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