By the time this is published, it will already be outdated; perhaps redundant; perhaps inaccurate. We invite you to sit with these words in the spirit of time travel. This is where we were in our spirits and bodies. This is one of the ways we met the call from our Palestinian kin. This is a part of what our solidarity looked like in this moment. May the many revolutions we need in this time thrive and flourish.
We are witnessing a genocide in Palestine take place in real time, through phone screens that have been mined by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each morning, we wake up to a new set of horrors: ambulances and evacuation routes bombed, children being pulled from rubble, survivors queuing for seven hours in the hope of getting one piece of bread. The people of Palestine are being subjected to relentless, merciless violence, as their lives, bodies, land and public infrastructures are being decimated. More than ever, it is clear how embedded we are as British “citizens” in colonial systems of oppression. We watch an American Palestinian in Palestine scream that his taxes are funding the bombs that are being dropped on him and his family. We should all be screaming the same thing.
We are intimately connected to the Palestinian people — far beyond the realm of taxes. And we’re cautious of how people in the West try to fix their complicity by throwing money at it, through well-meaning fundraisers and donations, even when we know that resources are barely getting into Palestine, let alone to the population areas who need it most. As Leon Sealey-Huggins reminds us when examining “reparations” in the context of the Caribbean and climate collapse, when it comes to crisis, there comes a point where money is obsolete. We will not ‘fix’ what is happening by Western tactics, including the comfort of our charitable paradigm. Our responses require much more critical and brave action than moving money around.
As a Black-led organisation, most of our team and ecosystem have direct lineages with colonised and enslaved people. Many of us deeply understand the generational wounds that are inflicted by this type of violence, and the immense grief and shameless erasure which follows. We watch in disgust as the same organisations who posted black squares in 2020, in sheepish support of Black Lives Matter, stay silent on the genocide of Palestinian people. There is no place for this type of erasure or minimisation in any of the spaces we hold. We refuse to bend to the rhetoric that this is a “complex” problem, taking place “over there” — when this genocide is epicentral to the systems of oppression our work calls to dismantle; there can be no Black liberation without Palestinian liberation. The same year that we witnessed the murder of George Floyd, Israeli forces shot a Palestinian, Disabled student for chanting: “Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Lives Matter”. Palestine, in their marches for Black liberation, wrote on banners: “Our struggles are one.”
Free Palestine. Free the people and the land. Free our Muslim and Arab siblings who have been, and will continue to be, subjected to heightened forms of surveillance, interrogation and abuse. Free us from our governments who are restricting what’s left of our rights to protest. Who attempt to polarise us; cutting off public travel and labelling our calls for freedom “hate marches”.
adrienne maree brown invites us to think of organising as a means of time travel: imagining, building and fighting for worlds which don’t yet, or no longer, exist. On marches for Palestine, we chant “Gaza, Gaza don’t you cry; We will never let you die” and tears fall from our eyes. We know that people die as we chant. And yet we keep chanting.
