Gaza Solidarity Statement from Individuals and Organizations Based in New York and New Jersey

[Protesters outside UN headquarters. Image by vikalpasl via Flickr] [Protesters outside UN headquarters. Image by vikalpasl via Flickr]

Gaza Solidarity Statement from Individuals and Organizations Based in New York and New Jersey

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued on 24 November 2012 by a coalition of activists and other invdividuals from the New York and New Jersey areas in solidarity with the people of Gaza.] 

We are a broad coalition of people of conscience in New York/New Jersey who strongly condemn the Israeli assault on Gaza.  Although a truce has been announced, Gaza still remains under a brutal and crippling siege and occupation. The recent assault on Gaza resulted in hundreds of civilian injuries and killings, including many children, and destroyed a significant number of homes and infrastructure, which will have a devastating effect on the strip.

The recent attacks on Gaza must be seen within a larger context and understood as the latest in the 64-year occupation and colonization of Palestinian land. Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, has been under Israeli siege since 2006. This is collective punishment on Gazans for democratically electing Hamas. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” the former chief of staff to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharonconfessed.  Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza violates international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions.  The majority of Gazans are among the estimated 7 million Palestinian refugees, and many are even second or third-time refugees. They were expelled from their homes in either the 1948 nakba (Palestinian catastrophe), which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, or the 1967 war.  Since then, the refugees have been prevented from exercising their right of return, which is enshrined in international lawfor every refugee population. 

Casualties on both sides in the recent hostilities are a consequence of Israeli aggression.  The labeling of the recent Gaza attack as “Operation Pillar of Defense” is both inaccurate and misleading.  Israel violated the Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel and Hamas by assassinating the military commander of Hamas, thus making Israel responsible for the escalating violence.  Moreover, international law guarantees all people, including Palestinians, the right to resist occupation.

We recognize the profound role the U.S. plays in the occupation and ethnic cleaning of the Palestinians. Instead of sending 8.5 million tax dollars daily to perpetuate Israel`s violations of international law, we believe our tax dollars should go to support education, health care, and victims of the latest disaster - Hurricane Sandy - here at home, and to fund reparations for US-financed death and destruction in Palestine. 

Therefore, we call on people of conscience in the United States to:

Contact the White House - 202.456.1111 and the U.S. Department of State Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Elizabeth Jones - 202.647.7209 and demand that President Obama hold to account Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government for their attacks on the civilian population of Gaza;

  • Participate in a local action near you. There are a number of protests/rallies/sit-ins around the world, or organize one;
  • Support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement (BDS Call for Gaza), which calls for an end to Israeli military occupation, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees; and back the efforts of labor unions and student groups to compel their employers and administrators to divest from companies that do business in Israel.

In solidarity with the people of Gaza,

ORGANIZATIONAL ENDORSEMENTS:

Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel
Al-Awda NY, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
American Muslims for Palestine - NY
Defend the Egyptian Revolution Coalition
Existence is Resistance (NYC)
International Socialist Organization-NYC
Labor for Palestine
Network of Arab American Professionals - NY (NAAP-NY)
New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT)
New York City Labor Against the War
Occupy Wall Street Environmental Solidarity
Siegebusters Working Group
Students for Justice in Palestine @ Brooklyn College
Students for Justice in Palestine @ Columbia University
Students for Justice in Palestine @ Hunter College
Students for Justice in Palestine @ John Jay College
Students for Justice in Palestine @ New York University (NYU)
US Palestinian Community Network – NY

INDIVIDUAL ENDORSEMENTS:

Abdu Salman
Abeer T.N. AlYazji
Amanda Najib
Ameera Hasan
Anna Calcutt
Anthony Arnove, author, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal
Carlos Guzman
Christine O’ Heron
Cyrus McGoldrick
Denise Fernandez
Eran Efrati
Fatimah Rimawi
Gabriela Lazaro
Hana Sleiman
Jasbir Puar, Professor, Rutgers University
Leena Widdi
Maryam Zohny
Maya Wind
Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325
Nasser Jaber
Ryan Green
Samer Asous
Sharita Sharmin
Sherry Wolf
Sundus Seif

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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