The Pandemic and Palestine
I want to write this post primarily on the ongoing mass disabling and death-causing event that is the Covid-19 pandemic. I also want to illustrate how actions to mitigate the spread of disease and make our communities safer is directly tied into actions to free Palestine, particularly as Israel uses disease as a weapon in its genocide in Palestine. I admit that I owe what I know about the pandemic and why it is so important to care about it to the relentless advocacy of disability justice Twitter. I fully admit that I have not masked consistently or enough since 2020, and I (whether unconsciously or not) bought into the public health and general pervasive societal propaganda surrounding the pandemic. I write this not as someone who has long been dedicated to covid and disability advocacy but as someone who has come to the realization that ignoring the ongoing pandemic is eugenics and ableism. While everyone is vulnerable to covid, the dominant public health rhetoric around the pandemic has routinely dehumanized and rendered disabled and immune-comprised people as disposable. This can be clearly seen in one of the primary faces of US public health Dr Anothy Fauci saying in a BBC interview in August 2023 that ‘the vulnerable will fall by the wayside’. This statement exemplifies how the public health approach to the pandemic is rooted in eugenics in the sense that there is no point in protecting ‘the vulnerable’ as they are simply disposable. This statement, of course, received no pushback from mainstream media because as far as they are concerned, we are in a ‘post-pandemic’ reality and rampant ableism has long considered disabled people to have less value in society.
I admit that when I first started working after my masters, I did not wear a mask and only started wearing a mask at work about 8 months ago in June 2023. Of course, no one else masks because the vast majority of people globally have bought into the myth that the pandemic is over. It is abundantly clear how, the ‘end of the pandemic’ and the normalization of the mass death and disability that is still ongoing was purely an economic decision that the economy needed to be opened up. Never mind, of course, that public health bodies and governments around the world had no interest in providing businesses, workplaces, schools, and hospitals with air filtration devices and purifiers. Despite the National Health Service (NHS) dropping many if not all precautions now, their website itself specifies that air purifiers can help reduce the spread of airborne disease. In a time when the World Health Organization (WHO) itself specifies that Covid-19 can cause ‘death, respiratory failure, sepsis, bloodclots, multiorgan failure, including injury of the heart, liver or kidneys,’ there is still no credible public health response to this ongoing mass death and disabling pandemic. No one can access healthcare safely in a reality where healthcare workers and patients do not mask nor install air purifiers, and of course this is doubly dangerous for people who are immune-compromised and disabled. More and more people are likely immune-compromised as re-infections and new variants spread because as the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US specifies, Covid-19 has been found to cause immune system damage. The WHO lead for Covid-19 has also declared that the world is still in a pandemic. This might be a surprise to the myriad of public health bodies and governments that have completely given up on any sort of pandemic precautions.
What is striking here is that I have been quoting sources that are public health bodies themselves. These bodies are well-aware of the damage that Covid causes and yet are unwilling to take action to mitigate the continuing pandemic. I also want to stress that nothing I have said here is particularly new or novel to disability justice advocates and anyone who is still taking precautions against this pandemic, although it may come as a shock to those who bought into the propaganda that the pandemic is no big deal. The Death Panel podcast is a great resource for those looking to hear about disability justice and engage with ideas around resisting the mass normalisation of the pandemic. It also brings in advocates around the connection between disability and Palestine and the interconnectedness of the struggle for liberation. The phrase ‘No one is free until we are all free’ very much also applies to disabled people. Some far-off utopia that negates the existence of disabled people is no utopia at all. This is also why it is unsurprising that many leftists are ableists and refuse to mask because they see the working class as the group that will bring about the end of capitalism, which inherently appropriates capitalism’s logic that the only valuable people are those who are productive. Of course, not masking will also disproportionately harm the working class as they are less likely to have access to healthcare and are likely to be working in-person roles. Disabled people’s lives matter too whether they are able to work or not. Indeed, disability activists are the ones organising mutual aid to Gaza such as fundraising to provide e-sims, since internet has been cut off by Israel.
As disability activist, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes that although they are not the first to say this, ‘everyone in Palestine is disabled’. They are disabled from the trauma of endless occupation, infectious disease, the bombs being dropped on them, and starvation. As Truthout reported in December 2023, 360,000 infectious disease cases were reported in 2023 with this number likely to be far higher now as Israel continues its relentless massacres. And among these infectious diseases is, of course, covid. The weaponization of disease and starvation is nothing new among colonizers. The Spanish colonizers in the Americas spread their diseases widely, which killed millions of indigenous peoples. As a settler-colonial state, Israel uses these same tactics to massacre the indigenous population of Palestine.
Further, the specific intent to cause disability is nothing new for Israeli colonizers. During the peaceful Great March of Return in 2018, Israeli snipers bragged about targeting the knees of protesters with live bullets. During this current genocide, the intentional targeting of hospitals with bombs and claiming that Hamas is using hospitals as its headquarters is also very much part of the intent by the Israeli state to prevent disabled and injured Palestinians from seeking healthcare. One cannot understand how Israeli settler-colonialism operates without understanding the underlying and fundamental ableism supporting its genocidal project. The destruction of hospitals also ensures that cancer patients, patients with dialysis and other serious medical conditions are unable to access care. Those who die from these conditions are very much also martyrs in Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocide, ethnic cleansing and dispossession. In any scenario where healthcare facilities are targeted for destruction and starvation and infectious diseases are used as tools of death, it is disabled people who will suffer the most.
I am very much not the first to come up with this analysis, but it is so important to understand how systematic ableism and the rendering of disabled people in the west as disposable and as acceptable that they ‘fall by the wayside’ is very much interconnected with settler-colonial and white supremacist attempts to dehumanize Palestinians. Activists like Alice Wong have highlighted how it is imperative for disability justice activists to stand with Palestine because there is no disability justice possible under settler-colonialism or under genocide. And I also want to highlight that simply because Palestine has received more attention does not mean that ableism does not undergird other ongoing genocides in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Indeed, arguably a contributing factor for why these genocides have not received the attention that they deserve is because of pervasive anti-blackness and rendering the suffering of black people as lesser. Through embodying the principles of disability justice, which I loosely define as resisting the dehumanization and othering of disabled people, one can really begin to see how interconnected oppressions are. Ableism, anti-blackness and settler-colonialism are all interconnected and all must be dismantled.
While there is really so much more to say on this topic, I want to conclude by saying that resisting the mass normalization of the pandemic IS resisting the genocide in Palestine. The tools which public health bodies and governments use to render disabled lives as less valuable are the tools that the Israeli colonizers use in Palestine. By all means, I very much encourage the continuation of masked protests in the imperial core for Palestine, for Sudan, for Congo and against all oppression and for the liberation of all oppressed peoples. If you can mask, wear a mask. Masking is resisting the ongoing eugenics and dehumanization of disabled people in the west and protecting communities. I also want to again emphasize how disability justice Twitter has been highlighting these issues far longer than I have and they are doing incredibly important work, but I still think is very important to stress the interconnection of the pandemic and Palestine and indeed the interconnectedness of the struggle for the liberation of all peoples.
