We are Unfree Until Palestine is Free
Audio version of the statement.
This statement in solidarity with Palestine was created on November 9, 2023 and featured in the Speaking Out of Place podcast episode: “Artists, Writers, Publishers Speak Out in Solidarity with Palestine.” Please check the podcast to listen to other statements by James Schamus, Ben Ehrenreich, Judith Gurevich, Raja Shehadeh, Ariel Dorfman, Bora Chung.
By Intan Paramaditha
In 2023, we are witnessing the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and churches in Gaza along with the strengthening of brick-solid structures of colonialism. The United States and its allies continue to provide Israel with impunity to commit war crimes.
In 2023, we are witnessing the failure of international law and institutions to protect the civilians of Gaza.
In 2023, we are also witnessing the largest, the loudest, and the most resilient transnational solidarity movements, crossing cultural and geographical borders, to support Palestine— in Washington DC, London, Sydney, Madrid, Krakow, Jakarta, Cairo, and many other cities. Protestors around the world— mobilized by Palestinians, Muslims, Jewish communities, feminists, unions, in hundreds, in thousands, in millions, took to the streets to chant: “Free, free Palestine.” “Stop the genocide.” “Stop the occupation.”
When protesters in Egypt took Tahrir Square, Fatima Said wrote, “We are not freeing Palestine. Palestine is freeing us.”
What this statement reveals is the new way of seeing that is open to us as we stand with Palestine, when we learn more about the Nakba, about Zionism as a European settler colonial project that continues to invade, displace, and criminalize Palestinians, about the complicity of many Western countries. Suddenly we realize that we are unfree.
Our own oppression cannot be compared to the losses of lives, homes, and land, and the dehumanization that Palestinians have experienced since 1948. But the colonial, capitalist structures of Western imperial powers that oppress the Palestinians are also the ones that are responsible for structural racism, exploitation of workers, oppression of the indigenous people, expropriation of natural resources, and environmental destructions around the world. Settler colonialism is a structure and a transnational affair.
The world that we are living in no longer makes sense. In persisting to resist, and to live, Palestinians teach us to reject this world and to imagine a new one.
When we chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” we imagine not only the time when Palestine will be free but also the time when we end the racist, colonial, patriarchal, global capitalist systems that privilege certain flows of people, capital, and ideas and yet at the same time demonize others, create open-air prisons, and enable mass killings.
Let’s keep using our voices to demand Israel to stop the genocide, to hold world leaders with blood on their hands accountable, to stand up against oppressive forces that hide behind words like civilization and democracy, to strengthen transnational connections against colonialism, from Gadigal to Gaza, from Palestine to Papua.
To tweak from Audre Lorde’s quote (because Palestine is a feminist issue): We are unfree when Palestine is unfree. So don’t stop talking about Palestine and keep imagining. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.