Long Live a United Palestine, Long Live the Intifada of Unity! — Read the The Dignity and Hope Manifesto on the goals and vision of the current uprising in Palestine.
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.
At least 38,000 Palestinians have fled their homes and sought shelter in schools run by the United Nations as hundreds of houses were completely destroyed in airstrikes since last Monday. Tareq Hajjaj reports from Gaza where Palestinians describe a night of fear, running from their homes barefoot and gripping children in the midst of Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire.
Palestinians disconnected from each other have struggled immensely to maintain a national project with clear objectives. Now, struggling together across the entire geography of historic Palestine, the disintegrated parts of our body are coming back together.
It is not a coincidence that Israel decided to remind us of its original sin, namely, the Nakba, by celebrating its “independence” in Sheikh Jarrah and Gaza. By committing the Wehda Street massacre, it has taken the so-called “conflict” to its origin.
Just like in the Great Revolt of 1936-39, the colonizer in Palestine is on the back foot in the face of unity and desperation.
Israeli police joined fascist mobs in attacking Palestinian neighborhoods, but this didn’t stop Palestinians in Haifa from joining the uprising taking place across Palestine. “These are historic moments and the people of Haifa are rising like never before,” Yoav Haifawi writes. “They are part of a united Palestinian struggle against their oppressors.”
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.