Jepke Goudsmit, co-director Kinetic Energy Theatre Company: By international law an occupied people have the right to resist their occupier, including by military means. Such resisters would be called freedom fighters.
Israel and its backers around the world call Palestinian armed resistance terrorism while sweeping their own state terror under the carpet. Leila Khaled is a freedom fighter, standing up for the rights of her people, the Palestinian people, standing up to the decades-long extreme oppression of her people by the apartheid state of Israel — an oppression that has been met by silence and impunity for most of those years. This state terror has only grown worse, and has now escalated into full-on annihilation and genocide.
The now elderly Leila Khaled has been invited to speak at the Ecosocialism Conference in Perth to be held in June this year. Her perspective on the crisis enfolding in the Middle-East now, and the environmental impacts of ongoing war, would be important for our balanced understanding of the conflict, and for our understanding of the detrimental effects perpetual war has on climate change.
For Australia to refuse an entry visa to her shows Australia’s unwillingness to look at the true history of Palestine and at its complicity in the current apocalyptic war on Gaza.
