Solidarity from Global North requires understanding
PJ Podesta, Electronic Intifada, Apr 23 2024
In Nov 2023, while analyzing the mainstream news immediately after the Oct 7 Palestinian breakout from Gaza and defeat of the Israeli Gaza command, legal scholar Noura Erakat noted that there was “a discourse on day one that understood Oct 7 as a prison break or the Tet Offensive; people were distressed, but there was an understanding of the logic.” This, however, soon shifted, as a counter narrative established a “framework that subsumed Hamas squarely within the War on Terror and Islamophobia and synonymized Hamas with ISIS.” And it has been clear that since the first day, Western liberal commentators, labor unions, and so on, have largely made sure to “condemn Hamas” before calling for a ceasefire, what The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah has called a “kind of condemnation olympics.”
Others have attempted to sidestep Palestine altogether, such as during the late-2023 and early-2024 US Congressional funding debates over a proposed combination of fascistic US border policies with weapons funding for Israeli, Ukrainian and Taiwanese “defense.” Alongside more prominent examples, a little-noticed letter from over 130 immigration advocacy groups went so far as to insist that the immigration “measures be stripped from the legislation or, should they remain, that Congress reject this bill,” while making no mention of the genocidal overseas weapons provisions. At best the statement implies: Let us put aside the key portions in this bill that fund the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and other military escalations; the immigration provisions are more important.
The signatories could have rallied around the opportunity to point out connections between US-domestic border imperialism and the occupation and oppression of Palestinians. Within a broader shared project of European settler-colonialism and imperialism, examples of such connections include police/military training and technology exchanges and the indefinite “administrative detention” of the colonized and displaced as a tool of discipline and deterrence. But the NGO complex enforces siloed, single-issue focus, undermining solidarity across intersecting movements, and generally compels avoidance of work on the imperialism and (neo)colonialism at the root of peoples’ oppression and displacement. While some of the signatory organizations have offered other signals of solidarity with Palestine, many appear to have avoided any such public discussion, presumably over fear of backlash from Zionists or a desire to “stay in our lane,” both common within self-styled “movement” nonprofits.
The US, meanwhile, has continued to provide weapons to the Israeli occupation and separately confirmed unprecedented billions in funding for US border enforcement and immigration incarceration systems based on a lethal and torturous deterrence policy, as Biden considers how to play to the right on other immigration measures. Enforcing both liberal silence and the ahistorical “both sides” stance common to many on the Western “left”, post-7 October mainstream Western media coverage has relentlessly repeated propaganda framing the resistance operation as an unprecedented mass atrocity. Many Palestinian analysts have pointed out this precise effect. Abd’al-Jawad Omar wrote in November:
When Palestinians dare to rebel and challenge their imposed fate after years of oppression, the responses are predictably schizophrenic. The same intellectuals who once sobbed at our plight are now torn. Many become moral policemen, quickly brandishing the baton of condemnation, but even more importantly, readily ‘adopting’ with full intensity Israel’s curated and sensationalized version of the events of October 7 in the so-called Gaza envelope (the Israeli settlements bordering Gaza).
Apparently designed to absolve themselves before liberal audiences of seeming to endorse violence, these sorts of condemnations ignore the long history of anti-colonial struggles, including Palestine’s, which have required the use of armed resistance in order to break free from the structural violence of colonization. Public intellectuals like Steven Salaita, ousted from US academia for speaking steadfastly for Palestine, offer an alternative example in which one preserves both moral integrity and intellectual clarity by refusing to be disciplined into silence or obfuscation. His reflections on becoming a schoolbus driver and eventually landing a university teaching job in Cairo provide valuable clarity against liberal opportunism and cowardice. His 2018 “A guide to principled anti-Zionism” remains an important read.
The Global North’s political economy relies on the oppression of the Global South in general and of Palestine in particular. As academic and writer Patrick Higgins noted in late October:
We’re seeing a blow against the US-led world system. Since, really post-WW2, but especially post-1970 or so, Israel has been the linchpin, the basket into which most of the American chips are put, in order to sustain broader control of West Asia.
This historical reality places a profound obligation on those in the Global North who would seek to be in solidarity to seriously consider what strategies and tactics Palestinians are calling for in the struggle for liberation, sovereignty and safety. Such calls to action do not include that we opine on Palestinians’ methods of resistance. They do include that we understand the history and actuality of that resistance, do all we can to stop the ongoing provision of arms to the occupation, engage in boycott, divestment and sanctions, and fight back against the criminalization of those who support Palestine’s liberation from Zionist settler colonialism. As Virginia Tech’s Bikrum Gill exhorted:
Show no fear, no surrender, as you oppose those who support the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Bring your institutions to crisis if their functioning requires silence or complicity.
Daily life in Rafah’s desert camp
Lubna Ahmad Abu Sitta, Electronic Intifada, Apr 22 2024
Our new camp in Rafah, after our third displacement, is located in a graveyard near the Egyptian border. Each day the tents of new arrivals of those forcibly displaced by Israeli attacks creep closer to the graves. After every Israeli massacre, both graveyard and camp expand, crawling toward the outer edges of the desert. We’ve been here since Dec 2023. Nine of us share a tent that is 16 square meters. We are in the desert, but sometimes it does not feel that way because of the density and the near-constant sounds of Israeli explosions and drones. There are so many people in the camp, all of us in tents that do not protect from heat or cold. Winds sometimes uproot tents. There are stray dogs everywhere. Every day we line up for drinking water. Sometimes the water runs out and we return to our tents empty-handed.
My family’s tent is in the middle of the camp. Next door is a medical point that supports those who have been displaced here. I’ve seen doctors stitch up children’s wounds with care. Often there is no local anesthesia, so the doctors compensate with extra warmth and smiles. An elderly woman came to the tent for treatment for a chronic condition. They treated her with kindness. They did not have much medicine for her. Since medical supplies are scarce, the doctors use what they have on hand. We are being annihilated. We are running out of options. The north and south are separated, and communication is cut off. I used to hope that I would see friends and family in the north again, but now I just don’t know. After this war ends, where will we go? Israel has destroyed our homes, and our favorite places no longer exist.
Tasting Gaza’s agony
Batoul Mohamed Abou Ali, Electronic Intifada, Apr 23 2024
It is heartbreaking to hear stories of Israeli cruelty every day. My cousin Nour is 29-years-old. She has three children: Omar, Rayan and Emad. In the early stages of the current genocidal war, she and her family left the northern half of Gaza and moved south. Doing so, they hoped, would keep them alive. Israel had claimed it was setting up a safe “humanitarian corridor” so that people could evacuate without being harmed. There was nothing safe about the route Nour and her family took. In Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, a missile struck the car in which Nour was traveling. The window was broken and Nour was injured in the left eye. Her child Rayan was wounded too. They needed urgent treatment. Doctors referred them to a hospital in Egypt. I hope they make a swift recovery.
My own immediate family had to evacuate our home without our belongings. We had been working very hard to make an honest living. Everything has been lost. Hassan, my eldest brother, went back to our land, even though he knew it had been invaded by Israeli forces. He needed money. So he collected wood to sell it. In this war, one of the few ways to make an income is by chopping wood. One day, Hassan was accompanied by his friend Yasir, 36. Yasir had been unemployed before the war began. When they were leaving the farmland, Israel fired a missile toward them. Yasir was cut in two. My brother had to carry out the dreadful task of gathering what remained of his friend. Yasir was martyred as he tried to protect his family from hunger. He had told his wife that if he died, she should strive to provide their children with “a better life than the one I was given.”
My friend Rama had a lovely family. Like me, she studied English and graduated from college in the recent past. During this war, her home was destroyed. Her family was massacred. Only Rama and her sister are still alive. But they have major injuries. They survived after being in a coma. While their medical treatment was successful in keeping them alive, the psychological wounds of this genocide will remain. We are all tasting agony in Gaza.
As if nothing happened
Nowar Nabil Diab, Electronic Intifada, Apr 22 2024
I remember the day in Aug 2022 when, finally, the war was over. A ceasefire had been agreed to, and the Israeli drones were no longer buzzing overhead in the sky. For three days, Israel had terrorized Gaza with airstrikes. I went to help my grandma move the mattresses from the corridor, where we had slept during Israel’s attacks. Then I went for a long-awaited walk. It felt like a luxury to go for a walk after sheltering inside from the airstrikes. I bumped into a neighbor on the street and we greeted each other with al-hamduillah al-salama, roughly, thank God for our safety. The words sounded light-hearted, but the intent behind the phrase was sincere. The rest of the walk was surreal in its “normalcy.” How could this be after the horrors of the past several days?
I received a message on my phone from my professor that class would be re-convening soon, and, of course, al-hamduillah al-salama. It felt like too much to process: How could life just go back to normal? That night, we slept in our beds, beneath windows. It’s funny how windows had become my worst nightmare in the preceding days. I was afraid that they would shatter at any moment. Sleeping was hard that night, but when had it ever been easy? I could barely sleep because of the takbir cries in the streets of “God is great,” as if we had won the war. But we had lost so much, even though we had once thought we had nothing to lose. After this war, we were all “fine.” Forgetting past horrors is our coping mechanism. Every war hardens us to something. We are confused when we see Israelis horrified, running to their shelters. We don’t have shelters in Gaza. They have everything, yet they are scared. We have nothing, but we cope. In the days after the August war, we tried to live life as we had never lived it before. We went to the beach, we breathed, and we appreciated it all.
Just over a year later, in Oct 2023, another war arrived and the routine started all over again. We packed our belongings, and I felt like a stranger in my own house. We went to my grandparent’s home down the street, because it was safer. But that was a lie we told ourselves. The truth is, if we die we want to die together. The first night was full of terror, and we didn’t sleep. Our eyes weren’t even tired. They were wide open because we know that at any time there could be an explosion. What really caused the most pain was that from the first moments of this “war,” we knew it was different. We knew it would be a genocide. We soon left our grandparents’ house and walked even farther down the street during a bombardment to my uncle’s house. At my uncle’s, there was no internet or electricity. I shared a bed with my cousin, because the house was packed. My aunts woke us up a little while later, screaming that it was again time to leave. I knew that this time it would be to the south.
In the south, we didn’t know where to put our tiny green tent. I almost felt nostalgic when I saw our tent, as it reminded me of a play tent I had had as a child. We ended up in the middle of nowhere: no bathroom, running water, or food, with seven of us sleeping in our tent. On one of the first nights I woke up in the middle of the night and had to use the bathroom. I didn’t know what to do. I walked to a nearby house and asked to use their toilet. They let me in, but I felt ashamed. I felt like screaming, I used to have a home, just like you! I couldn’t accept my new situation. We moved our tent to a denser area, less in the middle of nowhere. We ended up building a bigger tent and even built a bathroom that cost us a fortune. From my viewpoint in Rafah, the genocide continues. When will it end? Will it ever end? And if it does, will we be able to pretend as if nothing ever happened?
Niqnaq 