On May 11, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, released a statement “strongly condemning” Israel’s deadly bombardment of the Gaza Strip and expressing the AU’s strong support for the Palestinian people’s “legitimate quest for an independent and sovereign State with East Jerusalem as it’s capital”.
You may think the statement is familiar, because it is – Mahamat’s words are almost identical to the many bold and straight-to-the-point statements issued by the AU in response to Israel’s persistent assaults on Gaza over the years.
In May 2018, when Israel killed 266 people and injured tens of thousands during Gaza’s Great March of Return protests, for example, Mahamat promptly expressed his organisation’s strong and persistent support for the Palestinian struggle and called for a “just and lasting solution to the conflict…within the framework of the relevant United Nations pronouncements”.
And in July 2014, when Israel killed some 2,310 Gaza Palestinians, injured more than 10,000, and practically demolished Gaza’s infrastructure and economy, the then-African Union Commission Chairperson, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, strongly condemned the “outbreak of hostilities and the attacks against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip”. Dlamini-Zuma also reiterated the AU’s “full support” towards Palestinians and backed the “restoration of their legitimate right to establish an independent State co-existing peacefully with the State of Israel”.
Today, as far as diplomatic posturing and proclamations on Israel’s comprehensive repression of Palestinians go, the AU appears to be one of the most vocal and persistent defenders of Palestinian rights in the international arena. And the AU’s strong support for Palestine is hardly a recent occurrence.
As a body born out of the continent’s anti-imperialist struggle, the AU has always been eager and ready to publicly “stand up” for Palestine.
In 1975, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the AU, adopted the Resolution on the Middle East and Occupied Arab Territories in response to Israel’s “barbaric attacks and raids of refugee camps and bombardment of civilian targets in the towns and villages of Southern Lebanon in violation of all principles of international and human laws”.
Struck by the cold-heartedness of the systemic violence Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people, the OAU reaffirmed “its total and effective support for the front-line states and the Palestinian people in their legitimate struggle to restore all the occupied territories and usurped rights by every possible means”.
It condemned Israel’s shameful attempts to alter the “demographic, geographic, economic and cultural features” of occupied Palestinian territories. It castigated the United States’ role in the Middle East conflict and said the “flooding of Israel with such enormous quantities of weaponry is to establish it as an advanced case of racism and colonialism in the heart of the Arab and African World and the Third World”.
Moreover, the OAU determined that Israel’s systemic and persistent brutality against the Palestinian people could not be countered or expunged by stately appeals, or worse still – empty diplomatic posturing. So it requested all African states to “extend all possible potentialities” to Palestinians to fortify their struggle against Zionist aggression and called for the imposition of sanctions against Israel by international organisations such as the UN.
All this may cause some to conclude that the AU has not wavered from its principled anti-colonial stance on Palestine for nearly half a century.
