"To Defend Palestine is to Defend the World"

Under settler colonialism, all of our oppressions — past, present, and future — are connected. Just as Native genocide and Jim Crow helped inform Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, Israel has expanded the tools of bordering, surveillance, and war-making, and exported its wares around the world. We cannot separate the AI being deployed in public schools in the U.S. to monitor and criminalize children from Israel’s totalizing surveillance of Gaza or from the U.S. military’s plans to deploy autonomous AI drones. All of these policies of control, death-making, and subjugation are connected, just as the toxicity of Native lands in the U.S. is connected to the poisoning of Palestinian lands with white phosphorus and other deadly chemicals. The extractive projects that have led to environmental devastation for Native communities in the U.S. are inextricably tied to the Biden administration’s plans to use the genocide in Gaza as cover for a natural gas extraction project. This litany of connections is not an attempt, as some might suggest, to give you a “selfish” reason to support Palestinians, but rather, a whole-hearted argument that to defend Palestine is to defend the world. No one is safe from the violence Israel and the Biden administration are attempting to normalize and justify, because no one is safe from what settler colonialism has wrought.

In addition to all the specificities about what Israel stands for in the Zionist discourse, Israel is also self-consciously a laboratory for the “Western world.” Netanyahu said it a few days ago. He had a message for civilized nations everywhere to continue to back Israel, “because Israel’s fight is your fight. I’m telling you right now that the future of our civilization is at stake.” Now, he is not just talking about Jews, he is talking about Israel as the laboratory for the “War on Terror.” It’s not just Israel that wants security without peace or justice.

I’ve been working on this piece for a while—my working title of it is like “All the Iron Domes will Fail.” And it has to do with what it meant for Israel’s security bubble to fail as massively as it failed on October 7, that that was not only a message about the illusion of Israeli safety and the ability to have this bubble of security and relative luxury, just a few miles away from an open-air prison. It’s not just Israel that wants security without peace or justice. There are iron domes, bubbles of security all over this grossly unequal, fast-warming world. Every rich nation is fortressing their borders with ever more barbaric tools—saws in the buoys in the Rio Grande, barges in the UK bringing people to Rwanda—and many of these countries (Modi’s India) have been buying technology and know-how from the State of Israel, who, since 9/11, has openly been talking about security without peace. Every rich country in the world wants that. And I think the reason why the entire global south is so forcefully in solidarity with Palestine is because the wealthy world is communicating in the language of bombs that leave craters, and refugee camps, and white phosphorus, to say: We will stop at nothing to protect our iron domes, our security bubbles, our borders; we will use unlimited maximum force to the point of genocide. And I think it is absolutely crucial, in terms of building these coalitions and moving forward, that we understand what is happening now as mass communication, not only on behalf of the Israeli state. It is an entire world order that is being defended here.

Gaza is under siege because the people of Gaza choose to resist. The people of Gaza shoulder the largest burden for our Collective Liberation, and when I mean Collective Liberation I mean the liberation of all Palestinians, the liberation of all Arabs, and also the liberation of all oppressed people. Actually, in Arabic I like the way they frame it: They say it's for all “free people” instead of all “oppressed people”[…]No amount of collective punishment by the Zionist entity will ever bend or break the will of our people to live in dignity and freedom on our liberated land.

So Gaza, as we've discussed, is often described as an open-air prison—which it is. The material conditions are completely unbearable. The people of Gaza are the greatest victims of the Zionist terrorist state, but they're also the greatest heroes. Gaza is not simply the sight of catastrophe, Gaza is the heart of the liberation struggle, the pulse of the resistance across Palestine, and the “popular cradle” of the struggle.

So what do we mean by “popular cradle”? The popular cradle within Palestinian political literature refers to the popular base of support within Palestinian society for the Palestinian liberation struggle; The popular cradle is the organ, the beating heart by which Palestinian resistance is carried out against the Zionist entity. Israel's massacres in Gaza—as well as the total Destruction of over, at this point, over 50% of its infrastructure—is an attempt to break and destroy the Popular Cradle to destroy the beating heart of our struggle.

It’s been my relationships with anti-Zionist Jewish friends that have shown me that not only is it possible to unlearn the conditioning that the state of Israel has consciously seeped into many people’s brains, but that it’s necessary to do this work for the future of the planet.

At my core, what it has meant to be Palestinian, it’s disruption. We are so disruptive. We illuminate the colonial nature of the rest of the world. If you thought you set up your home beautifully, we will be the leak in the ceiling that bursts all the pipes. This home is still colonized.

…A free Palestine would look like a place that was a model for the rest of the world where the land doesn’t belong to us but we belong to the land. It looks like a place where the sky has no horizon and people can dream and have choice. We need to dream because we have been told that the world operates in a particular kind of way, and this is the only way that it can operate.

…Palestine is neither the beginning nor the end. Palestine is the place from which we fight for this new world where so much of it comes together. If I’m going to fight this hard, I want to fight this hard for all of us.