We are a group of individuals and collectives in revolutionary solidarity with the people of Palestine. As a response to the feminist call to strike for Gaza on 8th March (International Women’s Day), we feel the need to put out this statement to recognise the occupational, genocidal deprivations perpetrated by the terrorist settler-colonial Zionist state of Israel that has led to a death toll of over 30000 Palestinians with countless trapped under rubble and millions displaced. We bear witness to the carceral violence, torture, humiliation and murder of Palestinians, especially those held captive in besieged Gaza and hostages taken by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). This includes a wide range of carceral forms of torture including the use of Palestinian men as human shields, widely circulated dehumanising images of public sexual violation of Palestinian men, sexual assault of Palestinian women in Zionist prisons, enforced disappearance of children, and other acts of violence and debilitation. These largely go unreported, under-reported or misreported because of the Zionist hold over mainstream media.
Humanitarian aid is being withheld by Israel to intentionally starve Gazans as an instrument of ethnic cleansing and genocide. When the few aid trucks are allowed by Israel to finally cross into Gaza, or aid is airdropped by other countries attempting to break Israel’s siege, the Zionist army bomb, shoot, kill, and run over Palestinians rushing to food trucks as seen in multiple incidents including the recent flour massacre. Children continue to die from starvation and severe climate conditions; and those not dead yet are severely malnourished. Since October 7, Israel has incessantly bombed Gaza from F16s using 2,000-pound US-supplied bombs that blow up whole neighbourhoods, internationally banned white phosphorus, and smaller lethal bombs dropped from the constantly circling drones. Israel has destroyed 70% of the housing stock in Gaza, rendered all hospitals unable to provide care, and has further destroyed medical facilities, desalination plants that supply clean water, schools and universities, cultural and historical landmarks, mosques and churches, bakeries, roads, highways, and all civilian resources and infrastructure crucial for survival rendering Gaza unliveable. The sustained targeted attack on medical facilities have necessitated medical procedures like amputations and C-sections without anaesthetics while the neonatals and infants are dying on hospital beds and ICUs for lack of oxygen. Palestinian medics are not only overworked and severely under-resourced but under direct attack. Mass graves continue to pile up and Israel strips Palestinians of dignity even in death. Palestinian families are not allowed to recover bodies. Instead, the occupying forces attack and bomb graveyards and steal dead bodies for organs and skin to be used in Israeli forensic institutes. We have also seen the insidious images of Israeli soldiers posing with looted Palestinian women’s lingerie, mannequins, stealing children’s toys and making videos cooking inside houses Gazans have been forcibly displaced from. The entire population of Gaza has been subjected to ‘collective punishment’ directed towards the acts of resistance forces, which is, in fact, the right of a colonised people for self-determination and autonomy. Israel has carried out targeted attacks on journalists, medics, artists, academics and anyone who can help save lives and ensure the survival of Palestinian culture. The Zionist regime has killed over 100 journalists to suppress news coming out of Gaza. Murdering journalists has been a tool to silence Palestinian voices throughout the 75 years of occupation. We recall the targeted killing of journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 in occupied West Bank. We honour and learn from resilient voices like Wael Al-Dahdouh who survived an IOF attack and whose entire family was murdered by Israel.
The Zionist entity also has a long history of pinkwashing, touting itself as a queer haven, and using that as a justification for genocide. We see IOF soldiers proudly upholding rainbow flags on rubble or others proposing to their partners amidst the horrors they inflict on Palestinians. We see from various archives of queerness that Palestinian queers have always resisted this. Queer people all over the world reject Israel’s pinkwashing with the slogans, ‘Not in our name’, ‘Not Gay as in Happy but Queer as in Free Palestine’ and ‘No Pride in Apartheid’, and lately, ‘No Pride in Genocide’. We call for all queer comrades to include the liberation of Palestine in their imagination of queer liberation. Amidst the excruciating, incomprehensible ongoing physical and emotional trauma genocidal occupation inflicts, we call on our mad, queer, crip comrades to unflinchingly demand a free Palestine because disability and queer justice is intimately tied to Palestinian liberation.
On January 26 2024, in the case against Israel brought by South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled ‘plausible’ genocide and ordered six Provisional Measures that Israel must fulfil. The ICJ ordered Israel to take measures within its power to prevent genocidal acts, including preventing and punishing incitement to genocide, ensuring aid and services reach the Palestinian population in Gaza, and preserving evidence of crimes committed in Gaza. As we can see, Israel has completely ignored and defied all Provisional Measures. This also shows the impunity Israel enjoys because it is backed by imperial regimes. It reveals how colonial imperialism undergirds international law that has historically failed the colonised by protecting the interests of colonial imperialist regimes. Yet, the colonised have stood strong in their struggle for freedom and liberation, which has historically led to the downfall of empires.
We understand that our liberation as oppressed people is deeply intertwined with struggles of the oppressed worldwide. We recognise India’s complicity in enabling the genocide and occupation of Palestine. A recent report by Pew Research Centre, shows that India leads in support for autocracy and military rule among surveyed nations. Indian right-wing accounts are among leading amplifiers of anti-Palestinian fake news and have used it to fan and escalate anti-Muslim violence in India. As Azad Essa traces in his book Hostile Homelands, despite its official stance supporting the 1975 UN resolution that concluded Zionism as racism, India continued maintaining relations with Israel through security and defence engagements. For example, India adopted Israeli security systems in response to the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. Thereafter India bought its mass surveillance infrastructure – the Central Monitoring System – from Israel, which can operate without court orders and access any individual’s communication data. The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Hindutva regime (under whose fascist vision of ‘Hindu Rashtra (state)’ crimes against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis is at an all-time high) upgraded this relation to a ‘strategic partnership’ following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2017 Israel visit where the two parties signed a defence deal worth 2 billion USD. This deal included the Israeli spyware Pegasus, that the government used to arrest journalists, government critics, students, especially Dalit and Muslim organisers and throttle political opposition. India is now the top arms buyer from Israel, and our taxes fund the Hermes 900 drones manufactured by the Adani Elbit UAV Complex (the first facility in India and outside Israel to manufacture this drone) which Israel uses to massacre Palestinians. Israeli drones ‘field-tested’ on Palestinians are imported to be used on Kashmiris, thwart Adivasi movements in Bastar, and are being used against the ongoing Farmers’ protest. Much like Israel, the Indian state is a settler-colonial state occupying Kashmir. The abrogation of article 370 in Kashmir in 2019 that catapulted the facilitation of Indian citizens settling in Kashmir is starkly similar to Israeli settler-colonial policies. Kashmir has had a long history of what Dr. Ather Zia calls ‘affective solidarity’ with Palestine embodied through various ways of resisting whereby the Palestinian struggle is ‘inspirational, cathartic’ to Kashmiris. Following the article 370 abrogation, Palestine-Kashmir solidarity strengthened with the BDS movement’s call for solidarity for Kashmir. Pro-Palestine protests in Kashmir continue to be repressed, a history that goes back to 2014 where amidst chants of ‘Save Gaza’ and ‘Go India, Go Back’, the Indian Armed Forces shot at young boys who were stone pelting, killing a 14-year-old. We stand with the cause for a Free Kashmir because you cannot call for a Free Palestine without calling for a Free Kashmir.
We stand with the workers of India who have made their solidarity to the Palestinian cause clear—the water transport workers who have refused to aid the shipment of arms to Israel on 14/02/2024 and the major Indian trade unions who, on 09/11/2023, rejected the Indian government’s move to replace Palestinian workers with Indian workers in Israel. We extend our revolutionary solidarity to the workers of the world resisting the ongoing genocide. We stand with the students who have organised for Palestine and whose protests have been met with repression by several Indian universities. Indian academia continues to receive funding from and collaborates with Israel. We call for an immediate cessation of this act of enabling occupation. We call for a total academic boycott of the Zionist entity – no more enabling of the coloniser’s knowledge production, which is a tool for occupation and genocide. The Zionist regime continues to murder academics and destroy schools, universities and libraries. We recall and honour the memory of professor, writer and poet Refaat Alareer. We urge Indian academics to see how Zionism is directly connected to the Hindutva machinery that continues to imprison scholars like Hany Babu, GN Saibaba among others and student organisers like Sharjeel Imam, Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, among others, arrested for being dissenting voices. UK-based Kashmiri academic Nitasha Kaul was recently denied entry to India on her visit for a Bengaluru event on democratic and constitutional values. Our universities have long been bastions of resistance and we should strengthen our solidarities in knowledge production with the oppressed worldwide.
Following the call for strike on 8th March we put out this statement and will be participating with various actions in individual and collective capacities in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We learn from and honour Palestinian resistance in every form. We honour all Palestinian women, martyred and living, who are pillars of the freedom struggle. We pay homage to Tarab Abdul Hadi, Fatima Bernawi, Leila Khaled, Khalida Jarrar, Ahed Tamimi, Muna El Kurd, Bisan Owda, Amira Al-Assouli among countless others. We call for an immediate release of all Palestinian political prisoners. We remember Rafeef Ziadeh’s words, ‘We Teach Life, Sir! Actions can range from actively engaging in the Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, raising awareness in-person and on media platforms, sending emails to government representatives to send aid to Gaza and push for permanent ceasefire, amplifying fundraisers, donating e-sims, and more. From Palestine to Sudan, Congo, Western Sahara, Kurdistan, Balochistan, Kashmir all the way to Haiti and Tigray—no one is free until everyone is free. We call for economic, academic, cultural, and social boycott. We call upon organisers to honour the call for the strike by addressing and embracing the call for a free Palestine in their 8 March programs and events. We call for the end of casteist, patriarchal, capitalist, colonial regimes that oppress us. We demand immediate permanent ceasefire, end of the siege on Gaza, end to settler-colonial occupation and the dismantling of the Zionist state of Israel. We demand a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
Do make your support for the statement heard by posting on social media and handing out the handouts we have made here.
Do comment your organization’s name below to be added to the list of signatories.
Signed
Trans Queer Feminists in Solidarity with Palestine
Feminists in Resistance, Kolkata
COLLECTIVE, Delhi
Yugma Collective, Mumbai
South Asian Solidarity Collective
Pakistan India Peoples’ Forum for Peace & Democracy
Offstreet Journal, India
Morcha Patrika, India
All India Feminist Alliance ALIFA-NAPM
Ashoka University Student Government
Democracy Collective, Sonipat, Haryana
hasrat-e-zindagi mamuli
LGBTQIA+ Academics collective
Turbine bagh, London
The Polis Project, NYC
Insurgent Knowledges, UK
Naveddu Nilladidare (If We Do Not Rise), Karnataka
All India Progressive Women’s Association
Feminists For Palestine 
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