Palestine against an eco-apartheid world – Mondoweiss In coming years, eco-apartheid will become more prominent worldwide as colonial violence is used to maintain and safeguard Western interests and profits. We are seeing this future in Gaza today.
The combined ecocide and genocide in Gaza is an expression of eco-apartheid – a violent racialising phenomenon that advances the colonial frontier of land occupation and resource plunder to funnel wealth to a privileged few at the expense of the vast majority of people. As political ecologist Kai Heron writes, eco-apartheid makes it permissible for certain people to die “so that capitalism may live.” In an eco-apartheid future, the notions of “national security” and “climate emergency” will be deployed to justify a race to the bottom. It is also the duty of social movements in the imperial core, amongst them the Palestine movement, to understand that their own fight constitutes ecological resistance, and is one thread in the tapestry of freedom-making and liberation from ecocide and genocide. While the rise of solidarities across movements that put Palestine liberation at the heart and soul of their efforts is just beginning, this is a crucial first step that is absolutely necessary to prevent an eco-apartheid future. In spite of attempts to ignore its recommendations, South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ has sent shockwaves around the world, forging global solidarities across working class and grassroots efforts in sometimes unexpected places, and across the North/South divide. These solidarities include dock workers in Belgium, Italy, Greece, and India refusing to ship arms to Israel; consumers in Malaysia and Indonesia engaging in boycotts that have caused major financial losses for Western companies with ties to Israel; and students on university campuses around the world refusing to give an inch in their efforts to expose the hypocrisy of their institutions until their demands are met. Beyond these fronts, our challenge is connecting the struggles of brutalised workers across the world with the resistance of the Palestinian people against common systems which disregard life everywhere. Our challenge is organising workers from all domains to strike for Palestine, to prevent more shipments of arms and hard-earned tax dollars going to murder innocent people. It is this ecology of resistance that will liberate working people everywhere. Like all indigènes who suffer at the hands of oppressors, the Palestinian people and all colonised people will continue to resist the demolition of their homes, the occupation of their land, the redirection of rivers, the poisoning of soils, the killing of their non-human kin, the erasure of their culture, and the genocide of their communities. This represents an existential truth: there is something deeply ingrained in the human spirit that refuses to be dominated perpetually. Facing the reality of our apocalyptic conditions does not mean that we have lost: rather, it gives us the vision we need to fight back. Make no mistake: resistance against imperialism and its Zionist proxy represents the strongest ecological force of our times. Building an anti-war, anti-imperialist and ecological mass movement is our duty, in order to extend the resistance of the Palestinians to all corners of the world. The coloniser believes that with enough brutalisation they can lock us into an indefinite state of repression, but history has always bent towards justice: not by chance, but as a result of the inevitable and relentless resistance of people against the forces of genocide, for dignity for everyone on the earth. The liberation of Palestine represents the linchpin of our collective survival in the face of ecological collapse, it pulls forth a bright light from the black hole of a looming eco-apartheid future. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#33635): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/33635 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109628745/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
