PALESTINE ACTIVISTS CALL ON THE NETHERLANDS PRINCE TO DISSOCIATE
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Demonstrators in Jerusalem protest the Jewish National Fund’s colonization projects in the Naqab/Negev desert, February 2011.
(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
Palestinian boycott activists are calling on the Netherlands’ Prince Willem-Alexander to reconsider his decision to lend his name to a water project undertaken by the Jewish National Fund Netherlands in the Naqab/Negev desert in the south of present-day Israel. The project is in honor of the prince’s inauguration as king later this month.
Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian human rights activist and a founder of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, told The Electronic Intifada: “The [JNF] has played a key role in the dispossession of the Palestinians and in colonizing their lands. Today, [the JNF] continues its explicitly racist practices against Palestinians and rejects any notion of equal rights for all. Palestinian civil society appreciates the prominence that equality and non-discrimination have in the Dutch constitution and based on this, appeal to Prince Willem-Alexander to reconsider his decision to lend his name to a project of the JNF.”