Palestine is Everywhere: A Call for Autonomous Action in New York City from March 27-30

Palestine is Everywhere: A Call for Autonomous Action in New York  City from March 27-30

Palestine is Everywhere: A Call for Autonomous Action in New York City from March 27-30

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement is a call for New York City to take autonomous action for Palestine from March 27-30. Get a group together, think creatively, move autonomously, and act courageously. To learn more, join the Palestine is Everywhere Telegram Channel: t.me/PalestineIsEverywhere]

Why have so many people in so many countries pledged their solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank? First and foremost, a genocide is happening in Gaza in real time, and it is being televised, for the first time in history. No one should be silent in the face of that kind of horror. But that doesn’t fully explain why hundreds of millions have taken to the streets, week after week, in the months since October 7th.  More than anything, Israel’s crimes against humanity, with the full-throated sanction of Western powers, have drawn a bright line across the globe that corresponds almost exactly to the colonial division of the world’s population. When the U.K., Germany, France and the U.S. stand with Israel and set themselves apart from the rest of the planet, they have reminded people how much power is still invested in the old colonial order. In the same way, the Palestinian struggle against a brutal settler aggressor has unavoidably reminded people, wherever they are, of their own decolonial struggles, and how they are all connected to the Palestinian resistance. In the global South, everyone has their own version of the “ongoing Nakba,” even if it does not resemble the Palestinian one in its details. Even in states, like Haiti, that have been sovereign for centuries, the long shadow of the racist metropole continues to wreak havoc. Puerto Rico, Sudan, Haiti, Congo, Kashmir, Cuba and many of the planet’s other flashpoints show the impact of the shared legacy of imperialism. 

That is why when South Africa stepped forward at the International Court of Justice to point the genocidal finger at Israel and its enablers (primarily Washington and London), it spoke for so many others around the world. That is why Palestine is everywhere, and why we hear this chant, loud and clear, “in our millions, in our billions, we are all Palestinians.”

The international alliance that stands behind Zionism in the West includes the racist right, Judeo-Christian groups, and the neoliberal establishment. Globally, elites who trade in religio-nationalist populism are also aligned. As a result of their combined influence, Zionism has long been effective in dividing our own multiracial alliances, across borders and oceans. Until now. We are seeing an unstoppable torrent of outrage at Israel’s crimes, and it is eating away the transnational influence of Zionism. In our own countries, state repression has been rolled out to stop the bleeding. It won’t work. Because the complicity is too visible and the cause of Palestinian freedom is too compelling. When we look at the decimation of Gaza, we are also seeing the ruins of the old colonial order, in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Because Palestine is everywhere, freedom fighters, martyrs, lovers, healers, and dreamers are everywhere.

Our desire for freedom is a planetary struggle beyond the nation state. Nation states are our prisons. We must be free of them and their property laws. When we chant and hear Free Palestine we are imagining a world that does not think of land, water, and air as private property and settlements, but as relations to care for.

A NOTE FROM NYC


For nearly six months, Gaza has bore witness to the most brutal campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing that the zionist settler-colonial project has undertaken in decades. For nearly six months, the Palestinian people have been murdered, mutilated, starved, and displaced en masse. For nearly six months, the people of New York City have fought relentlessly against this genocide through mass mobilization, coordinated disruptions, creative actions, legal and cultural interventions, divestment campaigns, and more.

In response, we have seen an increasingly brutal wave of repression. New York State and city governments, along with board members and administrators at educational and cultural institutions, have deployed the NYPD and their own security forces to ruthlessly crush the latest uprising. Since October 7, thousands of protestors have been arrested with several of them sustaining injuries by police who were dressed in riot gear and utilizing surveillance technologies and repression tactics directly learned from the zionist occupation. Governor Kathy Hochul has brought the national guard into our subway stations as public transit infrastructure crumbles. Both news media and social media have suppressed pro-Palestinian speech. Universities, museums, corporations and state agencies have imposed bureaucratic measures to restrict access to public space and muzzle people’s right to freely assemble and speak. 

The boundaries of action deemed acceptable by the forces of hegemony—the same forces manufacturing consent for and contributing materially to the genocide in Gaza—are closing in as people are rising up.

THE CALL: 


Palestine is the center
Palestine is everywhere
Haiti, Congo, Sudan, Puerto Rico, Chiapas, Kashmir +++
Until all our lands are free 

March 27 - March 30

What does it mean to engage in anti-colonial struggle where we are? NYC offers many sites of engagement where powers of oppression and domination reside, and where friends, family, students, communities, and organizations can think creatively, move autonomously, and act courageously. 

We act with the desire to get free. Decentralized actions, de-occupations, assemblies and gatherings, public testimonies, research/writing, media-making and agitprop, mutual aid stations, trainings and teach-ins in the streets, roving shutdowns, disruptive poetry readings, sit-ins and slow downs, strikes and marches, singing and amplifying sound, painting walls, resistance parties, wheatpasting, and other happenings.  

We are not yet disillusioned. This is an open, non-affiliated and autonomous call. In the lead up to Land Day and the 6th anniversary of Gaza’s Great March of Return on March 30th, we affirm our interconnected struggles in order to defend Palestine and to protect our planet from genocide and extraction everywhere.

Spotted somewhere in Brooklyn, 3/24


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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