Marina Nikolaou: “The situation in Palestine is not simply a crisis. It is a genocide, and a test of our shared humanity.”

MARINA NIKOLAOU, PARIS 4JUNE2025

Your Excellencies, Dear comrades and friends,

I stand before you today as a member of the CC of the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL) humbled and grateful for the invitation.

We gather here today in a time of profound moral urgency. The situation in Palestine is not simply a crisis. It is a genocide, and a test of our shared humanity. We are witnessing what countless legal experts, human rights organizations, and now the International Court of Justice have described as plausible acts of genocide. Entire communities are being erased. Entire generations are being buried under rubble. This is an ethnic cleansing and this cannot continue.

So what must we do? What can we do – as political forces that defend humanity, peace, justice?

First and foremost, we must call for and demand an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Every day without one is another day of bloodshed, trauma, and displacement. This must be followed by the rapid and unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people – especially in Gaza – where famine, thirst, and disease now claim lives as brutally as bombs.

But that is not enough.

The root cause is the occupation. The only path to peace is justice, and justice demands the recognition of the State of Palestine. Recognition is not a symbolic gesture. It is a concrete political step toward ending more than 75 years of dispossession, displacement, and denial of basic rights. Recognition means admitting that Palestinians are not just victims – they are a people, with a right to sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination.

At the national level, each state must take responsibility. All UN member-states that must respect international law must also formally recognize the Palestinian state. Several European countries have recently done so – Spain, Ireland, Norway – and more must follow. Recognition must also be linked to real consequences for Israel’s ongoing violations of international law.

This brings us to the European Union.

The EU has failed to uphold its own aqui communitaire- its own laws and declared values. Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement

explicitly ties economic cooperation to respect for human rights and democratic principles. Israel has flagrantly and repeatedly violated these principles – yet the EU has taken no meaningful action. This is not just a failure of policy. It is a failure of conscience.

The peoples are well ahead of their governments.

We must demand the suspension of the EU-Israel Agreement until Israel complies with international humanitarian law. The EU cannot continue to be complicit by rewarding impunity.

 

Suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement must also mean a full exclusion of Israel from EU research funding frameworks like Horizon Europe. Israeli academic institutions are not neutral. They are deeply complicit in the structures of occupation, apartheid, and now in genocide. These universities provide research, development, and ideological support to the Israeli military and surveillance apparatus. Continuing to fund them through EU programs is not academic cooperation — it is complicity.

 

At the international level, we must intensify pressure on Israel. The recent provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice, in the case brought by South Africa, are legally binding. States that supported this application – but also those that did not – must now act to enforce the ICJ’s decisions. Genocide is not a bilateral issue. It is a crime against all of humanity. And silence is complicity.

Impunity must end. Israel cannot be allowed to operate as a state above the law. If the rules-based international order is to mean anything, then those who break the rules must face consequences. This includes supporting investigations by the International Criminal Court and cutting all forms of military assistance.

Which brings me to a critical point: the military-industrial complex. Arms exports to Israel must stop. The weapons used to kill civilians – to level hospitals, to destroy schools – come from somewhere. European states must impose a comprehensive arms embargo. But arms trade with Israel should stop too: buying Israeli arms “tested on the ground” that is on Palestinian bodies, serve to feed the Israeli war machine in double. The world cannot preach peace while profiting from war.

And finally, we must examine the role of military infrastructure on our own soil. In places like Cyprus, British military bases – which constitute an anachronistic remnant of colonialism- have been used for operations linked to this conflict. This demands transparency, accountability by the British government, and action. No foreign military presence should be allowed to support war crimes from our territory, and AKEL and the Cyprus Peace Council have been protesting against their presence and use since 1964, and during the last 20 months.

 

Israel’s occupation is an enduring injustice, constituting the longest occupation in modern history. As Cypriots, we are all too familiar with the horrors that imperialism and internal far-right collaborators have brought to the Cypriot people as a whole: bloodshed, Turkish occupation, missing persons, refugees, settlers, artificial division. As we are all very familiar with the US and their allies’ plans for the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

It is with this painful common history that we extend our unwavering support for the Palestinian people. We reaffirm our full solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for an independent and viable Palestinian state on the borders of June 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital. For the right to return and freedom.

In conclusion, the road to Palestinian freedom will not be paved by words alone – but by courage, action, and international solidarity. The recognition of Palestine is not a gift. It is a right, long overdue that the international community owes to the Palestinian people. The end of the occupation is not a dream. It is a necessity.

Let us not look back years from now and say we remained neutral in the face of horror of a genocide. Let us be able to say: we stood up. We acted. We refused to be silent.

Thank you, and may the call for a Free Palestine echo across the world.