A Call from the Women’s Freedom Assembly (Turkey)

[Suruç, 21 July 2015. Image via Wikimedia Commons.] [Suruç, 21 July 2015. Image via Wikimedia Commons.]

A Call from the Women’s Freedom Assembly (Turkey)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This statement was first released on 4 August 2015.]

Legends, myths, and folk tales are full of stories of women banned from burying their dead. In one of the best known, Antigone revolts against the regime that forbids the burial of her brother. How can the state claim a right to ordain by its law rules and restrictions over a much more ancient form of relationality existing long before the state was ever thought of—namely, the bond of brotherhood/sisterhood? What sort of state can take away the right of the dead to be buried, ban this communion of earth and man? What sort of state can sink so low as to usurp the peace and tranquility of the dead, and the right to mourn of those who remain behind? Antigone gives her own life in order to bury her dead. In doing so, she stands up against the authority of the state, with the power of all these very real questions that plague the entirety of civilization. The world never forgets these women who fought for their right to bury. And it damns those who usurped this right.

There are thirty-three dead bodies kept waiting on the borders of Turkey for the past ten days. These are the bodies of YPG/YPJ fighters. Thirteen of them are at the Habur border gate, nine in Derîk, and eleven at the Mürşitpınar gate. For ten days these bodies have been kept from their families. These thirty-three dead bodies are being made to rot in a heat that is scorching our very skins and soul. For ten whole days these bodies have not been able to reach their loved ones. For then whole days these loved ones have not been allowed to mourn; the dead have not convened with the earth. Their rights are being usurped.

And so we ask: what kind of law marks its existence by using the dead? What kind of law proves itself by way of its power to make bodies rot?

The Kurdish people are very familiar with the state’s constant attempt to tame and discipline them over dead bodies and funerals. Their history is full of bodies that weren’t allowed a burial, of loved ones who were made to disappear, who await identification in mass graves, of mothers who were begrudged even one single bone of their children’s bodies, of graves that were bombed and of executions during funerals.

The Kurdish people’s struggle has always been a struggle to give an honorable burial to the dead, as well.

Now we ask you, all the various peoples of Turkey, of this land; we ask you, the state of Turkey; we ask you, civil servants; we ask you, the directorate of religious affairs. We ask you from the bottom of our hearts:

Why have these families been kept waiting for ten days? Why are these young people, already dead and gone, being made to rot at border gates? Why is it too much to allow those who are already in mourning the chance to honorably shed tears during a funeral?

These young people went to defend the lives and land of their neighbors, friends, of the Kurdish people in Syria against ISIL. Now their dead bodies have returned. What is your problem with these dead bodies; what is your problem with us?

We, women, speak out to you: There is no law above love, there is no law above labor. We gave our love to these young people, we put our labor into them. You shall give them to us. We will wash them, we will look at their faces, maybe heat-rotten, for one last time, maybe it is from their clothes that we will recognize them, or their height and size. We will keep a vigil by their side, carry them on our shoulders and have them embrace earth.

Let no one ask us why we rebel. Even though world history is full of tyrants who usurp the right to bury, it is also full of upholders of truth who rebel against this.

We call on all the world, all the peoples of Turkey, all women to be at Habur Border Gate on 6 August 2015 at 10am to put an end to this atrocity and to take the dead bodies.

The Women’s Freedom Assembly

Note: Towards midnight the dead waiting at Habur for ten days were finally let through. We still have those waiting at Derik and Mürşitpınar.

Our collective resolute stand has achieved this.

Our thoughts and feelings remain the same in the face of this historically old atrocious state policy. The state cannot take what is ours. We women will determinedly stand up for peace, freedom, and a democratic political solution through negotiations.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412