[News] The Palestinian People Are Already Free

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*The Palestinian People Are Already Free: The Forty-Second Newsletter 
(2023)*


Malak Mattar 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=d6d04032a5&e=d206d0a40d> 
(Palestine), /Last Painting Before the 2021 War/, 2021.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=52ddb2eeb2&e=d206d0a40d>.

This week, from 14–18 October, the Dilemmas of Humanity 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=d815143d42&e=d206d0a40d> 
conference brought together political leaders, activists, and organic 
intellectuals from around the world to discuss the central problems 
facing humanity today and strengthen proposals to address them. Gathered 
in Johannesburg (South Africa), participants watched in horror as Israel 
escalated its genocidal war against the Palestinian people. On 17 
October, the eleventh consecutive day of its bombardment, Israel stunned 
the world by bombing the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City, where 
thousands of civilians were receiving medical treatment and seeking 
shelter from the attacks. According to the initial estimate of Gaza’s 
health ministry, over 500 people were killed, though that number is 
certain to rise in the coming days. One day before the massacre, the UN 
Security Council had the opportunity to pass a resolution calling for a 
ceasefire in Gaza, which may have averted the hospital bombing. This 
resolution, however, was blocked by the United States, United Kingdom, 
France, and Japan.

During the opening session of the Dilemmas of Humanity 
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conference, in the midst of what many have referred to as a second 
Nakba, Palestinian People’s Party member Arwa Abu Hashhash gave an 
impassioned speech about the assault on her country. This week’s 
newsletter contains her speech, which has been updated as of 18 October 
to reflect current figures and sources.

Malak Mattar 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=0802262a95&e=d206d0a40d> 
(Palestine), /Olive Harvest/, 2019

Allow me to speak on behalf of the Palestinian delegation that was 
supposed to be among us now but was unable to attend because of the 
difficult circumstances and the suffocating blockade that the 
Palestinian people are currently enduring. At this moment, as I address 
you, the besieged people of Gaza and Palestine are facing a genocidal 
operation by the fascist Zionist occupation forces. For the twelfth 
consecutive day, the Israeli war machine continues to massacre 
Palestinians, resulting in the killing of children, women, youth, and 
the elderly. Since 7 October, more than 3,400 Palestinians, many of them 
children, have been martyred. Dozens of families have been completely 
wiped from the civil register after multiple generations were martyred, 
and there has been a horrific destruction of infrastructure, including 
hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, government buildings, and media 
houses. This has led to the displacement of over one million people in 
Gaza from their homes, along with a suffocating siege and an attempt to 
starve the more than 2 million inhabitants of the region by cutting off 
all food, medicine, fuel supplies, water, and electricity.

The genocide of the Palestinian people today has the unequivocal support 
of the imperialist powers of the world, primarily the United States and 
some allied Western countries. These countries are making a terrible yet 
futile attempt to re-define the essence of the Palestinian-Israeli 
conflict as an issue of terrorism, likening the Palestinian people and 
their resistance to ISIS and placing Hamas and the Palestinian people as 
a whole within what they call the ‘War on Terror’. In their deliberate 
effort to establish this narrative, these powers first aim to legitimise 
the killings and daily crimes committed by Israel. They seek to blind 
the world to the truth behind the ongoing conflict and continue to 
ignore and evade the reality that the Palestinian cause is a matter of 
national liberation.

Malak Mattar 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=539be7ece9&e=d206d0a40d> 
(Palestine), /Mother Nature Embracing the Boy and His Horse/, 2023.

As we gather today from all over the world to discuss the crisis of the 
capitalist system – so that we can propose alternatives to overcome this 
system and formulate a socialist alternative – we are faced with one of 
the most fundamental tasks, which requires us to accurately identify the 
tools of this system. In order to understand the nature of the ongoing 
conflict in Palestine today, it is crucial to understand the Israeli 
occupation in the Arab and Maghreb region as a fundamental tool and an 
advanced military base that serves imperialists’ interests in the region 
and ensures their control and hegemony. This is part of the battle of 
ideas that we have repeatedly emphasised in our ongoing work through 
Dilemmas of Humanity.

Israel, which did not exist 75 years ago, was established through one of 
the most violent acts of ethnic cleansing in modern history with the 
unwavering support of British imperialism at the time and later US 
imperialism alongside French and other European imperialist forces. As 
these imperialist powers sought to seize our region’s resources and 
exploit its wealth, their interests converged with those of the Zionist 
movement, which proposed to address the issues of Jews in Europe by 
establishing the state of Israel and colonising Palestinian land, 
displacing its people.

Malak Mattar 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=f7b97b614d&e=d206d0a40d> 
(Palestine), /Giving Birth in a Prison Cell/, 2022.

These imperialist forces, with the United States at the fore, have 
continued to support and justify the state of Israel’s daily brutal 
aggression against Palestinians. This aggression includes stealing land, 
demolishing homes, building illegal settlements, and arresting, 
detaining, humiliating, and killing innocent young people, women, and 
the elderly in Palestine every day.

Israel, after seizing the majority of Palestine in 1948 and displacing 
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nearly 800,000 Palestinians – the vast majority of the population at the 
time – [in an act of ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba] reoccupied 
what remained of historical Palestine by capturing the West Bank and 
Gaza Strip in 1967. Since then, Israel has persistently violated all 
international agreements by building over 200 illegal settlements 
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each containing thousands of housing units where more than 700,000 
settlers now reside. The construction of these settlements involves not 
only the seizure of thousands of acres of Palestinian land, depriving 
many Palestinians of their land and basic livelihoods, but also the 
separation of Palestinian cities and towns from each other, hindering 
the movement and mobility of Palestinians and undermining the 
possibility of establishing a contiguous state, even in the areas that 
the entire world recognises as Palestinian territory.

Moreover, Israel continues to detain 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=0eb493b367&e=d206d0a40d> 
more than 5,000 Palestinians, including 1,264 ‘administrative detainees’ 
held without charge or trial – a practice prohibited by international 
law – as well as 170 children under the age of 16 and 30 women. More 
than 1,000 of these prisoners suffer from various health conditions 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=410796beb6&e=d206d0a40d>, 
including 200 with chronic diseases, and face deliberate medical neglect 
by the Israeli prison authorities. This includes failing to provide 
necessary medications, denying essential surgical procedures, and 
keeping ill detainees in confinement rather than providing them with 
medical care in clinics or hospitals.

Malek Mattar 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=beca4e5300&e=d206d0a40d> 
(Palestine), /When Family Is the Only Shelter/, 2021.

Gaza, which Israel is subjecting to the most brutal genocide today using 
massive amounts of heavy explosives and internationally prohibited 
weapons, has been under a suffocating siege for over sixteen years. 
During this siege and blockade, Israel has launched more than six bloody 
wars, resulting in thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of wounded 
individuals, many of whom have permanent disabilities, and the 
displacement of so many families. Gaza has been turned into an open-air 
prison for two million Palestinians. Hundreds of homes, schools, 
universities, places of worship, and health centres have been shelled 
and destroyed, leading to a persistent crisis of displacement for 
Palestinians, most of whom were already refugees driven from their lands 
during the Nakba of 1948. Today, there is an explicit attempt by Israel 
to forcibly displace the residents of Gaza, which they do not conceal 
but express openly in various television broadcasts.

Faced with the consequences of the brutal colonisation that the 
Palestinian people have endured for over 75 years, Western imperialist 
and Zionist powers have propagated a multitude of falsehoods in order to 
justify their unwavering support [of Israel]. This ranges from 
portraying Palestinian land as ‘a land without a people’, attempting to 
depict the conflict between Palestinians and Israeli settlers as a 
religious struggle, and, most recently, framing the conflict as a war on 
terrorism.

Today, we have the fundamental task of dismantling this Western 
imperialist narrative and replacing it with the true story of the 
Palestinian people, their legitimate struggle, and their resistance for 
their liberation and rights.

Today, we are also engaged in another battle, the battle of emotions, 
which we have always emphasised in our work in the International 
Peoples’ Assembly (IPA). In this battle, imperialist forces seek to 
strip humanity, including the Palestinian people, of its belief in the 
feasibility and potential of resistance and instead spread a discourse 
based on frustration and defeat. What happened on 7 October is an 
integral part of the Palestinian people’s struggle over the past 75 
years. Resistance against colonialism and occupation is a just human 
right that is protected by all international laws. Any attempt to 
portray what happened as an ‘attack’ or ‘terrorism’ is a cover-up for 
the terrorism of the occupying state and an attempt to legitimise it.

Malak Mattar 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=4dcc2964f1&e=d206d0a40d> 
(Palestine), /When Peace Dies, Embrace It. It Will Live Again/, 2019.

The Palestinian people today are in dire need of the widest possible 
solidarity from all free peoples. This call for solidarity is not made 
from a position of humanitarian or symbolic solidarity but is an 
integral part of our shared struggle. What is happening in Palestine 
today is not isolated from what is happening in India, Iraq, Haiti, 
Venezuela, Cuba, or elsewhere. The defeat of imperialist assaults in one 
region is a victory for all of us.

Allow me to thank all the social movements that are acting in solidarity 
with the Palestinian people and extend my thanks to the IPA, which has 
always embraced the cause of Palestine. It is true that the Israeli 
killing machine continues to take Palestinian lives, but we believe that 
this will only strengthen our determination to continue resisting. Allow 
me to conclude with a quote from the Palestinian communist poet Muin 
Bseiso: ‘Yes, we may die, but we will uproot death from our land’.

Victory to the resistance! Liberty and freedom to Palestine!

Heba Zagout 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=f604c9aa97&e=d206d0a40d> 
(Palestine), /Jerusalem Is My City/, 2022.

We hope that this message from Arwa is both informative and 
inspirational. Much of the art in this newsletter is by the Palestinian 
artist Malak Mattar 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=44c2b7344e&e=d206d0a40d>, 
who began painting at age 14 after a quarter of her neighbourhood was 
destroyed in an airstrike during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. The last 
painting is by the Palestinian artist Heba Zagout 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=046f4d0b22&e=d206d0a40d>, 
who, along with her two children, was killed on 13 October by Israeli 
airstrikes on Gaza. The terrible violence against the Palestinian people 
must stop now. Palestinians will be a free people. In fact, they are 
already free.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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