Birzeit University Union: ‘We are All Palestinians’ in the Face of Colonial Fascism

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Oct 18, 2023 Palestine
Birzeit University Union: ‘We are All Palestinians’ in the Face of Colonial Fascism

Birzeit University Union: ‘We are All Palestinians’ in the Face of Colonial Fascism

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees in response to the ongoing genocide of Gaza perpetrated by the state of Israel.]

2023 will be recorded historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism and screamed in defense of their homes, humanity, and lives. Palestinians as a people have endured over a century of settler colonial violence. We have thrived as a people and shall continue to do so. We do not need to speak of our right to resist, for it is not a right but a way of being and survival for Palestinians.

Zionism, the settler state, and the entire colonial system that is a product of this fascist ideology can no longer falsely hide beneath the cloak of humanism. In Palestine, in 2023, we do not demand our right to narrate. Our ability to narrate was never out of our hands, and resistance in all of its manifestations and forms does not need the pre-approval of static international law codes. The oppressed do not need to claim authority over their own oppression; the ongoing events of history – our history – are what allow us this authority. We consider it our duty not to expose the bloody barbarism of Zionism; their actions as a fascist state and a ruthless army are more than sufficient to undertake this task. It is our duty to record this moment not as its victims but as the people who will remember, record, survive, and resist it.

Our history will tell the story of these acts not only as a record of colonial brutality but also as a record of our boldfaced determination to live and resist it. We remain attached to our land and to our humanity as Palestinian Arabs – no need to prove our humanity to those who have lost theirs.

It might, nevertheless, be useful to remind ourselves and others of the crimes that have been and are being committed in Palestine – crimes that began with the violent and forceful introduction of Zionism onto the land and people of Palestine. This list is long and cannot be summarized in any simple form, but for those who have chosen to stand with the oppressed in solidarity with our struggle, we ask that you keep these points in mind when speaking about the idea of freedom and liberation – heads and souls raised high, as always, by the duty we have towards the blood of our martyrs and the righteousness of our cause. In compiling this list, we realize that phrases like “war crimes,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “criminality,” and “inhumanity” seem unfit and atrociously insufficient to describe what the state of Israel has and continues to do:

  • An occupying colonial power cannot claim the right to self-defense against the people under its brutal occupation. There is no moral equivalence between the colonizer and the colonized – however much the media attempts to claim otherwise;
  • As is their modus operandi, the Israeli military, in their war against Gaza, has directly targeted our people through the belligerent bombing of homes, hospitals, orphanages, playgrounds, schools, universities, mosques, churches, and public spaces, deliberately killing any and all Palestinians they can, even targeting the dead in cemeteries. Cutting off and targeting water lines, electricity engines, emergency services, and other crucial services and civilian facilities are the actions of a genocidal power made even more audacious under the irony of Zionist claims of their “purity of arms”: this purity clearly only refers to the notion that their weapons are ready for use against all Palestinians all the time;
  • The utter criminality of Zionist media coverage (adopted globally) persists in blaming the oppressed for the crimes of the oppressor. The great irony in the Zionist claim of victimhood is revealed in the genocide being committed by its military, fulfilling their aims of emptying Palestine of Palestinians. While always tragic, these crimes are part and parcel of Zionism and not new, for even now, massacres and displacement of Palestinian refugees continue as the world stands by only to bear witness;
  • The blatant and boldfaced genocidal racism of Israeli political discourse: the pornographic call to death of Arabs by settler Zionist politicians across the political lines is fascism and cannot be described as anything but support for further genocidal violence and settler colonial fascism that has defined the history of this ideology;
  • The violent construction of the prison of Gaza is the criminal imposition of what is now a sixteen-year sentence of solitary confinement for an entire population in the form of the blockade and siege of Gaza;
  • The criminalization of resistance, including the self-criminalization of the right to resist, where all blood that is shed is blamed on the oppressed and all crimes of settler colonial invasion and dispossession are ignored entirely;
  • The unfathomable crime of silence and complicity perpetuated by the entire world – including Arab and Muslim regimes under the oppressive power of American impositions — are openly supportive of genocide or mute witness to the crimes of settlers;
  • The most blatant American complicity in the genocidal massacre of an entire people. Zionist and American colonials, with Arab regimes’ complicity, have perpetuated crimes against the Palestinian people that define fascism in the 21st century;
  • The ongoing historic crime of the complete denial of the Palestinian nation’s political right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.

We Palestinians have a right to our freedom. It is not a right enshrined in the precarious words of law codes but our human dignity to fight for freedom. Palestinian resistance has been criminalized since the beginning of the settler colonial invasion of Palestine. Now that our resistance has used guerrilla war tactics, we have now become the oppressors?! What is the Israeli army fighting to achieve? Unable to counter the resistance fighters, the aircraft bombed besieged Gaza, targeting nothing and everything at once! Are they trying in vain to continue the genocidal war that began upon the arrival of Zionists to our land? Trying to complete the erasure of 1948?

Given all we know and all we have seen, we must act and choose justice and humanity and fight the oppression of colonial degradation. We are all Palestinians now, and we must all act immediately against the real criminals and scream in the face of this monster and his barbaric acts. Zionism is a genocidal settler project in Palestine that is built on false mythology and sustains itself on perpetual and endless violence against the native people in Palestine – it should be seen and dealt with as such. Talk of freedom – political, academic, or social – falls on deaf ears unless or until the true criminals are called such and dealt with as such.

We in occupied Palestine — and all Palestinians — have no illusions in the poetic dreams of the triumph of the pen over the sword because the sword has cut too deeply into our flesh at the hands of an enemy who has been granted by the hypocritical international community and the destiny of imperial history to claim a monopoly on both the sword (that which acts to kill) and the pen (that which narrates the acts of killing). As intellectuals and academics working in occupied Palestine, we have to use our words, however futile they may feel in such critical times. We also have faith in the bold souls of our people, our resistance and the triumph of freedom, and in our inalienable rights. We recognize and proclaim that at this critical and urgent historical juncture, we shall overcome – justice shall overcome. We are not your passive victims; we have been murdered, maimed, and displaced by a setter state driven by an ideology of insane hatred and bloody violence, but we will not be silenced. Our resistance shows us the path forward, and we remain steadfast, and we shall triumph.

October 11, 2023

Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees, Occupied Palestine

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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