Palestinian courage this spring has stunned people across the world. At home and abroad, the US and Israel can kill, and for the moment, this cannot be stopped. But they can also be made to lose the war of ideas that makes the killing sustainable. We have no right to ask that the Palestinians stand alone in this fight.
As Israeli Jews we call upon the international community to intervene immediately in order to stop Israel’s current aggressions, to adopt the demands of the Palestinian BDS movement; to work towards the actualization of the Palestinian Right of Return and to bring about historic justice; to reach a just and democratic solution for all, based on the decolonization of the region and found a state of all its citizens.
Devyn Springer and Abu Shawarib speak to Mohammed El-Kurd, a poet, writer, and activist from Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, Palestine. This episode is a collaboration with the Groundings Podcast.
The killing and destruction will end only when the root of the problem is addressed: a colonialist regime that continually dispossesses the Palestinians.
“To our people throughout Palestine, we are with you. You are protecting a future where Palestinians everywhere can live without fear of colonial violence”
The recent violence in the city Lydd (Lod) and other Palestinian cities in Israel has been described by many as “civil war,” but this narrative is misleading. Rather, what we are witnessing is the Israeli settler state declaring a war on its colonized “citizens,” and Palestinians fighting for their liberation.
The violence in Sheikh Jarrah isn’t exceptional. It is Zionism distilled to its purest expression. Dispossessing Palestinians is Zionism’s primary function.
It is a fiction to argue that there is any “co-existence” or that there are “mixed cities” inside Israel. It is a reality of ghettos and apartheid: an ongoing colonial project of Jewish supremacy. The reality of settler-colonialism, of Judaizing Palestine, is present in Lydda, “inside Israel” as much as it is in Sheikh Jarrah, in the occupied territory.
The experience of other colonized and oppressed people shows us that Palestinian women are most able to imagine a more just vision of our future, with a single democratic state for all its citizens in historical Palestine as its goal.
Studying literature expands our understanding of the possible. Studying (post)colonial literature shows how Palestinian state building has failed to achieve the liberatory promises of contemporary Palestinian nationalism.