Abbas: Israel is a “racist segregationist regime, an apartheid regime”
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas addressing the 20th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, January 2013:
“The coalition makeup in Israel is likely to change, but the demands of peace won’t change. Beginning with a settlement freeze and releasing the prisoners, solving all final-status issues including Jerusalem and the refugees, and culminating with the withdrawal of Israeli forces to the June 4, 1967 borders. Also, [Israel] allows settlers to harm religious sites and destroy crops. It provides them (the settlers) with their own roads, renames our cities and villages, impounds our tax revenue – all this in addition to innumerable Israeli violations of international law and the principles of the UN charter, and of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions…
All these actions of the occupation are nothing other than elements of a racist segregationist regime, an apartheid regime that is forcibly enforced by the Israeli occupation under different names on occupied Palestinian land. As you all opposed apartheid rule on your own continent and defeated it never to return, we in Palestine oppose Israeli apartheid, that we too are determined to defeat.”
“The coalition makeup in Israel is likely to change, but the demands of peace won’t change. Beginning with a settlement freeze and releasing the prisoners, solving all final-status issues including Jerusalem and the refugees, and culminating with the withdrawal of Israeli forces to the June 4, 1967 borders. Also, [Israel] allows settlers to harm religious sites and destroy crops. It provides them (the settlers) with their own roads, renames our cities and villages, impounds our tax revenue – all this in addition to innumerable Israeli violations of international law and the principles of the UN charter, and of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions…
All these actions of the occupation are nothing other than elements of a racist segregationist regime, an apartheid regime that is forcibly enforced by the Israeli occupation under different names on occupied Palestinian land. As you all opposed apartheid rule on your own continent and defeated it never to return, we in Palestine oppose Israeli apartheid, that we too are determined to defeat.”