Topic: Elimination of Xenophobia and Racism
Country: Palestine
Delegate Name: Rachel Westrick
School: Forest Hills Eastern High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Palestine position papers GLIMUN 2016 committees
Since its creation in 1945, the United Nations has adopted many declarations and programs intended to solve the global problems of xenophobia and racism: Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948 to provide international definitions on the basis of human rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) was ratified in 1969 to define and provide recommendations for combatting different forms of racism. However, despite these efforts, flagrant and often violent marks of racism continue to victimize and oppress millions of people around the world. Belligerent far right political parties, increased racial violence, and severe anti-immigrant sentiment has intensified in the West, and perhaps the most extreme incidence of racism today, the oppression of the the Palestinian people by the Israelis, has continued after nearly 50 years of the invasive Israeli occupation. It is imperative that our committee recognize the abuses of various groups and find ways to end this painful racism and subjugation.
The State of Palestine has been besieged, violated, and tortured by the violent and oppressive Israeli occupation, and our people have continually experienced the brutality of Israeli racism first-hand. The Israeli occupying power has inflicted its schemes of racism, oppression, exclusion, apartheid, and denial onto the Palestinian people since the Israeli occupation fell upon the Palestinian homeland in 1967, and the marks of military occupation and systematic oppression have remained ever since. Since 1948, the Zionist scheme has been to erase Palestine as a political entity and to remove the Palestinian people from their homeland and replace them with an unrestricted and unrestrained incursion of Jewish immigrants. Bypass roads for the exclusive use of illegal Israeli settlers rip through Palestinian territory. The Israeli government and its people deliver a reign of extremism, violence, racism as they assault defenceless and innocent Palestinian families and communities with their campaigns of terror. To maintain the conspiracy of Jewish superiority within the Israeli state, the occupying power has called for forced birth control and population management in order to fulfill its desire for ethnic cleansing and eliminate the Palestinian people. In addition, land expropriation, ID confiscations, and the demolition of Palestinian homes and holy sites characterize the terror of the Israeli occupation in Jerusalem and beyond. And as a result of Western guilt of its racist actions of the past, the United States and others have become puppets to the Israeli regime and allow the occupying power to act with impunity and without accountability– all at the expense of the suffering Palestinian community.
The subjugation of the Palestinian people must stop; the Israeli occupation and apartheid must end. Our committee must acknowledge the deplorable acts of racial discrimination and violence perpetrated against the Palestinian people and hold that if this suppression does not end, countries will agree to levy sanctions against the occupying power in order to reprimand them. We must assert that the global community will not allow the Israeli occupying power plunder Palestinian land and demolish Palestinian homes, and racist laws that violate international human rights, like the Civil Wrongs (Liability of the State) Law must be condemned and Israel must be called upon to revoke them. Our committee must find ways to encourage local or national governments or NGOs to campaign against racial intolerance and hatred, and also discuss methods by which those who have been victimized by institutionalized racism may receive compensation.
