Open Letter: Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine

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Feb 22, 2015 Palestine-Israel
[Angela Davis speaking in Oakland, California on 3 November, 2013. Image by Daniel Arauz.] [Angela Davis speaking in Oakland, California on 3 November, 2013. Image by Daniel Arauz.]

Open Letter: Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following open letter was issued by the below signatories on 4 February, 2015.]

We support and congratulate UC Santa Cruz on their selection of Angela Davis for UCSC’s 31st annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Convocation The undersigned organizations write in support of UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal for his office’s selection and sponsorship of the Black feminist theorist and activist Angela Davis, a luminary of our movements and our region, who delivered a speech on “Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine” at UCSC’s 31st annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Convocation. The event was attended by 1,000 people with 500 more spilling outside, and closed with a standing ovation. This gathering’s great appeal is indicative of the growing power of movements resisting state violence – from communities challenging prisons and policing to those fighting imperialism and global repression. 

In particular, we congratulate the chancellor for not bowing to the pressure of the Amcha Initiative – an organization that exists to attack and attempt to silence professors, students and others who dare speak out in support of the Palestinian cause. Amcha uses unscrupulous and relentless tactics to advance its racist program: attacking professors for establishing academic relationships with Palestinian institutions and accusing Palestinian student activists of being tied to “terrorist” organizations. Amcha has a long history of harassing student activists at UCSC in particular, and its 2011 Title VI complaint alleging antiSemitism at UCSC (which was declared unfounded by the Department of Education) had a chilling effect on student and faculty speech. 

We write specifically in support of the movements and individuals, like Angela Davis, who are exposing the role of the U.S. government and its partnership with Israeli state agencies and corporations to police. This partnership has expanded repressive policing, which criminalizes Black, Brown, immigrant, poor, queer and transgender communities. The U.S. wields the world’s largest and most powerful military, which it employs to gain access to resources and geopolitical influence, targeting Third World people. It trains police and militias around the world in order to monitor and repress populations and movements, and funds and supports the state of Israel to do the same. Israel has developed its military and surveillance infrastructure through its repression of Palestinians and the colonization of their land; in turn, Israel markets its products and shares its repressive tactics and technologies with the United States, Europe, and regimes across the Third World/Global South, bolstering its militarized economy and geopolitical stature. 

The United States and Israel work together on targeting communities of color/Third World people in order to maintain U.S. economic and political power globally and to support Israel`s occupation and colonization of Palestine. In one example of this U.S./Israeli partnership, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – an organization promoting support for and collaboration with the Israeli state in numerous sectors across the U.S. – and the U.S.-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) have facilitated Israeli military training of more than 14,000 U.S. law enforcement officials. The “counterterrorism” and “population control” techniques U.S. police departments learn are used to target communities and repress popular protest. These partnerships build up Israel’s capacity for the repression of Palestinians as well as its military and surveillance industries. Those trained by Israel include the former St. Louis County Police Department chief (whose jurisdiction includes Ferguson), the New York and Oakland Police Departments. In fact, ADL defended the St. Louis police in their murder of Michael Brown and the NYPD in their murder of Eric Garner. 

The ADL/JINSA Law enforcement training in a time of alarmingly repressive and racist police forces is one of many examples that show the crucial necessity for exposing the links between state-sponsored violence against Black people here in the United States, and the repression of Palestinians by Israeli state forces, as Angela Davis so eloquently did in her speech. We find it necessary to highlight the increasingly hostile role of ADL, which also contributes to the chilling effect on Palestinian organizing and Palestine solidarity activism on campus by labeling speech criticizing the state of Israel as “anti-Semitism.” At UCSC, ADL was involved in attempting to defeat the democratic student government resolution supporting divestment from multinational corporations profiting off of the occupation of Palestine; in a maneuver designed to confuse students, ADL published reports grouping together actual anti-Semitic incidents on campus with political activities by Students for Justice in Palestine and other groups that do not engage in anti-Jewish acts. By falsely accusing student-led Palestine solidarity movements of being “anti-Semitic,” groups like ADL lie in order to gain institutional and popular support and power. 

Therefore, as organizations working across communities to build up grassroots movements against racism, policing and repression and for justice, civil and human rights, we support the critical leadership of Angela Davis and others who are making these connections and reminding us that attacks on and repression of any people and movement enables attacks on and repression of others. Indeed, as James Baldwin once wrote to political prisoner Davis more than three decades ago, “we must fight for your life as though it were our own ... for if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” We are reminded of the centrality of Black struggle to all of our movements that envision a transformed world in which we can live without fear, but with dignity, well-being, and a sense of justice fulfilled. 

Signers 

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network 
Arab Resource and Organizing Center 
Haiti Action Committee 
Palestinian Youth Movement 
Bayan USA 
Gabriela USA 
American Muslims for Palestine 
Anakbayan 
Sin Barras 
Xicano Moratorium 
Eastside Arts Alliance 
California Coalition of Women Prisoners 
Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project 
Hella Organized Bay Area Koreans (HOBAK) 
Filipino/Filipina Studies Collective 
Arab and Muslims Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, SF State University 
Freedom Archives 
Middle East Children’s Alliance 
NLG Police and Prison Committee 
NLG Free Palestine Committee 
Students for Justice in Palestine – UC Berkeley 
US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Art Forces Jewish Voice for Peace 
Global Women’s Strike 
Women of Color in the Global Women’s Strike 
Payday Men’s Network, NLG Los Angeles Chapter 
ANSWER Coalition – SF 
Women in Black
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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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