2017 Reflection: African & Palestinian Solidarity is Key to Ending Zionism and Colonialism

Photo courtesy of Black-Palestinian Solidarity

The following is a reflection from Black4Palestine member LiT following a June 2017 visit to Palestine. Read this and other reflections in our 2017 year in review newsletter.

When I returned from my first trip to Palestine, I was filled with rage. I saw Palestinians fighting a three layered assault: they are separated (apartheid), dehumanized, and killed (genocide). 

I saw parallels between Palestine and what I learned Turtle Island (America) looked like in the first 100 years of European colonization. The Zionist’s illegal kidnapping, detainment, torture, and murder of Palestinian people and their extraction and dispossession of land and natural resources parallel the attacks on indigenous people on Turtle Island and the formation of the United States.

Connecting my work with indigenous groups on Turtle Island, other African descendants, and anti-colonial struggles across the world, I look back to the Balfour Declaration - Britain’s declaration of support for a Zionist state in Palestine in 1917.

The issue of Palestine is not 50 years old, but over 100 years old. So it is not enough to be anti-occupation, we have to be anti-zionist and anti-colonialist. It is not enough to end the occupation, but we must support and secure the right to return for all Palestinian refugees. We must be clear that all of “Israel” is occupied Palestinian land, not just the West Bank and Gaza.
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During my time in Palestine I formulated grounding principles that frame my definition of liberation:
 

1. As told to me by Afro-Palestinians in Jerusalem, African and Palestinian solidarity is key to ending zionism and colonialism around the world. Africans must see Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle as interlocked with African liberation and anti-colonial struggles. When we trace the dispossession of land and resources as well as disparities in our countries, we find the source of the problem as colonialism and imperialism backed by the United States, Israel, and Western Europe. 
2. Our definition of and struggle for freedom must be grounded in internationalism in order for indigenous people to win. Encountering numerous Occupiers throughout Palestine speaking to me in English exemplifies the internationalist nature of the occupation. Imperialists share practices and people around the world, so we must too.
3. It is our duty to fight back against the isolation and silencing of freedom fighters through imprisonment, assassination, and exile. We are required to hold up Rasmea Odeh with Assata Shakur, Nael Barghouthi with Mumia Abu Jamal, and Ghassan Kanafani with Malcolm X. Palestinians and Africans in exile sacrificed their life and their families for ours. In Palestine, Zionists have isolated Palestinian communities from each other by apartheid walls and checkpoints in order to more readily steal Palestinian land. It is our responsibility to see isolation as a common tactic of imperialist regimes and acknowledge those who fight on a daily basis. Local resisters who live in refugee camps are as important as the famous names who are lifted up in the media. We must honor the fighters in Nablus, Nabi Saleh, Ramallah, Gaza, Jenin, Bethlehem and Hebron. We must also honor the fighters in what we call Baltimore, Ferguson, Cleveland, New York who fight against local forces who are trained by Zionists and practice isolation, imprisonment, and exile.  We must fight for Leonard Peltier (political prisoner of the Indigenous People’s Movement) and center his right to freedom and return to his land.
4. Lastly, fighting for Palestinian and African rights is environmental justice. Deep in the conversation of climate change and environmental justice is the reality that people suffering from food insecurity, poisoned water and drought have been suffering from colonization. The soil is abused by our colonizers and soaked with the blood of our people. We have a duty to free the land and trust the earth to repair itself without further bloodshed of its people or extraction of its resources.

 
In spite of intense Zionist violence, Palestine remains beautiful. The morning I left Palestine, two young boys saw me waiting for the bus to Qalandia checkpoint. They asked where I was going and after I told them to the airport, they walked away and returned with flowers offering “something to remember us and our land.”
 
I felt despair when I first got back, but then I realized there’s no time for that - we must get to work.

Palestinians and Native Americans share two sides of the same story, via Settler deCOLONIZATION (Facebook)

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