1. What is the history of your group? What kind of political action or work do you typically engage in? If your group is a local chapter of a national organization, is there anything that distinguishes the platform/praxis of your chapter from that of the national level? How do you maintain political unity within your organization? What do you see as the status of Palestinian solidarity work in the U.S.?

In 2014, a loosely affiliated network of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters in New York formed New York City Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP-NYC). Our goal was to bring together SJP chapters from across New York City to collaborate, share ideas, resources and build campus organizations together. We also wanted SJP chapters to think about building organizations that could engage in work beyond college campuses. We imagined an inclusive space for students, yes, but also community members, workers and youth in general. Collectively, we began to shift our organizing focus away from an academic arena and toward the direct needs of neighborhoods from where we hailed, all while continuing to center the Palestinian liberation struggle.

At that time, various SJP chapters came together for a city-wide convergence. Those of us present shared a common desire to support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We had a common understanding of the legacy of mutual, international liberation work and support. And we decided to join thousands to march in the streets demanding an end to imperialism, “from Ferguson to Gaza.” Working together to support the BLM movement, our different SJPs coalesced. This shared organizing experience resulted in the formation of what would eventually become our current organization.

As NYC SJP, we sought to bring a revolutionary, internationalist analysis of the Palestinian struggle back into a movement that had been divided for over two decades since the disastrous Oslo Accords. To do this, we formed alliances and relationships with other national liberation movements and supported the anti-imperialist movement within the City University of New York (CUNY). We recognized CUNY as a university system that had been shaped historically through primarily Black and Puerto Rican working class student struggle in the 60s, and whose legacies were present in the current day.

We felt that in order to push the movement forward we had to begin to define what our role was outside of Palestine. We considered these questions both as an organization and, for many of us, as part of the Palestinian diaspora. 

Our organizational direction further developed through our stance on BDS; we sought to address the limits of the student struggle for Palestine. In this vein, we wanted to consider the importance of rooting our organizing work where we were. This meant prioritizing work that took place not in halls of academia, but in the streets of our own communities, local shops, and social centers. 

As mostly youth organizers based in universities, we analyzed our conditions and developed appropriate strategies. For instance, we were critical of the four year student organizing model which we believed inherently limited the youth collectives it births. We also felt that it created unnecessary divisions between students and non-students. It alienated us from youth and community members. 

By shift to an off-campus organization, first, we could continue the work we had already begun. Second, it allowed us to reorient the work in a meaningful manner towards our home community. We wanted to built lasting ties with other organizations in our struggle for collective liberation in the spirit and legacy of the internationalist Palestinian revolutionary movement. Our longest-lasting relationship was with our sisters and brothers in the movement for national liberation in the Philippines. Through our connections with the movement for National Democracy in the Philippines, we were invited to become a member organization of the International League of People’s Struggle, an international alliance of hundreds of mass organizations around the world.

In 2018, we changed our name to “Within Our Lifetime” to mark our development as an organization. This name change marked a shift in the way we perceive ourselves as integrally linked to the lessons we learned from youth and elders in our communities. It marked a recognition of these histories which have shown us our failures and guided us to our successes. Finally, it recognized a nod to our allies both inside and outside the movement for Palestinian national liberation.

Base building work within the Palestinian community is not new. Throughout the long history of the Zionist usurpation of the Palestinian homeland, diasporic people have organized in their neighborhoods. These neighborhood organizations have supported the movement for Palestinian liberation. It was the Oslo Accords, which Edward Said called the instrument of Palestinian surrender, that fractured of the PLO and created a crisis of strategy that we are still picking up the pieces from. Our goal is unity among Palestinians; however, we will not accept a movement dictated by grants and salaried employees, nor will our language be constrained by funding and outside interests. We are here for the complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, from the north to the south, through the holy streets of al-Quds down to the shores of Haifa. 

Our political unity is not based on having the same position on every single issue. Rather, we create political unity through practical, grassroots work. Our unity comes from the daily struggle for the collective life of the organization. We aim to create spaces for popular education, avenues for cultural resistance and a general mobilization of students, youth, elders, mothers, fathers, workers and all sections of Palestinian society in the United States to reclaim their historic place in the resistance. This has led to fostering organic ties with community, not simply spaces dominated by political jargon and powerpoint presentations. The space we create is one where Palestinian and Arab youth feel grounded and can take ownership. We strive to foster a collective imagination of a liberated Palestine. We aim to create a self-sufficient community grounded in oral history and family relics, practicing Dabke and other forms of culture as a tool to assert our Palestinian identities and the Palestinian character of our neighborhood. 

To be clear, we do not believe that the mobilization of diaspora is mere solidarity work; instead we see it as inseparable from the struggle back home and part of the rich legacy of exiled Palestinian organizing and mobilizing for our return. To imply otherwise would be an insult to those who have been martyred in exile, to those who have lived and died and endlessly worked all waking hours for the goal of return over these nearly seventy-one years. Labeling diasporic Palestinian organizing as mere solidarity work is a new phenomenon, one that correlates directly to the attempted liquidation of the Palestinian struggle in the Oslo era. It seeks to place us here, and Palestinians there, to label us Americans, and label them Palestinians, all the while criminalizing our political organizations both here and in Palestine, and imprisoning those who send even medical supplies to our people in Palestine. 

Today’s situation is a much different than when we founded our collective in 2015. Nowadays, we see an unprecedented level of support for Palestine in this country. However, what does that mean for us if the movement driving this support remains fractured and atomized campus by campus, city by city, and organization by organization? We are willing to work with any group that fights for the freedom of the homeland and we build towards the day where the Palestinian diaspora in this country speaks for ourselves in one uncompromising voice rich in dignity and blossoming with the fruits of resistance.

2. Groups working for the liberation of Palestine face repression from Zionist forces with material and ideological power who are ferociously opposed to the exposure of Israel as a settler-colonial, ethnocratic regime. On the one hand, we must consider groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Amcha Initiative, the Adelson Foundation, Canary Mission, and the countless Zionist organizations that work to protect the state of Israel through doxxing organizers, peddling anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim propaganda, equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and funding Zionist projects domestically and internationally. On the other hand, we must consider repressive state forces, university administrations, the possibilities of infiltration, and laws which criminalize Palestinian liberation work. How do you combat these forces and their varying forms of repression and attacks waged against your organization and the individuals within it? Are there tactics you find particularly useful in opposing smear campaigns and claims that attempt to instill fear into pro-Palestine organizations? Do you think the nature of repression against anti-Zionist organizing has changed in the past few years? Specifically, has repression taken a new form under a Trump administration?

Popular resistance needs to grow outside of Palestine now more than ever. While Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are shot with live ammunition by the israeli army simply for demonstrating unarmed, they continue to resist. Those of us on the outside must intensify popular mass resistance as Palestinians experience repression by paying with their lives. Any forms of resistance in Palestine are repressed through illegal detention, beatings, tear gas, collective punishment and murder. And while repressive state forces here have targeted Palestinian organizations through infiltration and criminalization, forms of repression like Canary Mission seem inconsequential in comparison. When Palestinians commit to their just struggle by marching to the border with nothing in their hands knowing they may never walk back, we too must develop a level of commitment and sacrifice by fighting back here as well. 

Blacklist websites like Canary Mission are nothing new. They have always existed to target Palestinian individuals and organizations alike, attributing false information and spreading rumors and generally attempting to discredit them. The only reason Canary Mission has any traction is because it does so on a massive scale; however, that is also why it should not be so worrisome. As a greater number of educators, professionals, young students and everyday people are put on the website, it continues to lose credibility. We are careful not to claim that Canary Mission had any credibility in the first place. Most of its profiles “exposing” individuals have the same copy-paste information about BDS, SJP, or whatever other organizations it adds to the list, with public tweets and video transcripts that are actually likely to sway the average reader to support Palestine. 

As for more direct pressure, we have faced  these forms of repression on campus ourselves, although they actually led to an outcome in our favor. In the fall of 2015, the vice-president of the Hunter Zionist Alliance at CUNY and, more revealingly, a member of the Zionist Organization of America, posed as a student sympathetic to Palestine, came to Hunter SJP meetings and texted a member calling for revenge and damage against the israeli and US governments. This text went unanswered of course, but we later realized this was part of a greater effort by the ZOA. This was revealed in the spring of 2016 when they wrote a 14-page letter falsely attributing anti-Semitic acts on campus to Palestinian organizers and demanding the shutdown of all SJP chapters across CUNY. To top it off, the New York State Senate simultaneously approved a resolution to cut $485 million in funds for CUNY in order to “send a message” that the colleges were not taking action in response to campus anti-Semitism. While students were rallying for tuition freezes, $15 minimum wage for workers and a change in the racist colonial curriculum, intense pressure was mounted on Palestinian activists to divide them from the rest of the student movement and take up our time from organizing. The state, the administration, external Zionist organizations and Zionist individuals on campus were all working together to create a smear campaign that would cripple Palestine organizing efforts on campus. 

The administration went forward with investigating SJP members, leadership, and faculty advisors over these unfounded claims, although it rarely investigates instances of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism for example. Our members were part of this investigation that ended up being resolved in the fall of 2016, after most of us had graduated. CUNY issued a public report. It not only cleared all of us from these accusations of anti-semitism but also came to the defense of words like “intifada” as protected free speech (terms which Zionists on campuses attempted to officially define as “violence against Jews”). The report read “we recognize that some take particular offense at SJP’s calls for intifada. Although the word means “a tremor, a shudder or a shiver” in Arabic, it has come to be a call for violence in a region that has already experienced far too much violence. Many find the word profoundly alarming. But CUNY administrators cannot ban the word, no matter how much they may regret its use.”

Through political education, consolidation and support for each other, our members were never worried. False narratives can be shut down just as easily as they are created, but the battle lies in shutting them down. Fearing further action or stepping away from organizing in times like these only serves to reinforce space for Zionist propaganda to run amok with these wild accusations. We maintained unity and clarity and drew from resources such as Palestine Legal. This is the best an organization can do in these situations. Had we allowed this to stop stop our work, it would have resulted in the real victory for organizations like the ZOA. Whether the administration stops us or not, their attempt is for us to stop ourselves. Continuing to organize, integrating with the student body or local communities, and maintaining a standard of discipline, security culture, and organization is the best recourse in these situations. 

3. Rare interview footage from 1970 of Ghassan Kanafani—a Palestinian revolutionary and novelist who was murdered by the Mossad, an Israeli intelligence group—was released last year. The interviewer Richard Carelton asks Kanafani, “Why won’t your organization [The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] engage in peace talks with the Israelis?” to which he responds, “You don’t mean exactly peace talks. You mean capitulation, surrendering.” When further pushed on the question of engaging in talks with Israeli leaders, Kanafani responds, “That’s a conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean.” The questions Carelton poses to Kanafani are hauntingly familiar in that they reflect the kind of questions—ones of dialogue, peace, and conflict resolution—Palestinians and those organizing around Palestinian liberation in the United States are burdened with by Zionists and their sympathizers today. How does your organization address the question of normalization and dialogue with Zionists? As organizers situated in the West, in a different historical and political context, do you adopt a similar political line as Kanafani and other revolutionary Palestinians rejecting any form of conversation? Do you see any political strategy in “dialoguing”? When (if at all) is it effective to have dialogue, and with whom? How do you grapple with the assumption that decades of material violence can be resolved in the terrain of speech?

Our organization and the various SJP chapters that we have come from have always had a strict and militant opposition to normalization. It is our opinion that it is not enough to only refuse to organize events with Zionist organizations, but we must be proactive in combating normalization. We have to confront our allies when they do normalize and maintain constant vigilance in our coalition spaces and conferences against Zionism, whichever form it takes. To heed Kanafani’s guidance means to make sure that the sword is not allowed in conversation with our neck — or any of our allies’. 

As Kanafani explains, dialogue and conflict resolution are never in a vacuum. They are never intended for “peace for peace’s sake.” Any political action has an intended political consequence, so when Zionists attempt to reach out to us or progressive organizations in general, we can be sure that the intended political outcome is the legitimization of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Leila Khaled, speaking about the normalization of the so-called ‘Committee on Communication with the Israeli Society’ described the aims of normalization succinctly:

The women of Palestine are stronger than the conspiracy of normalization. The real peace… will come with the end of occupation and colonialism, and this will come to pass through resistance with the goal of defeating the Zionist project on the basis of radical contradiction and confrontation, not by adapting or conciliating to its conditions and hegemony.

Often this comes in the form of Zionist student groups organizing bake sales with Muslim student groups or well meaning off-campus Islamic organizations unwittingly inviting Zionist speakers to speak at events in the name of multi-faith initiatives. These groups, funded by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, Israel on Campus Coalition, AIPAC, AMCHA Initiative and more have near unlimited resources to pour into astro-turfing a seemingly legitimate student movement in support of the colonizing entity in Palestine. In recent years they’ve even attempted to use leftist-lingo and strategies to emulate progressive movements in an attempt to chip away at transnational support of oppressed communities for the Palestinian national struggle. They will not pull their punches, so neither should we. 

We should be clear – that normalization of Zionism is not only a political battle; it is a security concern as well. We have seen in the past few years the proliferation of counter-insurgency style tactics of Zionist organizations to demoralize and collect raw data on thousands of Palestinians and their supporters on websites like SJP Watch, Canary Mission, and others. The FBI within the US and the occupation forces in Palestine at border crossings have used these resources to intimidate, harass and humiliate Palestinians in the diaspora. When we or our allies normalize Zionism, we let them into our spaces to further collect data and get a more complete view of our lives and social relationships, putting ourselves and our movement in danger.

There is an additional trap that Zionist’s attempt to pull us into when they ask to host a panel with us or pathetically employ that hackneyed platitude “let’s continue the conversation.” There is an inherent manipulation in Zionists claiming that “dialogue” between two student groups will advance “peace” in Palestine. First of all, the timeline and strategies of the Palestinian national liberation struggle will be decided by the Palestinian people and their resistance alone. Given the power imbalance between an astro-turfed political project (theirs) and a grassroots collective of diasporic Palestinians and their allies (us), this appeal for dialogue can only advance the strategic goals of the Zionist infrastructure here in the United States. Second of all, in regards to the claim that conversation can end the fighting, we cannot explain it better than Ghassan Kanafani, “Talk about what?…not fighting for what? People usually fight for something, and they usually stop fighting for something.” 

We talk when there is something to talk about. There is nothing to talk about with Zionists. We stop fighting when there is a reason to stop fighting. Until Zionism and Imperialism and the roots of poverty and war have been eradicated from this planet and the people of the world can breathe, we all cannot stop fighting.

4. The history of Black-Palestinian solidarity is a rich one which goes back to the liberation struggles of the 60s and 70s. With anti-imperialist movements springing up all over the world, Black-Palestinian solidarity networks were established transnationally, through organizations including the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Within the past few years, the parallels between the Black-Palestinian struggle have become more apparent, especially when we consider the uprisings of Ferguson, Missouri in conjunction with the Israeli attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014: as militarized police forces closed in on Ferguson residents who were protesting the killing of 16-year-old Michael Brown, Palestinians were enduring a brutal massacre carried out by the Israeli state. This moment pointed to the material and symbolic ways that the repression of Palestinians and Black people in the U.S. are linked. More specifically, Israel and the U.S. are involved in a number of police exchange programs, in which law enforcement “tactics” are passed from one imperial body to the other. Historically and currently, the US was and is a central power in the buildup of the Israeli arms-industrial base as well as the investment and growth of the security industry, reflected in the dominant presence of companies such as G4S. 

However, just as tools of violence are exchanged transnationally, so too are tools of resistance. Powerful gestures and actions of solidarity across borders are seen in Palestinians tweeting advice to Black Americans on how to deal with tear gas and the PFLP releasing a statement in solidarity with those resisting racist state violence. Since Ferguson, the movement has continued to grow—Movement for Black Lives has endorsed BDS in their platform, Black and Palestinian intellectuals continue to pressure Zionist university administrations, push divestment resolutions, and BLM has sent delegations to Palestine. Considering both the historical and contemporary linkages, what does Black-Palestinian solidarity look like to your organization? How do we address the parallels between the struggles for Black and Palestinian liberation while recognizing each within its specificity? How do today’s articulations of Black-Palestinian solidarity contribute to a broader anti-capitalist and anti-racist project?

The history of internationalist solidarity between the Palestinian and Black Liberation movements dates back to the 1960s and 70s, but in recent years these linkages have had a resurgence in the US and around the world. Alongside the mass surveillance, criminalization, incarceration and murder of Black people in the US is repression of Palestinian people in occupied Palestine by the US and israel. These phenomenon have been revealed to be collaborative projects. This growing consciousness has led to the re-alignment of grassroots struggle and popular resistance by Black and Palestinian communities and movements targeting the state and corporate entities that are waging genocide against our people and displacing us from our land. 

We recognize that systematic white supremacy and racism have been ingrained in the colonial project here in the US from the jumpstart, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and the establishment of modern capitalism on the plantations of Virginia. The soil is soaked in the blood of enslaved Africans and their descendants who built the wealth of the US through their forced labor. The zionist settler colonial project is also a white supremacist and inherently racist project aimed at extermination of the Arab Palestinian population. This much is clearly stated by the founder of zionism, Theodor Herzl. Therefore, zionism is also racism that calls for the mass exploitation, ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (also known as Malcolm X), one of the most prominent revolutionary theorists of the Black Liberation Movement in the 20th century, laid out the famous line “right to resist by any means necessary” as a response to the marginalization of the Black population in the US. He also showed his unapologetic anti-zionist solidarity by condemning the invasion and occupation of Palestine in the article titled “Zionist Logic” in the Egyptian Gazette after visiting Palestine in 1964. We believe in the right of Palestinians on the ground and the Palestinian refugee population to resist by any means necessary. We follow the legacy of Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, co-founder and Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, who also officially declared solidarity with the Palestinian Struggle in the article titled, “On the Middle East.” Newton put out an international call stating, “We support the Palestinians’ just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), also broke it down simply when he stated in 1968, “if white people who call themselves revolutionary or radical want our support, they have to condemn Zionism.”

In order to combat zionism, it is necessary to simultaneously combat racism and capitalism here in the US. In the US, gentrification is carried out through a standardized process in which Black and Brown and immigrant communities have their land occupied while they are surveilled, criminalized, incarcerated and pushed out of their communities. New real estate projects (read: settlements) are erected on the remains of the old neighborhood and new residents (read: settlers) move in, raising property values and pricing out the people who were already living there. In Palestine, the expansion of settlements has unfolded under dramatically different conditions, but the use of the police state and military to displace occupied people from their land and to make way for new settlement bears many resemblances. Furthermore, we know that the families of accused Palestinian “terrorists” and accused Black and Brown gang members are systematically evicted from their homes and displaced by the state. These practices are carried out in different contexts, but they share the same blueprint. 

Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Saheed Vassel, Stephon Clark, and the countless other Black youth who have been murdered in cold blood by the police state in the US are not just victims of individual police officers but victims of an entire system that is predicated on their criminalization, incarceration and murder. We understand that the arc of state violence against Black people in the US directly traces back to the first slave ship that reached the shores of Jamestown in 1619. Until the total liberation of Black people in the US from the prison system and from capitalist exploitation is achieved and reparations for Black people and other oppressed nations, including Native Americans are won, our struggles must go on.

Palestinian refugees expelled from Palestine during the Nakba in 1948 by the UN in Resolution 194 have never been granted the reparations they were promised to, neither in the form of money nor land. In the US, Black people have yet to receive reparations for centuries of genocide, slavery, segregation, housing discrimination, labor exploitation, mass incarceration, environmental racism, gentrification, and displacement. While historical experiences and present-day material realities that Black and Palestinian people face cannot and should not be conflated or generalized, the possibilities of sharing ideas, plans, resources, campaigns, and people power to work towards building a vision of what liberation and victory for our people looks like and what reparations for our people looks like has the potential to open up new arenas for mutual support and struggle. 

George L. Jackson, field marshal of the Black Panther Party in California’s prison system, stood firmly against the the international oppression of Black and Brown people. In his book, Blood in My Eye, he stated that destroying capitalism “will require cooperation and communication between our related parts; communion between colony and colony, nation and nation. The common bond will be the desire to humble the oppressor.” This includes the Palestinian diaspora, in the US building a strong, united front with the Black Liberation Movement, to build power for the people and globalize joint resistance in the streets. There is bi-directional solidarity as well as mutual recognition, united around two major components to combat global capitalism and racism that has been stressed by multiple revolutionaries and grassroots movements. This common ground, historically and at present, is called internationalism. Whether Huey P. Newton’s unconditional support for Palestine or Palestinian revolutionary Rasmea Odeh fighting social injustices in Ferguson, unity is key. 

Another form of joint resistance that has re-emerged in recent years are the prison strikes being waged by Palestinians in israeli prisons and by Black and Brown prisoners in the US prison system. The Palestinian prisoners movement organized a massive hunger strike in 2017 and continues to resist the israeli occupation from the inside through ongoing strikes. Last year a National Prison Strike in the US took place to challenge the capitalist system of modern prison slavery. Incarcerated workers, depending on the state, earn anywhere from no wages to 30 cents an hour. In each of these instances, we see expressions of mutual resistance strategies and solidarity.

Our role here as a Palestinian-led organization is to continue to expose the collaborative nature of oppression of Black and Palestinian people and to work toward a more coordinated popular resistance. Our struggles for liberation must be coordinated in response. We also see our role as continuing to strengthen and build organizational ties with Black anti-imperialist organizations who are struggling for Black and Palestinian liberation and the liberation of all people of oppressed nationalities: to support one another in the areas of political education, strategy building, campaigns and community work. 

The solidification of Black-Palestinian solidarity continues to contribute to a sharper understanding of the material reality of our oppression and the forces propelling it forward. As we chart the course for the future and build up the power of our communities, we look forward to being in an even stronger position to support one another in our offensives against white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism.

7. Benjamin Netanyahu’s tweet proclaiming  “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success,” reminds us that the project of erecting borders to surveil the mobility of biologized enemies does not simply occur “elsewhere.” These remarks about Trump and border technology tether Israeli state violence in Palestine to U.S. domestic policy. What work needs to be done in order to undo and challenge the view of Palestine as “elsewhere,” or, on the other hand, the view that Israeli violence is somehow exceptional? How does your organization and the broader movement for justice in Palestine address Zionism within a broader framework of anti-imperialism and decolonialism? 

On May 23, 2018, Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzáles, a 20-year old indigenous woman from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, was shot and killed by a Customs and Border Patrol agent in Rio Bravo, Texas. Just a week before Claudia was murdered in cold blood trying to reach the US white supremacist media commentator Ann Coulter tweeted an article detailing the massacre of over 60 unarmed Palestinian protesters by israeli occupation forces along Gaza’s eastern border on the first day of the Great Return March (March 30). She added the comment “can we do that?” Coulter later followed up by tweeting “if you shoot one to encourage the others, maybe they’ll learn.” While it’s tempting to dismiss Ann Coulter as a fascist provocateur (which of course she is) her comparison is not just a far-right fantasy; it’s a material reality that spans from the US-Mexico border to occupied Palestine and beyond. 

At its core, the US and israeli projects of border militarization do not simply run parallel to each other but are deeply intertwined and entangled. Under the guise of counter-terrorism in the wake of the second intifada and the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US and israeli war machines carried out massive border militarization efforts. When we do the work of investigation, we find these two entities are not just ideologically and politically aligned, but directly investing in, funding, arming, training, and protecting one another. These conclusions demand that we not only connect our struggles symbolically but do the work of integrating our movements so that we can identify our common oppressors and direct our collective efforts at weakening them in service of the liberation of our land and people. 

With the passage of the Secure Fence Act in the US in 2006, Congress authorized the construction of 700 miles of border fencing and barriers on the southern border. “With a price tag, on average, of $4 million a mile,” as journalist Todd Miller reported in 2016, “these border walls, barriers, and fences have proven to be one of the costliest border infrastructure projects undertaken by the United States.” Beyond the cost to taxpayers, the militarization of the southern border has had devastating consequences for the land, for the indigenous people who live on it, and for all of the migrants, asylum seekers and refugees like Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzáles who risk their lives trying to reach the southern border of the US, fleeing the violence of US imperialism. 

In the wake of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, the Tohono O’odham Nation which has inhabited present-day southern Arizona and the northern state of Sonora in Mexico for thousands of years found itself cut into pieces. The traditional passages between O’odham villages on opposite sides of the US-border now sealed off. In a 2014 interview, Alex Soto, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation and an organizer with O’odham Solidarity Across Borders, explained how the 28,000 members of the O’odham Nation were currently “caught in the midst of colonial policies that are militarizing our lands,” referencing the increased presence of Border Patrol agents, checkpoints, drones and vehicle barriers. As Peter Heiderpriem notes in the American Indian Law Journal in 2015, as a result of the United States government intensifying border enforcement on the Tohono O’odham reservation post 9/11, “O’odham can only pass through the border at official points, and O’odham without sufficient documentation (e.g., birth certificates, tribal IDs, etc.) cannot cross.” This practice is reminiscent of the israeli ID system imposed on Palestinians living under occupation where they are required to present these to occupation forces at checkpoints. 

On the website of the Tohono O’odham Nation, the impacts of the ever-evolving militarized border are described in detail:

On countless occasions, the U.S. Border Patrol has detained and deported members of the Tohono O’odham Nation who were simply traveling through their own traditional lands, practicing migratory traditions essential to their religion, economy and culture. Similarly, on many occasions U.S. Customs have prevented Tohono O’odham from transporting raw materials and goods essential for their spirituality, economy and traditional culture. Border officials are also reported to have confiscated cultural and religious items…The U.S.-Mexico border has become an artificial barrier to the freedom of the Tohono O’odham to traverse their lands, impairing their ability to collect foods and materials needed to sustain their culture and to visit family members and traditional sacred sites….The division of O’odham lands has resulted in an artificial division of O’odham society. O’odham bands are now broken up into 4 federally recognized tribes.

When it comes to the US and israel – the theft, annexation, destruction, carving up, and militarization of indigenous lands is not unique. Rather, it’s a core feature of colonialism. As Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, “for a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” Thinking practically about decolonization, then, requires us to situate the struggle against militarized borders as part of a larger struggle for national liberation being waged by colonized people against their colonizers. The root cause is not the walls themselves but the colonial entities that ordered their construction. Because we recognize that the engine propelling US and israeli colonialism forward is capitalism, our sights are not set on these two governments alone, but on the corporations and the industries that are profiting off of the ongoing theft and militarization of indigenous lands. 

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration set in motion the remaking of the southern border in the shadow of the US war machine. The next year in November 2002, Bush signed the Homeland Security Act, which combined 22 federal departments and agencies into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the largest restructuring of the federal government since the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency were established in 1947. Its inaugural 2003 budget was $38 billion. As Todd Miller writes, “the enforcement landscape has changed drastically since that first wall was built in 1994. The post-9/11 border is now both a war zone and a showcase for corporate surveillance.” This includes:

…remote video or mobile surveillance systems, implanted motion sensors that set off alarms in hidden operational control rooms, spy towers made by the Israeli company Elbit Systems, Predator B drones built by General Atomics [and] VADER radar systems manufactured by the defense giant Northrup Grumman that, like so many similar technologies, have been transported from the battlefields of Afghanistan or Iraq to the U.S. border. 

This remaking of the southern border has brought the US and israeli military industrial complexes closer together than ever before, blurring the line where one ends and the other begins. 

In 2000 (the same year the Second Intifada broke out), two israeli companies, Elbit Systems and El-Op, merged to create the largest publicly-traded military contractor in israel. Two years later, in 2002, israel started building its apartheid wall. At 440 miles long, it is more than twice the length of the 1949 green line. Today 85% of the wall runs through the West Bank. The wall has effectively carved up the West Bank and East Jerusalem into an archipelago of bantustans, annexing illegal israeli settlements and military installations and cutting off entire Palestinian villages from their lands and from each other. In 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall was illegal under international law. Yet the israeli government ignored the advisory opinion and, to this day, the international community has failed to act to hold israel to account. 

We cannot stress enough that the israeli occupation of Palestine did not begin in 1967, but started in 1948 during the Nakba when over 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated or destroyed and 1 million Palestinians were driven from their lands by israeli terrorist militias. The 1967 occupation and the illegal settlements that have been built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the last 50 years and the apartheid wall that has been erected in the last thirteen years are but the latest chapters in the ongoing 70 year history of the Palestinian Nakba. 

Since 2002, Elbit Systems has been one of the main suppliers of surveillance technology that has been integrated into the israeli apartheid wall. In June 2004, US Customs and Border Patrol started flying Elbit Systems drones on Arizona’s southern border. Under the terms of the contract, Elbit provided drones, “ground control stations, operational crews and support personnel for flight support of border patrol operations.” Three years later in 2007 Elbit Systems established Elbit Systems of America, LLC as a subsidiary in the United States to reflect the parent company’s intentions to pivot into American markets. With this, the presence and influence of the israeli military-industrial complex in the US has grown exponentially. Since its founding, Elbit Systems of America has received hundreds of millions of dollars in DHS contracts to install high-tech surveillance towers along the southern border, Elbit Systems of America is now also a main sponsor of the Border Security Expo which brings together private military/surveillance contractors with law enforcement agencies from across the country.

While Elbit Systems is one of the most tangible case studies of the ways in which capital flows between israeli and American markets, there is no shortage of other examples. The same tear gas canisters manufactured by Combined Tactical Systems in Pennsylvania were fired on Black protesters in Ferguson as well as well as Palestinian protesters by israeli occupation forces. A subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries was one of eight companies chosen by the Trump administration in September 2017 to build a prototype of a border wall with Mexico. 

But identifying these material connections is not enough. 

Beyond the southern border, DHS has transformed the landscape of the militarization of the police state in the US. Between 2002 and 2014, DHS handed out $41 billion in grants to local and state law enforcement agencies to buy equipment earmarked for “counter-terrorism” directly from private contractors at events like the Border Security Expo and Urban Shield, but DHS specifies that once acquired, the equipment can be used for any other law-enforcement purpose. While the federal government has subsidized law enforcement agencies buying directly from the private sector, NGOs like the Anti-Defamation League have stepped in to further cement the ties between US law enforcement and israeli occupation forces. The ADL’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar, an intensive week long course established in 2004, has brought hundreds of law enforcement executives from the US to occupied Palestine to attend workshops and trainings by senior commanders in the israel national police, intelligence and security services and the army. 

While US military aid to israel–which stands at $4 billion a year and makes up over 50% of ALL US foreign military funding – is the most direct manifestation of the US empire’s role in propping up the israeli occupation of Palestine, the elaborate web of government contracts, subsidiaries and NGO influences running in both directions has effectively blurred the line between the public and the private sector, between governments and corporations. 

What we can say with confidence, though, is that there is nothing exceptional about the violence of the US and israeli war machines. As anti zionists and anti imperialists in the belly of the beast in the United States, we recognize that it is our taxes that fund US military aid to israel, that it is our taxes that fund the militarization of the US-Mexico border, and that it is our taxes that fund the militarization of the police state and the mass surveillance, criminalization and incarceration of our communities. These processes are carried out in unison, and depend upon each other. Our role in the United States must be to connect the struggle for Palestinian national liberation to the struggle of all Black and Brown and oppressed nationality people in the US and more broadly in North America. Our goals must be to weaken the links between the NGOs, corporations and government entities that are facilitating the ongoing militarization, destruction and theft of our people’s lands, and ultimately, to dismantle the occupations that exist and liberate the land for our people so that we can return to it. 

As we continue to analyze and map the infrastructures of state and corporate power, violence and control that oppress us, its weak spots and its vulnerabilities will continue to be exposed. This will provide the opportunity for us to go on the offensive. From boycotts to direct actions to mobilizing workers to strike and shut down supply chains, the possibilities of resistance constantly shift and morph as the conditions around us evolve. Our struggles continue until liberation. 

8. In her article Tricontinental solidarity and Palestine today, Maren Mantovani writes about Che Guevara’s letter to the Tricontinental Conference, in which he “pointedly stated: solidarity ‘is not a matter of wishing success to those who are being attacked.’” This critique of vacuous proclamations of solidarity provides us with a useful entrypoint in which we can examine contemporary understandings of solidarity. The term ‘solidarity’ is one which is often thrown around and runs the risk of being reduced to symbolic gestures, including petitions or Facebook statuses circulated among politically-aligned online communities. Both historically and currently, what has solidarity with Palestinians looked like for your organization? What are the limits and barriers that prevent your group from being able to concretely or materially support Palestinians?

In our transition from a solidarity organization to a Palestinian- and Arab-led organization, we have come to understand that what is needed is not just for Palestinians in the diaspora and their allies to be in solidarity with their compatriots fighting on the ground in Palestine. Rather, what is needed is for the refugee population across the world, who may not have direct contact with the enemy, to articulate themselves as a national force and key component of the Palestinian nation. To paraphrase Che Guevara’s remarks at the Tricontinental Conference, we do not just wish success to our sisters and brothers in Khan Al-Ahmar, in Gaza, and in Bil’in, but we consider the campaigns we are undertaking even far away in Brooklyn, New York, to be a critical component of the Palestinian struggle. Building a movement in the United States is not only a motivational or symbolic gesture which encourage our people in Palestine to continue the struggle (as we reciprocally are encouraged and inspired by their movement). In reconstituting a movement of Palestinians abroad, we are actively contributing to the larger movement against Zionism and imperialism.

This is not without historical basis. National liberation groups, including and especially the Palestinian national liberation movement, have often been reconstituted and sometimes even stronger in the diaspora than within the physically colonized lands. Historically, the Palestinian national liberation movement has not only consisted of its people within the historical confines of Mandate Palestine, but of mass mobilization of Palestinians in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Egypt, and other countries, who actively took on resistance against the continuing Nakba, with the founding of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964. It was the reconstitution of diaspora groups like the General Union of Palestinian Students in Cairo and the Arab Nationalist Movement in Beirut that reinvigorated the Palestinian struggle in the 60s and led to the formation of the major political organizations of the Palestinian people with the capability to struggle within historic Palestine. 

Of course, currently, this is complicated by the fact that the major Western powers and israel have prohibited political communication between the diaspora and their friends and relatives in Palestine itself.  Of the four biggest political organizations of the Palestinian people, three have been designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the United States, and the only one that has been delisted was also considered a terrorist organization for the majority of its existence. This puts incredible legal limits on communication between different sections of the Palestinian people: in ‘48, abroad, in the occupied territories, in the refugee camps, etc. This puts a strain on the development, construction and articulation of a unified, comprehensive Palestinian national liberation movement. Indeed the limits are so severe that even aid groups operating in Palestine and abroad can be targeted under these restrictive laws.  In the case of the Holy Land Five, we have seen even basic charity work in the service of those oppressed in Gaza can be criminalized. So we face the additional challenge of building a unified movement that can challenge these divisions imposed from external forces like the United States and israel.

We look also to the struggles of the Algerian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Filipino, and other oppressed people as prime examples of movements that were able to connect a diaspora pushed out by imperialism with those who remained at home to fight colonialism and imperialism.  Particularly relevant to our position is the discourse in William Klein’s documentary Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther in which, during the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Cleaver explains (after meeting with Yasser Arafat) the policy of the Black Panther Party on international solidarity. Quoting BPP Chairman Bobby Seale he says that “the best care package that we could send to other liberation struggles around the world is the work we do at home.”  For our organization, we build solidarity through highlighting specific causes of the Palestinian people: political prisoners, the demolition of Khan Al Ahmar, the ethnic cleansing of Al-Quds, but also to use these struggles to build organizational capacity to create a global and unified movement of Palestinian people and their allies. This is not limited just to solidarity with those struggling on the ground, but with the capability to confront an entire system of imperialism of which Zionism is only one piece.  Our work to build a Palestinian- and Arab-led movement in the United States (the chief funder and political ally of israel) and to connect our struggle with other oppressed groups is our greatest care package and highest form of solidarity.

9. While the notion of a “Palestinian voice(s)” is usefully asserted within organizing spaces and pro-Palestine activist discourse, it risks potentially homogenizing Palestinian voices and obfuscating internal divisions. What does it mean to center Palestinian voices and demands within your organization? Whose voices/demands are prioritized? How should the solidarity movement in the U.S. address the question of internal political divisions between Palestinians? 

The Palestinian people are not a monolith. While they are undoubtedly in consensus on liberating their homeland, the preferred method to do so remains a point of debate. Centering Palestinian voices is a must for any organization in the Palestinian liberation movement. However, we seek to do this in a way where our politics are always in command of our positions and actions. We say “ours” with the knowledge and confidence that our leadership is primarily Palestinian, and that their stake in a solution to the occupation and apartheid Zionist regime matters no more or less than that of any other Palestinian.

We call for a one-state solution because that solution is in the interest of the Palestinian people worldwide. When we speak of the Palestinian people, we are speaking of all Palestinians, including those in the diaspora who consist of the majority of Palestinian people. Most refugees and diasporic Palestinians cannot return to their homes even in a hypothetical two state solution; their towns are now israel. When we take a position like being pro one-state it is informed by what we understand as the desires of a majority of Palestinians.

We do not insist that someone’s viewpoint is valid merely on the basis of their Palestinian identity, however. A Palestinian voice will always be relevant in discourse about the occupation of Palestine, but it will not always be correct. If this were not the case, we would legitimize the likes of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, a known Zionist-collaborator whose regime has been used to undermine the Palestinian liberation movement, not to liberate Palestine. We can draw parallels between the Palestinian collaborators of the Zionists who facilitate apartheid and occupation and immigration patrol agents of Latino descent in the US, or cops from oppressed nationality backgrounds – groups whose presences in oppressive structures do not advance the national liberation struggles of their communities but in fact undermine them.

It is incumbent upon the solidarity movement in America to draw the distinction between what Palestinians want and what Palestinian officials in power claim Palestinians want. This is achieved partially by having Palestinian leadership.