Every year, on 15 May, we remember the Nakba Day in Palestine (“the disaster”, in Arabic). That day we remember that the Zionist movement began the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to create the State of Israel in 1948. Between 750,000 and 800,000 Palestinians were driven out by violence; hundreds of villages were destroyed, massacred, the property of the Palestinians confiscated, the names of towns and villages changed, and even new species of plants other than here. To conceal the existence of Palestine. All this to legitimize the presence in the Middle East of one of the main allies of imperialism.

Even today, the Zionist State is protected by the explicit complicity of the major imperialist powers (EE.UU. and EU) which, despite the continued violation of international law, give it total impunity. The negotiating processes have only served to extend the Zionist project, perpetuating the Nakba and permanent apartheid against the Palestinians, occupying territories, expelling and killing the Palestinians.

So far the data, the story and the facts. Data that we all know very well and that we remember like every year. I write, "Like every year," and I get mixed in the casings.

I should like to stress the importance of solidarity with the Palestinian people as a contribution to our struggle. Real solidarity beyond the borders of the liberal institutions. It goes beyond tweets and headlines. While this text is being prepared, the Israeli authorities are expelling Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, in Jerusalem, for later occupation by the settlers; in the territories of 48, Israeli groups attack “Arab” citizens, as well as their houses and shops, simply because they are Palestinian; and in Gaza, once again. More than two hundred Palestinians were killed. And I say over two hundred because I have had to update the macabre number of Palestinians killed in the drafting process of this article, and I suppose by the time it is published, it will surely be outdated.

And in the meantime – which is only part of what the occupation of Palestine entails – I rewrite “as every year” or “again”. These words make me increasingly repugnant.

“They’re bombing the gauze again.” Once again, “this or another Basque institution has invited a representative from Israel”. I went online and I put CAF in the search engine. A company that continues with the project to build a tramway in the occupied territories of Jerusalem, which helps to steal the Palestinian lands and violates international law. And I see that all the news is linked to new contracts. And nothing happens.

And I am meeting with hundreds of communiqués from institutions and agents at all levels, which reaffirm the need to sit down to dialogue, equating oppressors and the oppressed. And I get the urge to vomit.

Because no one who believes in the liberation of peoples can accept or normalize the oppression of a people fighting for their liberation, much less when it comes to a colonial and imperialist entity such as the State of Israel.

The struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people is the struggle for the liberation of peoples, against imperialism and the capitalist system that provoke oppression. Those who trample on the Palestinians are the same people who condemn us here to precarious lives.

For no one should be obliged to negotiate and accept the conditions of those who oppress it and those who seek the destruction of their country; as it is useful for imperialist interests, it is bound by the international community itself that maintains oppression.

This text can do little more than to get a little rage and to claim the need to strengthen international solidarity with Palestine. At least from there we have been asked to be able to give a strong, bold and effective response to the BDS campaign, to put an end to all the complicity in Euskal Herria with the effort and Zionism to normalize a colonial, imperialist and profoundly racist project.

In the rest, read, listen and report from the Palestinians. They are the ones that matter in this matter. It is they who refuse to be expelled from their homes. Those who face harassment, discrimination and oppression. And in the face of that model of resistance and dignity, each from their trench, we have to fight alongside them.

* Ester Muñoz Nogal is a member of the internationalist organization Askapena