PSA STATEMENT: On the Second Anniversary of the Al Aqsa Flood

Recognising a fundamental truth for a Decolonial Reckoning and the Unyielding Demand for Justice.

Two years of relentless genocide.
Two years of steadfast resistance.
Two years, and the struggle for liberation continues, fuelled by the unwavering spirit of a people fighting for their very existence.
Yet we ask when will the world’s complicity end?

7 October 2023 was not an isolated beginning but a significant rupture in a decades-long anti-colonial struggle. It marked the moment the Palestinian resistance shattered the illusion of a quiet occupation, forcing the world to witness the brutal reality of settler-colonialism. It was he beginning of the end for the international community’s ability to plead ignorance while bolstering the last bastion of colonialism.

Today, Gaza has reached this precipice of genocide precisely because of the decades of impunity granted to Israel since the Nakba of 1948. The foundational ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians established a pattern of crime without consequence. This impunity was cemented after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, reinforced during the regular assaults on Gaza, and normalized throughout the relentless expansion of illegal settlements.

Each tragedy, recorded and condemned, was met with empty rhetoric, allowing the colonial project to evolve with increasing brutality. The current genocide in Gaza is the logical, monstrous culmination of this uninterrupted impunity. It is said that the first casualty in war is truth, and we can testify that for too long the second casualty is justice. As we mark this sombre anniversary, the mainstream narrative has laid bare a global hierarchy of human value. While paying lip service to the sanctity of all life, the structures of power have demonstrated that white Israeli lives are centred, while Palestinian lives are systematically devalued—their resistance stripped of context, their deaths rationalized, and their grief rendered invisible.

There is a deliberate, violent refusal to acknowledge that the events of October 7 erupted from the suffocating context of 75 years of ongoing Nakba, 56 years of military occupation, and a 17-year illegal siege designed to break Gaza. The ensuing, disproportionate slaughter of over 100,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, has been met not with a universal moral awakening, but with a devastating deficit of empathy from those in power. This is the logic of genocide, the culmination of a settler-colonial project that seeks to replace the indigenous Palestinian people.

It baffles those with a semblance of human dignity that so many others accept and regurgitate the Israeli narrative that dehumanizes all Palestinians as deserving of this punishment for daring to resist their erasure. How dare they name their oppressor? How dare they call out the apartheid racism that confines them and the settler colonialism that steals their land? How dare they challenge the very fundamentals of the exceptionalism of a state for Jews only?

How dare they report on their own suffering?

Worse, this colonial punishment is now a global project, applied to anyone who dares to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, the victims of genocide, as governments detain their own citizens, smear activists, and silence voices calling for basic human rights and justice. Yet, in these two years, a powerful global solidarity movement has risen, not only to bear witness but to actively demand accountability.

We must now consolidate these truths by affirming:

• That Gaza has exposed the naked racism of Zionism, an ideology that permeates Israeli society as it pursues ethnic cleansing and genocide for settler colonization.
• Jewish Supremacy, as a state-enforced doctrine, is no different from white supremacy, as both drive toward the total annihilation of a people.
• That the South African case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) stands as a historic landmark for global justice. The Court’s provisional ruling, which found it “plausible” that Israel is committing acts of genocide, legally vindicates what Palestinians have long endured. Israel must be held to the Court’s orders, which it has flagrantly ignored, proving its contempt for international law.
• That Israel systematically targets the very pillars of civil society. Aid agencies like UNRWA have been deliberately bombed and defunded, crippling the primary lifeline for millions. (A reminder that 80% of Gazans were already dependent on relief aid before 7 Oct. 2023). Medics, hospitals, and ambulances have been sniped and raided, turning healing into a death sentence. Academics, universities, and archives have been destroyed—an intentional erasure of Palestinian memory, future, and intellect.

More than this:

• We decry the system of mass incarceration that holds thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, including children. They face torture, sexual violence, medical neglect, and administrative detention—imprisonment without charge or trial. This carceral system is a key tool of the colonial project, designed to break the spirit of the Palestinian people.

• We stand with the “Break the Siege” campaigns, from the flotillas to the aid missions, which represent the conscience of humanity. They directly challenge the illegal blockade, and their obstruction by Israel exposes a regime that would rather starve a population than concede its right to life. Israel is solely responsible for the man-made famine.

Importantly, the Al Aqsa Flood has exposed the hypocrisy of the world that finds it incomprehensible that Israeli captives are not returned, yet accepts as reasonable Israel’s policy of holding hundreds of Palestinian bodies in the “cemeteries of numbers,” using them as bargaining chips in a grotesque necropolitics. Worse that the Israeli military can invoke the Hannibal Directive—sacrificing their own people to pursue a military objective—with impunity, while any call for the dismantlement of the colonial army, for an arms embargo and for BDS is deemed intolerable.

As the global Palestine solidarity movement advances across cities and towns throughout the world we stand united on the following non-negotiable demands:

1. An Immediate, Permanent Ceasefire: The bombing must stop. The killing must end now.
2. A Full and Complete Lifting of the Siege on Gaza: Unrestricted humanitarian aid, including food, water, fuel, and medical supplies, must flow immediately and continuously.
3. An Arms Embargo on Israel: An immediate halt to the flow of all weapons and military aid from all nations, ending the external support that enables this genocide.
4. An End to All Complicity: We demand our governments sanction Israel, cut diplomatic ties, and end all forms of military and economic cooperation. This includes a call for free press that speaks truth to power rather than succumb to it and worse one whose algorithms are manipulated to propagate Israeli lies and distortions while silences first hand reports of Palestinian victims.
5. The Liberation of All Political Prisoners: An end to the military court system and the immediate release of all those unjustly imprisoned.
6. The Recognition of the Inalienable Right of Return: For all Palestinian refugees, as stipulated under international law and UN Resolution 194.
7. Accountability and Restorative Justice: We demand a comprehensive international legal process to investigate and prosecute all Israeli war criminals and political leaders, from the
   past to the present, at the International Criminal Court and through universal jurisdiction. True peace cannot be built on impunity. It requires restorative justice—including reparations, the
   return of stolen land, and the rebuilding of a decolonized Palestine—to address the profound historical and ongoing harms.

7 October 2023 was a natural response to the festering settler colonial state. The true struggle it represents is that of the fundamental fight against the logic of elimination under the right to resist.

As South Africans we affirm that

• Our solidarity is irrevocably with the oppressed.
• Our truth speaks the name of Palestine and
• Our demand is for full accountability, for justice, and for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.

The resistance continues because the Israeli occupation is a crime—and it will, it must, end.

7 October 2025

Issued by The Palestine Solidarity Alliance
95 7th Avenue, Melville
Email: info@palestinesa.co.za
www.palestinesa.co.za
0823366711
0827279940

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