Forging bonds of solidarity
Interfaith Peace-Builders organized its third African Heritage Delegation to Palestine in late October 2014. The delegation was comprised of 15 participants with a variety of political and organizational experiences, ranging from Students for Justice in Palestine, the historic civil rights and Black Power movements, the antiwar movement, and other movement and social-justice efforts. Four of the 15 participants had visited Palestine/Israel before.
As the third delegation of its kind, the delegation set as its primary mission not only to learn firsthand about the conditions Palestinians face in Israel and the Occupied Territories, but also to build on the experiences, findings and conclusions of previous delegations. In addition, the delegation sought to formulate a systemic analysis of the occupation, including the U.S. role in maintaining it, and to explore the strategies for resistance and liberation in Palestine.
Here, , a participant in the delegation, talks about what the group saw and the conclusions it drew, in the first of several articles about the visit.
ABOUT TWO months ago, I participated in the 2014 African Heritage Delegation to Palestine to learn about the daily struggles facing Palestinians and to forge bonds of solidarity between the Palestinian and the African American liberation struggles. The lessons from the intense scenes we collectively experienced will be seared into our minds and into our consciousness, conditioning all of our political work from this point forward.
Upon my return, I spent the first week trying to wrap my head around what we had witnessed and processing my anger and disbelief. Even though I am a seasoned activist who has read many books and articles on the occupation, I was repeatedly struck by the sense that I had been transported 60 years into the past to the Jim Crow American South. This is what Palestinians face on a daily basis--apartheid and unbelievable oppression.
In retrospect, there is nothing that could have fully prepared me for witnessing the level of scientific oppression, the all-encompassing occupation and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing taking place in Palestine/Israel. Palestinians are intensely aware of the occupation in the course of their daily lives. The experience binds them together in struggle and defines their existence. And the latter is exactly what they're fighting for--their right to exist on a land that has been ripped from underneath them for decades.
This fight for existence and the worth of their lives bears similarities to the struggles of Black and Brown people in the U.S. We were able to concretely identify both of our struggles as a joint struggle for liberation, because we understand that the same apparatus that represses dissent and guns down Black and Brown people in the U.S. violently represses and occupies Palestinians thousands of miles away. We understand that both struggles need the solidarity of the other in order that we may have liberation.
As a delegate said in the hours before we boarded the bus to Dulles airport, "If Palestine isn't one day free, there will never be justice anywhere on this earth."
IN A very important development for the Black struggle here in the U.S., and barely two months after our own delegation, Ferguson activists, Dream Defenders from Florida and the Black Youth Project embarked on their own delegation to Palestine, making the same crucial connections between Palestinian and Black liberation.
Ahmad Abuznaid of the Dream Defenders described the delegation's aim with these words:
The goals were primarily to allow for the group members to experience and see firsthand the occupation, ethnic cleansing and the brutality Israel has leveled against Palestinians, but also to build real relationships with those on the ground leading the fight for liberation...In the spirit of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and many others, we thought the connections between the African American leadership of the movement in the U.S. and those on the ground in Palestine needed to be reestablished and fortified.
Delegation participant Cherrel Brown pointed to the important practical outcome of the trip:
I want us to take back things we can do in the now, as Americans, to raise awareness and action around Palestinian liberation. I want us to reimagine what society could and will look like when we've dismantled this white-supremacist patriarchal and capitalist society. I want us to do it together. I want to bring back these conversations and stories in hopes that it will help add to this global struggle to get free.
This is a crucial moment for both movements. We are at the confluence of a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that has experienced an uptick in victories and influence, a sustained Black struggle on a scale that we haven't seen since the early 1970s, rising general consciousness on the issue of the occupation of Palestine, and Israel's cynical and sick attempt to ideologically merge some Black religious and political organizations with apartheid.
This attempt by Israel shows how desperate it is, not just to piece together some legitimacy, but to tear Black people away from our long and proud history of struggle--our proud history of solidarity with oppressed groups around the world. Israel understands the power of the social forces that have been unleashed by previous Black liberation struggles. It understands that these historic dynamics still have the potential to burst forth today.
These attempts by Israel, however, will not succeed. Black people, along with other oppressed groups, will never allow our proud tradition of struggle and resistance to be hijacked by one of the most brutal occupations in modern history.
IN LIGHT of these developments, and the fact that ours was the third African Heritage delegation, we are currently brainstorming possible ways to link up with these activists and bring together past delegates in order to push back at Israel's attempt to win influence within our community, and to establish and solidify a core of pro-Palestine liberation activists within Black and Brown struggles.
Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories are completely silenced from telling their stories. They routinely have to prove their right to exist. A couple times on our delegation, we were met with hostility from Israelis who overheard our conversations. Within hours of first stepping onto the ground during our first full day, we were argued with by two individuals, one of whom who challenged the delegation guide, who was Palestinian, to "prove" her story.
On another occasion, our delegation guide was challenged to "provide documentation" to back up his account of the struggle that Palestinians have had to wage. On other occasions, one of which I can recall in Jaffa, people were visibly uncomfortable--some even appeared angry while overhearing our conversations--at the possibility that Palestinian life and resistance might enjoy the slightest consideration. This is a society that barely sees Palestinians as human, much less worthy of demands for justice.
Another component to our delegation was grappling with what, if any, possibility there was for Israeli society--namely, non-Palestinians--to take up the cause of ending the occupation. One of the ways in which the government of Israel is able to maintain its occupation is through the vast support Zionist ideology has throughout society. The conclusion that some of us on the delegation came to was that Israeli society, although it has a very small left, is not up to the task of taking up Palestinian liberation on a mass scale.
Materially, solidarity with the Palestinian struggle seems inconceivable for a society built on ethnic cleansing and steeped in settler-colonial ideology. As we were told by one Israeli student activist, "There are so few dissenters in a country so deeply ideological." The activist continued:
So much so that Zionism isn't considered an ideology at all. It's like motherhood. It's just "good." It's something that everybody has to like. It's not something to be questioned. It's just a part of you as a human being. It's inconceivable that there's something wrong with the idea that there should be a state with privileged rights for some and expulsion for others.
At some future point, after a long, hard and unprecedented international struggle and pressure, Israelis will no doubt rediscover the impulse for justice--because they'll have no other choice.
THE SENSE you get in Palestine is that time is running out. Everything, especially in Jerusalem, is moving so fast. The state is moving quickly to push Palestinians completely out of Jerusalem and concentrate them on small, island-like refugee camps, surrounded by settlements, in the West Bank. Settlements are exploding in Jerusalem. In fact, we learned of a plan to build 1,000 new settlement units in East Jerusalem approved on the very day we flew into the Tel Aviv airport.
Furthermore, settlers are incredibly violent. Their attacks on Palestinians, with almost complete impunity, are daily and numerous.
Palestinian revolutionary political organization is lacking. Palestinians are aware of this and are uncertain of what's going to happen next. There are times when it felt that the struggle is insurmountable. One has to understand just how all-encompassing, strategic, brutal and established the occupation of Palestine is. It appeared insurmountable at times to us, but a lot of us understand that nothing is insurmountable. Palestinians understand this. The conditions for Palestinian liberation exist. They exist in the massive international movement that we need to build, but also in Palestinians themselves.
Amid the harshness of the occupation, Palestinians carry within them a level of joy and strength that's not only powerful, but I would say was quite unexpected from some of us. In fact, it was this strength that inspired us when even we were psychologically overwhelmed by what we were learning.
The conditions of an all-encompassing occupation typically leaves Palestinians with very few resources in which to live on, but it's also meant to demolish and crush their history, culture and spirit. However, in our experience, we know that these will be the last things taken from them despite the many aspects of life that they are denied on a daily basis. What the occupation seeks to crush, it often makes stronger. And it is this Palestinian strength and spirit that should fuel and inspire all solidarity activists around the world to fight to break the foundation upon which Israel has relied on for its decades-long brutal occupation of Palestine. Palestine will someday be free, because as long as Palestinians exist, they will resist.
One of the last things requested of us by Palestinians was that we "go back and tell our [the Palestinian] story." We're going to take this a step further and dedicate our lives to liberation in Palestine because we understand that if Palestine isn't someday free, there will never be justice anywhere on this earth.
