PYM Stands with the Palestinian Uprisings

Originally circulated 10/15/15

We, the Palestinian Youth Movement stand steadfast with our counterparts in the homeland as they demonstrate brilliant displays of steadfastness, resilience and resistance despite the ongoing Zionist settler colonial project that aims to erase our people from our land and history, break our bonds from one another as a people, and to break our spirits as human beings.

We understand the surge of Zionist military and settler vigilante violence as part of an ongoing continuum of Al nakba which commenced in 1948 dispossessing 800,000 ancestors and occupying our homeland. While their project intended for "the old to die and the young to forget" We say to the Zionist regime, we young people will never forget. You will never fragment us from our parents and grandparents and ancestors. You will never sever the ties of our people from history and you will never break the historical belonging we feel to our cause, people and land. As youth in the Shatat, it is our full rights and responsibilities to take our place in the struggle for liberation wherever we are in the world. We call on all young people to claim our role, labor for liberation and devote ourselves to collective healing, community organizing and liberation work!

The implementation of colonial ideological and physical borders by the Zionist entity and its Imperialist allies is designed to beat us into submission, dehumanize us and make us turn violence and hate inwards against one another! The Zionist project has created a class of Palestinian leaders who have chosen to stand as the gatekeepers to occupation rather than the forerunners of liberation in order to advance small individual advantages of wealth and power in exchange for the collective empowerment of the people. The Zionist project has created the split in Palestinian national unity as well as the rupture of the Palestinian peoplehood ideologically, geographically, socially, economically and culturally.

While we believe in holding our leadership accountable for their cowardice decisions in advancing the interests of the oppressors, we as youth are adamant in recognizing that these issues are ALL and ONLY a result of our colonial condition and are in no way excuses to justify the escalation of the ethnic cleansing project or the de-legitimization of Palestinian resistance.

We also recognize these colonial ideological and physical borders imposed on us in order to separate the Palestinian struggle from the broader Arab regional struggle and the broader Islamic dimension. We recognize that poverty, dictatorship, repression, sectarianism, civil war and state violence in the Arab countries is directly an outcome of Zionism and its goal to destabilize the region.

For these reasons, we in the PYM assert that the Arab people and minorities of the region are in fact not solidarity allies but rather central to our struggle and that regional liberation from dictatorship, repression and economic disparity is central to Palestinian liberation.

In addition, we recognize and respect the particularities of the Islamic dimension to the Palestinian cause which aims to preserve the holy land as a site where all faiths can worship freely as we continue to contest the Judaization project of Jerusalem and ongoing attacks on the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron and Al Aqsa mosque.  The destruction of Al Aqsa mosque and temple mount signify the attempts for the oppressors to assert dominance over Palestinian spiritual and political life. Al Aqsa serves as the heart beat of the Muslim Ummah and thus signifies the deep ties of spirtuality to the mandate for political action in the pursuit of justice and freedom for all Muslims of the world. We will fight to defend our land, the freedom to worship and the holy sites which offer resilience to our people in the most dismal of times.

We understand the oppression of the Palestinian people as deeply entangled with the Western "War on Terror," a borderless and boundarliness war that takes shape on Arab and Muslim communities, bodies and lands wherever we are in the world and that has killed millions of our people from Iraq to Afghanistan and Syria to Yemen. This war on terror, here in the US has justified the rapid expansion of the prison industrial complex, the militarization of policing and building a state that is continues the centuries long war on Black and Brown communities, Native peoples and immigrants in pursuit of maintaining a system of White Supremacy.

Furthermore, we understand the role of the Zionist entity in building itself as a leader inthe industry of international arms trade, warfare, state violence and repression. In 2011, 25% of the Zionist entities economy was reliant on international arms trade.  Using Palestinian and Arab bodies and lands as testing grounds for new weapons and tactics of crowd control, surveillance and repression in order to build an industry of repression that is then outsourced to corrupt regimes across the world to stifle other movements of dissent. Because of this PYM is convinced more than ever that Palestinian liberation is directly entangled with the liberation of all colonized subjects. From Ferguson to Baltimore, from Anaheim to Ayotzinapa, from Chiapas to Mindanau, From Sana to Cairo, From the Congo to Aleppo; We stand with all indigenous people and third world people fighting colonization, ethnic cleansing, militarization, occupation and repression.