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“2023 will be recorded historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism and screamed in defense of their homes, humanity, and lives. Palestinians as a people have endured over a century of settler colonial violence. We have thrived as a people and shall continue to do so. We do not need to speak of our right to resist, for it is not a right but a way of being and survival for Palestinians.” – Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees (2023)
“We know why Gaza is being targeted: because it is the heart of our resistance. And that resistance is both a strategic and moral necessity to the ordering violences of the Zionist system from river to sea, which seeks the extermination of the Palestinian people. We therefore maintain what the rest of our Palestinian sisters and brothers maintain: we will continue to fight, and we will win.”
– Palestinian Youth Movement (2023)
At the time of writing, the State of Israel has been attacking Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank for eight consecutive days. The Israeli colonial regime has ordered “a complete siege” on Gaza and for a week, Palestinians living in Gaza have not had access to water, food, electricity or gas. Like the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Gaza has been occupied by Israel since 1967. The 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have lived under an illegal air, sea and land Israeli blockade, which cuts them from other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the rest of the world. Before the most recent eruption of violence, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed in 2023 – the deadliest year since the United Nations records began in 2004. The UN officially recognises Israel as an apartheid state and violating the international law because of the continual expansion of illegal settlements. But as Birzet University Union of Professors and Employees, whose statement opens our letter, state powerfully, Palestinian resistance “does not need the pre-approval of static international law codes,” instead it is led by the fight for human dignity and freedom. Indeed, it is misguided to believe state law or international law and human rights necessarily reject settler colonialism (see Tatour 2019; 2021).
This is unfolding as the US and European nations and media co-operate these massacres by supporting Israeli occupations of Palestinian territories, enabling the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians and reproducing and disseminating Israeli propaganda intended to dehumanize the Palestinian people in mainstream media. Indeed, as Majed Abusalama (2023), a Palestinian researcher and activist at University of Tampere has accurately noted, “international audiences and media commentators who fail to recognise, call out and oppose Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid practices, are complicit in the ongoing injustice.” These double-standards and public support of Israeli violence are not left unchallenged. For example, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), an independent organisation of lawyers, politicians and academics based in the UK, have “written a notice of intention to prosecute UK government officials, for aiding and abetting war crimes in Gaza.”
In the past few days, Israeli officials have not been subtle in their genocidal intent. Such statements were cited on TV, in public statements and online, such as Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Defense Minister, describing Palestinians as “human animals” or asserting that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” As Israeli-Irish sociologist Ronit Lentin (2018, p. 88) has explained, “[I]n the Israeli case dehumanizing racial classifications emanate from the aim of ensuring that Jewish Israelis live at the expense of the Palestinian other(s). Such dehumanization, based on separation, segregation, and self-segregation, affirms Israel’s control over discriminated Palestinian citizens and occupied and besieged subjects, whose lives are regulated by the Israeli state’s civil and military authorities through racial technologies of surveillance, population transfers, raids of Palestinian homes, the West bank checkpoints and separation wall, curfews, house and village demolitions, arrests and administrative detentions, the detentions of minors, practices of torture and interrogation, culminating in extrajudicial executions, as well as imprisoning and deporting asylum seekers and migrants, all of which render the Palestinians (as well as Israel’s non Jewish others) subject to, and the object of Israeli rule.”
Israel, the US and the European community appear to justify this ongoing genocide using the narrative of self-defense against the military attack of Hamas on territories currently occupied by Israel on Saturday 7th October. While at least 2,215 Palestinians have been killed and 8,714 wounded, 400,000 displaced within the strip, and 5,540 housing units destroyed as a result of uninterrupted bombardments by Israeli forces which openly stressed that “the emphasis is on damage rather than on precision,” Palestinians who have left their homes after Israel demanded their evacuation of North Gaza have been bombed, including on the routes that were advertised as “safe” by the settler regime, the media and political leaders refuse to extend their grief, outrage and concern to the millions of Palestinians whose lives do not seem to matter to the same extent as Israelis’.
In effect, this disregard is to the extent that “Palestinian civilians” becomes an oxymoron. The most recent example of this is Israel’s president Isaac Herzog claiming in a press conference that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. Under that rhetoric, 2 million Gaza residents are potential “terrorists.” Indeed, “[w]hen the State of Israel declares that its war is against terror and supporters of terror, we find ourselves facing a state that is ‘targeting’ the theoretical possibility of civilian existence in the Palestinian territories because this population is seen as supporting ‘terror’” (Ghanim 2008, p. 74). The negation of Palestinian civilian existence serves the purpose of justifying what genocide scholar Raz Segal (2023) has described as “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” Many have written about the weaponization and distortion of the Holocaust and antisemitism to defend Israeli violence against Palestinians, justify Israeli settler colonialism and boost the Israeli arms industry. In this context, Israeli and Jewish grief is politicized and transmuted into violence towards Palestinians (Winant 2023).
At this point, it seems important to remind readers that Israel is a Zionist settler colonial state, as any act of colonial and anti-colonial violence must be understood within that frame of reference. As Nada Elia (2023, p. 5) writes “[m]ost Palestinians identify primarily as a people who have lost their homeland, and continue to lose their homes and lands.” The lives and territorial sovereignty of Palestinians changed dramatically when the Zionist colonial enterprise took over. Zionism as a movement “built on biblical discourses of Jewish racial supremacy” (Lentin 2018, p. 84) drove the settler colonial project in Palestine and should be understood in connection with other European colonial and imperialist projects in order to comprehend why the support of US and European leaders and media for Israel upholds the euro-colonial order. Indeed, “the colonial ambitions expressed by early Zionists are grounded in Europe’s eighteenth- and nineteenth- century imperialism, as much as they are a response to Europe’s centuries-old antisemitism” (Elia 2023, p. 32). The first colony in Palestine was settled in 1919. From this point on, settler colonial expansion demanded turning “large portions of Palestinian land […] into sovereign Jewish territory” (Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, p. 7).
Settler colonialism is “a historically created system of power that aims to expropriate Indigenous territories and eliminate modes of production in order to replace Indigenous peoples with settlers who are discursively constituted as superior and thus more deserving over these contested lands and resources” (Saranillio 2015, p. 84). Fayez Sayegh (2012, p. 215) argues that in Palestine “the political embodiment of Zionist colonialism (namely, the Zionist settler-state of Israel) is characterised chiefly by three features: (1) its racial complexion and racist conduct pattern; (2) its addiction to violence; and (3) its expansionist stance.” The massacres in Gaza and the West Bank currently unfolding in front of our eyes are an expression of all three of these features. The emptying of Gaza as well as the West Bank must be understood as both a racist and violent project of elimination of Indigenous Palestinian people but also as clearing the land to make space for Israeli settlers. This is a continuation of the destruction and dispossession that is ongoing in the West Bank, where “entire communities have been forcibly displaced from their residential areas” as noted by the Palestine Research Group at the University of Tampere (2023).
In 1948, the majority of the Palestinian population was forced to leave their homes and lands due to military assault by Zionist militias, direct expulsion by Zionist forces, the panic caused by the atrocities committed in other fallen villages, fears of Zionist attacks and psychological terror campaigns (Abu-Sitta 2010). This was called the Nakba (which means “catastrophe” in Arabic). This is what some Israeli political officials are referring to when they are calling for a second Nakba, as did Israeli parliamentarian Ariel Kallner recently on X, previously known as Twitter: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” As Palestinian researcher Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (2023, p. xiii) explains in her book “Colonizing Palestine,” “history is present. The Nakba continues. Some actors might be different, their practices altered, but the violence and its purpose persist.” The creation of the State of Israel, its very existence, and its maintenance, aided by the US and European powers, is a death project. As Honaida Ghanim (2008, p. 74) writes, “[t]he ability to oppress the occupied, to rule them and to manage their existence is neither supported nor upheld by the principle of life. It is the perpetual threat of death and the transformation of death into a political collective existence. Death becomes the field into which the power relations between occupier and occupied flow.”
Throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of people are protesting in support of Palestine as they refuse to passively watch and participate to the genocide of Palestinians under their eyes. In Helsinki, an estimated 500 people took to the streets on Friday for a Palestine free of occupation, Israeli violence and colonialism. Unfortunately, in some European cities, these protests have been criminalized or deterred. For example, in Rome, pro-Palestinian protesters were met with violence by Italian police hitting them with batons. In France, the minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, has banned all pro-Palestine protests, which did not deter thousands of protesters in many French cities who were teargased by French police, some of them arrested. In the UK, Home Secretary Suella Braverman suggested that waving the Palestinian flag in British streets may not be “legitimate.” Despite this, tens of thousands of protesters across the UK took to the streets to call for a free Palestine. In Germany, “a hundred police officers, dog handlers, motorbike police and numerous plainclothes officers were deployed” to police about a hundred demonstrators in Duisberg and a solidarity rally with Palestine was forbidden in Berlin. Solidarity for Palestine in Europe is always willfully misunderstood and misrepresented by euro-colonial powers as antisemitism, despite the vast number of resources explaining that Palestinian liberation has nothing to do with antisemitism. Much to the contrary, Jewish solidarity for Palestine is repressed by the police in Germany and the Israeli police regularly raid the anti-Zionist Jewish neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem for their open support of Palestine and the Palestinian people, as documented by Torah Judaism, thus restricting Jewish people’s political agency when they reject Zionist settler colonialism.
In June 2021, RASTER published a call to action for Finnish Higher Education Institutions, Scholars and Students Based in Finland to support Palestine which explained the connections between Finnish universities and Israel and the need for universities, teachers, and students to commit to supporting Palestine in their practices.
Today, RASTER reaffirms its support of Palestine and the Palestinian people and strongly condemns the Israeli violent regime against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We express our unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people and their century long struggle for liberation against the perpetual assaults against their collective life and existence.
This statement was written by a scholar on behalf of RASTER. We thank them for their contribution.
Further reading: Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees’ statement (11 October, 2023)
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