Community Movement Builders Statement on Palestine Liberation
Community Movement Builders Statement on Palestine Liberation
“ People cannot be free until they realize that peace is not the absence of war or struggle…
Peace is the presence of justice”
Ella Baker (1964)
We speak to you as fellow inheritors and instruments of liberatory struggle. We represent peoples, cultures, and knowledges of Africa, North America, Latin America and Caribbean with a shared history of resistance against Western imperialism, capitalist exploitation, cisheterosexism and patriarchy, and white supremacy with comrades in Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, and Indigenous territories around the world.
As Black peoples in the Americas, we assume the legacy of Africans who confronted and survived European plunder of the continent. As descendants of stolen people who resisted on slave ships and plantations, and marooned themselves in strange lands, we carry on the struggles for liberation of the Black revolutionaries who led armed revolts against enslavement. We call on the spirits of Nzinga, Zumbi, Queen Nanny, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Nat Turner.
We speak to you as Africans in the white supremacist cisheterosexist settler colony that is the United States. We build upon the freedom movements mobilized by Indigenous, Black, and Brown radicals against genocide, sexual exploitation, land dispossession, environmental destruction, slavery, apartheid, economic predation, and premature death. As Black internationalists, we affirm the fight of colonized and other oppressed peoples around the world against racial capitalism and Western imperialism. As Black feminist and queer liberators, we defend the collective right of peoples to achieve freedom by any means necessary.
We speak to you from Turtle Island (aka USA), where our actions for civil and economic rights have been bombarded with the same CTS tear gas deployed in Hebron and Tahrir Square. We speak to you from the occupied cities of Dallas, Detroit, Delaware, Oak Park-Sacramento, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, where we are being pushed off the margins due to state disinvestment, corporate settlerism, gentrification and police terrorism. Nationally, we struggle against the further militarization of the police using Israeli technologies of terror. And from the center of the U.S. empire, we recognize the white supremacist imperialist plot to exterminate the peoples in the Congo, the Sudan, Yemen, Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti.
“To co-exist, one must first of all exist, so the imperialists and the colonialists
must be forced to retreat.”
Amilcar Cabral (1974)
As of this statement, the Israeli occupation forces’ relentless and indiscriminate bombardment of schools, mosques, churches, hospitals and homes in the Gaza Strip has killed more than 12,000 people—including more than 4,000 children. 1.5 million of Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants are internally displaced. In the West Bank, Israeli occupation forces and state-armed settlers have killed 183 Palestinians. But this struggle did not begin on October 7th.
Every facet of Israel’s present campaign of terror – mass civilian deaths; abduction; torture; the murder of journalists; denial of basic resources; restricted mobility; destruction of infrastructure; widespread displacement; and the brazen flouting of international law – has been visited upon the Palestinians for over 75 years of crimes against humanity and genocide. Since the 1948 Nakba, Israeli occupation forces, including Zionist militia, have forcibly displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians and stolen over 78% of historical Palestine.
We rightfully separate being Jewish from being an Israeli settler and a Zionist. We remember and denounce the fascist German regime that slaughtered more than 6 million Jews, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, up to 250,000 Roma and Sinti people, over 240,000 disabled people (including 5,000 children), and over 15,000 gay men in the 20th century. As such, we recognize that the removal of Indigenous Palestinians from their land to establish Israel is not justice for the Jewish people. Instead, the United States and the United Kingdom invented the Zionist state as a colonial outpost to protect Western capitalist interests in the Middle East.
Community Movement Builders unequivocally supports the right of ALL colonized people to liberate themselves from oppression by any means necessary. We believe that all humans have the right to a homeland, and relatedly the right to clean water, fresh air, foods that nourish, quality housing and safety, as well as relationships with other humans in the form of families and communities.
“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against.
I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
Malcolm X (1963)
May the Palestinian people’s ongoing resistance to their oppression serve as a reminder that colonialism is not invincible, and that nowhere is safe as long as it remains in place. May those who resist continue to inspire all of us who dream of collective self-determination.
We proclaim all power to the people. We declare our solidarity with Palestine liberation.
Long Live the Intifada!
No to Genocide!
End the Israeli occupation of Palestine!
No to fascism and imperialism!
Yes to Peace and Liberation in our Lifetime!
From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!
