and, ultimately, sever the economic lifeline that feeds and preserves Israeli Apartheid.