Agencies-Gaza post
Attempts to illegalize solidarity with Palestine failed in Argentina
On May 19, 2021, while the second week of Israeli bombing against Gaza was taking place, partner of parliament Juan Carlos Giordano took the floor in the Argentine Congress. In a brief speech, he condemned the “criminal bombings by the racist State of Israel”, the murder of 217 people, including dozens of children, and the destruction of a structure with international press offices and a university library.
“That’s why we chanted in the marches in solidarity with the Palestinian people: Israeli state, you are the terrorist,” he recalled. He rejected the Israeli ambassador in Argentina for ensuring that “every democratic person should support Israel”, which would mean supporting both the ongoing attack on Gaza and Israel’s policy of apartheid in force since 1948.
“The people support the Palestinian people, not Israel. Italian dockworkers refused to load an arsenal that was going to Israel, an impressive internationalist workers’ gesture,” Giordano added.
Giordano condemned the center-left Peronist Argentine state for equating Israeli and Palestinian violence, identifying the so-called “theory of the two devils” with which sectors of the Argentine right tried for years to relativize the offenses of the 1976-1983 military tyranny.
“How can we talk about two forms of violence when there is a genocidal state and an oppressed people?” he questioned.
Days earlier, while Israeli troops harassed Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, police fences in Buenos Aires were simultaneously preventing a pro-Palestine solidarity march by the Left Front from reaching the Israeli embassy.
Giordano has often used the same parliamentary rostrum for international denunciations in the past, from the persecution of Catalan sovereignty activists by the Spanish regime to the siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo in 2016. On that occasion, he used language against Putin and Bashar Al Assad as harsh as that required at Israel, urging the severance of diplomatic relations with the Syrian regime.
This time, Giordano’s words developed a counterattack by the Israeli embassy and Argentine Israeli organizations, which charged Giordano with “anti-Semitism”. A widely circulated online petition urged his expulsion from Congress, directly accusing him of being a “Nazi”.
Source: HERE
