NYC Students for Justice in Palestine stands alongside all communities in the United States under the threat of white supremacist violence by both the State and hate groups that target oppressed nationalities, Muslims, women, LGBTQ communities, and the working class. The election of Donald Trump is an urgent wake up call to address and fight the rise of a white nationalist movement that is eager to ravage our communities through violent deportations of undocumented families, extra-judicial killings of Black and Brown families, expanded surveillance and entrapment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities, and state sanctioned violence against queer and gender nonconforming people. Since the election of Donald Trump we have already seen a surge of white supremacist violence against non-white people living in the U.S., surpassing the levels of the months after September 11th. As organizers in the belly of the beast dedicated to the liberation of Palestine, it is our duty to struggle alongside the people against a fascist dictatorship. Our fronts are simultaneously cultural, political, social and economic.
Since the election of Trump we have seen the fears of many Palestinian organizers and communities become more concrete with the appointment of fascist Steve Bannon, a founder of the red-baiting, conspiracy theory-filled, white nationalist website, Breitbart. This “news” website has given both right-wing zionists and the “alt-right” (a new name for an old enemy: Nazis) a platform to disseminate their designs for an ethnically pure nation state, exclusive to their ultra-nationalist colonial definition of a citizen. In harmony with their violent anti-semitism, the white nationalist movement points to the Zionist state as a model of such a project, disputing the personhood of the Jewish people while embracing the ideology of European settler-colonialism. Israel uses perceived anti-semitism as a justification for the ongoing settler colonial project and theft of Palestinian land, and the orientalist mythology of the Zionist state relies on anti-semitism in SWANA (South West Asia North Africa) and the West to entice Jews all over the world to settle on Palestinian land. Anti-Semites for decades have advocated for the existence of a separate Jewish state to remove populations of Jews from Western countries to “dilute the white bloodline” and serve the imperialist interests of empire in the Middle East.
Democrats and Republicans are both enemies of oppressed nationalities and obstructions to true democracy and to the freedom of communities bound by their borders. They are both enemies of Arab and Palestinian self determination. They both support the settler colonial terrorist state of Israel. Both Trump and Clinton showed up at AIPAC’s annual meeting in March. Trump declared Israel “a strategic ally” and “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Clinton doubled down and denounced the nonviolent global movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the apartheid regime as “alarming,” equating it to antisemitism.
The struggle between the white settler colonial legacy and multi-cultural imperialism has manifested itself in the past few elections within the empire. In the past month, the Republican party has consolidated a broad support base of ultra-right Nazis who wish to rebrand themselves as the “alt-right.” Trump’s cabinet appointments of open white supremacists such as Bannon and Jeff Sessions represent a right wing nationalist pushback against neo-liberalist policies.
On the other side of the two-party dictatorship, neoliberal interests are championed by faux-progressives like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, beholden not to the people they claim to represent but only to the empire over which they have draped a multicultural veneer. Through the numerous leaks that have emerged over the past months, the Democratic National Committee has shown itself to be just as undemocratic and beholden to corporate interests as the Republican Party. The Democratic Party has a long and poisonous history of sucking the revolutionary vigor out of social movements, transforming them into hollow NGOs or benign talking points for Democratic Party candidates. We say this with a conviction forged in the napalm fires of Vietnam and the white phosphorous of Iraq: the Democratic and Republican parties are two wings of the same empire, the empire that is nothing less than the enemy who we aim to confront and defeat.
We are committed to struggling with other oppressed groups to secure our collective liberation. None of us are free until all of us are free. New York City Students for Justice in Palestine will contribute by integrating ourselves amongst our communities, facilitating Know Your Rights workshops and self-defense trainings, and helping our communities get answers and resources with our broad network of allied organizations that have been doing the work for years. We will take leadership from organizations that are concerned with the well being of the people and work towards our collective freedom. We will participate in the foundation of an overall collective process to build the power of the oppressed that pushes us, students, workers, and community members to be present in the trenches of struggle, not wallow in the shallow rhetoric of allyship.
As part of the mobilization by a broad section of the people against Trump, we encourage as many to participate in the #J20 day of action to disrupt the inauguration, whether in Washington DC or in our local cities, towns, schools, workplaces and blocks. We urge all Palestinian solidarity organizers to not only participate in J20 but also build in your communities to defend vulnerable communities against vigilante xenophobic attacks or state violence in its many forms of repression.
We will not sit in the ivory tower and gesticulate about the various forms of resistance being taken by oppressed peoples in this country and abroad to combat the system intent on destroying their communities. Whether it is the indigenous warriors defending sacred land on the frontline against the Dakota Access Pipeline, rebellions against state violence in urban centers, or antifascist mobilizations against the klan and alt-right, it is right to rebel. There is no better time than now to clearly and unapologetically articulate our politics and goals. Join us on January 20th and beyond.
Smash Trump, Free Palestine!
There is only one solution, intifada revolution!