Moroccans prepare for a nationwide march for Palestine on Human Rights Day

Morocco is set to witness a nationwide pro-Palestine march on 10 December in yet another public effort to urge Rabat to sever its ties with Israel amidst the ongoing war in Gaza.

"The National group for Palestine calls all Moroccan people to participate in (Rabat's) national rally against the holocaust in Gaza and the normalisation," reads a press release by the Moroccan Pro-Palestine group, published on Thursday, 7 December.

Several other pro-Palestine groups have joined the call, stressing the importance of protesting and occupying public space to push for annulling the diplomatic, military and economic cooperation with Israel.

The much-awaited rally will coincide with the International Day of Human Rights, a day typically marked by high-level political conferences and widespread protests around the globe. It also coincides with the day Donald Trump, President of the United States at the time, announced, on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that Rabat and Tel Aviv will sign a normalisation deal under the US auspices.

Since 7 October, the North African Kingdom has witnessed hundreds of pro-Palestine protests, with a growing number of civilians joining the rallies that used to be exclusively led by activists and political parties in the past.

On 15 October, Morocco witnessed its biggest pro-Palestine rally since normalising ties with Israel in late 2020.

The organising parties said about a million people attended the rally.

Videos from the AP news agency showed hundreds of thousands of protesters with women and children in front rows covering the 500,000-meter Mohammed V square, the same square closed three years ago for the singing of the normalisation accord.

Activists and politicians attribute the rising anti-normalisation feelings in the Kingdom to different factors.

After the normalisation, Morocco witnessed a political silence on normalisation and a complete ban on pro-Palestine protests as the country lived under a two-year-long COVID-19 pandemic state of emergency.

The Palestinian flag has always represented an amulet of luck and goodwill in shops and houses; normalisation has never changed that popular sentiment.

But, since Morocco's normalisation was in exchange for the US recognition of Rabat's sovereignty over Western Sahara, opposing normalisation was longly twisted to a 'traitor's act' against the nation's sovereignty.

"We were silent. Everyone was afraid," Nabila Mounib, head of the opposition socialist party, said as she recalled the pre-Gaza war.

"We don't need anyone to help us figure out our national cases. The Zionist entity only came here for its own benefit," added the politician in a statement to the press on 15 October.

Two days after the eruption of pro-Palestinian protests in the country, Israeli officials in Rabat were evacuated to Tel Aviv.

A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry has denied the closure of the Israeli liaison office in Rabat, arguing that Tel Aviv "took measures related to temporary circumstances."

Rabat, which has condemned violence on both sides amid the Gaza war, has yet to comment on the status of its relationship with Tel Aviv.

The two states are set to celebrate the fourth anniversary of signing the normalisation on 22 December.