Palestine Action Salt Spring

Slanderous accusations were made about Palestine Action Salt Spring, Apartheid-Free Communities, and local businesses in an incredibly hateful and disingenuous post approved and published on the Salt Spring Exchange on Wednesday, February 11, which has since been removed. We denounce this attempt to discredit our growing movement with a statement steeped in racism, misinformation, and genocide denial.

PASS is a multicultural, multi-faith, diverse group of friends and neighbours, all connected by our fierce love and desire to stand up with the oppressed and name the abusers committing crimes against humanity. We are inspired to take this opportunity to introduce Salt Spring to the Apartheid-Free Communities (AFC) initiative and celebrate what everyday people are doing to align their actions with their values and make a difference in the world.

We encourage everyone to support the businesses taking a bold stance on the side of justice.

What does Apartheid-Free Communities stand for?

“All people are created equal and should be treated with dignity and respect.”

This is the crux of the Apartheid-Free Communities movement and at the heart of every person who pledges to dismantle Apartheid.

Inspired by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, we aspire for our own communities to be “Apartheid-Free,” and support the many ways we can individually and collectively shift our material investments to make this a reality. 

As of December 2025, more than 1000 communities, representing over a million constituents, solidarity organizations, faith communities, non-profits, student organizations, unions, businesses, and municipalities, have signed on.

In BC, the municipalities of Burnaby, Surrey and Powell River have taken the pledge, as well as the BC Green Party.

The pledge asserts, “We affirm our commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people and all people,” and we really mean all people—this is an explicitly anti-racist movement, which includes rejecting and opposing antisemitism. 

It is a well-established legal fact that Israel’s separation wall, separate road systems and forms of documented status, administrative detention, illegal settlements, and complete control over Palestinians’ everyday movement, access to basic resources, and right to enter or stay in their own homeland make it an apartheid state.

This crime against humanity is the daily reality Palestinians have been enduring and documenting for decades, affirmed by the International Court of Justice, the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, Yesh Din, and human rights organizations worldwide.

There is also overwhelming consensus among human rights organizations, genocide scholars, and international legal bodies that Israel’s actions meet the legal criteria for genocide, another crime against humanity for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court.

AFC encourage people to pressure governments and corporations to comply with international law and to stop materially supporting the infrastructure that allows Israel to commit apartheid and genocide, which currently constitute the primary barriers for pursuing peace in any meaningful way.

AFC’s ultimate goal is to stop the harms being done through the collusion of governments with weapons manufacturing, surveillance technology, and resource extraction industries.

While this most violently impacts people being bombed, starved, and exploited in places like Palestine, or Sudan, or Congo, it is also evident in the ongoing legacy of colonization here in Canada, as Indigenous communities have been on boil water orders for decades, are disproportionately targeted by police, experience medical discrimination, are dispossessed by pipeline projects–these are also apartheid conditions which we oppose and hope to dismantle.

We also know that these interconnected systems of harm do not only impact the direct targets of violence, and that the environmental consequences of warfare and resource extraction endanger all living beings sharing this planet together. The world AFC strives to co-create honours the dignity of all life.

Al-Thawabet and International Human Rights Law

Al-Thawabet (“constants” in English) are the unwavering demands for self-determination asserted by Palestinians, a people under military occupation, subject to the ongoing crimes of apartheid and genocide documented above. Al-Thawabet is a framework developed by and for Palestinians to maintain the vision of liberation. The five principles of Al-Thawabet assert: 

  1. Refugees have the right to return; 
   2. The dispossessed are entitled to restitution and compensation; 
   3. Palestinians have the right to resist occupation; 
   4. Palestinians are entitled to full self-determination from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea; 
   5. Reject all forms of colonialism and normalization of the occupation.

If you are unfamiliar with Al-Thawabet, it is important that you let Palestinians tell you what it means.

A cursory internet search prioritizes sites sponsored/created by non-Palestinians using false definitions with the goal of inciting fear.

Countless historical examples show how the right to self-defence is exploited by oppressors and abusers, while denied and vilified when exercised by the oppressed. According to the Geneva Conventions, created to protect human rights during warfare and armed conflict, occupied people have a protected right to resist–this is true for Palestinians, and for any people anywhere who find themselves under military occupation. 

The double standard is seen here where the documented efforts of white Europeans to overcome an oppressing force is hailed as heroic while the steadfast resistance of Palestinians in the face of the destruction and theft of their land is likened to mindless violence.

The Geneva Conventions also declare that the occupying state has a legal responsibility to protect civilians including guaranteeing food and medicine, and refraining from destroying civilian infrastructure. As you are reading these words, Israel continues to flagrantly defy this obligation as Palestinian men, women, and children are being murdered by bombs, bullets, and manufactured famine.

Despite agreeing to a ceasefire on October 9th, 2025, Israel has killed more than 500 people since then and continues to destroy homes and civilian areas while continually moving the boundary they unilaterally created around a supposed safe zone. Palestinians in the West Bank are facing violent attacks from Israeli settlers backed by the military; destroying villages and burning ancient Olive groves to expand their illegal settlements.

More than 9,000 Palestinians are currently held in administrative detention, and Israel just legalized a Palestinian-specific death penalty. To suggest that opposing Israeli apartheid and genocide “endorses continued violence” only makes sense if the astonishing, relentless, and ongoing violence perpetrated against Palestinians does not matter, asserting a dehumanizing hierarchy of life that is the foundation of anti-Palestinian racism.

There is indeed too much hate, anger and violence being spread in communities worldwide. Inflammatory, disingenuous, and factually incorrect statements such as the ones made in the defamatory statement this responds to are doing just that. It is incumbent upon regular people of all walks of life to examine with intellectual and moral integrity the systems undermining the right of every person on this planet to live a life of freedom, dignity, and justice.

A statement from PASS’s Jewish members:

The statement published to the Salt Spring Exchange on February 11 perpetuates the dangerous and antisemitic conflation of Judaism and Zionism. It was offensive to see the accusation of “antisemitism” cynically deployed to cast baseless and racist aspersions at anyone demonstrating solidarity with Palestinians, and the denial of the existence of Jews who reject the State of Israel’s claim to represent us and our interests.

In fact Jewish law such as tzedakah (justice) and Tikkun Olam (repair) guide many of us to understand that it is our particular obligation as Jews to resist and dismantle the Zionist agenda because of the immense harm it perpetuates in the name of Jewish safety. Rooted in both apocalyptic Christian dogma and Jewish supremacy, Zionism exploits the real trauma our families and communities have experienced and weaponizes it against both Jews and Palestinians, attempting to separate us from other oppressed people and conscript us into perpetual warfare for the sake of capital and empire.

It is truly sad to hear that some Jewish community members feel threatened by the Apartheid-Free Communities initiative, and at the same time it is important (especially for those of us who are privileged to live on this beautiful island, have access to housing, food, and water, are not currently enduring a military occupation, etc.) to discern the difference between being unsafe and being uncomfortable. Most importantly, it is imperative to understand that Jewish safety is not at odds with Palestinian liberation—they are bound up together, as our own tradition reminds us: no one is free until everyone is free.

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