In solidarity with Palestine

TWELVE DAYS into the relentless bombing of Gaza, we in the Caribbean are watching the dread of the Israeli state’s continued genocide of Palestinians who had long become walled within what Human Rights Watch calls an “open-air prison” with all land, sea and air exits controlled by Israel.

Already, Palestinians were facing forced expulsion and violent suppression since 1948. Gaza was being decimated by destruction of farms, economic stagnation, rising rates of hunger, daily intimidation, forced immobility, and lack of access to medicine; and lives were determined by 16 years of Israeli blockade. All this while major Western powers supported Israel, the most guilty of them being the US which has given billions in military funding.

Both Western states and media ignored atrocities, unjust detentions and soldier killings which occurred repeatedly over decades of apartheid policy to eliminate Palestinian access to land, freedom, equality, peace and self-determination.

When Hamas, the Palestinian armed resistance movement, attacked Israel on October 7, killing about 1,400, injuring 4,000, and taking hundreds more civilians hostage, this act of retributive and hypermasculine violence gave the Israeli state an excuse to launch its most recent air strikes, as both collective punishment and vicious warning, against more than two million Palestinians.

There is no justification for Hamas’s taking of innocent lives, which must be condemned, but there is also no chance of understanding such action without acknowledging the history of Palestinian occupation since the Nakba, or mass dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, consistent settler displacement since then, and uprisings known as the first and second Intifadas of 1987 to 1993 and 2000 to 2005, in which vastly unequal numbers of Palestinians were hurt, killed, left homeless and without income, detained or left to mourn their dead.

On October 12, Israel ordered 1.1 million people to move south in 24 hours before it began bombardment, and cut off water, electricity and fuel, creating shortages of basic food supplies, and provoking a humanitarian catastrophe amongst this trapped population, half of whom are children under 18 years old.

It was estimated that more than 400,000 people in the Gaza Strip have fled their homes, and more than 260,000 were sheltering in 102 UN schools and premises. People don’t know if they will be prevented from returning to their homes, leading to yet another round of settler colonisation in the occupied territory.

Hospitals are describing a collapse of the healthcare system when fuel-based generators run out. Right now, everything is being described as collapsing, from waste-treatment and water desalination plants to 14,000 destroyed or uninhabitable housing units. Neighbourhoods, including schools, are rubble.

Al Jazeera reports that more than 1,000 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 10,000 people have been wounded. Human Rights Watch has determined that Israeli forces used white phosphorus, or chemical weapons, on October 10 and 11, which Israel denies.

Across the world, there have been protests against Israel’s brutal and illegal military occupation and against violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. There are also Israelis and Jewish people, and feminists, who have spoken out against the Israeli state’s Zionism. Women in Black, begun in Israel in 1988, has long held silent protests for peace and against the occupation, bringing together Israeli and Palestinian and Jewish and Muslim women.

Global protests are being policed, silenced and misrepresented by media and by state spokesmen. Indeed, there’s significant anti-Palestinian and Islamophic disinformation (deliberately spread misinformation) getting circulated globally, including from India which has become right-wing since the rise of the BJP.

In the Caribbean, we are not too small nor too far away from Gaza to speak out in the face of war crimes. Indeed, we live in an indigenous region built on occupation, dispossession and displacement, and know its harms.

Having fought for our own right to self-determination, we should also always speak out against state violence, human rights abuses and genocide, and call on Caribbean regional leaders to do the same.

Additionally, we should be aware that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a laboratory for testing tools and technologies for repression and surveillance. Having seen how the TTPS arrives with sub-machine guns to intimidate peaceful union gatherings, including on the UWI St Augustine campus, we should know that our governments will be trained and weaponised by Israel, through the US, against us one day.

Having been raised by a radically political Caribbean mother in life-long solidarity with the Palestinian people, this column expresses what she would want me to fearlessly say.

Diary of a mothering

worker

Entry 517

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