Israeli Brutality Will Lead to More Protests

Gulf News quotes USCPR Executive Director Yousef Munayyer in its coverage of the ongoing Great Return March in Gaza.

Yousuf Munayyer, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, likened attempts to cross Israel’s fence to American civil rights marchers’ attempts to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, more than 50 years ago. He said he saw the demonstrations as an opportunity for a strategic shift by Palestinians.

“This is not a battle that protesters are coming to with guns,” he said. “They’re coming to it with their bodies and they’re confronting very real policies of violent repression. The protesters paid with their lives to get people to question whether these policies are justifiable,” he said.

“Frankly, I think this is Israel’s Achilles’ heel,” he added, “and it’s very important in this moment for the international community to be supportive of the protesters. They’ve always said, ‘Abandon militancy, abandon violence.’ If the international community allows the violent repression of these protests without any real condemnation or intervention to stop the killing, it’s going to send a message that the world doesn’t want any Palestinian resistance – not violent, not nonviolent, not anything in between.”

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