I say this with my whole heart and soul - FREE PALESTINE.
Every human life is precious and sacred. To my Jewish friends who are deeply grieving and whose ancestral wounds have been echoing through your bodies and spirits, I honor your pain. To my Palestinian friends, who have lived your entire lives experiencing the daily dehumanization of this apartheid system, whose families have persevered through ethnic cleansing and genocide, who are witnessing as the world condones the on-going genocide of your people, I stand unequivocally with you as you live and resist.
As someone who has had the privilege of spending time in Palestine on three different occasions over a decade, I support the right for Palestinians to resist the brutal apartheid regime and horrifically violent settler colonial reality that is at the root of all violence that occurs on stolen Palestinian land.
The first time I visited Palestine in 2009, the gap between mainstream American discourse/propaganda and the stark reality of apartheid that Palestinians exist under was overwhelming. By the end of the month that I stayed there, I could not sleep through the night. The layers of psychological terror that Israel inflicts on Palestinians is hard to communicate. There are so many dimensions to how Palestinians are brutally dehumanized every day. While I was there, daily the Israeli military flew fighter jets in the sky, breaking the sound barrier so it sounded like bombs were being dropped. Every time a car passed in the middle of the night, I would wake up in a state of panic. The impact on my psyche is nothing compared to what Palestinians who have lived their entire lives being subjected to the never-ending violence of apartheid have experienced.
It was my time in Palestine that first awakened my understanding of how deeply intertwined the histories of settler colonialism in the so-called United States and Israel are. We haven’t reckoned with the genocide at the root of our government, and we have funded the genocide that is at the foundation and continuation of Israel’s existence.
Israel was founded after WWII because of the UK, Europe, and the US’ anti-semitic refusal of Jewish refugees who had survived the holocaust. It was a continuation of British imperialism that armed Zionists to murder and displace Palestinians to found the settler colonial structure called Israel.
The founding & basis of the US is ethnic cleansing of native Americans and enslavement of Africans. The founding and basis of Israel is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Both systems are maintained through unending oppression - through violence, mass incarceration, and dominant narratives that equate resistance with terrorism.
The United States funds the weapons that kill Palestinians. The police that violently maintain a status quo of racial oppression in the United States are trained by Israeli occupation forces. We protect and uphold an apartheid state. We mythologize our foundings, attempting to erase the original inhabitants of the lands we occupy. Our unwillingness to acknowledge the illegitimacy of the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel is because the U.S. is one as well.
I’ve had the honor of collaborating with Palestinian and anti-zionist Jewish activists who are deeply rooted in nonviolent resistance. These movements have largely been ignored internationally, with the U.S. providing protection at the U.N. for Israel to continue to violate international law by violently repressing Palestinian liberation movements.
I’ll never forget the stories I’ve heard from non-violent Palestinian activists about how their children were abducted in the middle of the night and held for weeks in Israeli prisons. How they couldn’t finish grieving one family member’s murder by Israeli occupation forces before they had to grieve another. I’ll never forget running from tear gas and toxic, carcinogenic chemicals that were sprayed by Israeli Occupation Forces in this Palestinian town’s weekly Friday protests, where they ritually attempted to walk to their sacred water source, which was seized by Israeli settlements.
Over time I’ve come to humble myself to the understanding that colonized and oppressed people have the right to resist their oppression through armed resistance. While I wish to see an end to apartheid and ethnic cleansing in ways that do not further deepen legacies of violence & trauma, I also know that as a white privileged settler on stolen land, I do not get to dictate how people who have experienced unfathomably traumatic structures of oppression seek their freedom. I uplift the work of non-violent liberation movements, but to equate resistance to apartheid to apartheid itself is to play into the narratives that uphold these systems.
APARTHEID AND GENOCIDE ARE AT THE ROOT OF THIS VIOLENCE.
You cannot have safety for Jewish people by continuously violently oppressing the indigenous population. Palestinians exist and there was no legitimacy in displacing and killing them to establish this apartheid state. There is no legitimacy or justice in an ethno-theocratic state that maintains a hierarchy of who is allowed to have basic rights and maintains that hierarchy through oppression.
If we want a future where Jewish and Palestinian people are genuinely safe, where the sacredness of every human life is honored, and I do, the only answer is to dismantle apartheid, end genocide, and give land back. We have to end the violence at its root.
As people living on stolen land, whose government is funding and emboldening the genocide of Palestinians, we have a sacred responsibility to advocate for Palestinian liberation. There is no future of peace without dismantling oppressive systems. The absence of Palestinian resistance is not the presence of peace, but the maintenance of apartheid. There is no peace while settler colonial states implement genocide.
I will continue to work for a future in which oppressive systems are dismantled. I will continue to support Palestinian liberation movements. I will continue to say with my whole heart and soul FREE PALESTINE.
