A group of Indian intellectuals and artistes have backed Palestinians for resisting illegal occupation of their land by Israel.
A collective that includes Bollywood actor Naseeruddin Shah and is led by writers Arundhati Roy and Nayantara Sahgal has said that the rockets fired by “Palestinians is part of a resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation.”
They said that international law backs the right of Palestinians to defend themselves.
“Palestinians in Gaza fired rockets at Israel. The rockets did not start or define the brutality that followed. The rockets came as part of a resistance — backed by international law — of an illegal occupation,” reads a statement from the collective.
The collective squarely blamed the state of Israel for killing innocent Palestinian children and settlers in Palestine for stealing the lands of the original owners.
The group called on the Egyptian air force to provide a “no-fly zone” above Gaza strip. It also criticised the Arab world, saying that they lacked the political will to protect the vulnerable Palestinians from the Israeli onslaught.
“In early May, Israel attempted to illegally evict Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah (Jerusalem). This eviction is part of the ‘continuous nakba’, as the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury puts it,” the statement reads.
“These families had settled in this part of Jerusalem when they had been expelled by the Israelis from their homes, and now they were to be expelled again,” the statement declared.
The collective also includes actor Ratna Pathak Shah, novelist Githa Hariharan and economist Prabhat Patnaik.
