Our Statement for Palestine

Dear readers,

We come to you with broken hearts and broken minds, aching for yet thousands more of Palestinian lives taken by settler colonial violence before they were able to experience liberation. We do not want to offer a statement that performatively reaffirms our solidarity with the Palestinian struggle oriented towards this liberation. We want to offer something useful for it.

We would like all of us to understand that the powerlessness so many of us have been feeling these past couple of weeks is what we are doomed to feel, years after years, if the massive beautiful impetus of solidarity for a free Palestine only happens during the most murderous, most spectacular forms of Israeli settler colonial violence.

We would like all of us to understand that if this impetus were to be sustained in time, months after the dreadful return to what many will call “normal”—normal being a more swallowable reality where only the slow, mundane, daily violence is at work—the international support Palestinians have been generously nurturing for decades will have an actual chance to contribute to decolonization.

What this impetus sustained in time looks like is up to you and depends on your own context. We would like to tell everyone that we remain willing to take the time to think at our own scale with any collective or organization that wonders about their own role and about the way they can contribute to organize, mobilize, curate, publish, research, resist the growing censorship and criminalization of our engagement.

Now is the time to think about our long-term commitment, not solely focusing on “the interruption of our programs.” Now is the time to hold in our hearts the words of Mohammed al-Ardah who, after digging their freedom out of Gilboa Israeli prison with spoons in September 2021—something we perceive as the most beautiful and powerful architectural act there can be—said that he and his five comrades in struggle did it to show that the occupation is a mere illusion made of dust.

Palestine will be free, from the River to the Sea.