Lasair Dhearg Belfast launch BDS campaign
Lasair Dhearg announce campaign to declare West Belfast an ‘Israeli Goods Free Zone’. The Socialist Republican group have declared their intention to canvas all businesses across West Belfast to attain and survey each ones commitment to boycotting goods produced within the occupied territories of Palestine and profited from by apartheid Israel.
Spokesperson for Lasair Dhearg Aindriú Mac Ruaidhrí, said:
“In recent months we have all witnessed via social media the destruction and death delivered upon the Palestinian people by Israeli Occupation Forces. Whilst the violence against Palestinians may have simmered, it has not stopped, and the occupation continues. The Israeli Apartheid system remains, and each day it contines to physically and psychologically brutalise millions of people – many of them children. These people, the Palestinians, are daily stopped by military checkpoints, caged away and made to walk separate roads to avoid israeli settlers, arrested arbitrarily, evicted from ancestral homes, businesses closed and neighbourhoods attacked. These are symptoms of a colonial system the people of West Belfast have experienced all too well.”
Aindriú continued: “It is in this spirit, the spirit of international solidarity, that we commence this campaign in response to long-held calls for support by the Paletinian people to ‘Boycott Israel’ as part of the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaign. Whilst awareness to their cause is important, what is even more important is taking steps locally that will make a direct material impact on the advancement of the Palestinian struggle – this means hitting Zionism where it hurts: its pockets.”
“Our solidarity and activism for Palestine must not be reserved to periods of heightened terror and media gaze. We must always keep the struggle of the Palestinians in our hearts and minds, because they are part of the same international struggle against imperialism that we are here at home. We cannot wait for the next wave of genocide: the time to end the occupation was yesterday, the time to start helping end it is now!”
