Nothing to celebrate

For all the talk of Israel's evacuation of Gaza, barely a day passes without the Israel Defence Force deploying air power, tanks, armoured bulldozers or undercover death squads to assassinate Palestinians there.

Tel Aviv imposes a collective punishment of unimaginable horror on the 1.5 million people - a million of whom are refugees driven from other parts of Palestine - squeezed into this overcrowded, squalid enclave.

They are deprived of adequate supplies of food, water, medical supplies, power and fuel. Most are unemployed, dependent on meagre UN rations that are delayed by Israel.

And, worst of all, they are denied the right to free movement, hemmed in by barbed wire fences like animals.

Israel justifies this crime against humanity by citing Palestinian resistance groups' direction of rocket fire against Israeli towns such as Sderot, where 13 Israelis have been killed in seven years.

As indefensible as any attack on civilian non-combatants is, the death toll in Sderot does not begin to compare with Gaza, where it is not unusual for so many casualties in a single day.

When large numbers of children are slaughtered, the Israeli government often issues a grudging, insincere apology, while blaming the Palestinian resistance causing all violence.

But targeting of civilians is not an aberration. It was the deliberate strategy of the armed groups that set up Israel in the first place.

Largely unarmed Palestinian villages were attacked and destroyed by Jewish armed groups that had gained military experience either in anti-British-mandate militias or, ironically, in British army Jewish units, with the Arab population offered the choice of flight or death.

Arab villages were razed to the ground to be replaced by Jewish entities.

Despite Israel's military superiority from the outset, which has been confirmed by its state-of-the-art air, sea and land forces, to say nothing of its hundreds of nuclear weapons, Tel Aviv has successfully affected a victim status.

It claims to be afraid for its very existence, when the only state in the region that really faces oblivion is the yet to be proclaimed Palestine.

The US and the European Union turn a blind eye to Israel's constant expansion of its illegal settlements on the West Bank. Indeed, they encourage these land grabs by financing them.

And why has none of them ever questioned Israel as to why its troops are sent to protect the so-called extremist settlers who colonise Palestinian land and set up what Tel Aviv calls "unauthorised" settlements?

The truth is that Israel is still seeking to expand its borders, which is why, uniquely, the state has never attempted to define them.

Palestinians and their supporters will gather at London's Victoria Embankment on Saturday at 1pm to march to Trafalgar Square to spotlight this lack of justice for this nation of refugees and the dispossessed.

They will highlight the hypocrisy of the Western powers over international law, posing the questions as to why one people can be denied their right to nationhood and one state has the eternal right to ignore UN resolutions.