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Solidarity with Palestine from Diné Bikéyah
Abstract
This commentary focuses on recent Palestinian solidarity efforts unfolding in Indigenous communities and how these efforts have the potential to expand and strengthen US-based Palestine solidarity movements. One such effort, Diné Solidarity With Palestine (DSWP), is attempting to apply lessons from academic solidarity with Palestine to grassroots organizing and education with Navajo people in Diné Bikéyah (Navajo Nation). DSWP seeks to mobilize collaborations that address and resist the violence of settler colonialism by organizing directly with Native people and connecting Diné and other Native folks with Palestinians. The work of this small but growing campaign asks us to consider how the presence of Palestine in Native resistance work shifts the landscape of these struggles by opening up comparative considerations of Native and Palestinian anticolonial politics, which in turn allows Native people, Palestinians, and others engaged more broadly in intersectional anticolonial work to sharpen our analysis, organizing skills, and politics of accountability.
In addition to centering Palestinian liberation in its organizing principles, DSWP actively considers how solidarity with Palestine informs our collective response to contestations over power and resources in the American Southwest, many of which Israel now influences. DSWP thus links solidarity with Palestine to urgent social, human, and environmental issues that result from the disciplinary mechanisms of colonial violence at play in this region of the world. The campaign understands that Palestinian liberation requires the liberation of Indigenous and other oppressed peoples from occupation by Israel’s collaborator and guarantor, the United States. It also understands that effective organizing and mobilization occurs when seemingly unrelated issues like the occupation of Palestine are linked to local concerns. DSWP thus embeds Palestinian liberation in the myriad struggles coalescing in our local context that challenge the interlocking, transnational, and hypermilitarized forms of settler colonialism that dominate both US and Israeli nationalism. Struggles like Apache, Hopi, O’odham, and Diné (Navajo) movements to defend sacred lands against state-supported corporations; the growing antipolice brutality movement in Albuquerque, New Mexico; border town justice campaigns in notoriously violent settlements like Gallup, New Mexico; efforts to decolonize and queer the immigrant rights movement along the US–Mexico border; and Diné struggles to end resource colonization are only a handful of local efforts intent on abolishing settler colonialism. Through various forms of public and grassroots education, DSWP plans to bridge these Native-led struggles to Palestinian liberation.
This approach rethinks prevailing paradigms of Palestine solidarity tied to academic institutions and associations like the American Studies Association, which have gained traction through political activism sparked by burgeoning work on settler colonialism in the interdisciplinary lines that now feed the field. While efforts by American studies faculty and students to change institutional policies and accountability through boycotts are critical forms of struggle, such efforts tend to isolate Palestine from other struggles or elevate it above other concerns, especially those pertaining to Native-led anticolonial resistance here in North America. DSWP engages in solidarity with Palestine beyond the academy by putting critiques of settler colonialism to work in on-the-ground organizing and grassroots education informed by a comparative framework. Its comparative approach builds on examples of direct action support between First Nations and Canadian Palestine advocacy groups, as well as emerging comparative perspectives from participants in North American delegations to Palestine who frame solidarity as a form of transnational anticolonial politics embedded in nationalist self-determination movements. DSWP’s orientation to Palestine solidarity work thus asks American studies scholars to increasingly engage comparative frameworks in our study of settler colonialism, which requires a shift in the accountability politics that underwrite current critiques of settler colonialism (and thus current approaches to Palestine solidarity efforts) and their tendency to center questions of state power, institutional shortcomings, or the analysis itself at the expense of providing real and urgent support to Native struggles—including anticolonial nationalist movements—against US occupation. Because the United States and Israel are so intimately intertwined, Native liberation is bound to Palestinian liberation. Wherever situated, our Palestine solidarity work in American studies and beyond must evolve to directly reflect this reality.
Because of limited space, this commentary fails to cohere into an essay that does justice to the complexities of Palestine solidarity work or its impact...
... In place of this complicity, I chose to advocate for a decolonial orientation to Indigeneity (i.e., by approaching Indigenous knowledges and ways of being on their own terms, beyond colonial logics and categorizations), which takes inspiration from networks of Indigenous scholars and activists. For instance, in describing the campaign for Diné Solidarity With Palestine (DSWP), Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) has argued that such a global perspective on Indigeneity facilitates "comparative considerations of...anticolonial politics" that can "sharpen our analysis, organizing skills, and politics of accountability" (Yazzie 2015(Yazzie , 1007. To make space for these coalitional perspectives within JEDIB's framing of ethnicity is to emphasize how "belonging" can include acts of solidarity. ...
The Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (JEDIB) committee formed in 2022 in order to support diversity and inclusion in the Health Humanities Consortium and to advance best practices for equity and inclusion in the field of medical and health humanities. This Forum Essay describes our first year of work, including participant-led commitment statement crafting and strategic planning. Health humanities-specific JEDIB work is described in detail in essays about disability justice; gender, sex, sexuality, and reproductive justice; and Indigeneity from a decolonial standpoint. The authors offer transferable techniques for other organizations and institutions with particular attention to heath care and health professions education. Another essay analyzes US institutional and demographic data to show that as an academic program, health humanities gives robust indicators of contributing significantly to student diversity and inclusive success in higher education and medical education. The Forum closes with a reflection on joining the work of equity and inclusion and what new priorities and awareness can emerge to inform health equity scholarship and epistemic justice.
This article explores the trope of desert desolation in the Zionist state-building project. It traces the strategic uses of desolate imagery in the pioneer narrative (1880s–1920s), by the New Hebrew culture (1923–1948), during the ‘golden age’ of urban and regional planning (1948–1956), and through marketing the Negev desert town of Mitzpe Ramon to tourists (1993–present). These eras highlight the tension between desolation as reflecting the alienated ‘outsiders’ gaze’ versus desolation as energizing and inspiring place making. I argue that since unproductive, desolate landscapes pose an economic threat, both Israel’s collectivist and capitalist settlement projects have confronted the challenge of strategically rebranding desolation to promote its allure.
To see for ourselves the conditions under which Palestinians live and struggle – this was the mission of the delegation of Indigenous and Women of Color Feminists that traveled to Occupied Palestine in June 2011.1 All of us had been part of social justice struggles in our respective communities and all of us sought to increase our capacity for effective solidarity action with Palestinians. I traveled with the delegation as an Indigenous woman living under US occupation seeking to understand how another Indigenous population struggled under settler colonialism. Sometimes it takes seeing the suffering of others to realise the full magnitude of our own suffering. As a Dakota woman in Palestine, I had the painful experience of witnessing the monstrous destructiveness of settler colonialism’s war against a People and a land base. I told one friend that it was like witnessing ahigh-speed and high-tech version of the colonisation of our Indigenous homelands. Colonisation ought to be one of the most easily recognised forms of oppression in the world, but it is not. In fact, colonising powers work so steadfastly to rationalise and justify this crime against humanity that it eventually becomes normalised, acceptable, and even righteous. I come from a place where the government denies that it is colonial – it denies that it is a government of occupation. I recognised this same colonial deception at play in Israel’s disavowal of itself as a colonial entity.
This article explores the possibilities and histories of indigenous solidarity struggles against the settler colonial states of Canada and Israel. Throughout this work, we examine activist and political movements from Canada that make connections between the struggles of indigenous peoples in Canada and Palestine. We ask: In light of efforts to usurp indigenous identities in the service of settler colonial states, how do Palestine activists in Canada create lines of solidarity with indigenous peoples? And how can we foster global solidarity with Palestinians that are attuned to local native struggles for sovereignty and self determination? We attempt to address these questions by utilising a comparative framework that addresses the gendered and racialised aspects of the settler colonial projects of Canada and Israel.
This American Quarterly forum on Palestine and the U.S. Southwest grew out of a symposium held at the University of Southern California on March 30, 2009, to mark Cesar Chavez Day. March 31 marks Cesar Chavez Day in eight states in the United States. The holiday was adopted in California in 2000 and is intended not only to commemorate the labor leader, but also to promote community service in his honor. In 2009, in an effort to celebrate Chavez’s legacy and the spirit of his politics, and to make new and contemporary linkages, David Lloyd proposed, as a fitting tribute, a community forum exploring the connections and differences between the struggles of the Chicana/o and Palestinian peoples. The forum was inspired by a question posed in various forms during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Gaza: “What if a terrorist group were lobbing rockets into San Diego out of Tijuana?” However tendentious, and even if it misrepresented both situations and their histories, the analogy prompted us to ask if there are in fact connections between the Chicana/o and the Palestinian situations. Accordingly, we organized an event that brought together Latina/o activists and scholars and those committed to justice for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Israel. The questions the participants posed took different approaches, most of which are reflected in the essays in this forum:
—What lessons can the current movement to boycott Israel draw from the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) boycott? How does a boycott work, what is its status as an instrument of nonviolent struggle, and when and why should a boycott be pursued? Cesar Chavez and the union he helped to build, the UFW, were the experts of the boycott—having used it effectively to pressure grape growers to come to the bargaining table. In the early 1970s the UFW developed an international boycott because it realized that lack of consumer demand was one of the few ways that a relatively powerless group could get growers to negotiate with the union—and it worked. In the present moment, activists and scholars are also organizing an economic, academic, and cultural boycott to build international pressure on Israel not only to fully recognize the human and civil rights of Palestinians living in Israel, but also to cease expansion into Palestine and end the undeclared war on the Palestinian people.
—Are there analogies between the wall being constructed along the U.S. border with Mexico and the separation wall that cuts through the occupied West Bank—both with the participation of the same Israeli firm, Elbit Systems?1 As it turns out, and as all the essays stress, it takes some effort not to see the parallels between Israel’s security “fence” and the wall that the United States has been building along its southern border. Both are intended to exclude a population that has a political and/or economic claim to the land in question and that is seen as a threat by the resident populations.
—What is the impact of the security state that has emerged in the United States since 9/11 and in Israel in the wake of the Second Intifada? In particular, how have such changes affected how the movement of people is controlled, whether U.S. Latina/os or Palestinians and Arab Americans? This is perhaps the question with the furthest reaching implications, given that neoliberal models of the free movement of capital and goods and the restriction of the movement of labor have intersected on a global and not merely regional scale with the security concerns of the contemporary state. Israel and the United States offer exemplary instances of these tendencies that promise to be replicated internationally.
—Are there comparative dimensions to educational inequalities affecting both Chicana/os and Arab Israelis, both of whom form substantial minorities that suffer from discrimination against their cultures and languages and significant underrepresentation in the upper levels of education? Both the Chicana/o and Latina/o population and Palestinians not only suffer from limited formal education, but must also contend with systematic educational exclusion—whether because of the bombing of Palestinian educational institutions or the refusal to allow undocumented students financial aid...