Solidarity with Palestine

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Hackers & Designers stands in full solidarity with the Palestinian people and their ongoing struggle for self-determination and liberation from the oppressive colonial State of Israel and its Western supporters.

The Zionist apartheid regime, the murder of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, the destruction of religious sanctuaries and vital civilian infrastructures, the forced displacement of thousands of Palestinians, the suppression of fuel, water, electricity and medical supplies, and the weaponization of civilian death, fear and grief must end now.

Supporting Palestinian liberation stands by no means in opposition to acknowledging the violence caused by the attack of Hamas. We grieve the deaths and kidnapping of Israeli civilians and stand in solidarity with their families and friends.

We also refuse to see what has unfolded since October 7th divorced from the violent colonial history and occupation of Palestine since 75 years.

We are asking ourselves 'How can we care for one another and the (international) communities we consider ourselves part of?’ We believe its vital to continue checking in with each other, and resist the polarisation that we see working its way into our communities. Simplistic dichotomies and easy conflations between the zionist state of Israel with Judaism or Israeli citizenship, between Hamas and Palestinian civilians, bring us further away from locating and understanding the root of this systematic violence and our own implication in it. We urge everyone within the H&D cosmos to stay in touch and in solidarity with one another, and refuse shortcuts.

We are critical of the state of Israel as much as we are of our own governements that finance and justify, thus reinforce colonial violence.

This statement has evolved alongside discussions amongst H&D – a group of people who hold different positionalities. We took time to talk, read, exchange resources, ask questions,... and we decided to share this statement to stand in solidarity with all people who are facing arrests and violence for expressing solidarity.

As a community committed to education as a collective endeavour and one of self-actualization, H&D would like to offer a list of resources we have read and discussed leading up to and during the Global Solidarity strike of October 20:

Resources

This (growing) list of resources has been composed by members of the H&D collective as we found ourselves shocked and saddened by the suffering our friends and peers are currently enduring, and the lack of actionable responses from our governments. As an attempt to educate ourselves and engage in conversations with each other across our different positionalities, we started gathering and discussing these resources together.

News

News coverage can be quite disorienting. Western news channels are reproducing oppressive colonial rethorics. Social media, while amplifying many unheard voices, is owned by extractivist Big Tech companies, that further reproduce colonial violence. Twitter is not actively fighting misinformation [1], Instagram injects the word "terrorist" into Palestinian users' bios [2], and Facebook blocks profiles left and right with no justification whatsoever [3].

We recommend considering independent media platforms that are not owned by social media platforms and big tech. Listen to voices from within Palestine; news channels and reporters in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, testimonies from displaced families, Palestinian historical archives, and so on. Amplifying these voices is another important strategy.

• Al Jazeera for live updates. They have journalists reporting from inside Gaza, The West Bank, Israeli (Occupied Palestinian) Territories, Jerusalem, south Lebanon and West Jordan. They are factual and exact in their reporting but also clearly leaning in the direction of support for palestinian liberation in their approach to journalism. They are funded by the Qatari Government. https://www.aljazeera.com/

Al Jazeera could be censored by Israel after passing of new "emergency" legislation in Israel on October 20th, which gives the government the power to ban any media that poses a threat to the saftey of the country.

• Jacobin https://jacobin.nl/
• French independent media BLAST https://www.blast-info.fr/emissions
• British indepedent news outlet https://novaramedia.com/

Watch

• Short informative videos:
  • How Israel Was Created: https://youtu.be/6foH3Zc82ZQ
  • How Israel Made Gaza The World’s Biggest Prison: https://youtu.be/iWG7JB9saE4
  • What Your Taxes Pay For in Israel: https://youtu.be/-nLZRmKXmmc
  • Why Only Palestinians Must Condemn Violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19jQ_tJmaMo
• Rabbi Isroel Dovid Weiss on the difference between Judaism and Zionism: https://youtu.be/gIX368TtOJs
• Histoires Crépues is an independent French Media project, that deconstruct colonialism. We recommend watching their video on the colonial history behind the Israeli-Palastinian war https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQH22pqOdDQ Very relevant in this video is also, the attention drawn to the language we use to describe what is happening right now in Gaza. The video is in French but the auto-generated English captions are quite good.

Films / programs

• Unprovoked Narratives is a collection of films celebrating the beauty of Gaza, its people, its struggle and its survival. The program aims to resist the demonisation of this beautiful place. https://www.palestinefilminstitute.org/en/unprovoked-narratives
• https://www.palestinecinema.com/
• 'Born in Gaza' (available on Netflix) was filmed shortly after the 2014 Gaza war and examines how violence has transformed the lives of 10 Palestinian children.

Listen

• Palastinian radio station: https://www.radioalhara.net/
  • They put together a 12 hour program: https://soundcloud.com/radiokarantina/until-liberation-radio-alhara-12-hours-program-on-palestine

Read

• Protean magazine partnered up with the Institute for Palestine Studies, sharing letters of Gazians written since the 7th of October https://proteanmag.com/2023/10/15/letters-from-gaza/?fbclid=PAAaav0wGM42LpunO2eKzXTPTuBzI35nIW4guafPqUWP57MaRQ1ns6-eZfalU_aem_Aafcsbg_BcrbG5-w3_SOsoCLh-hdgFfJcdyQ2NohPQQKUYbyr4gPOgP89xWb3jrGncw
• +972 magazine published an article about the instrumentalization of anti-semitism to shut down criticism of the Israeli government, which also leads to a lack of actual protection in the situations of anti-semitism https://www.972mag.com/antisemitism-israel-jews-ihra/?fbclid=PAAabk1UMk0tbOOvjyQANB0s4WUqCH0jlB0e6wG9z-lzM8v7AM-nHVG1qUsmM_aem_ATc37Fa-YXuCVfRffJqdUFYOWfK-SvwIzCOJgiDCgEuzt2yQLZH9azKBDAsJKCYig4s
• An interesting opinion and expression of confusion in the anti-Zionist Jewish community from the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents: https://jewishcurrents.org/we-cannot-cross-until-we-carry-each-other
• About anti-semitism https://www.972mag.com/antisemitism-israel-jews-ihra/
• Also from Jewish Currents, A Textbook Case of Genocide: https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
• UK-based NGO demanding political change for Palestine: https://www.foa.org.uk/resources
• https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/israel-gaza-war-manufactured-consent.html
• INC https://networkcultures.org/tactical-media-room/2023/10/18/from-resistance-to-liberation-how-october-7th-made-palestinians-once-again-protagonists-of-their-own-history-eng-ita/
• Open letter from the art community to cultural organisations: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1e1kTZtiW11KzRD-rWuwEXSj5jTOAE4X4DRuCdy8aAtU/viewform?edit_requested=true

• Technology & the Israeli apartheid state
  • No Tech For Apartheid https://www.notechforapartheid.com/
  • Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OPT: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/6701/2023/en/
  • The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2684-the-palestine-laboratory
  • More on: https://racismandtechnology.center/2023/10/16/standing-in-solidarity-with-the-palestinian-people/

• Long(er) reads
  • Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibili https://www.perlego.com/book/3824197/minor-detail-pdf?fbclid=PAAaYJu4MUI8F9j1aZ3zctD8J1fGVNvbzThKfCGlLGAyz1ydqpItSS-nmj4jw_aem_Ae6_-hi-5SrS7QQ_ASMGflAjCSixH-5ACovi3FspoD7lJY0Dgb89rbvzF0nUdQR6s68 Fitzcarraldo, the publisher, placed the book in open access after the author's invitation for the Frankfurt book fair was revoked and the prize they stood to receive, was cancelled in the wake of the attacks by Hamas.

Projects

• Ramsey Nasser's project https://occupied.land/
• Majd Al-Shihabi's Palestine Open Maps, bringing together geo-spacial data with oral history indeces: https://palopenmaps.org/en/maps?basemap=9&overlay=pal1940&toggles=places
• Investigations by forensic architecture on palestine https://forensic-architecture.org/location/palestine
• Palestine decolonisation struggle archive https://sabil.ethz.ch/s/en/page/welcome
• Tirazain, a digital archive and library with the aim to digitally document, preserve and reclaim Palestinian embroidery. https://tirazain.com/

Act

We would like to propose direct collective political action: Occupy public space, join protests, demand de-escalation and ceasefire, write to your governments to demand sanctions and absolve support for the Israeli military, contact people around you and talk about the need for Palestinian liberation, at work, during dinner with your housemates, with your family. We understand that this is a demanding conversation for many, but we'd like to encourage sitting with the discomfort.

• Dutch Scholars for Palestine (DSP) is a network of academic and cultural workers committed to solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination: https://www.dutchscholarsforpalestine.nl/dsp-statement-14-10-2023
• Varia's statement and list of actionable resources https://varia.zone/en/solidarity-with-palestine.html
• Jewish Voice for Peace is an organization consisting of jewish diaspora, mostly in the contexts of the US, who join Palestinians in building a just society, rooted in equality rather than supremacy, dignity rather than domination, democracy rather than dispossession. JVP put together a useful lis tof actionable resources: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/take-action/
• Contact your governments: How to get in touch with elected officials: link
• The BDS movement calls for a boycott/divestment/sanctioning of Israeli and international companies that are complicit in violations of Palestinian rights. https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved/what-to-boycott
  • BDS in the Netherlands https://bdsnederland.nl/
• As the national elections in the Netherlands are coming up (Nov 22),please consider voting for political parties in NL supporting sanctions for Israel and a stop to its continuous military support. This would help to levy against the motion that has been adopted for the "wholehearted" support of Israel's right to "self-defense"
• Actionable ways to support the end to genocide in Palestine: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qK3xSk4SSNpull2mv5QX8A1qq1gVaAj98asV1u61IWQ/edit
• Protesting from the bed: Tips for disabled and chronically ill folks: https://www.instagram.com/p/CysrYKAoe2C/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Donate

Humanitarian aid is slowly trickling in, consider donating to:

• Palestine Children's Relief Fund https://pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/gaza-relie
• Medical Aid for Palestinians https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate
• Doctors without Borders: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/our-response-israel-gaza-war

visual by Atelier Brenda

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[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/musks-paid-checkmarks-help-fuel-xs-spread-of-israel-hamas-misinformation/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/20/instagram-palestinian-user-profile-bios-terrorist-added-translation-meta-apology

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/26/pro-palestine-censorship-facebook-instagram