Recently I attended a rally in Kingston Jamaica in support of the Palestinian people fighting the genocide being inflicted upon their people by Israel. At the heart of this war in the Middle East is an issue of land sovereignty. Land sovereignty, the ability of First Peoples to assert control over their ancestral lands. Without land there are no crops, no safety and stability needed to have a sustainable and successful life. The question of land sovereignty in Palestine directly reflects a similar issue faced here in Jamaica today. While the native Palestinians are being pushed off of their land, Jamaicans too are losing access to their land as the beaches that were once public are being sold off to large multinational business entities.
Israel from the Bible is not the Israel of Today
First, lets talk about the Jewish state and how we got here. The Zionist movement, which sought a homeland for the Jewish people, gained momentum in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, played a crucial role in advocating for a Jewish homeland even though he was an atheist.
During World War I, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which was then under Ottoman rule. After World War I, the League of Nations granted Britain the mandate to govern Palestine. During this period, Jewish immigration to the region increased. In 1947, The United Nations proposed a partition plan recommending the division of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, along with an international administration for Jerusalem. The plan was accepted by the Jewish leadership but rejected by Arab states. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, declared the establishment of the State of Israel.
Fighting Spirit
Despite the annexation of their lands and the massacres they endured, Palestinians have always fought back fiercely. Through culture, art, scholarship, and armed struggle, Palestinians have used every means available to them to resist colonialism. Some giants of the Palestinian resistance movement include militants like Ghassan Kanafani and Leilah Khaled, scholar and author Edward Said, and author and activist Basil Al-Araj. Edward Said insisted that boundaries and barriers must be transgressed. He believed that intellectuals should speak truth to power and that the intellectual must insist on justice and not give attention to fashion and passing fads but to real ideas and values, which cannot be articulated from inside a position of power. He advocated for the right of Palestinian self-determination, producing an enormous impact as a writer and advocate for the Palestinian narrative in the West over several decades.
The spirit and dedication of the Palestinian resistance is one to be admired and replicated for oppressed peoples everywhere. The will of the Palestinian people to fight and live is also one reflected in the struggle of the Jamaican Maroons who resisted slavery and subjugation at all costs and by the Jamaican masses who would later resist British colonialism on the island. Jamaican people much like the Palestinian people have been victims of British colonialism. As survivors still struggling under the grip of neocolonialism, we must stand in support of the Palestinian people and all people in their struggles against colonialism. Together we win.
Why Gaza is Significant
Historically, the Gaza Strip has been under a land, sea, and air blockade, imposed on top of a decades-long Israeli military occupation and with an enormous cost in terms of human suffering. The blockade has limited the movement of people, goods, and services in and out of Gaza and has contributed to a chronic humanitarian crisis entailing a lack of sufficient electricity, sanitation, and health services for Palestinians in the Strip. Israel has intentionally calibrated its occupation and blockade measures to maintain Gaza on the brink of perpetual collapse. Commonly considered the world’s largest open-air prison Gaza has a population of two million people, 70% of whom are refugees whose right of return to their homes in present-day Israel has been systematically refused since 1948. All political attempts to resolve the refugee crisis over the past seven decades have failed, leaving millions of displaced Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and elsewhere in inadequate temporary living conditions.
The Palestinian resistance movement in March 2018 started a mass resistance movement called “The Great March of Return.” It aimed to draw attention to the humanitarian situation in Gaza, demand the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and highlight the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s ongoing challenges. The protests called for an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which severely restricted the movement of people and goods. Over the course of one year and eight months, 223 Palestinians were killed by Israeli Occupation Forces while some 8,000 sustained live ammunition injuries. Many of those injured have yet to fully recover from the wounds left by Israeli bullets.
Supporters of Israel will insist that the attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023 came from nowhere, that Hamas is a terrorist organization with the stated goal of eliminating jewish existence. The truth is that Palestinians are fighting for their right to live. Zionists do not believe in God only in racism, genocide, capitalism and colonialism. I firmly support the efforts of the Palestinian people to fight back for their right to life and land.
Jamaica, it’s also your time to regain access to the beaches, rivers, falls, and land that has been denied to you by the neocolonial corruption in Jamaica.
