The People’s Tribunal on Gaza; Sarajevo declaration
JVL Introduction
In the footsteps of the Tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell to support the people of Vietnam; when addressing the Tribunal, Russell said: “We are not judges. We are witnesses. Our task is to make mankind bear witness to these terrible crimes and to unite humanity on the side of justice.”
In that same vein, the Gaza Tribunal has been meeting over the past months and earlier in June published the Sarajevo Declaration which, “(i)mportantly,…expresses the conviction that the struggle against all forms of racism, bigotry, and discrimination necessarily includes the equal rejection of Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, and antisemitism, as well as an acknowledgment of the horrific effects of Zionism, apartheid, and settler-colonialism on the Palestinian people.”
We commend this report of the work of the Tribunal and summary of the Declaration itself.
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Thu 5 Jun 2025. Read the original here.
The People vs. The Abyss: The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal
In the face of genocide and global inaction, the Tribunal recognizes that the challenge of justice falls to people, to legitimate resistance, to acts of solidarity, to civil society, to social movements, and to people of conscience everywhere.
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I am surprised that the above article does not reference Bertrand Russell’s prescient final message to the world concerning the fate of Palestine, written on 31 January 1970, two days before his death, and which was read out at an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo the following day. The eerie immediacy of its contemporary relevance after 55 years tragically illuminates the barbarous futility of empire.
https://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/Docs/CX5576-RussellMidEast.htm
Huge thank you to George Wilmers for providing that link. If only the world had paid attention to what he said and acted on his words there could have been a very different Middle East today.
This is excellent, but how will the Tribunal’s work and its final report become widely read and understood? How many mainstream media outlets will bother to draw their readers’ attention to the Sarajevo Declaration? And how will this news reach Palestinian citizens?