Calling for Collective Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Scientists of the Palestinian Youth Movement (SPYM) writes to voice our analysis and concerns regarding the escalation of responses to coronavirus disease COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), formerly known as 2019-nCoV (2019 novel coronavirus). We believe that science does not exist in a vacuum, and scientific rigor must incorporate an understanding of the systemic forces of oppression and dispossession. We must remain attentive to all of those individuals and populations who are structurally deprived of the means necessary to lessen their exposure to the virus and of quality medical care generally.

Palestinians who continue to struggle against Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing, for example, face restricted access to hospitals and are denied the necessary treatment due to the brutal machinery of military occupation, siege, and apartheid. Medical deprivation is not an incidental outgrowth of a settler-colonial project, but an inherent measure of a colonial system geared toward making the land and society fatally uninhabitable for the native population. The Zionist state, built on the dispossession and exile of Palestinians, has always considered Palestinians an external threat to the state, often equating them directly with contagion and vermin. Given this, we have every reason to believe that Zionist media will blame Palestinians themselves and their underserved health system as the main perpetrators of COVID-19.  

In addition to constricting Palestinian access to healthcare, the Zionist state is the main actor in curbing Palestine’s emergency health responses to mass scale emergencies that the state itself has inflicted upon the Palestinian people, including genocidal campaigns in Gaza. Among only the most recent examples is the Zionist state’s intentional targeting by sniper fire of journalists, medics, and children present during the Great March of Return protests in 2018. Razan Al-Najjar, a 21 year old paramedic, was one of the heroic martyrs assassinated by the Zionist Occupation Forces precisely because she provided life-giving support to the maimed and wounded. 

Being trapped in a colonial apartheid system is a guarantor of an exponentially inflated rate of exposure and infection with a vastly minimized possibility for treatment and relief. As Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud writes: 

“What is needed is a fundamental and structural change that would emancipate the Palestinian healthcare system from the horrific impact of the Israeli occupation and the Israeli government’s policies of perpetual siege and politically-imposed quarantines – also known as apartheid.”

Indeed, the Zionist response to the precarity of the colonized Palestinian population has only resulted in a deepening entrenchment of systems of restriction and incapacitation. For example, Mascoubiya prison in occupied Jerusalem was placed under complete quarantine, preventing any and all entry and exit by Palestinian prisoners, after suspicions that a prison worker had been exposed to the virus in Ramla. Given their abhorrent conditions, Palestinian prisoners within Israeli jails now have even more reason to fear for their lives amidst the squalor and deliberate, routine withholding of medical care that defines imprisonment. In a colonial state that seeks to make all modes of life increasingly carceral, prisons become crucial sites of resistance and prisoners are necessary recipients of solidarity and support as they come to assume the direct manifestation of the entire plight of their people. As Samidoun declares: 

“Palestinian prisoners are at the center of the struggle for freedom and justice in Palestine – they represent the imprisonment of a people and a nation.”   

We know all too well that occupied Palestine and surrounding refugee camps share similar conditions caused by colonization and siege. Thus, while the UN recently claimed that there were no COVID-19 cases among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, these refugees, who struggle against profound socio-political and material negligence on the part of their host country,  are alarmingly vulnerable to the spread of infection. In addition to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, the situation of refugees in Greece is dire, with the medical charity Medicins Sans Frontiers urging the government to evacuate all migrants. The charity notes that forcing migrants to live in such conditions as “part of Europe’s containment policy” was “always irresponsible,” but is on the verge of becoming “criminal” if heightened sensitivity to migrants’ plight is not reflected by the actions of the European Union and Greek authorities.

As we struggle to prevent the spread of the coronavirus among our spaces, we cannot forget the plight of the most deprived and vulnerable populations, from imprisoned and colonized Palestinians and refugees to the undocumented families brutally forced into concentration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border where children are forcibly separated from their parents and caged in chilled, dimly lit rooms amid wanton medical neglect and resource shortage. In addition to the prison-like atmosphere of detention centers geared toward instilling rampant fear, terror and suffering among the undocumented and effectively promoting ethnic cleansing through structurally imposed and mandated process of family separation whose impacts upon the victims are often irreversible, we cannot forget the deplorable conditions of actual U.S. prisons, which house some of the most precarious and deprived populations and are similarly structurally pre-disposed to heightened risk of infection. Ironically,  prison labor is used to make the very hand-sanitizers and face-masks that many individuals are hoarding in an attempt to offset the threat of infection. 

Finally, many workers in sectors including service, retail and dining are still effectively prohibited from staying home or working remotely. For individuals to participate in the buying frenzies surrounding critical items in  this moment forces us to see clearly the violence that makes the access of some predicated on the direct deprivation of the many. In place of self-interest, we must insist, for ourselves and especially others, on an ethical, structural awareness of how capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism intersect and become even more brutal at times of global crisis. As the Red Nation claims in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic, "The crisis has exposed the capitalist system for what it is: anti-life.” We must work toward responses that promote communal modes of care and attention and collective well-being, not individualist profiteering, plunder, and panic. 

The only way to ensure the safety and well-being of all communities within a more just social and political order is to refuse to put ourselves above others, and to remember that a collective ethics that can be willfully discarded when it matters most is worthless in the end. For select sectors to be forced to continue working and living in deprivation and lack as the disease spreads is callous and places these workers at severe risk, particularly when these same populations have limited access to medical care. Self quarantine and social distancing is currently the best mode to slow the spread of this virus. Not allowing this to all at risk populations, regardless of socioeconomic and legal status, is saying that some populations are disposable, and not all people deserve the same protections, concessions, and care.This is not an equitable way to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We must continue to advocate and agitate for the overturning of unjust systems and structures whose oppression will only sharpen in the weeks to come, and to remember that health-care and human wellness are not abstractly “humanitarian”--they are political, first and foremost.

We cannot fully control the spread of the coronavirus. But we can control how we act, how we engage, and whether we choose to let our response to this moment be reflective of our wider anti-oppression politic. For these reasons, moving forward, we must remember that the structural deprivation and suffering of our people will continue during this period of tribulation, and most likely in intensified form. We, therefore, join with others in medical and scientific fields in calling for a list of demands that includes, but is not limited to, eliminating evictions and mortgage foreclosures; instituting paid leave for all vulnerable families during the COVID-19 pandemic, including insofar as this necessitates childcare provisions for children who will no longer be able to attend school; releasing all immigrants and families in immigration detention by granting them humanitarian parole; releasing prisoners (and providing them with necessary material support, including housing); and continuing to pressure all governments to mount the most comprehensively ethical and humane responses to precarious populations’ need for safe medical treatment and attention to curb the spread of the virus.   

Even as we remember ourselves, we cannot forget one another.

Until Return and Liberation,

Scientists of the Palestinian Youth Movement

No Free Homeland Without Free Women

PYM Celebrates International Women’s Day 2020

Artwork by Michigan-based Palestinian artist, Sr7aneh

On March 8th, the world celebrates International Women’s Day to honor the lives of women throughout history. This International Women’s Day, we, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), pay homage to Palestinian women who have been pillars in our struggle for justice, liberation, and return to Palestine. We acknowledge that Palestinian women have been central political actors in the struggle to liberate Palestine, and have also selflessly sacrificed for the collective wellness of Palestinian society across decades. Building upon the history of Palestinian women’s movements, we believe that to achieve a liberated Palestine, we must realize the total emancipation of all our people from all systems of oppression. We believe that freedom entails the end of Zionist settler-colonialism, imperialism, gender-based violence, exclusion, inequity, and other forms of structural oppression that govern Palestinian land and life.

We are moved to action by the political principles advanced by Tal3at, a movement organized by Palestinian women within Palestine and in exile who have elucidated that there can be “no free homeland without free women.” We are committed to confronting gender-based violence, femicide, and Zionist settler colonialism as they are co-constitutive of one another. This sentiment is akin to the spirit of Tal3at’s mass mobilizations last September in response to the murder of Israa Gharib by her family, and the soaring rates of violence against women in Palestinian society. In these mobilizations, Tal3at protestors, both women and men, chanted for refugee return, freedom, dignity, and social justice, and insisted that national aspirations can and must be achieved through a feminist revolution. Also, Palestinian women, self-identifying as “the daughters of Palestine,” called for a revolution against “Masculinity, Patriarchy, Occupation, Zionism, Colonialism, and Oppression.” 

We recognize the entangled relationship between Zionist settler-colonial gendered violence and the intra-communal violence Palestinian women endure. Since early phases of Zionist settlement in Palestine, acts and threats of sexual violence have been among the most instrumental weapons used to decimate Palestinian bondages to land and one another as part of the greater process of ethnic cleansing. Today, countless numbers of racist and gendered codes inscribed within Israeli law legitimize state-sanctioned violence and control over Palestinian women's bodies, movement, economic sovereignty, and access to justice, particularly for Palestinian citizens of the settler-state. Under colonial siege in the Gaza Strip and occupation in the West Bank, pregnant Palestinian women are unable to access medical attention as a result of militarized roadblocks, checkpoints, curfews, and inaccessibility to hospitals resulting in chronic rates of mortality. 

Not only are Palestinian women unable to produce life freely, but they are also barred from preserving life. Such was the case of 20-year-old nurse Razan al-Najjar who was deliberately targeted and shot dead by Israeli sniper fire on June 1, 2018, as she tended to the wounded during the Great March of Return in the Gaza Strip. Death, debilitation, and injury to Palestinian bodies have become quintessential characteristics of Zionist colonialism. Under an increasingly robust Israeli surveillance and security apparatus, Palestinian women are denied the right to safety both in public and private life; Israeli home invasions in the middle of the night that tear families apart, are but one illustrative example of the persistent torment Palestinians endure, and the various ways population control techniques reinforce the control of women’s bodies, relationships, spirituality, practices of intimacy, and home life. Furthermore, imprisoned Palestinian women and girls experience varied forms of psychological and physical torture that negate their humanity and weaponize gendered and sexual violence against them and their families. 

As Palestinian women leaders such as Khalida Jarrar have argued, Palestinians exist within a domain of colonial occupation, in which all Palestinians are denied freedom, and whereby women within the Palestinian society are doubly affected by structural and intra-communal and interpersonal violence. It is in this context that we recognize the impossibility of addressing communal and intimate violence against Palestinian women without contextualizing the broader racial, economic, and colonial structural oppressions that condition Palestinian society. We recognize intra-communal/interpersonal violence within Palestinian society, including gender-based violence, as deeply entangled with Zionist militarism; an entanglement corresponding to what Black feminists have described as interlocking systems of oppression and/or intersectionality. These entanglements do, however, require political approaches to organizing that account for how and why many within Palestinian society have come to register phrases, such as “women's rights,” as pseudonyms for neo-liberal Zionism and imperialism.

We are sorely aware of the ways that “women’s rights” have been appropriated by the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Palestine, as well as, in liberal Zionist, Imperialist, Islamophobic and Orientalist feminist discourses that reproduce racist notions of Arabs and Muslims. These discourses underly the notion that the violence Palestinian women endure is resultant of cultural and religious dogma. Such claims ignore, even justify, the violence of Israeli colonization. These agendas have had a chilling effect on Palestinian society whereby grassroots Palestinian demands for gender and sexual justice are seen as “Western” concepts and delegitimized as inauthentic to Palestinian cultures. As a collective of Palestinians, we reject all forms of pseudo-feminist solidarity with Palestine and simultaneously assert that ending violence against women is a Palestinian national aspiration alongside aspirations for return, freedom, and dignity.

Furthermore, for Palestinians in the U.S., any meaningful acknowledgment of Palestinian experiences - let alone Palestinian women - has been suppressed within US mainstream feminist spaces as a result of the too-long accepted ambivalence to Zionism as a structural form of gendered and sexual violence and oppression. As the movement for justice in Palestine has grown exponentially within the U.S., it has also been met with excruciating repression campaigns that aim to stifle dissent. While women of color have long expressed - and continue to demonstrate - their solidarity with Palestine, it is disheartening that many women's movements and discourses continue to silence Palestinian women and calls for freedom in Palestine. 

Only last year, the United States Women’s March expelled Muslim American advocate Zahra Billoo from the board due to her support for Palestine. Conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is but one way Zionists have worked to exclude justice in, and for, Palestine from the intersectional vision that must drive the Women’s March forward. The growing Zioness movement, for example, aims to normalize Zionist “feminism” as part of contemporary movements for women's liberation. We state clearly so the misconception is impossible: there is no way for a “women’s movement” to be feminist and liberatory if it protects and defends ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and the degradation of an entire people and land. 

We understand that Zionist settler-colonialism is also a project of capitalist accumulation, not only impacting Palestinian bodies but also our ancestral land as a resource for extraction, decimation, and ‘development.’ We recognize that Palestinian women have been instrumental in defending the integrity of land and the life it nurtures. Borrowing from the learned lessons of women involved in land-based struggles from Turtle Island and the Kingdom of Hawaii, to the Philippines, we believe in the land as a provider of life rather than a site of extraction and aim to refortify reciprocal relations of care, love, and appreciation, for land as part of our political ethos. We recognize that unabated capitalist accumulation has resulted in global crises of displacement, fascism, xenophobia, environmental degradation, and violence against women. We honor and join women from across the global South who are rising against gendered violence, dispossession, authoritarianism, masculinist militarism, class warfare and in the protection of land. We unwaveringly affirm our commitment to transnational solidarity.

We envision a future where all our people can be free from prisons, occupation, refugeehood, economic, gendered and sexual violence, and landlessness. We trust in the power of grassroots liberation organizing and we refuse to accept injustice in the name of prioritizing one cause above another. Women's liberation is not secondary to national liberation. We look to Palestinian women’s movements deeply embedded in our histories for guidance and inspiration as we build upon their legacy. We borrow from the profound lessons of Arab and Muslim women’s movements throughout history and the radical collective traditions of Black, Indigenous, and Third World Feminisms. As Palestinians in the U.S., our work to advance an inseparable social and national liberation struggle is thus guided by the following goals: 

1. End all forms of gender-based violence, exclusion, and inequality and center gendered and social liberation as a critical component of our vision, discourse, strategy, and methods to achieve national liberation.

2. Confront Zionist, Orientalist, Imperialist and Islamophobic feminist appropriation of women’s rights discourse as a means to justify and normalize colonialism and oppression.

3. Uplift the participation of women in our local communities, wherever we reside, in the broader movement against both gender-based violence and Zionist colonialism.

With love, solidarity, and a tenacious hunger for freedom, we salute Palestinian women today and every day, and we commit our lives to political and social liberation as one people and one struggle.

Until Return and Liberation,

The Palestinian Youth Movement

#InternationalWomensDay

#PalestinianWomen

#Tal3at 

The Palestinian Youth Movement Stands with Wet’suwet’en!

On February 6th, 2020 the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) invaded Wet’suwet’en land, armed with snipers, and forcibly removed land defenders while they were mid-ceremony, in order to allow the Coastal Gaslink pipeline to be built through the land. The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have unanimously rejected the pipeline, yet the Canadian government has refused to acknowledge this. 

In response to this, support for Wet’suwet’en has sprung up all across so-called Canada. Train rail blockades and port blockades have been the most powerful, causing a mass disruption of the Canadian economy, domestically and internationally, with massive popular pressure for state actors to change their engagement with the Wet’suwet’en Nation. 

We, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), stand in firm and unrelenting solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation in their struggle to defend their land, water, autonomy, and sovereignty from the colonial Canadian state and the Coastal Gaslink pipeline. The Toronto Chapter of the PYM is participating in solidarity rallies and direct action in support of Wet’suwet’en and will continue to do so until their demands are met.

In light of the current claim by the RCMP that they are removing themselves from Wet’suwet’en land, we look to reports from the Hereditary Chiefs. We encourage all those engaging with Wet’suwet’en actions to do the same as we are aware that the Canadian media outlets are actively trying to sway public opinion towards anti-Indigenous racism in order to foment the public sentiment necessary to justify the use of greater force against Indigenous land protectors and their allies. 

As Palestinians, we are all too familiar with colonial violence, dispossession, and exploitation. The Deal of the Century is an extension of the the ongoing displacement, the barring of self-determination by the Israeli state and its allies, in efforts to undermine us as a people and destroy our culture and livelihood. As we continue our struggle against settler-colonialism, we extend our full and unequivocal support to our Wet’suwet’en relatives on Turtle Island in the spirit of Joint Struggle. 

The PYM amplifies the calls from our Wet’suwet’en relatives for the removal of the RCMP from Wet’suwet’en land, for the Canadian government to respect their commitment to UNDRIP, and for Canada to respect the sovereignty of Wet’suwet’en. We call on our supporters and followers, Palestinians and Arabs in the homeland and diaspora to join solidarity actions with Wet’suwet’en wherever they are and to organize these actions in accordance with the calls from the Hereditary Chiefs. It is clear that, not only do our struggles parallel each other but our fates as peoples struggling against colonialism and oppression are indelibly tied together. Liberation will be achieved through a united front and together we are powerful enough to win. 

The Law is not on Canada’s side and, even more significantly, the people are not on Canada’s side. We stand with Wet’suwet’en!

Until Return & Liberation,

Palestinian Youth Movement