Inquilab

Queers in Palestine

 

From Palestine to the World.

 

Sharing this submission sent in and originally published at queersinpalestine.noblogs.org

 

Language: Unworded by colonial violence, resisting erasure

After a year of an ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, attempts of expansion by the Zionist settler-colonial project, and of our ongoing steadfast global revolt, we are delivering a message from Palestine, to the world, while words cannot convey the depths of our collective trauma or the radical resistance we embody. Words collapse as we bear witness to the destruction of bodies, lands, histories, and futures. Language can no longer hold the weight of our suffering, our rage, our endless grief. It cannot do justice to our feelings and experiences. While capitalism and colonialism’s forces of death and destruction are wounding the world, we are still determined to deliver our voice, we are still moved by the force of life, and will always move with and towards it.

 

Palestine and Lebanon: One land in grief and struggle

The Zionist colonial entity still exists because colonial and imperialist powers are supporting and funding it. These are the same powers that produced the Sykes-Picot colonial agreement that fragmented Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and other Arab nations in 1916 by enforcing borders on our lands. We live with the implications of these systems. We deeply embody the knowledge of this violence, and have been trying to warn the world that these powers neither see our humanity nor respect our sovereignty. The world’s promises of justice and accountability through colonial international laws and institutions only reproduce violence and harm with no transformation. The very existence of these colonial powers is built on the (social) death and exploitation of others. The same tactics of annihilation that have been used in Gaza since last October are now also used in Lebanon. They are reaching us all––from surveillance tools of political repression, to weapons for direct killings. From corporations to other colonial structures, if we do not dismantle these systems, they will continue to consume us all.

 

Zionism: Threat against humanity

Zionist settler colonialism has been perpetrated against the land of Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. But it does not stop there: Zionism is a global threat. While Palestine is used as the Zionist entity’s testing-ground to develop technologies of oppression (including cyber invasions and technological warfare) to control the people and suppress resistance worldwide, these Zionist inventions are exported and used for state violence to further colonial, imperial and capitalist expansion. The Zionist entity’s influence extends to geopolitics and resource extraction across Latin America and Africa––from mining projects in Namibia, to diamond extraction in Angola, and ‘Cop City’ in the USA–– and its aggression can only be contained through struggle and abolition.

 

The myth of individualism and separation

Individualism is an instrument of the systems of (neo)liberalism, racial capitalism and colonialism. It is designed to destroy our collectives and community practices through fragmentation and separation––from each other, the land, the planet and universe, and from ourselves. The illusion of separation denies our autonomy, our sovereignty over our bodies and land. We resist this colonial myth of individualism that serves oppressive systems. We are interdependent and our struggles are interconnected and intersectional––there is no such thing as individual liberation. No one is free, until we are all free.

 

On the path of abolition and transformation

Our reality, and our queer, feminist, radical truths, cannot be quantified. They cannot be reduced to data, to screens, to consumable images. The genocidal violence we face and resist everyday, is not an event to be documented. This deep rupture is a tearing apart of the fabric of life that demands something more than mere speech. It demands action and transformation. And it necessitates abolition. Abolition not just through the dismantling of prisons and the destruction of all carceral systems—but the refusal of all structures that seek to imprison and kill our bodies, our desires, our lands, our futures. Abolition is a direct confrontation with the forces that seek to erase us on the path towards life-affirming and systemic transformation, it is to radically imagine and build a different future from the present.

 

Hope as a radical practice

Our bodies ache with exhaustion, our spirits bruised by the relentless weight of oppression. In this land stolen from us, where we live the genocide in our every moment, hope is a radical practice. We are warriors, survivors, rebels. We will not be extinguished. The world’s indifference is a betrayal––we know that. We will not allow our disappointment to consume us. Fuelled by our collective rage and grief, we unite and empower us. Still amidst these difficult times, we channel our hope as a collective force of resistance to the very foundation of these unjust systems, in Palestine and everywhere. We will not only survive this genocide, we will thrive––reclaiming our stolen land and building a future free from the chains of patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism and zionism.

 

Constant transformative struggle towards collective liberation

One year later, we continue to call for the world to:

• Be radical, feminist, queer, intersectional, decolonial, and abolitionist in our resistances: fuelled by rage, love and longing for justice, transformation and collective liberation.
• Resist the hegemonic colonial narrative: do not stop talking about Palestine with your kin, queer siblings, friends and community. Challenge the colonial and Islamophobic framing of Palestinian and racialized voices as antisemitic.
• Escalate all forms of disruption of the colonial and capitalist systems enabling this violence. Rage and strike against the use of your labor and tax money to fund, support, and endorse settler colonialism and genocide. Fight against governments and hold them accountable for their military, diplomatic, economic, and political relations with and support to Israel.
• Rage and grieve as radical forces for change: together we channel our anger and grief towards a world free of Zionism and all other systems of oppression.
• Radically imagine a different world and put this imagination into practice by organizing to fight current systems and build the future from the present.

Always re-membering: honoring those we have lost, and standing steadfast in resistance by all means possible.

 

From Palestine to the World: October 2024