FOUNDER of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, Omar Barghouti has arrived in Belfast ahead of participating in a panel discussion on Palestine Day as part of this week's Féile an Phobail. 

The Palestinian academic won the Ghandi Peace Award in 2017 and will join Tim Hanley, Campaigns' Officer for Amnesty International Ireland, who recently published a report entitled ‘Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestine’; alongside David Landy, member of Jewish Voice for Just Peace-Ireland, Academics for Palestine and author of 'Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel' in a panel discussion chaired by Unison's Regional Secretary, Patricia McKeown.

Speaking to the Andersonstown News ahead of the event, Mr Barghouti said: "Today, more than ever, Palestine is in dire need of meaningful solidarity, as Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid feels more invincible than ever.

"In broad daylight, with utter impunity, it is perpetrating massacres; killing our children – 15 in the latest massacre; besieging, bombing, suffocating and bringing to the verge of starvation to two million Palestinians in Gaza; ethnically cleansing our communities in occupied Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, Al-Naqab, Masafer Yatta, among others; brutalising Muslim-Palestinian worshippers and repeatedly desecrating the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, and repressing Christian-Palestinians’ freedom of worship.

"In short, and as Amnesty International stated in its watershed report earlier this year that designates Israel as a system of apartheid, Israel treats indigenous Palestinians as “an inferior racial group” I would add, dispensable."

Mr Barghouti added that as we commemorate the 74th anniversary of the Nakba, the planned ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, Israel reminds us that it is perpetrating an ongoing Nakba.

"Still, it is placed on a pedestal in the West, as South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement simple strives to take apartheid Israel down from this pedestal so that it is treated like every other oppressor, in accordance with international law," he continued.

"To do so, we need to strengthen human rights campaigns, including in the UK, aimed at ending all forms of complicity in Israel's regime of oppression."

When asked to compare the response of the West to the situation in Ukraine and how they treat the BDS movement, Omar added: "The West’s blatant double standard in imposing sweeping sanctions against Russia for its illegal, months' old invasion of Ukraine, while actively supporting Israel's decades-long system of settler-colonialism and apartheid against Palestinians has been condemned by Palestinians and many others.

"This hypocrisy is particularly painful and enraging given the massive U.S. and Western complicity, particularly in the form of military funding and diplomatic shield, that enable apartheid Israel to relentlessly commit brutal crimes against Palestinians with impunity."

Omar will join the panel discussion in St Mary's University College from 7pm on Thursday evening.