LONDON (Dispatches) – One of Britain’s leading trade unions, ASLEF, has published an article in its monthly journal highlighting the Zionist regime’s apartheid, another sign of the growing awareness of systemic racism that Palestinians suffer under the occupying regime’s brutal military occupation.
Under the headline “No peace without justice” the piece was written by Hussein Ezzedine, the secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the 22,000-member train drivers’ union.
He denounced Zionism as a racist ideology and called on readers to join the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS seeks to end the structural racism in occupied Palestine, just as international sanctions played a leading role in dismantling the apartheid regime in South Africa.
“It is actually very simple,” wrote Ezzedine as he pointed out that Zionism is a racist ideology. “There is an occupier and an occupied. There are ethnic cleansers and the ethnically cleansed. There is discrimination and the victims of discrimination.”
He urged readers to think about their view of the Zionist regime. “We need to change the narrative. You don’t get to drop an entire colony on top of an inhabited land, grind the inhabitants into the dirt for decades and then claim self-defense every time they retaliate!”
There can be no equality, the ASLEF official argued. “By its very nature [the Zionist regime] places one people above another.”
His remarks echo the conclusion of Human Rights Watch, which declared the Zionist regime to be an apartheid regime. Prominent Israeli human rights group B’Tselem also branded the occupying regime as an “apartheid” regime that “promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”
Former United Nations’ chief Ban Ki-moon has also suggested that the Zionist regime is imposing apartheid on Palestinians and called for a new approach to the conflict that focuses on ending the occupation and ensuring equal rights - moving away from the traditional “peace process”.
In an article published in the Financial Times on Tuesday, Ban said international policies towards the Zionist regime-Palestine must “recognize the fundamental asymmetry between the parties”.
“This is not a conflict between equals that can be resolved through bilateral negotiations, confidence-building measures or mutual sequencing of steps - the traditional conflict-resolution tools,” he wrote.
Instead, Ban argued, the conflict is between a powerful regime, the Zionist reigme, controlling Palestinians through “open-ended occupation”.
Ban, a South Korean diplomat who served as UN secretary general from 2007 to the end of 2016, said it has become clear that the Zionist regime seeks to make its occupation of the Palestinian territories and “structural domination” of the Palestinian people permanent.