من المية للمية

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE MUST BE FREE.

This is my statement, my belief, my conviction. What follows is a deeper explanation of my position, and how and why I’ve come to it.

In 2016, I was watching Ava Duvernay’s documentary, 13th. When it reached the part about the murder of Tamir Rice, including graphic footage of his death, I lostit. I honestly can’t recall another time where I experienced such rage and grief simultaneously, or such a visceral reaction: spontaneous tears and literally overturning a table. Of course I had heard the story in the news when it happened, but there’s nothing like seeing it with your own eyes. The film had inadvertently broken my commitment not to consume media depicting egregious violence against Black people.

I lead with this story to explain why I also actively avoid any visual media depicting the genocide in Gaza. I just cannot handle it. As a parent to a young child, the rage I feel over stories of children being maimed, starved, killed — not as collateral damage but strategic targets — is of a kind with those feelings for Tamir Rice, yet on another order of magnitude. These stories are just words on a computer or cell phone screen. And so I know anything more would unravel me. I feel a “peeling at the edges” even now as my imagination fills the void. 

What a privileged position, to be able to “opt out”, while men, women, children, their land, culture, history, and futures are being annihilated. My delay in writing a statement of solidarity has everything to do with my cozy position at the heart of empire, the fact that my tax dollars are funding the genocide, while I haven’t so much as attended a protest. The pittance I donate through the Samir Project is the most I’ve been able to do within my current means and capacities. My absence from the streets, however, wasn’t for lack of solidarity, so much as a disbelief in the efficacy of appeals to the state, particularly as the pro-genocide position is firmly entrenched across party lines. And it is even less clear, in this political moment, that courting state violence against my Black body would yield any positive outcomes for Palestine.

I have also struggled to write this statement in part because: Who am I? Who really cares what I think? What difference does one self-righteous diatribe make?

Yet my silence and inactivity have not meant that Gaza has not been on mind — in fact, I read about it regularly, the stories of suffering, death, and destruction impressing themselves deeply into my consciousness. 

So why now? Because I finally found the words adequate to the task of representing both my feelings and my analysis. But also because of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk and everyone else who has been punished for speaking up from a more vulnerable position. Because I want it to be clear to anyone who asks, who comes looking, anyone who is or will enter into any kind of relationship with me, personally or professionally, now or anytime in the future, that I absolutely have a position, and that it is unequivocally and irrevocably in support of Palestinian liberation.

Because the obvious, the objective, the undeniable truth is that the state of Israel is currently perpetrating a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, this atop a more than 75 year foundation of settler colonial domination. In fact, the genocide did not begin in October of 2023, but has followed a pattern of “punctuated equilibrium” an unbroken continuity with the 1948 Nakba, fluctuating between periods of “slow violence” and periodic spikes, and culminating in the unprecedented level of brutality today.

Anyone who disputes what is happening in Gaza, who attempts to explain it away, justify it, or downplay it, is not just ignorant or in denial, but complicit. I count the majority of the U.S. news media among these. If genocide is defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group”, what else is one to make of the indiscriminate use of military munitions on an unarmed population, the blockade on food, water, energy, their regular kidnapping and torture, the denial of medicine and care to pregnant women and the murder of children — both of which represent the future of a people — the execution of medical and emergency response personnel, the destruction of land, infrastructure, cultural and heritage sites, and the killing of hundreds of journalists who try to tell the story?

Western media likes to call it a “war,” as if there is anything even approaching parity of might between Palestinian civilians and the Israeli military. No, what’s happening in Gaza is unequivocally genocide.

One word I have not used so far is “innocent”. Even though the vast majority of Palestinians are in fact absolved of the particular crimes of Hamas, my position stems from a deep moral objection to genocide, regardless of who the victims are, where they live, where they come from, what I know or how I feel about them, their history, or culture. Genocide is perhaps the most egregious manifestation of evil that humankind has ever produced. And I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being. Period.

There is nothing that any Palestinian could ever do to justify the evil being unleashed upon them. Nothing. To put a finer point on this: even if by some act of God, the entire dynamic were to be reversed, with Israeli Jews suddenly at the mercy of some dominant Arab power, ready to subject them to the same evil, specifically as retribution for what some amongst them had done to the Palestinians, I would still be opposed to it.

At the same time, there are specific qualities and characteristics of Palestinian people which demand preservation. From consuming works of Palestinian literature, history, music, film, and accounts of life in Gaza, I have found it remarkable how they manage to maintain a culture of generosity and kindness in spite of the constant violence and precarity experienced under occupation. 

These narratives are important, not only for how they dispel the myth of terroristic predispositions, but for how Palestinians model possibilities for abolitionist futures. For how they have responded to a history of oppression, violence and trauma, the periodic attacks by Hamas notwithstanding, Palestinians are the diametric opposite of the reactionary Israeli state. For that, I believe that a liberated Palestinian people are uniquely poised to offer guidance and leadership toward a new world in which all people are free and self-determined.

With regards to my statement that “Palestine must be free”, I support the No State Solution. This means I summarily reject the premise of Israel’s “right to exist”, just as I reject the necessity or inevitability of the US empire’s continued existence. This is consistent with my position as a state abolitionist more broadly, and my belief in all people’s right to collective self-determination, itself contingent upon a careful, constant, and directly democratic (re)negotiation of relations between people and with the land. 

My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest.

— Albert Einstein

Where the self-determination of one people infringes upon or denies the self-determination of another, it is forfeit, and the terms of the relationship must be re-established. Because Israel has decimated Palestinian self-determination, even beyond the ways inherent to statecraft, its entire existence is forfeit. This does not mean — and I absolutely do not believe — that the existence of Jewish people is forfeit.

Despite the spurious and nonsensical claims of Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, and an increasing percentage of U.S. politicians, Jewish people and the Israeli state are not one and the same. Jewish people predate Israel by thousands of years, and in fact, due to a long history of migration, statehood remained elusive. It stands to reason that Jewish people can continue to exist — even to thrive without persecution — after Israel ceases to exist. Which I believe it must, in order for both Palestinians and Jews to be free. 

Yet, Israeli Jews are not passive observers of the state’s violence. That every adult, with few exceptions, is conscripted into the military, for the blatant seizures of Palestinian land by Israeli settlers, and for the fact that explicit calls for genocide are becoming more mainstream, a collective internal reckoning is long overdue. 

When I say “from the river to the sea”, I do not mean that Palestinian self-determination depends on – and in fact I believe it is compromised by – any notion of a Palestinian state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, or anywhere else. “Palestine” for me, then, is interchangeable with “Palestinian people”, not a nation-state. And yet I do believe that self-determination is dependent on the right of return, for indigenous Palestinians to be able to re-enter the reciprocal relations with their ancestral homeland, which have been continuously disrupted by settler colonial displacement. Just as Jewish people and the Israeli state are separate entities, so too is the restoration of the material and political conditions of Palestinian indigeneity, separate from any project of statehood.

What’s happening in Gaza also ripples outward, resonates across time and space, and has implications for the rest of the world. I stand in solidarity with Palestine because I am both anti-colonial and anti-imperialist, and Israel is nothing if not a settler colony, and simultaneously the tip of an imperial spear lodged deeply in the Middle East for almost a century. Furthermore, Palestine does not exist in a vacuum. The people of both Gaza and the West Bank are subjects within an imperial laboratory, of experiments testing not only the efficacy of technologies of violence and surveillance, but the limits of human immorality. These technologies and genocidal logics are Israel’s chief exports, sold to U.S. police forces, or turned into investment vehicles for the Big Tech industry.

How the world is responding to the Palestinian genocide — for its egregiousness, its totality, and for the fact that there is hardly a person on Earth who can claim not to know it’s happening — is setting a new moral precedent, against which future evils, up to and including subsequent genocides, will be measured and deemed permissible. 

It is not difficult to imagine the logic of genocide being turned against undocumented immigrants in the United States, or even its Black and Brown citizens, whom the state has already deemed subject to systematic violence. It could — and likely will — be turned against climate refugees globally, as a warming world continues to drive displacement. As the oceans encroach upon freshwater sources, another likely Israeli export is its desalination technology, such that it may even be in their financial interests to accelerate the effects of climate change. Israel’s tight control over the water flowing into Gaza, up to and including their current blockade, would seem good practice for weaponizing fresh water access globally.

Even with all of this, I am sober on the prospects of dismantling a nuclear-armed state, fortified by the most powerful imperial power the world has ever known, and occupied by a people who, for their deep historical trauma, have become quick to reactionary violence. And this, before any consideration of other powers enacting their own agendas through Israel, both directly and as proxy. Yet this entangled geopolitical complexity makes me even more certain that the Israeli state must end. 

The two-state solution was always a failing proposition, because Israel and its enablers have never had any respect for the sovereignty of other states, as evidenced in many instances, from the Suez Crisis of 1956, to the Six Day War of 1967, to more recent incursions into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The one-state solution is dead on arrival for the fact that Palestinians have continued to exist at best as second class citizens (outside occupied territories) or as utterly disposable nonhumans under occupation. There is no state in which Israeli nationalism and fair Palestinian representation, let alone self-determination, can coexist.

Obviously there is no single leap from the current conditions of genocidal Israeli nationalism to a liberated stateless society of Jews and Palestinians (and everyone else between river and sea). So there will likely need to be transitional formations, some of which may resemble states as a practical matter, but with a clearly negotiated timeline for dissolution once the social and political infrastructure for collective, mutual self-determination is built. 

And I think this can only happen where the Jewish people nurture the humanity they share with Palestinians outside of the structure of the predatory state, and cultivate practices of collective direct democracy in defiance of racist, fascist, reactionary nationalism. I also think, against all odds in the current moment, that this development will have to be led by Palestinians.

So I say again: From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free. For the liberation of all people who live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and for the possibilities it might model for the rest of the world.

Statement last updated June 13th, 2025