Statement from the Afro-American Committee Against Genocide, 1982

The unspeakable atrocities brazenly carried out against the Palestinian people by the zionist terrorist entity with the unbridled and, indeed, gleeful, support of the West are nothing short of genocide. The only thing more terrible than the fact that this genocide is happening now, is that it is happening again — and that it will happen again until the map of Palestine has been erased and the Palestinian people are exterminated. What began in 1948 continues with ever-increasing intensity, with the complicity of the white West, and with the same morally bankrupt responses from so-called progressives. Though of course, it is zionist terror that ignites Palestinian resistance. And, over the years, it is clear that this is resistance against genocide. 

Many in the international solidarity community have always understood Zionism as not only apartheid, but genocide itself. Indeed, in the early 1980s, when the zionist terrorist entity attacked Lebanon, the Afro-American Committee on Genocide named the operation as one of “genocide and death for the Palestinian and Lebanese people.” In their statement, which is reprinted below, they called for an end to the slaughter, the withdrawal of troops, and the establishment of an international tribunal in the tradition of the Nuremberg Trials for those responsible. They concluded by warning that inaction would only lead to repetition: “We would like to declare that if the genocide is not halted terror will beget terror, hate will beget hate and a holocaust could well engulf us all.” 

This zionist holocaust against Palestinian people is now engulfing all of us. We must act.

STATEMENT FROM THE AFRO-AMERICAN COMMITTEE AGAINST GENOCIDE

Now we know that the peace which the Israeli Government of Menachem Begin would establish in Lebanon is the peace of genocide and death for the Palestinian and Lebanese people; we, as a committee of concerned Afro-Americans, call for a halt to this carnage and these crimes against humanity. Now that we've heard an Israeli General tell us with brutal candour on ABC-TV that the purpose of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is to impose a "final solution" on the Palestinian people, we say enough, no more: AND WE CHARGE GENOCIDES In this tragic situation we see history confronting us with a cruel irony, a savage reply, not of Hitler, but incongruously, of Zionism, wearing a fascist face three generations after the incinerators at Dachau had become museum pieces.

Censored Israeli accounts would have us believe that all the death and devastation was inflicted upon the Lebanese and Palestinian people "democratically". But to describe an avowed attempt at a "final solution" as democratic is to be as perverse as Beaudelaire's Devil, who claimed that "the cleverest trick I overplayed was to pretend that I didn't exist".

General Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Defense Minister and the Commander of the forces in Lebanon, stated last December that Israel's security interests extend to Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, the whole of North Africa and Zimbabwe. It was the same General Sharon who, after inspecting South African forces on the Namibian-Angolan border, issued a plea to the United States to supply more arms to South Africa.

The French paper Le Monde (no United States paper has done it so far) reported that in Israeli-occupied Lebanon, all young males, some of them as young as eleven years old, are being rounded up and interrogated. The Palestinians with a cross branded on their backs are then separated from the Lebanese and taken away in trucks or. air-lifted in nets to an unknown destination. The Israeli Prime Minister, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, from which the representatives of 94 nations walked out before he spoke, declared that the right of self-defense was a sacred one. This spurious claim via-k-via Lebanon and other States bordering on Israel is not unlike the ones made by Hitler before he moved into Sudetenland prior to swallowing up all of Czechoslovakia and before occupying France. Hitler, carrying his fatuous claims to a logical conclusion, was to engulf most of the world in a destructive war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. Begin's "sacred right" could, if unchecked lead us down the road to the end of all human life on this planet.

As Afro-Americans this South African-Israeli connection is of particular concern to us, and this concern is not academic but visceral, because the same forces supporting the invasion of Lebanon and the genocide being carried out there behind a wall of censorship, half-truths, lies, deceit and omissions are pushing Black people to the brink of destitution here in the United States. Heartless cuts in social services, in education, the attack on voting rights, the growing armies of unemployed appear to us as part and parcel of a grand scheme to Lebanonize us and our children. Therefore, when we raise our voices in defense of the Palestinian and Lebanese people, we are also defending ourselves. This attempt at genocide against the Palestinian people is something we can feel in our bones.

As we piece together fragments of what is said, and what is left unsaid, we know that "if they come for them in the morning, they'll come for us that night". We therefore join with our fellow Americans, 54 per cent of whom declared themselves against the invasion of Lebanon in a recent poll taken during the week of 14 June, and demand a halt to the genocide and the systematic campaign of racial extermination. As Americans, and in particular as Afro-Americans, we would be diminishing ourselves as human beings if out of fear, indifference or an apparent lack of humanity and compassion, we allowed the Palestinian and Lebanese people to be sent down into an appalling oblivion while we remain silent.

The Afro-American Committee Against Genocide therefore calls for the following steps to be taken immediately:

(1) Following the tradition already set by the Nuremberg Trials, we demand that an international tribunal be immediately set up to carry out a thorough investigation into the systematic genocide being perpetrated against the Lebanese and Palestinian people in Lebanon;

(2) That those responsible for this illegal act of war and genocide be put on trial;

(3) That a halt be called to the slaughter of innocents and the burying of thousands in mass graves, and that the inmates of concentration camps be set free immediately and compensated;

(4) That a world-wide campaign be waged to raise funds for the hundreds of thousands of homeless and destitute who were left in the wake of the Israeli devastation of their towns, cities, villages and hamlets;

(5) That United States covert and overt complicity in this carnage and desolation be brought to an end immediately;

(6) That Israeli troops be immediately withdrawn from Lebanon and that steps be taken to ensure that no United States troops are sent to Lebanon to bail out the Israeli occupiers and to share the world's odium at the spectacle of mass graves, concentration camps, and mass torture;

(7) That since the Israeli Government illegally used weapons supplied for its defense in a war of aggression, no further arms should be supplied to that country by the United States;

(8) That the United States Government and people stand squarely in support of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and representation by a national authority of their own free choice. Since Palestinians the world over have already expressed their choice and are already represented by such a national authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization, we call upon the United States Government to recognize this authority.

We are not anti-semites; but we are anti-fascists, and if by words and deeds a ruling class of Israelis chooses a path that can only lead the great majority of the Jewish people to destruction and earn them the hatred of the majority of the world's peoples; if by word and deed this class chooses to be fascists, we oppose them as anti-fascists and not as anti-semites, and the distinction is very clear to us.

And finally we would like to declare that if the genocide is not halted terror will beget terror, hate will beget hate and a holocaust could well engulf us all.

SIGNED BY: Prof. Jan Carew, Dr. Joy Carew, Edward Palmer, Dr. Alice Palmer, Fannie Rushing, Prof. Sterling D. Plumpp, Thomas A. Curtis, Ms. Christine Johnson, Lee Bush, Ms. Ruth Booze, Earl Johnson, Dr. Mikal Ramadan, Sidney Williams, Fr. George Clements, Richard Durham, Ishmael Flory, Rev. Al Sampson, Rev. Harry Gibson