{"id":11683,"date":"2023-11-05T21:20:41","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T02:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=11683"},"modified":"2025-01-19T21:50:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T02:50:47","slug":"support-palestinians-when-they-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/11\/support-palestinians-when-they-fight\/","title":{"rendered":"Support Palestinians when they fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

L<\/span>ast month, inmates of the Zionist state\u2019s de facto concentration camp in the Gaza Strip executed a desperate, yet powerfully courageous, escape.<\/p>\n

The scene shocked the world. Just four years prior, Palestinian protesters had tried week after week for nearly a year to end their imprisonment in Gaza during the Great March of Return in 2018\u20132019. They paid a heavy price<\/a> for their resistance as Israeli snipers killed more than 200 protesters, medics, and journalists, and wounded some 36,000 people in a centralized campaign to maim<\/a> as many Palestinians as possible. Thousands of people were shot in their limbs, resulting in over 150 amputations due to Israeli bullets.<\/p>\n

Then, on October 7, the border fence came down. Members of the Palestinian resistance streamed across the border, celebrated on captured Israeli tanks, and dealt the most serious blow to Israeli Occupation Forces in generations. In the weeks since, the Israeli regime has put an end to the celebrations in a brutal, genocidal bombing campaign spanning four countries and murdering more than 9,000 Palestinians and counting. But the spirit of resistance ignited by Al-Aqsa Flood has spread throughout the globe. Despite heavy repression of activism in solidarity with Palestine in the state of Israel\u2019s many European and settler-colonial allies, the U.S. included, millions have taken to the streets in cities and towns around the world to call for an end to the bombing of Gaza and in support of Palestinians\u2019 ongoing struggle for freedom from the river to the sea.<\/p>\n

\"Long
Gaza: The Great March of Return. Screen cap of a 2019 Al Jazeera video<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This outpouring of international support for the Palestinian struggle has challenged the foundations of political hegemony throughout the globe. Governments everywhere see the radicalizing potential of the Palestinian freedom struggle and thus have criminalized protests in solidarity with Palestine, banned the keffiyeh, the Palestinian flag, and other Palestinian nationalist symbols, and encouraged workplace-based repression of pro-Palestine sentiment. And yet, millions of people have proven the inadequacy of such measures to stem the tide of solidarity, turning out in massive numbers to illegal demonstrations because, for the exploited and oppressed of every country, the significance of the battle for justice in Palestine is apparent. Not out of charity but because of a collective recognition that a Palestinian David\u2019s blow against the Goliath of Israeli apartheid and U.S. imperialism would reverberate through the struggles of working and oppressed people everywhere. In the images of fences toppling and resistance spreading\u2014particularly throughout the Arab world\u2014we saw a glimpse of new possibilities. And instinctively, in our millions, the Palestinian struggle became our struggle\u2014and so the scope of protest and resistance ballooned.<\/p>\n

This moment is a crystal clear demonstration of the importance and meaning of socialist internationalism. All our movements owe a tremendous debt to the Palestinian fighters and activists sacrificing everything in the struggle for freedom. We pay it back in small measure by staying loud, staying militant, and staying in the streets to demand an end to the genocide and a free Palestine.<\/p>\n

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Even as millions of people around the world have come to see themselves in Palestinians\u2019 struggle for self-determination\u2014and indeed, their fight for their very survival\u2014a devastating number of our comrades on the broad left here in the United States have missed the significance of October 7th. In a minority of cases, but nevertheless too many, it was not the courageous act of resistance which drew activists\u2019 solidarity, but the suffering of the Israeli settlers still dwelling in the racist, colonial communes that first enlisted Jewish workers from across Europe in the theft of Palestinian land and the eradication of Palestinian people.<\/p>\n

While coverage in the New York Times<\/em> and Washington Post<\/em><\/a> would have one believe that the Left had responded to the violence of October 7th with a collective, crazed baying for the blood of Israeli children, the substance of this specter of a blood-lustful, anti-human Left was seldom substantiated with more than statements of basic, principled, unconditional support for Palestinian resistance. In many cases, this unfounded specter was raised from among the Left\u2019s own ranks.<\/p>\n