Solidarity with Indians for Palestine 

On 26 January 2024, India's Republic Day, for the first time in history, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel must “take all measures within its power” to prevent any genocidal actions being carried out in Gaza. This ruling not only demands accountability from Israel but "imposes a moral and legal obligation on other country members of ICJ, including India, to cease funding and otherwise, facilitating Israel’s military actions" (Indians for Palestine, 23 February 2024). Contrary to this, the Indian government has continued its support of Israel in various ways that facilitate its genocidal actions in Gaza. On 23 February 2024, in a public meeting in Delhi, members of the Indian public re-asserted their historical and ongoing solidarity with Palestine and refusal of the government's prevention of the right to protest for Palestine in India. India Labour Solidarity (UK) sent a statement for the event and further solidarity building in the future.

Statement of solidarity from India Labour Solidarity (UK)

As the International Court of Justice continues its hearing of the depositions of 52 countries on the settler colonial and genocidal policies of Israel in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, India Labour Solidarity (UK) commends Indians for Palestine for organising today’s public meeting in Delhi in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Again and again genocides have emerged in the same way, the incremental beginnings in everyday violences, the name calling, the stereotyping, to bulldozing and lynching, to denial of citizenship rights, restrictions on free movement and participation in enforced exploitative and slave labour for sustenance, to being made a political prisoner for ‘throwing a stone’, to finally the grabbing of ancestral lands and natural resources. We also stand in solidarity with the Indian labour and trade unions that have called out the Indian government's actions to support the genocide in Gaza and strongly objected the recent deal between India and Israel to send Indian construction workers to Israel to “replace” the Palestinian workers from Gaza who were stopped from working in Israel since 7 October 2023, and in solidarity with the Indian Water Transport Workers’ Union which recently refused to load and unload any weapons to be used against Palestine.

We draw attention to the thousands of Palestinians, who over all these decades of Occupation, have been made political prisoners for reasons including such as entering Israel without a permit, stone-throwing and traffic violations. Why are they prisoners and not hostages? We call on Indians everywhere to stand in solidarity with the families and movements campaigning for freeing Palestinian hostages languishing in Israeli jails, and restoration of the basic prisoner rights they won through many hard struggles and which were confiscated on 7 October 2023. Given over 80% of India’s prison population comprise undertrials, there are similarities in the carceral systems of Israel and India. 

We salute the Palestinian people’s resistance to refuse a burial under growing mounds of rubble and we salute all communities who have refused and – with the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and beyond –  are refusing their erasure though the processes of genocide, including in India, Muslims, Adivasi and tribals in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nuh, in Haldwani, in the many colonies of Delhi that have been bulldozed, in Chhatisgarh and in Odisha.

We observe that the oppression and surveillance tactics such as drones and facial recognition used against Palestinians are now being used against Indians. We are appalled about the exchange of weapons between the Indian and Israel regimes.

We join you and the other growing international voices in demanding accountability from and a commitment to bring to an end the inhumanity being perpetrated by Zionist ideologues holding sway over Occupied Palestine, and their imperialist backers, in particular the leaders of our own country, the United Kingdom. We are horrified that the UK’s first Indian-born prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is complicit in the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, and we continue to support the wider UK campaigns against his government’s continued supply of weapons to Israel and denial of ceasefire to the Gazans.