To our comrades,

On the opening day of the Democratic National Convention, “Israeli” air strikes murdered at least 35 Palestinians in Gaza, while ground forces, expanding the siege of Deir al-Balah, pushed 1.2 million people into a “safe zone” measuring 8.9 kilometers. An engineer in Khan Younis described a water crisis caused by the destruction of infrastructure, leaving Gazans with less than two gallons of water per day. (Americans use 82 gallons daily on average.) A hospital director in Beit Lahia reported that children are on the verge of death because “Israel” won’t allow fuel to enter the Strip. A doctor in Deir al-Balah said that the entire healthcare sector had collapsed. In “Jerusalem,” U.S. Secretary of State Blinken had a three-hour meeting with “Israeli” prime minister Netanyahu, which Blinken described as “positive and conducted in a good spirit.” Gaza’s director of healthcare said that polio, appearing in the Strip for the first time in 25 years, could kill more people than bombs. 

There were protests outside the United Center, thousands marching and chanting. There was even, almost, a riot — a tear in the fence. But inside the convention, the reality of the streets seemed to matter as little as the day’s news from Gaza. 

Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commended the room, the city, and the country’s “energy,” a terror-filled verve masquerading as “joy.” The enthusiasm was delirious and unbearable. The main agenda item: feeling good. Clinton proclaimed that Harris would break the “glass ceiling” in which (Democratic) women had left “a lot of cracks” eight years before, claiming that she could see “freedom” through the cracks. But if the ceiling is glass, you don’t need cracks to see through it. It’s always been clear what is on the other side — not liberation, which is too enormous to be metaphorized, but full participation in the maintenance of the empire’s self-image. Kamala, like the President before her, is a liar; she represents a system of lies. 

“There have been no indications that Harris is playing a central role in any ceasefire negotiations,” Kaleem Elrefai wrote on Wednesday. “And there is mounting evidence that those negotiations are more fantasy than reality.” 

“Killer Kamala,” as the U.S. Palestinian Community Network called her, gave her acceptance speech Thursday night. To thunderous applause, she promised to send “Israel” weapons, to shutter the southern border, and to make America’s military the “most lethal” in the world. She concluded with an appeal to liberty at the expense of life. Rarely has a presidential candidate made plainer the price of American “freedom,” extolling, without so much as blinking, the sacrifices “we” have made to secure the exceptional status of the world’s most sovereign nation. But it’s not “we” who are paying the price in blood. It is the oppressed people of the world. It is the people of Gaza. 

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The inferno and the flood

In the months following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, 26 million people flooded the streets, burned cop cars, established autonomous zones in various cities and, most notably, set the Third Precinct in Minneapolis ablaze.

Five days after the burning of the precinct, Joe Biden emphasized in a campaign speech the need for “real police reform.” Countering demands to defund and/or abolish the police, Biden sought to bolster his electability by claiming that the cops “need more help; they need more assistance.” Trump, he said, “supports cutting programs that would…fund local police departments.” The discourse was maddening and the constant refrain of electing someone who was not Trump silenced the demands of the masses. 

Reforms were proffered to cure the wild desire for abolition. A campaign to implement the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” took the place of real justice for Floyd; a bill that “limits the unnecessary use of force and restricts the use of no-knock warrants, chokeholds, and carotid holds” passed in the House in June 2020, but died in the Senate nine months into Biden’s presidency. “These reforms could not have even saved George Floyd’s life,” Derecka Purnell wrote. “Under the George Floyd Act, police will still kill more than 1,000 people every year. The victims will be overwhelmingly poor, Black, and disabled.” 

History slowed. Nothing fundamentally changed. 290 Black people were killed last year by police. 

Then came the flood, sweeping away apathy in the imperial core. When Hamas fighters broke Israel’s seventeen-year siege of the Gaza Strip, the images of torn fences and children dancing on tanks elicited a similar affective response as the burning of the Third Precinct. What had appeared to be permanent was revealed to be temporary, conditional, frail. Armed resistance exposed the lie of Zionism’s infallibility.

Or, put another way: anti-Zionism was transformed from a political orientation into a militant position from which victory could be — had been, could be again — attained. “Israel,” enthralled by the myth of its own perpetual victimhood, assumed that masses of people could be deterred from belief in a free Palestine by witnessing the so-called savagery of decolonization in action. Yet it was mostly the elites who, watching the rules-based order crumble, recoiled. Among the rest of us, there are millions more anti-Zionists than before.

Over the past 300+ days, mass protests have sharpened revolutionary demands and brought new political horizons into focus. common to place Zionism within a settler-colonial framework, to reject a two-state solution as a means to address Israel’s 76-year-occupation of Palestine, and to frame armed resistance as justifiable in the face of occupation.

It is the possibility of victory — over oppression, over injustice everywhere, over the colonists and the imperialists and the elites — that has refashioned the Palestinian national liberation struggle as a transnational mass movement. It is the desire for what’s possible that electoralism threatens to sublimate. Here in the U.S., desperate electoralists seek to capture and placate the imagination of all those fighting — or at least openly calling — for a free Palestine.  

Anti-Zionist calls for an arms embargo are met with lies that the Democrats are “tirelessly working towards a ceasefire.” An immediate end to the Israeli occupation is countered with demands to “bring the hostages home.” The outrage from people of conscience to stop sending weapons to the Zionist entity are sidelined for the sake of protecting domestic rights. 

The administration’s second-in-command who is funding and facilitating this genocide has reaffirmed “Israel’s right to defend itself.” And instead of actually engaging with those of us who threaten to withhold our votes, the Democratic Party deflects and banks on our fears of some nearby existential fascist threat.

But, as psychoanalyst Lara Sheehi explained on Millenials Are Killing Capitalism, this weaponization of existential threats is built into every election cycle. “Fear is mobilized in always enticing us to think that what we fear is off in the future,” Sheehi says. Meaning, fear entreats us to focus on “what could possibly happen” rather than what is already happening. 

In Gaza, the massacres continue without pause, millions are starving without food or aid, and the first polio case in 25 years has been confirmed. Based on UN estimates, it will take a century to rebuild the port city, fifteen years just to clear the rubble of decimated homes. Still, as Gaza bleeds, the genocide is sidelined, reduced to a “single issue,” an obstacle to Kamala’s electability rather than the greatest moral travesty of our time.

The people, united, cannot become defeatist. What will you do instead of voting for one of two warmongers? What will you do to resist fear, complacency, and the creeping paralysis of false choices? What will you do to win?

Stay united

The myth that Black and Palestinian freedom are at odds during this election season is a tactic of counterinsurgency spread by elites to sabotage our movement. We must be diligent in identifying the divisive tactics meant to dilute our collective power. We cannot let liberal politics of representation bastardize the solidarity that our Palestinian and Black comrades have cultivated throughout decades of struggle. We cannot accept a compromise that comes at the expense of genocide. As Ruha Benjamin repeated in her Spelman commencement address, “Black faces in high places won’t save us.”

For liberals to condemn those applying pressure on a presidential nominee, not yet in office, as anti-Black obscures the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness and weaponizes it in the same way Zionists weaponize antisemitism: to repress dissent. To put our hope in a Vice President who has funded and facilitated Palestinian extinction for ten months is not strategic. Instead, it prioritizes self-interest over the material reality of the earth’s wretched. Electoralism stifles our political imagination and defangs us of our most radical demands.

Voting is not an exercise in pragmatism, but in resignation. it is a concession to the state that allows “electeds” to dictate what is and isn’t possible. The demand has never been less Black and Palestinian death. The demand has always been liberation. The Democratic apparatus, and the American idea of capital-D “Democracy,” has been selling a kind of cruel optimism to all of us, promising freedom in exchange for other’s freedoms, promising safety at the expense of others’ safeties.

And now, as it was with Obama, we are being sold the promise of representation at the expense of Palestine’s freedom; we are being sold a false image of equality to distract us from an accelerating genocide. Representation is cruel optimism fueled by the cruel optimism of Democracy.

Both Black and Palestinian communities understand the brutalizing force of imperial subjugation and state-sanctioned violence. Our comrades are calling not for us to abandon our own causes, but to remember that our causes are interconnected. This is why we must condemn Zionism and anti-Blackness as praxis — not simply in our language, but in our actions. 

Study the history of resistance

A watershed moment in Black-Palestinian solidarity came in the form of “Third World Round-Up: The Palestine Problem — Test Your Knowledge”, a fact sheet which appeared in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s June-July 1967 newsletter in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. The SNCC communications director and longtime freedom fighter Ethel Minor based this document on the Palestine Research Center’s “Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts About the Palestine Problem,” and aimed to spur a discussion of Black solidarity with Palestine within the SNCC. 

The fact sheet provoked a vicious response from Zionists who compared the SNCC’s condemnation of Zionist atrocities to the rhetoric of neo-Nazis and the KKK, and accused them of doing a “grave disservice to the movement for civil rights”, foreshadowing the racist rhetoric employed by Zionists today against Black activists who voice support for Palestinian resistance. Amid the controversy, the SNCC released a more formal statement entitled “The Mid-East Crisis.” Both can be read in full with illustrations here.

Watch with us

Throngs of people make their way to the gates of a demolished city. When loved ones find each other, they kiss and embrace beneath the late afternoon sun. Despite the joy of their reunion, the people wear sorrow on their faces; This is no jubilee. A woman breaks away from the crowd and wanders into the city, down long dirt roads lined with crumbled buildings. She looks back at the camera, quickens her pace. She begins to run, and the camera follows her, scanning the destruction wrought on this once bustling city in the high valleys of the Syrian Golan Heights, Quneitra. 

Directed by the Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas, the short film Quneitra ‘74 documents the aftermath of the Zionist invasion of Quneitra, which lasted from the Naksa of 1967 until the Israeli army withdrew in 1974. The residents returned to a rubble city; they never lived there again. Part documentary, part fiction, the film invites viewers into the loss of this place in a grove of eucalyptus trees near the border of Occupied Palestine and asks what of the self remains when a city, a home, is annihilated. 

Watching it nearly a year into the genocide, we cannot help but wonder when Palestinians in Gaza will make it back to their bombed out neighborhoods, even just to wipe clean a remaining window pane, to reflect on and to honor what was lost.

You can watch Quneitra ‘74 here.

We end with a reflection from the late comrade, George Jackson:

“When we participate in elections to win, instead of disrupt, we're lending to the fascist system's credibility, and destroying our own.”