There is no disability justice without a Free Palestine

I am a disabled, anti-Zionist Jew. On my dad’s side, I am the grandson of Irish immigrants and descendent of folks who fought against British occupation. On my mom’s side, I am the descendent of Holocaust survivors and Jews who faced persecution across Eastern Europe. My life’s work is committed to achieving collective liberation for all those impacted by oppression, especially as a lifelong disabled person, and I believe, deeply and without qualification, that we will see a free Palestine. But I also believe this: anyone claiming to do the work of disability rights or justice while remaining silent on Gaza is actually doing no such thing.

Twenty months into Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, it is impossible to claim to practice and work for disability justice while ignoring the deliberate disabling, ethnic cleansing, and mass slaughter of a population already enduring decades of siege, displacement, and occupation. Before October 2023, an estimated 58,000 people in Gaza were identified as disabled, and early on in this genocide, an estimated 15% of those displaced were disabled. We don’t know what that number is today, but it’s very likely much higher.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them women and children. Even more have been physically injured and maimed. Thousands of children have lost limbs, making this the largest cohort of pediatric amputees in recorded history. But beyond those realities, trauma too is disabling. Every single survivor will be forced to live with the often invisible disability that accompanies unimaginable physical, psychological, and emotional violence.

None of this is being done to protect Jews. None of this is simply collateral damage. It is the intended outcome of a genocide that too many, especially those in both the Jewish and disability communities, are choosing to look away from.

As someone with cerebral palsy, I cannot look away from the photo of 10-year-old Yazan al-Kafarneh, who died in Gaza early last year. Yazan, who shared my disability, died in an emaciated state, starved and abandoned by a world that refused to bear witness. When that photo circulated, I waited for the outcry from the broader disability community. It never came. When Muhammed Bhar, a 24-year-old man with Down syndrome, was mauled to death by an IDF dog, I thought that we might hear more from the mainstream disability community. That did not happen. And when Israel killed 12-year old Ahmed Abu al-Rous as he sat in his wheelchair at a refugee camp just last month, I thought that surely the time had come for our disability community leaders to finally speak out. I was wrong.

Where are the statements? Where are the demands for access, aid, and an end to ethnic cleansing? Why do we see so many who rush to denounce ableism in the media, schools, or government suddenly say nothing when a state, backed by our own tax dollars, bombs prosthetic limb centers, deliberately targets the only remaining hospitals, and blocks the delivery of durable medical equipment?

This silence is complicity.

Disability justice is rooted in principles of intersectionality, collective access, and cross-movement solidarity. It was founded by Black, brown, and queer disabled people who understood that liberation is either for everyone or it is for no one. That includes disabled Palestinians. That includes Gaza. That includes those disabled by bombings, by starvation, by blockade, by trauma. That includes every soul stolen from this world.

Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza has not spared disabled folks. In fact, it has targeted them. A 2020 report by Human Rights Watch documented how decades of Israeli restrictions on Gaza have long prevented disabled people from accessing medical devices, medications, and necessary supports. Now, with Gaza’s healthcare system essentially collapsed and thousands, including babies, not having access to food, the only fate for most of them who are left, should the genocide continue, is death.

It’s not just happening in Gaza. Palestinians in the West Bank face disabling and deadly violence from the Israeli military and settlers alike that limits access to healthcare, destroys homes and property, and has displaced over 1,700 people so far. Apartheid has created horrible conditions for disabled Palestinians there, too, and it was witnessing that system of apartheid myself that made me commit to Palestinian liberation over ten years ago. In my second visit there in 2015, three years after my first visit through Birthright, I saw and heard things I had not been exposed to previously. I was horrified to see the dehumanization of Palestinians. I learned about the reality of the West Bank and the illegal settlements. I witnessed the checkpoints and the different rules for Israelis versus Palestinians. That trip fundamentally changed me, and in the ten years since, it has demonstrated clearly that any serious organizing for disabled liberation must include Palestinian liberation. 

Let me be clear: there is no disability justice anywhere without freedom in Palestine. We can’t claim to believe in collective access while being silent about apartheid. We cannot claim to recognize the wholeness of all human beings while co-signing the occupation of some. Our values do not stop at the U.S. border. We have to stop treating solidarity like it’s optional.

To be in this movement and to ignore genocide is to betray these values we claim to uphold. If we can mobilize thousands of people to protect Medicaid in this country, which we absolutely can and do, then we can speak up when an entire population is being disabled and destroyed before our eyes.

My hope, as waning as it sometimes feels, is rooted in the moments where our movements come together in solidarity. Where a multiracial, interfaith, cross-disability coalition says “enough.” We have done it before, and we must do it now.

Stopping this U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza is the disability issue of our time.