Palestinian Solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives

Dear friends and comrades in the US,

This is a short message not to distract you from the important duty and opportunity you have to challenge the deeply rooted system of racist oppression.

Yet, we in Stop the Wall Campaign would like to express our solidarity and support to you amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd by racist police violence, which have been taking place since over two weeks. Your amazing and relentless protest that is growing everyday has inspired people of conscience and minority groups in the Global North and oppressed people in the Global South, including Palestine, to take to the streets demanding justice, freedom and an end to white supremacist paradigms of power.

We Palestinians recognize very well the chokehold technique that ended the life of George Floyd, as the Israeli occupation uses similar techniques against us. The suppressive measures the police have been using against the peaceful protesters in the US are no different from those used by the Israeli occupation to intimidate us as we protest the dehumanization, oppression and discrimination they inflict upon us.

We need the people in the streets struggling for their rights and humanity that Palestinians are standing strongly with them, we consider their struggles as ours.

In different cities in Occupied West Bank, besieged Gaza Strip and beyond the Green Line outrage and demonstrations sparked to show solidarity with black people and to protest the constant murder of unarmed Palestinians by Israeli army and police, which train the US police. The face of George Floyd is now painted alongside our own martyrs in a powerful mural on the apartheid Wall. We all are together in the same struggle.

I am writing this letter to you at a time while our struggle for self-determination is heightening as the Israeli occupation authorities intend to annex 33% of Occupied West Bank squeezing us Palestinians into ever-smaller Bantustans. The impeding Israeli annexation also flagrantly tramples on our national aspirations to be realized on our ancestral land. Yet, being preoccupied by the escalated Israeli violence against us to lay the ground for the de jure annexation of the West Bank does not mean that our solidarity with your heightened struggle at the moment would wane. Rather, mutual solidarity grows even more the more heightened our struggles are.

As somebody who is politically rooted in the first Intifada, our popular uprising that started in 1987 triggered by one particular incident of killing and provoked five years of unprecedented struggle, I feel profoundly connected with you in these days-the moment when anger and pain inflicted every day by a racist, oppressive settler-colonial regime explodes into protests and popular rebellion. As both the US and Israel are founded on the same principles of white supremacy, otherness and racism, your struggle for justice and equality cannot be separated from ours-your and our struggle can only thrive on internationalism.