Freedom for Palestine
While I have been boosting content from Palestinians and attending protests in solidarity with Palestine, I wanted to now lend my voice to expressing my full solidarity with Palestine. In the face of Israeli genocide against Palestine including the indiscriminate bombing of people in Gaza and settler and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) violence in the West Bank, silence is complicity. I also strongly disagree with attempts to ‘both sides’ this issue because the only just side is for the immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the complete liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation and apartheid. From the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, Palestine will be free. The Western media and Western governments have attempted to smear this slogan as antisemitic and genocidal. What the slogan actually represents is a rallying cry for Palestinian liberation from Israeli oppression and settler-colonialism. While I and many others have written about this before October 7th 2023, the founding of Israel in 1948 entailed Zionists ethnically cleansing Palestinian villages and lands in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or catastrophe. The mission of these settler Zionists was blatantly clear through their own writings. Theodore Herzl, considered the founder of the Zionist movement, discussed Jews settling in Palestine using the language of colonization. Herzel framed the colonial project in Palestine as creating ‘an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’. Thus, the Zionist project in Israel has always been about creating a ‘civilized’ state in the Middle East that would serve to cement Western interest there, particularly with regards to the US.
In this sense, then, the assertion by the Israeli defence minister that Israel is fighting ‘human animals’ in Gaza is a direct continuation of this colonial narrative which has consistently dehumanized, displaced and killed Palestinians since the Nakba. It also explicitly about justifying committing genocide against Palestinians. Raz Segal, a genocide scholar, has decisively argued in his piece that Israeli attacks on Palestine constitute a ‘Textbook Case of Genocide’. Meanwhile, the US, UK and other Western powers cheer on Israeli war crimes through the assertion that Israel has a ‘right to defend itself’. What of course is left out of these statements are the decades of occupation of Palestine by Israel and the on-going, daily oppression of Palestinians. Hamas, the group that launched the attack against Israel on October 7th, has actually been supported by Israel in the past so that Hamas could crush more left-wing groups within Gaza. Endless calls to condemn Hamas in the media ignore the important context of Israeli settler-colonialism and occupation as well to reinforce the idea that Palestinians are barbaric savages, and that Israel is only defending itself. Media and governments that tout this narrative are complicit in the ongoing genocide against Palestine, and this is echoed in chants at protests such as ‘shame on you, Rishi Sunak’ and ‘shame on you, Keir Starmer’.
Lately, genocide apologists and enablers have instead resorted to calling for a ‘humanitarian pause’ in Gaza. This cruel suggestion is tantamount to saying to the Palestinians, ‘Have a brief respite and then Israeli bombs will kill you but at least we got you a break’. Today, the Labour leader in the UK, Keir Starmer, refused to call for a ceasefire and instead resorted to this suggestion of a humanitarian pause. This cowardly position is evidently because Labour is terrified that criticising Israel will get them labelled as antisemitic. In reality, Israel’s propaganda that criticising Israeli actions is antisemitic actually makes Jews more unsafe. Israel’s policies of occupation and apartheid make Jews in Israel more unsafe because endless violence will have to be used to oppress Palestinians and eventually Palestinians will resist as happened on October 7th. Associating all Jews with the genocidal Israeli regime will only lead to more antisemitism. At the protests I have attended in London, there have been numerous Jews there who criticize Israel and can see past Zionist propaganda. While those on the right and in Western governments have smeared them as self-hating Jews, they are the ones truly enacting the philosophy of ‘Never Again’ with regards to the holocaust. That Israel is the state committing genocide cannot ever condone genocide.
History also reveals how Israel has cynically used antisemitism as a cover for its actions while globally promoting regimes that have enacted terror upon Jews. For instance, during the Argentinian dictatorship in the 1970s, Israel provided weapons to the regime, and roughly 10–15% of those killed by the dictatorship were Jewish. The Israeli state has also exported its methods of oppression in Palestine to El Salvador in the 1970s where Israel helped to train death squads and the police and strongly supported apartheid South Africa by selling many weapons to the regime. Of course, the US has also materially supported these grave human rights abuses and continues to steadfastly stand behind Israel. Indeed, Biden suggested recently without any evidence that Palestinian accounts of deaths in Gaza could be exaggerated thus serving to undermine accountability for Israeli war crimes.
The struggle for Palestinian freedom and liberation underlies the interconnectedness of interlocking systems of oppression. Recently workers in the UK blockaded Elbit, which is a company that sells weapons to Israel. The tactics that the IDF is using in Palestine have been replicated across the US by police department trained by Israel who use violence to oppress women, queer people, people of colour and indigenous people. The struggle in Palestine is an anti-racist, anti-carceral, and decolonial struggle. Indeed as the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang wrote, Decolonization is not a Metaphor. Resisting Israeli settler colonialism and ending Israeli occupation and apartheid is what decolonization looks like in real life. It is not simply about having more diverse representation in a committee at a university, but it is instead about creating new possibilities through resisting oppressive systems and showing that oppressive systems can and do fall. The struggle for trans rights, for an abolition of the police, for the end of heteropatriarchy, for the end of this glorification of the murdering and ethnic cleansing of an entire people necessitates full and unwavering solidarity for Palestine. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Free, free Palestine!
