This International Women’s Day, let us affirm that there can be no free homeland without free women, without free queers, and without free children as they rise above binaries, reach out across boundaries, laugh at society’s archaisms, and model the alternative.
Delegations to Palestine have always been be a way to witness the ways Palestinians suffer under Zionism, but some trips disguised as “progressive” awareness-raising opportunities only normalize apartheid.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s denunciation of disparities in medical access in the U.S. will sound hollow if he accepts the Dan David Prize from Israel, a country that is denying people under its illegal military occupation access to life-saving vaccines while bribing allies with the extra doses.
Too often Palestine solidarity organizations expect the expertise of Palestinian women for free, while paying Nice Guys handsome amounts of money, for being “decent.”
The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s open letter asking allies to adopt Palestinian liberation as a critical feminist issue has set off debates within feminist and Palestinian liberation movements. Nada Elia writes that some of the debate is understandable considering mainstream Western feminism’s disregard for the plight of the Palestinian people, but ultimately the call is about affirming, yet again, that one cannot be a feminist while supporting gendered violence, settler-colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and apartheid.
Despite the challenges of remote learning, campus activism for Palestine charged forward this past year.
Dr. Hanan Ashrawi resigned from the PLO, calling for reform within the Palestinian political system. Nada Elia says her call is already being met by the next generation of vibrant Palestinian leaders, but they are far outside the system Ashrawi is looking to revive.
At a time when grassroots activists and organizers everywhere are denouncing normalization with Israel, one Palestinian with a very large global social media following is actively promoting it, pandering to the liberal Zionist line of “both sides” being to blame for the violence and loss of life in Palestine.
Many in the Arab world are saying that the normalization of Israeli-UAE relations demonstrates the failure of “Arab nationalism,” but Nada Elia says this idea was invented to begin with and was never a true basis for solidarity.
Ahmed Erekat. Twenty-seven years old, executed on the eve of his sister’s planned wedding, two weeks before his own. He was born, lived, and died, under a brutal, merciless occupation. Honor his life, and that of all Palestinians–under occupation, under apartheid, under siege, and in exile–by not normalizing Israel’s egregious crimes.