Caption: No to Zionism! Poster by Marc Rudin (Jihad Mansour) 1980 Marc Rudin | The Palestine Poster Project Archives Arabic says: “There is no solution but to uproot Zionism”.
Recently, I attended a Zoom meeting titled “Palestine: Land, Liberation And Return,” part of the lead-up to the Ottawa Liberation Conference (Confronting Colonialism, A Vision for Liberation) that’s being organized by Masar Badil. Here is my takeaway from this meeting, where four activists spoke passionately about this crucial moment in Palestinian history and looked ahead to a victorious future, namely the end to colonialism and Zionism in Palestine.
The meeting took place on Apr 8, 2023. April is a cruel month for Palestinians. In April, Zionist massacres against unarmed Palestinians occurred during the Nakba and current images of Israel’s brutality against unarmed Palestinians worshipping in Al-Aqsa Mosque are blanketing social media this April. It is no wonder, then, that the protests in Berlin against the Al-Aqsa assaults organized by the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path movement (Masar Badil) and Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network included chants such as those heard in the following reel (Rough translation: Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful/peaceful nothing/give us bullets, give us rockets/Look, look, we’re demanding this openly):
Caption: Poster by Samidoun and Masar Badil announcing demo in Berlin on April 8, 2023. See also “Germany’s Never-Ending Guilt Trip” by Samir Abed-Rabbo
Masar Badil is not an alternative to the Palestinian revolution; it is an alternative to the failed “peace process” that has shown itself repeatedly to be nothing more than a land-grab for Israel. From its inception, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path movement has been Palestinian, Arab, and international, because the Palestinian cause is the cause of every revolutionary and of all the oppressed and exploited masses of our time. It is not an accident that the Liberation Conference to fight back and to organize together for liberation will be taking place in North America (Ottawa) on Turtle Island, on Algonquin Anishinaabe land. The speakers emphasized that the Palestinian cause is “one and the same as all anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles against white supremacy, capitalism, indigenous ethnic cleansing, slavery, and resource-looting.”
At this moment in time, as Rumzi Farouki (of Al Falasteniyeh Media Network and one of the organizers of the Conference) put it during the meeting, “the holes in the thin veil [masking Israel’s settler-colonial Zionist crimes] are getting larger.”
The Masar Badil movement wants to rip off that mask once and for all and, in the process, pressure all those allied with its crimes to cease and desist. This movement, as Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of Samidoun, eloquently put it, is also in the business of giving hope:
“… every single day the Palestinian resistance proves and the Palestinian people prove that it is still possible to fight back against imperialism, that it is still possible to reject Zionism and not only that it is possible to fight, but that it is also possible to win and to achieve victory, and so with every bit of news that comes from the Palestinian resistance, what we also see as a message of hope, not just for Palestine, but for people around the world and for everybody who wants to see a future in which humanity is cherished and imperialism and Zionism are defeated as we’re gathered here today.”
Meme: Khaled Barakat of Masar Badil with Daisaku Ikeda’s quote: “Hope is a decision”
The ongoing mass protests in the streets of cities all over the world are not simply to “protest attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque;” they are meant also to protest and delegitimize the very existence of the settler-colonial self-proclaimed Jewish state in Palestine and to legitimize Palestinian resistance, including armed resistance.
Note: First published in Medium
_____________
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank
