Loading ...The People of Palestine Have a Powerful Message for #BlackLivesMatter Protesters in the U.S.
The connections between black people protesting state violence in the United States and Palestinians fighting occupation in Gaza and the West Bank have been well-documented.
When armored trucks and riot officers stormed the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in August — days after white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown — some Palestinians usedsocial media to communicate advice to protesters on how to cope with tear gas.
In the subsequent months, this transnational solidarity has only grown stronger. Activist and scholar Angela Davis has spoken at length about its links, highlighting, for instance, how the multinational security company G4S hasprovided both material support for the Israeli occupation — a support they have vowed to scale down over the next three years — and for private prisons in the U.S., which profit from mass incarceration, a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts black and brown people.
“Both communities share many of the same grievances, suffer from the same systematic forms of violations, and therefore also campaign against some similar actors that profit from these abuses,” Fadi Quran, an activist and educator in Palestine, told Mic. “[G4S] is just one example of many, and that’s why solidarity and connecting our struggles is not only important, but necessary if we want to put an end to injustice.”
It doesn’t end there. Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, in February expressed solidarity with the people of Palestine in a letter addressed to the students of Stanford University, some of whom were voting for their school to divest from “corporations that profit from the Occupation” in February (the universitydeclined to divest shortly thereafter).
“No studying could prepare me for the level of violence and trauma that exists inside Palestine,” Cullors-Brignac wrote of a recent visit she took to Palestine. “The Black Lives Matter movement can benefit greatly by learning about struggles outside of the U.S., but particularly the Palestinian struggle.”
To further illustrate the degree to which these movements are mutually intertwined, Mic has asked people from across the Palestinian diaspora — students, artists, educators, Americans, Europeans and people currently living in Palestine — to create a set of visual responses to the question:
“If you could say one thing to black American citizens about police brutality in the U.S., what would it be?”
The answers come from Palestinians from all over the world, of varying backgrounds and spanning a 45-year age range. But they all have one thing in common: They depict, unambiguously, how the civil rights struggle in Palestine and that of black Americans aren’t as disconnected as one might presume.
Source: mic.com