{"id":12258,"date":"2024-01-08T23:04:37","date_gmt":"2024-01-09T04:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=12258"},"modified":"2024-01-13T23:28:35","modified_gmt":"2024-01-14T04:28:35","slug":"we-are-fighting-for-palestinian-liberation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/01\/we-are-fighting-for-palestinian-liberation\/","title":{"rendered":"We are fighting for Palestinian liberation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n early December, the Los Angeles branch of Tempest Collective co-organized a Palestine teach-in at All Saints\u2019 Church with Pasadena City College\u2019s Anti-War Club, Middle East and North African Students\u2019 association, and other campus and community allies. The event drew around 70 attendees at its height, featuring presentations from Tempest members, Anti-War Club students, and a local Palestinian community member who came from Gaza. We publish here an edited transcript of Tempest LA member Den\u00e9e Jackson\u2019s speech on centering solidarity with Palestine from the position of intersecting identities.<\/em><\/p>\n

I want to begin by sharing my identities to position myself in this conversation. I\u2019m biracial\u2014Black and white\u2014queer, Jewish, working-class, and a woman. Intersectional solidarity is important to me. It\u2019s life for me and for my people who identify with multiple marginalized identities. Many of these identities, as some of you may know already, have been weaponized by Zionists in their propaganda to support the genocide of Palestinians. So, what I\u2019m going to be talking about today is solidarity, and I will begin by talking about Black solidarity with Palestine.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, Black liberation struggles were fighting for basic human dignity, which Black folks have never had in the United States. There were many movements going on at the time, such as the Civil Rights Movement.<\/p>\n

I want to quote Martin Luther King Jr., who has been weaponized by Zionists to say that he supports Israel. And indeed, he was once in support of the State of Israel and had a trip scheduled with a delegation to the Holy Land. It was interrupted by the Six-Day War, and so he canceled his trip. Later he was quoted in an interview saying<\/a> that Israel should \u201cgive up the land\u201d back to the Palestinians. Today, we have all kinds of social media to figure out what is happening on the ground in Palestine. In 1967, that wasn\u2019t the case. But once he learned about what was happening and raised his political consciousness, King knew better. He knew that solidarity with Palestinians meant land back. Also, the Black Panthers used an image of Leila Khaled, who was a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I highly recommend reading her biography<\/a>. The Panthers used her image to articulate their politics around the global struggle against colonial powers, because they knew that it was the same colonial powers that oppressed folks all over the world.<\/p>\n

I also want to share a victorious example of Black-Palestinian solidarity. In Detroit in the early 1970s, Palestinians and other Arab Americans took inspiration from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to create their own organization. In 1973, they went on strike<\/a> to pressure the United Auto Workers (UAW) to divest from Israeli state bonds. Today, the UAW is the largest union to sign on to a ceasefire resolution<\/a>, building on this legacy of workers\u2019 solidarity for Palestine.<\/p>\n

We know Black folks in the United States were stolen from their ancestral lands, just as Palestinians have been displaced from theirs. Neither group has ever been given equal opportunities in life, and similar structures of oppression are shared between Black and Palestinian peoples. So, I want to talk about abolition as a step toward liberation led by Black people in the United States, which also means applying abolitionist principles to a free Palestine.<\/p>\n

I want to call in a couple of books that have really helped to define my identity as a pro-Palestine abolitionist: Mariame Kaba\u2019s We Do This \u2019Til We Free Us<\/a> and Angela Davis\u2019 Freedom Is a Constant Struggle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, first, what is abolition today? Abolition is completely eliminating systems of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment. It\u2019s not just \u201cdon\u2019t give them any more funding,\u201d but completely destroying them because we know that policing and prison are death-making institutions and they serve to reproduce violence, even though we’re taught that they are supposed to promote safety.<\/p>\n

Surveillance companies and punitive tactics in the United States operate the same as those in Israel. Israel is central to the militarization of police forces globally, and in the United States, police chiefs to campus police have been trained by Israeli forces.<\/p>\n