On January 21st, pro-Palestine activists gathered in front of Burgtheater Vienna to protest a panel discussion taking place inside titled „Debating Europe – is there a peace perspective in the Near East?“
Among the participants were Austrian minister of foreign affairs Alexander Schallenberg, Gudrun Harrer, foreign desk editor at Der Standard Austrian daily newspaper and Dahlia Scheindlin, German-Israeli strategy adviser at Century International, a think tank promoting US foreign policy fostering “international cooperation, peace and security“.
The event abstract on the website referred to what happened on October 7th as a „brutal massacre“ while the three and a half months of the genocidal Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip – with more than 30.000 Palestinians murdered and missing, 63.000 injured and two million displaced so far – was merely sidelined as „the subsequent destruction due to Israeli military operations“.
This is unacceptable. It is a deliberate and dangerous deception of the reality on the ground in Palestine. A harrowing reality of fully-fledged genocide, following 75 years of settler-colonial occupation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
The panel revolved around the question if „after the war“, Europe would play a role in a solution to the „conflict“ alongside the United States. It is beyond appalling that first, these insignificant „experts“ act like vultures, debating and exploiting the current unimaginable plight of Palestinians in Gaza while they are still being bombed and buried by the minute.
Second, that they even dare to assume that the US and Europe – the biggest supporters and financial backers of the relentless terror perpetrated against the Palestinian people by Israel in front of the world‘s eyes, would have a say in the „post-war“ future of Palestine is insulting.
Palestinians deserve and will achieve freedom, return to their lands and self-determination. Europe and the United States, those who manufactured and wilfully maintain the settler-colonial project in Palestine, will never contribute to these objectives.
We as BDS Austria firmly reject any normalization, rationalization and cooptation of the genocidal reality in Gaza and Palestine and will keep disrupting every attempt to do so.
Stop the massacres in Gaza!
Free Palestine!
