Free Palestine to Free Us All

GulfRoots has and will continue to unapologetically fight for Palestinian freedom until it is won. We mourn all the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost from the violence since October 7. We understand this violence is a product of a century of Zionist settler-colonial oppression and that the only way to reach peace is to uproot oppression.

We agree with Ofer Cassif, an Israeli Jewish legislator, who said “Israelis and Palestinians pay the price of the arrogant, criminal, ongoing occupation that Israel refuses to end.” We join his calls for an immediate end to occupation and of Israel’s “fascist subjugation” of Palestinians, an act which he says will “also liberate the Israelis.”

“Never again” means NEVER again. Israel’s military, extremist settlers, propaganda machine, and co-conspirators – particularly the United States – are committing genocide right now. This is not Judaism. This is not self-defense. This is nothing other than systemic dehumanization, ethnic cleansing, and extermination.

As environmental, labor, and community organizers in the U.S. Gulf South, we have a particular responsibility to name the racial, environmental, and class dimensions of this ongoing atrocity. Israel is besieging Gaza – denying food, water, fuel, medicine, and communications to millions of stateless people, while carpet bombing their homes and hospitals. Prior to this week, already 90% of the water in Gaza – which Israel completely controls – was undrinkable. Israel disposes it’s cancer-causing electronic and military waste on people in Gaza who they consider equally disposable. The U.S. military-industrial complex – the worst climate polluter on earth – makes billions of dollars annually from this suffering. The 16-year blockade prevents farmers and workers in Gaza from selling the fruits of their labor, forcing them to rely on “aid” from imperial countries who benefit from dividing and extracting people and natural resources from the Middle East.

As a result of the same systems of racial capitalism, we see similar landfills, petrochemical plants, sea level rise, water crises, and other climate and environmental injustices in Black, Indigenous, and communities of color here in the Gulf South. The Israeli military trains U.S. police who terrorize Black communities. Cancer Alley in Louisiana, built on top of former slave plantations and unmarked burial grounds of enslaved Black ancestors, is another genocidal project. The build-out of fracked methane gas export terminals – the world’s largest fossil fuel expansion – along the Gulf Coast is a product of centuries of racist colonization and imperialism to dominate land, people, and natural resources in order to make a handful of murderers obscenely rich.

The West has dominated Palestine for centuries while allowing fascism to grow, leading to the Nazi Holocaust. Then Britain, France, and the U.S. exported the “Jewish Problem” to Palestine so they could continue extracting wealth from the region while acting like allies to Jewish survivors. Some Zionist Jews, desperate for their own safety, internalized Western racism and militarism to become oppressors and killers of the Palestinian people, who themselves had been struggling for independence and self-determination. As a result, Jewish people are not safe in so-called Israel, which was supposedly the purpose for creating a Jewish state.

We believe in a future where every life is precious, where all people live in freedom and safety. Right now, Palestinians, Israelis and all of us with family on the ground are terrified for loved ones. We all deserve liberation, safety and equality. The only way to get there is by uprooting the sources of the violence.

GulfRoots Collective calls on the US government to use its power to 1) produce an immediate ceasefire in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, 2) open safe pathways for humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, 3) stop arming Israel, and 4) end Israeli apartheid. We ask all of our friends and community members to call their members of Congress with these demands.

We call on labor unions, environmental organizations, and all other groups committed to justice to make statements exposing and condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Until life, breath, love, and freedom flow like water,

El Colectivo GulfRoots