But Belize has an interesting position, since we currently have a territorial dispute in front of the ICJ. And in that context, we asked Barrow why he believes Belize should show solidarity with Palestine, a state that has had to grapple with occupation for almost 8 decades.
Dean Barrow, Former Prime Minister
"While our situation is nowhere near as extreme, no way near as dire and has never been, there were times when, I'm old enough to remember when the UK had to send Harrier jets down here when the Guatemalan military was massing troops along our borders and even in more recent times, there have been…"
"Incidents, what is ongoing, the ongoing situation with the Sarstoon, those are sorts of things that ought to cause us to say, there but for the grace of God go we, so apart from just the fact of the commonality of our humanity, the fact that we are human beings, Gazans are fellow human beings and that ought to provoke from us outrage at their suffering, there is this specific dimension, this added element of the fact that we in small as it were face a kind of, in microcosm, we face a situation that, as I said, is not comparable but that, a situation that has contained historically, and up to now, still contains seeds of a possibility that we could end up in a situation that we have to deal with the military power of a neighboring state against which we would be defenseless."
