Statement of the Palestinian Youth Movement USA Branch in Support of the Weekend of Resistance in St. Louis and Ferguson

Originally circulated 10/11/14

We, the Palestinian Youth Movement--United States Branch, stand with our comrades, brothers, and sisters in their call for action to demand justice for the countless victims of police violence, state repression and militarization of our communities in the US and transnationally. Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and most recently, Vonderrit D. Myers, are just a few of the hundreds of black men who have been senselessly murdered in just the past decade at the hands of the police. 

This call to action in St. Louis inspires us to continue challenging and exposing the brutality happening everyday in our own backyards while connecting this to the systematic racism and subjugation happening in occupied Palestine. We see incidents like that perpetrated against Michael Brown as an ongoing outcome of the racist structures that were founded on indigenous erasure and slavery and continue with the repression, and policing of Black and Brown communities. We carry on a mutual struggle to subvert the same colonial logics of supremacy and exclusion that are inherent to the Zionist colonization of Palestine. 

Like Black and Brown communities righteously struggling against incarceration and subjugation, Palestinians righteously resist their annihilation and are systematically and illegally held captive in Israeli prisons. Like Black and Brown communities displaced by gentrification and discriminatory laws and lending, Palestinian homes are confiscated and our lands annexed daily to build illegal and exclusive Jewish-only settlements. Like Black and Brown communities, Palestinians, African and Asian migrants living and working in the State of Israel suffer as second and third class citizens under an apartheid legal system.  

As the United States government wages yet another war based on deception in our homelands, we want answered: are our communities here not worthy of the funds spent on weaponry? or more worthy of the support the US government unequivocally provides to Israel?  We want answered: how is America’s safety bound to the killing of people of color here and overseas? and how is US security secured with more wars, militarism and violence? 

We will no longer stand by and watch while this relentless epidemic of brutality continues to be unleashed onto black and brown bodies here in the US or in our homelands. We demand an end to the Israeli training of and collaboration with US police and special forces that terrorize and surveil our communities. We demand an end to the militarization of the police and its racist brutality against all communities of color. We reject the Israeli and US governmental collusion to stir up fear and persecute activists challenging injustices in the US or abroad. Whether the PATRIOT ACT or COINTELPRO, the targeting and criminalization of our communities must end now. We stand with you in Ferguson as we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of our Black and Brown brothers and sisters here in the US.