حرية لفلسطين

Smearing protestors and inciting violence:

The reprehensible act of smearing and inciting violence against pro-Palestinian protesters – even indirectly – represents dangerous attempts to silence advocacy for human rights and suppress criticism of the oppressive policies enacted against the Palestinian people. These unconscionable tactics seek to delegitimize and demonize those standing in solidarity with the struggles against occupation, apartheid, and the denial of self-determination.

By characterizing these demonstrations as violent hate-marches not only serves as an attempt to smear demonstrators in the eyes of the general public but also gaslight them into questioning their own actions. When combined with the false narrative around how these spaces are “unsafe” for Jewish individuals, played up only by inflammatory and incendiary terms like “no go zones” to further divide the movement and block meaningful mass organising between the different pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide and anti-Zionist movements.

This provides a smokescreen to justify forcibly disrupting and violating the fundamental civil liberties of peaceful protestors and conflates lawful expressions of dissent with threats to public order, falsely portraying those decrying injustice as provocateurs and aggressors in need of subjugation by state forces.

This defamatory rhetoric has routinely been deployed by authoritarian regimes throughout history to discredit challengers to their unjust systems of domination and marginalization. By cynically equating criticism of state misconduct with impending chaos, the powerful can recast efforts to hold them accountable as threats to societal stability requiring violent suppression. These divisive strategies are no different to the age-old tactics employed by colonial regimes who label the colonized as terrorists for taking up arms in their quest for liberation.

Those who peddle such dangerous rhetoric against Palestinian activists engage in an obstruction of truth and an assault on the sacrosanct rights of free speech, free assembly and freedom of conscience. They provide ethical and rhetorical cover for the repression of noble grassroots movements born of moral outrage in the face of subjugation and apartheid policies.

This results in the violent suppression of voices by police regimes, a reality we’re already seeing unfold before our very eyes across the global north. While it’s predominantly only extremist individuals committing acts of violence against their peers who are choosing to protest against the active genocide, it’s a worrying trend that should be

Any claims of such demonstrations being “inconvenient” or “not winning any hearts” only demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the core tenets of protests, civil disobedience and the philosophy behind demonstrations. Protests, in their very nature, are intended to disrupt and cause inconvenience, because at the end of the day, they’re a community’s desperate efforts to get their peers to listen, pay attention and take direct action.

By instead ignoring these calls to action and discussing how the protests affect you personally, you not only undermine the wider collective’s efforts but shift focus away from the core goal of saving lives and ensuring equality for all.Defenders of the indefensible find themselves resorting to such duplicitous vilification because they cannot counteract substantive criticism of the injustices and human rights violations they enable through truthful argument and moral reasoning. Smears and incitements become their only available tactics to obfuscate and deflect righteous condemnation.

Those genuinely committed to democratic values and universal human rights must firmly resist such ignoble efforts to denigrate and endanger pro-Palestinian demonstrators. In reality, portraying pro-Palestinian solidarity as an incitement of violence is, in itself, an incitement against the nonviolent civil resistors who represent the continued march toward universal freedom, dignity, and adherence to international law. This vilification of protestors is merely a desperate attempt to preserve an outmoded ethnonationalist order through the weaponization of misinformation and undemocratic physical force.

Conflating Zionism with Judaism:

While the Jewish faith and cultural identity not only long predate and but have no inherent connection to the racist political ideology of Zionism, the modern Israeli regime has deliberately pursued an ethnic supremacist agenda rooted in Jewish ethno-religious identity — yet built upon the demolition of Palestinian homes, the theft of Palestinian lands and the generational uprooting, displacement and dehumanization of the Palestinian people at large.

The harrowing cost of human suffering, loss of life and deprivation of the most basic liberties and security has been unconscionable and now, Zionism represents an utterly deplorable ethnic supremacist ideology that has enabled unconscionable acts of violence, displacement and subjugation against the Palestinian people for almost a century.

Its real-world impacts have been nothing short of a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure and apartheid racism - a horrific legacy that cannot be decoupled from Zionism's founding vision of creating an exclusionary Jewish ethno-state through the denial of Palestinian self-determination and indigeneity.

The forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and villages during the Nakba, rendering millions stateless and exiled as refugees, was an act of premeditated ethnic purging. With the willful destruction of Palestinian property, demolition of homes, uprooting of ancient olive groves, and obliteration of cultural resources further demonstrating a systematic effort to erase Palestinian identity, history and any enduring claims to the land.

Subsequent decades have seen this brutal ethnic persecution, land confiscation and denial of human rights institutionalized through severely discriminatory policies, illegal settlements, violence by occupying forces, arbitrary detentions, torture, and most notably, systemic oppression under Israel's racist apartheid regime.

These are not mere "realities" for Palestinians who remain, but grave crimes against humanity perpetrated through Zionism's new brand of unrelenting, institutionalized cruelty. This utterly shameful legacy of calculated ethnic cleansing, apartheid governance and flagrant violations of international law is inextricably intertwined with how Zionism's racist, supremacist and anti-democratic ideology has been implemented on the ground by Israel.

Any attempt to decouple or whitewash these egregious atrocities from Zionism itself is a form of explicit denialism and complicity in oppression of the highest order. No ethnic, religious or any other group deserves an ethno-supremacist theocratic state constructed through the forcible subjugation of indigenous populations as second-class citizens stripped of all rights, dignity and humanity.

Such an abhorrent exclusionary system based on racial hierarchy is fundamentally incompatible with even the barest notion of true democracy, self-determination or universal human rights regardless of ethnicity or faith.

Statehood, sovereignty and self-determination can never legitimately emerge from such systematic violence, discrimination, forced displacement and ethnic persecution as political Zionism has perpetrated against the Palestinian population.

If a state were to arise organically through democratic processes that enshrine equality, safety and liberty for all citizens regardless of ethnicity or faith, it would have legitimacy. But any racist system of ethnic domination erected through brute force subjugation and calculated ethnic supremacy, as Zionism has done, is an egregious affront to justice and human rights that requires being dismantled - not enshrined - with a new equitable path forward established.