BDS, Palestine & Zionism

Who has the right to have rights?

With January’s cease-fire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.

I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.

The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa holders, green card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs."

I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear.

For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.

Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel.

Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the front lines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.

At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.

Attention to the strategic constraints faced by Hezbollah, as well as its political limitations, should not, however, prevent socialists from maintaining that Palestinians and Lebanese have a right to resist Israel’s racist, colonial, apartheid state violence, including through military resistance. This includes defending the right of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, which are the main actors involved in the armed confrontation with Israel’s occupation army, to resist. Israel’s war against Palestinians and Lebanese is part of its attempt to pursue its historical objectives as a settler-colonial state serving Western imperialism. Central to this project is the elimination of the Palestinian populations through a continued Nakba and the consolidation of a regional order serving US imperial interests. These objectives are, without exception, a mortal threat to the whole region. Defending the right of people to resist oppression should not however be confused with political support for the specific political projects of Hamas or Hezbollah in their respective societies, or lead us to imagine these parties will be able to deliver Palestinian liberation or that they have a strategy that could lead to it. Finally, socialists must continue to denounce the complicit role of Western ruling classes in supporting not only the racist, settler-colonial, apartheid state of Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinians but also the Israeli war against Lebanon. They must participate in movements pressuring those ruling classes to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv. No one should expect Western ruling classes to easily change their political positions regarding Israel. But never in history have the ruling classes granted genuine democracy or justice except under pressure from working-class mobilization from below.