ARMED 2024 - Zine by USyd Autonomous Collective Against Racism (ACAR)

Armed is published and produced on stolen Gadigal land. It is on this very same stolen land that the University of Sydney sits and where the Autonomous Collective Against Racism (ACAR) organises.

We respect the struggle First Nations peoples continue to wage in order to resist occupation. We also recognise that land acknowledgments are largely performative and used in order to assuage white liberal guilt. ACAR demands actions, not empty words.

ALWAYS WAS, ALWAYS WILL BE ABORIGINAL LAND.

Armed serves as a mouthpiece for ACAR’s radical, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and decolonial politics. We understand that in order to achieve collective liberation we must arm ourselves with a revolutionary consciousness.

Although ACAR is autonomous to BIPOC, we decided to open Armed up to everyone as (1) Armed is the only publication on campus centred on racial politics and (2) our struggle against imperialism “consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind”. As brother Frantz Fanon teaches, this “will be carried out with the indispensable help, of the European peoples, who themselves must realise that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned.”

Our task is to sublate racial categories, not to reproduce them in a different form.

EDITORS

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Ravkaran Grewal

CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND COVER Ramneek Thind

DESIGN CHIEF

Simone Maddison

Miles Hiroshi Huỳnh

Reeyaa Agrawal

Purny Ahmed

Jordan Anderson

Bipasha Chakraborty

Emilie Garcia-Dolnik

Ishbel Dunsmore

Sidra Ghanawi

Lizzy Kwok

Nafeesa Rahman

Get involved in the antiracist activism, BIPOC social events and political education we do on and off campus!

LIBERATION, THROUGH ZINES

The Other Worlds Zine Fair was held in Marrickville earlier this year. Upon arrival, I encountered an eclectic patchwork of artists and writers. From zines on Indigenous literature, to Hong Kong politics, and queer love — zine-makers were at the forefront of selfexpression.

The Other Worlds Zine Fair came about in 2014 as a boycott of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Zine Fair due to the MCA’s connections to Transfield Holdings, a service provider for Australia’s offshore detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru. The Sydney Biennale boycotts famously ended in the Biennale severing ties with Transfield. Now, the Other Worlds Zine Fair has expanded, featuring the works of more than a hundred zine makers. Its continued success is a testament to the role of artists in furthering boycott and divestment strategies.

What is a zine, anyways?

Sold for as little as a dollar at the Fair, profit is not the main concern here. Anyone can make a zine — that is the essence of the medium. Zines are

self-made, self-distributed, and self-published. Aside from these few recognisable characteristics, the form is unbound by convention. Most zine-makers are interested in a form of self-expression outside of the mainstream publishing process.

Empowered to defy convention, the zine is often used to explore radical political ideas as well as one’s most intimate feelings. In Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (1997), one of the only comprehensive scholarly studies of zine culture, cultural historian Stephen Duncombe describes zines as “bursts of raw emotion” that prize “unfettered, authentic expression” over polish. It is impossible to construct a representative history of zines. Distributed only to small groups of people, zines are ephemeral in nature and hence difficult to trace or archive. Attempts to historicise the zine, however, situates marginalised figures in publishing history in positions of centrality by acknowledging zines as an important means of political

By Lizzy Kwok

and artistic expression.

Emerging from science fiction fanzines of the 1930s, zine culture flourished in the 1970s with the proliferation of punk zines, representing the ideals of an entirely new subculture — albeit an overwhelmingly white and male dominated one.

Reacting to the blatant sexism of punk culture, the Riot grrrl movement of the 1990s aimed to foment the ‘revolution, girl style’, using zines as a form of activism and community building. The accessibility of photocopying technologies and copy shops like Kinko’s made the artform relatively inclusive and accessible — it was possible for anyone to create a zine.

Even the samzidat, a form of underground publishing in post-Stalinist Soviet Union, can be considered a zine. Samzidats imagined a new Soviet society and were “the lifeblood of a community of Soviet dissenters,” as literary scholar Ann Komaromi writes.

Of course, Armed, the publication currently in your hands, is a zine. With a team of almost twenty students involved in the hands-on

editing and design process, Armed continues to participate in the tradition of community created around the zine. As Art historian Branden W. Joseph observes, “[Zines] welcome correspondence,” and are more collaborative in nature than your traditional magazine.

Squeezing my way through Marrickville Town Hall amidst a sea of families and Inner West creative-types, I talked to local writers, artists, and designers. Among these zine-makers were veterans, novices, political activists — many of whom advocated for Palestinian liberation through the zine. New immigrants feeling the political weight of their home governments, expressed their innermost frustrations and existentialism through the zine.

It is no wonder then that marginalised groups have long felt attracted to the medium as a means of selfexpression. In “A Gazan Young Man Dreams of a Peaceful Death” (2023), Mo. Alkrunz reflects on life under the Zionist entity. During a time when death surrounds him, Alkrunz writes to process his grief — both for his community and for himself, whose death he views as imminent:

Nowhere to flee? How do I ensure that my fingers do not get scattered in a garbage container? How can I ensure that my blood does not mix with sewage? How do I ensure that my body doesn’t dissolve in one of the asphalt mixtures? How can I ensure that my head will be present when someone would close my eyes?

All he asks for is a peaceful death, but “This

death has become impossible,” as Alkrunz repeats throughout the zine. The hands of IDF soldiers stained with the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

In “Queer Voices from the Fight for Palestinian Liberation” (2023) created by Breaking Patterns, they highlight the role and perspectives of queer people in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. On the first page of the zine, US-based Palestinian artist Zaheer Suboh is quoted:

What do any of you know of my Palestine? Of the late night queer parties in Ramallah? Of raves held in biblically aged buildings? Of lesbians in hijabs, of gay men in hoop earrings, of trans Palestinians dancing with joyful abandon?

This zine artfully weaves together poetry, personal stories, and piercing critiques of the Israeli regime to establish the demands of queer Palestinians living in Palestine and throughout the diaspora. It repeatedly warns of pinkwashing, which threatens to erase the Palestinian queer movement, reminding readers of the intersection between queer liberation and the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settlercolonialism.

International organisations have also created their own zines as expressions of solidarity. Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, for example, made six zines in 2014 including The ABCs of Occupation & Resistance by Rachel Mattson and “Handala” by Josh MacPhee, a collection

of photographs tracing the ubiquity of Handala across Palestine, a poignant symbol of Palestinian resistance to occupation.

Boston-based activist organisation Pleasure Pie also distributed the zine We [Palestinians] Are Not Going Away from 2023 onwards to encourage local action. They collected first-hand accounts of the war on Gaza, mostly handwriting these words against the background of Palestinian symbols such as the olive tree and the keffiyah. Quoting an unnamed nurse in Gaza on December 1 2023, “If we are not destined to continue living, then memorise our actions, our names, and our pictures, and write on our graves in bold script.”

At a time when Palestinian cultural institutions — universities, libraries, museums — and property are being systematically destroyed and plundered, the act of archival is a distinctly political one. The zines highlighted in this article reveal only a fraction of the diverse Palestinian Arts culture. Exploring zine culture honours the creativity and resistance of ordinary Palestinians despite ongoing attempts to erase their history.

Zines propose an alternative form of communication severed from the capitalist behemoth of the publishing industry. Often messy, angry, and idealistic, they are a special artform. Through zines, written and visual language reach a harmonious medium to represent the strength of marginalised cultures.

INTERSECTIONALITY

It is common within academic and activist spaces to talk of race in conjunction with gender, class and a multitude of other social categories. During the 1970s, such expressions of “intersectionality” emerged to articulate the unique experience of black women in the US as simultaneously subject to white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalist exploitation. These particular relations are understood as existing separately before “intersecting” to create social experience. As Leslie McCall describes in her article ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, here “personal narratives and single-group studies derive their strength from the partial crystallization of social relations in the identities of particular social groups.”

By presenting such an ‘intersection’, the whole (the social individual) is recognised as an aggregation of parts — as ‘partial crystallizations’, where things have come together. Here, the actuality of categories such as class, race and gender is individual, each are substances in and of themselves. In regards to the impossibility of locating these substances objectively, Himani Banaji’s criticism is spot on: “[An individual’s] sense of being in the world, textured through myriad social relations and cultural forms, is lived or felt or perceived as being all together and all at once.” A non-reductive theory of oppression cannot present any one social category as independent of another without a fragmented understanding of reality.

The advent of intersectionality is coupled with the neoliberal era, the turn away from Marxism and the academisation of oppression. The unidisciplinary structures of academia leads to conceiving of social identities in isolation rather than via a totalising critique. Here oppression is treated as a purely abstract object of study rather than a concrete task to be overcome. Whilst it is permissible to recognise that the ‘experience’ which intersectionality presents as substance is certainly real, for social analysis to move past the level of description one must recognise, as Linsey German does, that “oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not”.

By Ravkaran Grewal

Social categories such as class, race and gender find identity in a substance that is common to all, what Marx calls “sensuous, practical human activity” in Theses on Feuerbach. An individual’s identity is but a particular expression of this human substance. Although such categories are necessarily relational, their status as attributes is not determinately equal or incommensurable as stated by intersectional analyses. Class, race, gender, ability, nationality and so forth bound and delimit each other in different ways, and through the uncovering of their necessary relations, one can establish a determinative progression. To do so is outside the bounds of this essay, but it is possible to tentatively claim that historically, gendered oppression does not predate class society nor does racial oppression preceed capitalism. This is difficult to recognise for intersectional approaches which deny the identity inherent within categories of social difference, posit an equivalency between oppressions and often treat class as an afterthought.

IDENTITY POLITICS

The academisation of oppression through intersectionality has transformed discourse into praxis for “radical” politics. For example, Shahrzad Mojab and Sara Carpenter recount a solidarity gathering for protesters in Iran at which a motion was passed to “ensure intersectionality was observed”

in all actions. Here, “intersectionality was seen as an act of solidarity and it signaled representation and recognition of a range of differences” and how such differences “coalesce in lived experience”. Whilst recognising differences can certainly be important, truly revolutionary politics must go beyond this. In fact, the narrow concern for discourse can lead to a strategy of “elevating voices” at the expense of political struggle. These concepts are often easily co-opted to reproduce the very same social oppressions they were formulated to critique. For example, during her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton used the gender pay gap and the (still ongoing) water crisis in Flint, Michigan amongst others as examples of the “combined effects of intersecting issues” — absurd coming from an establishment democrat who has worked her entire life to uphold US racism, imperialism and capitalism.

Intersectionality is a commonly accepted theoretical basis to identity politics. This praxis, even in the most ‘radical’ interpretation, is essentialist and ineffective. Consider the explanation of identity politics offered by the black feminist Combahee River Collective: “this focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else’s oppression.” Here we can see how the

ORGANISATION OF REVOLUTIONARIES

Vladimir Lenin made this point clear when examining the proletariat’s relation to the development of socialist politics in ‘What is to be done?’, where he quotes Karl Kautsky approvingly: “Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge … socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously.” It is not on the basis of personally experiencing the class struggle that socialist theory was conceived of but through the study of capitalism. As Lenin clarifies in a footnote, this does not mean that workers have no part in the formation of socialist politics but rather “they take part not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians”: they take part insofar they engage in social inquiry. This sublation of identity is made more explicit in Lenin’s conception of an “organisation of revolutionaries”, which “must consist first and foremost of people whose profession is that of a revolutionary” and where “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals … must be obliterated.” To change society one must understand it in its totality rather than through the bounds of personal experience or identity. Does this mean that autonomous politics, which centres the oppressed, is doomed to be ineffective?

X

To answer this question we must turn to the politics of black nationalism, starting with

America, but had broader dimensions between the exploiter and the exploited globally. Indeed, his adoption of ‘X’ denies a return to particularity — reclaiming some long lost cultural identity — and instead embraces the universalism that white people can only desire but fail to achieve. While Malcolm X found this universalism in Islam, later proponents of black nationalism were able to come to more radical conclusions.

THE BLACK PANTHERS

The achievements of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense demonstrate that autonomous politics can be a tool for revolution. Party leader Fred Hampton made this clear in his speech “it’s a class struggle goddammit”, which refuted naysayers of the party who chastised them for working with white radicals and made clear that the revolution would be a struggle of class rather than race. The Panthers strived to become a vanguard party capable of mobilising the masses to overthrow capitalism. Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition — a multicultural anti-racist, working-class movement based in Chicago — served as an implementation of this universal programme. How did the Panthers rectify their autonomous organisation with a vision of liberation for all racial groups? Hampton’s answer is clear: “we know that black people are most oppressed. And if we didn’t know that, then why the hell would we be running around talking about the black liberation struggle has to be the vanguard for all liberation struggles?”. From this, the Panthers posited a political strategy to overcome all forms of oppression and thus posed a real threat to US capitalism and white supremacy. For them, the extreme oppression faced by AfroAmericans provides a unique opportunity for black liberation to liberate us all, one we should all work together to achieve. While mobilisation on the basis of lived experience can certainly be a starting place, it should not be the end goal for revolutionary theory or praxis.

To be successful, revolutionary politics must embody the scientific procedure where, according to Hampton, theory and praxis continually inform each other: “if you can’t control and define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner, then you don’t even have any dealings with power, you don’t know and you

probably never will know what power is.” Furthermore, revolutionary programmes must be based not on abstract principles, but on the concrete study of political conditions. In this way, autonomous organising should not be understood as some principle — to be absolutely for or against — but rather as a tool to achieve revolutionary aims: a tool that serves particular purposes and contexts. Necessary in having this

“Sick children have a sense of saintliness to them.”

- Ghassan Kanafani

Between grief and forgetting Comes a space we conquer Frail skinned, balding and scabbed the people have lost cities.

A city is a sediment resting your gut, your wisdom tooth amidst funeral clothes. People we carry on shoulders Unbury, unyawn, unrest, chain break.

Coloured bodies emerge from lights Never broken — sweat condensed in all Could never be cooled/rehealed/ Forgotten.

Brown hair seep in sweltering sun, a new love is emerged. I could be so many things but I am always you. Reimagining the new in ways old.

Violence can never be love the colony’s guns don’t meet their own eyes. Every bullet looks away; sighs The oppressor’s breath mounts Innumerable crimes.

A city not liberated is a city most visible.

By Misbah Ansari

THEY WILL COME FOR YOU IN THE NIGHT

By Simone Maddison

The title of this introduction to prison abolition pays homage to Angela Y. Davis’ seminal text If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. Published in 1971, Davis’ book combines the essays of the Soledad Brothers and members of the Black Panther Party into one of the first concerted critiques of the political, racial and gendered repression upon which the US incarceration system is predicated. Since then, abolition has become a core tenet of struggles seeking the liberation of workers, Indigenous communities and gender-diverse people from racial capitalism and the prison-industrial complex. Davis’ voice, the echoes of which are repeated throughout the sub-headings below, remains pivotal in distilling the praxis of a truly anti-racist, anti-capitalist and transformative justice.

Racism cannot be separated from capitalism Anti-carceral activism finds its origins within the United States’ anti-slavery movement. Hailing from precedents set by the Black Codes and Jim Crow legislation, race has played a significant role in constructing criminal archetypes, informing arrests and delegating modes of punishment. Discrimination against people of colour has also informed the ways jails operate, particularly through the overrepresentation of non-white prisoners within maximum security prisons. Racial capitalism, within which racialised exploitation compounds capital accumulation, therefore forms the foundation of the controlling and coercive modern prison system. Where profits and revenue can be attributed to corporate stakeholders benefiting from the surveillance, policing, imprisonment and exploitation of incarcerated people; racialised capitalism creates a prisonindustrial complex.

It is no surprise, then, that the prison system is failing to deliver ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ for those caught within its mechanisms. As Marxist feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker argued in 1971, only a small number of law violations are reported, and most criminal defendants plead guilty without a trial because they cannot afford a lawyer. Today, 92% of Australian women do not

report incidents to police; only 17% of criminal defendants also plead not guilty.

Our histories never unfold in isolation Consequently, the material conditions which have institutionalised and normalised prisons — alongside those currently surveilling and disciplining incarcerated people within a cell’s four walls — cannot be sequestered to the American context. Operating within an enduringly settler-colonial society, prisons in Australia represent the dispossession, assimilation and brutalisation of First Nations land, culture and bodies. This is most pertinently reflected in the over-incarceration of Indigenous Australians: despite comprising only 3.8% of the nation’s total population, this group accounts for 35% of incarcerated people. First Nations children are also 26 times more likely to be imprisoned than their non-Indigenous counterparts, while 85% of Indigenous women in prison have been victims of sexual assault.

The privatisation of jails within the prisonindustrial complex is also a major feature of the Australian landscape. Australia has the highest proportion of inmates in private prisons of any nation, at around 18%. These prisons are owned by four private companies sharing a collective annual profit of $613 million. In addition to generating profits by providing food, drinks, secure transportation and legal consultancy to prisons, corporations including Serco, G4S and John Holland enjoy lucrative contracts to test surveillance technologies and exploit incarcerated labour for construction projects.

We cannot rely on governments to do the work that only mass movements can do One way strategies to “defund” or “reform” the police manifest is through the endorsement of better social work, mental health and education services at the government level. Of course, these frameworks may provide important ways to confront and heal the psychological, economic and political violence inflicted upon incarcerated people and their communities. But as scholars

Craig Fortier & Ed Hon-Sing Wong argue, the formalisation of care remains “circumscribed by the logics of conquest, extraction, apprehension, management and pacification that advance the settler-colonial project.” Only by refusing the white supremacist and capitalist origins of these industries, as well as their tendency to commodify incarcerated people, may they benefit the struggle towards prison abolition.

Therefore, abolition centres upon what Davis calls the “balancing act” of attending to the needs of prisoners without sacrificing the ultimate goal of mass political movement. The language of the prison — to ‘isolate’, ‘correct’, ‘punish’ or ‘remove’ inmates — is fundamentally one which pathologises individual criminality. Not only does this dismiss social conditions like poverty and violence which may compel people to break the law, but it deploys a logic that everyone is potentially ‘criminal.’ The importance of mass political movement, then, is two-fold: as a defence against the alienation and exploitation of workers’ labour from inside and outside the prison, and as a means of abolishing prisons as an extension of the state’s capitalist power.

Reading List

Angela Y. Davis. (1981). Women, Race and Class. Penguin Books.

Angela Y. Davis. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? AK Press. Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith. (2011). Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. AK Press.

George L. Jackson, Jean Genet & Jonathan Jackson Jr. (1970). Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Lawrence Hill Books.

Russell Marks. (2023). Black Lives, White Law: Locked Up and Locked Out in Australia. Black Inc Books.

Michelle Alexander (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness. The New Press.

Mumia Abu-Jamal. (1995). Live From Death Row. Harper Perennial.

BY SIDRA GHANAWI

As the credits rolled on the documentary No Other Land, the silence in the theatre was palpable. The audience was rightfully reminded of the colonial violence of occupation.

No Other Land is a 2024 documentary, directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor and follows the hostile ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta as it unfolded. Basel Adra is a Palestinian journalist and activist born in the village of At-Tuwani in Al-Khalil (colonially referred to as Hebron). He navigates a complex friendship with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, and together they resist the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF) attempting to degrade and erase the Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta.

In the early 1980s, Masafer Yatta, home to twelve Bedouin Palestinian villages and 2,800 residents, was designated a ‘Firing Zone 918’ by the IOF. In layman’s terms, ‘firing zones’ are used by the IOF for military training and future reservation of stolen Palestinian land to “provide an opportunity for Jewish settlements in the area”, as stated by the then Israeli Minister for Agriculture in now declassified documents.

Israeli soldiers threaten Palestinians in Masafer Yatta and across the Occupied West Bank by day, while settler violence continues into the night.

At present, every day looks the same in Masafer Yatta. Israeli soldiers arrive at the first signs of dawn to bulldoze Palestinian homes, schools, hospitals, and any mark of civilisation. Thus, Palestinians resist in whatever way they see fit: screaming, bargaining, filming, pleading, praying, throwing rocks.

Regardless of whether their resistance is non-violent, Palestinians are met with the unilateral threat of arrest, abuse of weapons, and murder by Occupying forces. No Other Land is laced with this exact footage that reveals horrific scenes, and the emergent patterns of Palestinian resistance.

The film depicts the days following a demolition, in which reconciliation efforts begin. Men rebuild homes at night and by day women and children continue the job. Local protests against the demolitions are organised, attracting 100-200 people, and are often led by Basel Adra. The crowd chants in Arabic, but signs and placards are written in English, evidently targeted toward the so-called ‘West’. Of the crowd, a large majority are children and one can only wonder, am I doing enough for these children?

The Palestinian sands and the desert mountains bear witness to these protests, and though they lack visibility and are relatively small, the residents persist. The IOF is often quick to “disperse” the crowds by shooting at random.

One scene follows a man shot by an IOF soldier during a protest, suffering paralysis in his entire body. The documentary captures the rapid decline of the man’s already low quality of life. His inability to sit, stand and walk, coupled with the lack of access to treatment make him severely depressed, using sleep as a coping mechanism. American journalists regularly visit to tell this man’s story, to give him a voice, documenting his living conditions and lack of mobility. I couldn’t help but reckon with the eerie undertones of white saviorism that came with these visits, coupled with the placards written in a language that is far from their mother tongue.

So, if they are out protesting, at risk of paralysis or even death, what more must we do? As I watched mothers pushing prams out in the desert roads of Masafer Yatta, chanting their demands for freedom at the risk of death, it served as a surreal manifestation of Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die”.

If I must die, you must live to tell my story

This is what their protests are, this is what nonviolent resistance is. No Other Land for the imperialist West to save Palestinians, it is an insistence to be acknowledged, a refusal to be forgotten, a reminder to us all that we have a duty to the generations of Palestinians to follow.

Overall, No Other Land depicts the heterogeneous nature of Palestinian life under occupation. It is quite simply, in and of itself, an act of non-violent resistance on the path to justice and a collective call for the liberation of Palestinians which transcends borders. A liberation that challenges and quashes the swords of colonialism, patriarchy, class inequality, racism and ableism.

A liberation that dignifiedly rejects the privilege to say “this is too sad to watch”.

A liberation in which we all have a role to play, no matter how big or small.

And finally, a liberation that comes in our lifetime.

Art by Miles Hiroshi Huỳnh

THE MEDITER- RANEAN AND THE CARCERAL STATE

By Emilie Dolnik-Garcia

The Mediterranean acts as an ideological boundary to many Europeans who have constructed a social consciousness predicated on their superiority to the ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’ lands across the sea. It has thus transformed into a dual geopolitical and ideological frontier. In many ways, it is a tangible meeting place of North vs. South and a strategic border where European Union (EU) policy willfully oscillates between hyper-security and non-security, fortified by a deeply entrenched and technologicallyadvanced militarism, to the detriment of migrants and migrant communities. As such, those refugees and migrants that take to the Mediterranean are subject to a series of hostile policies that violate principles of international law, ensnared within a cruel matrix of continued colonial power and ideology that encodes those of the so-called Global South as deviant and inferior.

Over the past decade, European states have pursued increasingly restrictive and inhumane policies with the goal of curbing the flow of migrants and refugees crossing

the Mediterranean. Despite protections in International Maritime Law that require vessels to attend to migrants in distress, current EU immigration policy is blatantly flagrant of international norms. These conditions are interwoven within the international capitalist system, where the so-called Global South can be rendered into a hyper-securitised and militarised carceral territory to the benefit of the West. Let us not forget that the EU established a deal with Frontex in 2021 for the use of Israeli Heron Drones, a new form of contactless surveillance first tested on Palestinians and now used to willfully ignore migrants in distress. According to Anthony Lowenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, these drones, used as a replacement for naval patrol vessels, are deployed first and foremost to relay information to coastguards situated in Europe, delaying the deployment of humanitarian services and rescue vessels, often negligent to refugees in distress. Willful negligence empowered by a constructed moral panic of crisis and emergency has become the justification for increasingly militaristic and inhumane state security policy — fortifying an orientalist East vs. West opposition that prioritises a xenophobic concept of state security over human security.

In 2024, the EU established a strategic bilateral partnership with the Egyptian government under Al-Sisi, frequently described as a ‘cash-for-migration-control’ approach. The cooperation agreement ascribes a considerable sum of €200 million for

migration management, creating incentives for stricter repressive policies for migrants on Egyptian soil. To contextualise, increased migration out of Egypt and across the Mediterranean is linked to the state repression and human rights violations under Al-Sisi’s regime, which has seen the detainment of peaceful protestors. This itself is inextricable from Egypt’s colonial history — the 1914 Assembly Law, which allows security forces to forcefully disperse any gathering of five or more people deemed a threat to public space, employed for over 5000 arrests during the 2011 Arab Spring, is derived from the British desire to control the Egyptian population and stifle anticolonialist sentiment. Here, the colonisers’ tools and apparatus are continuously evoked to secure new forms of oppressive power. Colonial power is alive and well, and continues to work for the benefit of the imperial core.

The European Union’s partnership with the Al-Sisi regime holds dual strategic elements: (1) it enables Al-Sisi to continue his policies of state repression without accountability from the EU and its member states and; (2) it draws the Egyptian state towards close proximity to Europe, as the centre of tradition and modernity. Indeed, the hierarchy of global power is predicated on proximity to this imperial core. Europe’s disregard towards Egypt’s repressive migration control is not merely the result of imperception. The political economy of the Mediterranean is bulwarked by European and Egyptian carceral statism. Europe’s carcerality is inextricable from centuries

of colonial ideology and xenophobia, and the contingencies of racially-dependent matrices of citizen desirability. Carceral citizenship is the form of state organisation that enables the encoding and punishment of those of the so-called Global South. Egypt’s carceral quality, in contrast, renders the state into a laboratory where increasingly oppressive ‘human security’ policies can be tested to fortify the exclusivity of the West, where domestic human rights failures can be obscured through strategic partnership.

To assume Egypt as a regional outlier would be fallacious. Amnesty International condemns the imprisonment of migrants and refugees in the prisons of Libya who suffer grave human rights violations, drawing linkages to the migration policies of the EU. In 2023, Human Rights Watch reported that the EU has trained and financed the Libyan coast-guard to intercept and forcibly return people to Libya where migrants face ‘torture, arbitrary detention, forced labor, and sexual assault.’ It is estimated that over 5000 migrants are held in prisons across Libya. To Ian Urbina of The New Yorker, the EU has created a ‘shadow immigration system’ where aid programs and humanitarian work often involve pressuring African states into adopting tougher immigration policy. State violence and control have been normalised by the continued tradition of imperialism. Carceral statism exposes the global colonialist dynamics that shape state governance and foreign policy. Anti-colonial work is far from wholly accomplished, requiring strong transnational solidarity to dissolve the primacy of the state and colonial world.

Art: Mahima Singh

INTRODUCTION

‘Whiteness’ is often presented as a transhistorical and universal social identity. For instance, in Orientalism Edward Said references Herodetus’ account of the Greco-Persian Wars as an expression of the innate and oppressive character of European whiteness, stretching back to at least the 5th Century B.C.E. In this account, ‘whiteness’ is synonymous with inherent physiological features and European geography. While systems of oppression have existed since the advent of class society, ‘whiteness’ is a uniquely modern social invention. This article will argue that identi whiteness and non-whiteness historically developed as superstructural outgrowths of capitalism, especially the racism of the African slave trade. It will also demonstrate the socially constructed character of whiteness by investigating the malleability of the category through its expansion to southern and eastern Europeans and Irish people.

IS WHITENESS TRANSHISTORICAL?

In previous societies, social identities and oppression were structured differently. For example, in antiquity Roman citizens (who could not legally be enslaved) were largely counterposed to non-Latinised “barbarians”. Though designed to uphold the oppressive slave mode of production, these legal categories

civilized and barbarian—and you could have white skin and be a barbarian and you could be black and civilized.”

cheap cotton and tobacco that the system of enslaved African labour began to form. With this development, the racialised identities of ‘black’ and its dialectical opposite ‘white’ started to cohere. Trinidadian academic Eric Williams in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery traces the historical process of the construction of racial oppression, arguing that these social 18

Likewise, in feudal Europe when Christianity was the prevailing ideology, the social division was conceptualised as being between ‘Christendom’ on the one hand against Pagans, which included Scandanavians and Slavic people, and Muslims.

periphery, they laid the foundations for modern justifications of slavery, apartheid, and genocide. In particular, with the decline of white indentured

intelligence of humans based on race further lended the appearance of legitimacy to these systems of oppression. For several hundred years, the fatuous association of

rather, becoming white is a social-metabolic process. It occurs generationally, through suburbanisation, assimilation, and changes in the structures of oppression.

By Nafeesa Rahman

Performative activism is justifiably struggling to shake off its pejorative connotations. The performance of ‘wokeness’ to feel morally absolved of guilt is often antithetical to genuine, actionable care for a social justice issue.

Since October 7th last year, the Free Palestine Movement has seen a surge of new supporters taking to social media to express their support for a liberated Palestine. Amid social media platforms systematically censoring voices critical of Israel through content removal, shadow-banning, and account restrictions, social media users continue

to circumvent these barriers to free speech by ‘tricking the algorithm’ — breaking up keywords with dots or slashes, posting unrelated content in between activist posts, and using watermelon emojis to express their support for Palestine.

Unavoidably, the influx of online support gave rise to innumerable cases of performative activism, notably, the AI-generated image ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ shared millions of times across social media platforms as a global outcry against the Israeli airstrike in the humanitarian

safe zone in Rafah which killed at least 45 Palestinians.

Those critical of the post have rightfully complained about its sanitised depiction of genocide.

Shorn of context, the image serves as a facile cop-out for those claiming to ‘care’ about the Palestinian cause with little to no real-life involvement in the movement itself. This kind of ‘slacktivism’ — or lazy activism — naturally bears comparison to the thousands of black squares with hashtag #blackouttuesday shared on social media as a protest for the Black Lives

Matter Movement back in 2020. Only this time, celebrity figureheads were not so quick to pay lip service to the ‘trend’ of Palestinian solidarity.

But is performative activism all that bad?

Of course, a distinction must be made between online activism and virtue signalling. With our attention spans decreasing and social media growing as a news source, it’s easy to reshare content to make a definitive statement about being on ‘the right side of history’. In reality, what is right or wrong is never that easy to determine. The objective of social media algorithms is to keep users hooked by presenting content that aligns with what we already think. When we are stuck in these echo chambers, we succumb to oversimplified narratives, diluting complex issues into a dichotomy between good and evil, and we reprimand those who fail to readily condemn our preferred villain.

The simple answer seems to be that if we are not intimately educated about the nuances of a movement, we must refrain from posting about it all so as to avoid being labelled as fake and performative.

But social media is inherently performative. We carefully curate our online personality to suit what our audiences want to see. Hence, activism on social media is performative by proxy. But does performativity matter if our intentions are well-meaning? Why gatekeep political involvement when a ‘slacktivist’ posts an aesthetic Instagram infographic about deaths in Gaza if that means that the Free Palestine Movement gains visibility? Should it matter if one does not have genuine concern about Palestinian people when they repost a trending AI image, if that contributes to spreading awareness of human rights breaches? In the early stages of a movement, especially something as historically censored and repressed as Palestinian solidarity, the

more people post, like, and reshare content, the more people know about it, and the bigger the community of support grows.

Online exposure for a movement depends on accessibility — the amount of people who can be moved by a cause enough to post about it. In an ideal world, all online activists would post informed content from credible sources, share expert analysis, and testimonies from people on the ground. In the real-world, exposure for movements like Free Palestine is growing, but only because the nature of online activism is changing.

An interesting study titled Freepalestine on TikTok: from performative activism to (meaningful) playful activism explores how the innovative, unserious, and playful form of new social media platforms like TikTok offers a space for the Free Palestine Movement to evolve. Performative activism reaches its peak here, transforming into performance. TikTok’s characteristic content such as memetic challenges, sarcastic skits, makeup transformations, and duets are hacked and repurposed by young users tackling hard political topics in playful, communicative style. Searching #freepalestine on TikTok’s Explore page reveals hundreds of videos that expand the possibilities of typical content under Palestine-related hashtags, and enables political claims to penetrate spaces which are usually politics-free. Naive as it is, ‘playful activism’ makes activism accessible to a younger generation who otherwise feel excluded or uninterested by activism’s traditional forms.

Like any activism, the real-world efficacy of playful activism is not guaranteed. But it’s representative of how the nature of activism is changing and we need to change our mindsets with it. Otherwise, we will be left behind in a fruitless struggle for political correctness that has little to no bearing on what we are protesting for in the first place.

By Ishbel Dunsmore

The abolition of the slave trade presented significant challenges for the British Empire, which still required labourers for colonial plantation economies. From Mauritius to Suriname, Guyana, and Fiji, colonial officials recruited nearly 2 million Indians, mostly from lower-caste communities, for indentured servitude. This agreement (or “Girmit”) with the Empire promised high wages, favourable working conditions, and the option for a free return to India after ten years of servitude.

Little is known about the Girmit, and how, under the guise of a sojourn, it replicated all-too-familiar brutalities against colonial subjects. Even less attention is given to the stories of Girmitya women. A veil of dishonour shrouded their lives, plagued by colonial and patriarchal forces, Girmitya women were stigmatised by white and brown men. One prevalent rhetoric that reinforced this veil was the supposed sexual immorality of Girmitya women.

Walter Gill, an Australian who observed Fiji’s indenture system, remarked that they were ‘joyously amoral as a doe rabbit.’ Emancipating the history of the Girmit requires a removal of the veil of dishonour, as Naraini’s story shows.

Naraini arrived on Fiji’s shores as a 24-year-old. A month into her servitude, she prematurely gave birth to a child who passed away only four days later.

Shortly after, Overseer Bloomfield, the supervisor of the sugarcane plantation, requested Naraini to present herself at work. Distressed and physically incapable of working, Naraini refused— well within her rights, as it was standard practice for women not to work for three months after giving birth. Bloomfield then exercised his colonial-granted authority, physically abusing Naraini as punishment. When a doctor at the local hospital saw Naraini, he remarked that it was “a degree of brutality that can be hardly conceived by any man in his right sense.” Bloomfield did not report the incident, and it was not until the doctor raised Naraini’s injuries to the plantation manager that an official inquiry was conducted. The investigation did acquit Bloomfield but officials asserted that his callousness indicated he was not fit to be in charge of indenture labour. Naraini’s life, on the other hand, was forever changed as she descended into mental illness.

The inquiry highlighted two significant revelations about indentured servitude. Firstly, there was a growing recognition of the need to attribute responsibility for the plight of Girmitiyas. This coincided with the rise of the Indian independence movement. Secondly, there was a stark contrast between colonial rhetoric professing protection for Girmitiya women and the harsh realities on the ground.

Previous inquiries into the mistreatment of Girmitiya women saw colonial officials insisting on “fair and just treatment” for all labourers. However, as Brij Lal notes, Naraini’s case “illustrates how racist and sexist beliefs justified and excused the unsympathetic treatment endured by indentured women.” The indenture system was officially abolished in 1920 amidst mounting criticism of its unethical nature.

Naraini’s story reminds me that, as a Girmitya descendant, my history is paved by countless, hidden stories of sacrifice, sorrow, and strength. My foremothers were denied an education, taught only how to be agreeable wives and mothers and forever caught in cycles of poverty and disenfranchisement. When violence erupts on the island, usually outpourings of ethnic tensions, the white man continues to evade all blame while women endure the most horrific impacts. But within it all, there are stories of unfathomable resilience that must be honoured, as Ireen Rahiman-Manuel (2024) beautifully captures:

Their izzat (dignity) draped in their white sari Is what remained A priceless commodity That no white person could take.

The women of Girmitya Their cries have slowly faded Their souls have come to rest Their stories remain.

** reproduced with permission

UNMASKING THE VEIL OF DISHONOUR

By Sanaa Shah

RESISTANCE TAPES

Art by Bipasha Chakraborty

“China” (said politically) is a conversational landmine. No one in my vicinity uses it unprompted, except my dad sometimes at family dinner. More commonly, I hear “China” (said economically), or “China” (said apologetically), or inevitably “China” (said mistakenly, in the place of another east or south-east Asian culture).

When poet Ouyang Yu writes about boarding the plane “for home which is / Of course china”, his “china” is lowercase, defensive, anticipatory. His “Fuck you Australia!” said “through the arsehole of a window” is, in contrast, bold and recalcitrant. Yu’s anger and confrontationality was a thrilling discovery for me. It’s a discursive modality that the Chinese diaspora has been discouraged from using — usually met with scepticism, or the question, what do you have to be angry about? This is evident even by the fact that Yu is known as ‘the angry Chinese poet’, as if being expressly angry and Chinese (and, until very recently, an anglosphere poet) were oxymoronic.

The most common reason people have for dismissing this anger is the visible representation of Chinese people in high-earning jobs. When I’ve expressed, or recounted my friends’ and relatives’ experiences of racial discrimination (or the underlying fear of discrimination) to a white person, I’m more often than not met with a counter-argumentative list of Chinese people who have risen to the top of the corporate ladder.

It’s frustrating to see the economic successes of a few, highly visible because they are non-white, overwhelm and silence the negative experiences of many.

Racism against Chinese-Australians is hard to pin down and easy to dismiss in a nation whose leaders peddle Sinophobia and still expect us to be grateful. Sinophobia has a history concurrent with that of settler Australia; its 2024 mien is not entirely severed from its 19th century ‘yellow peril’ roots, which was the basis for the White Australia Policy (hilariously, WAP).

In 2014, federal senator Clive Palmer publicly described the Chinese as “mongrels”, “bastards” who “want to take over this country”. After backlash, he apologised for this statement. Federal senator Jacqui Lambie then emphasised the threat of “a Chinese Communist invasion” which will result in “our [white] grandchildren…becoming slaves” to China.

Lambie stands by her comments, saying that she is “speaking about the Chinese communist regime and not the Chinese people.” This tack-

on disclaimer has become an idiomatic phrase often used to get away with frankly disgusting, not to mention unproductive, name-calling and racist fearmongering. The language used—“take over”, “invasion”—generates a discourse of fear that resonates with the 19th century fear of the “yellow hordes”.

As Professor Georgina Tsolidis of Deakin University identifies, such “discourses of fear” are neoliberal devices used to reaffirm a sense of identity “at a time when obvious forms of identity are breaking down”. The postmodern public consciousness relies on iconocentrism, which is the linking together of names, words, images to form icons in which one word is inextricably tan-

(DEROGATORY)

By Faye Tang

gled with certain other associations. China’s recent economic rise has meant an increase in Chinese immigration, international students, and investments, welcomed by certain Australians who profit off of foreign investment (and the modern profit-driven university model).

The field of property investment is especially divisive, since Australia’s ever-worsening housing crisis is heightened by growing competition. Prominent news sources circulate dozens of articles zeroing in on Chinese faces and blaming foreign investors for ruining the ‘Australian Dream’ of owning a home. What should be an economic issue has thus been racialized; instead of holding the (mostly white, male, capitalising) policymakers accountable, the irresistible image of Chinese competition externalises the threat and creates fear of an invasion from—what? Would you call this the “Communist regime”, or the Chinese people?

These narratives of fear and blame that have surrounded the Chinese diaspora since early colonial Australia are continually perpetuated by such vague, easy linkages between Chinese faces; China as a threatening polit-

ical ‘other’—an antagonist, alongside Russia, to ‘western democracy’; and the cause of failures in the Australian economy. It goes without saying that this is damaging to the Chinese-Australian community, to the simultaneous two-faced narrative of Australian multiculturalism.

Recent instances of racial attacks on Chinese-Australians and Chinese international students are a violent but unsurprising outburst of the Sinophobia that mainstream media, politicians, and educators are complicit in. This is not to speak of the vile unfettered Sinophobia online, from people hiding behind burner accounts. The hostile and underhanded rhetoric surrounding discussions of China needs to change to dispel the fear from both sides: the fear of “yellow peril”, and the fear from Chinese-Australians that our home is increasingly inhospitable.

Ouyang Yu’s Australia (seen “through the arsehole of a window”) is not an unsightly historical relic. It’s alive — prophetic, if I’m being pessimistic. The problem with our national imaginary and rhetoric is neatly summarised by Yu: “You thought I’d wanted to learn your English that / Called me names / That fucked, whenever it could, anybody, especially us…”

By Ramneek Thind

WHY

THE GROUND-BREAKING HAITIAN REVOLUTION FAILED TO BECOME A FAMOUS SYMBOL OF POLITICAL FREEDOM & EQUALITY & ADVANCEMENT OF HUMAN RIGHTS.

Self-liberated Haitian slaves successfully defeated Napoleon’s la grande armée — an army that otherwise ploughed through Europethus revolutionising colonial struggle. It also destabilised the slave-reliant Caribbean economy, marking a watershed moment in advancing political freedom and human rights. Yet, the Haitian Revolution remains largely uncharted on the maps of history, which begs the question: why is this the case?

The Achievements of the Haitian Revolution Originally referred to as Saint-Domingue by the French, the post-revolution state, Haiti, was aptly named to reflect its struggle against Western imperialism. Haiti, derived from the Indigenous Taino language, translates to ‘rugged, mountainous’, symbolising a rejection and usurpation of French colonial rule. In addition to this, Haiti became the first independent Black republic, second independent state in the Americas and first ever state to gain independence from European colonial empires. Through this struggle, the Haitians disrupted accepted colonial power dynamics. Thus, the Haitians not only challenged their own colonial rule, but set a precedent that colonised people can successfully agitate against their oppressors. The Haitians also dismantled the economic status quo, replacing the latifundia tenure - plantations owned by corporations or wealthy individuals - with self-sufficient community-based minifundia, small-scale farms, demonstrating the significance of the Haitian Revolution.

Shifting Sands: how did the Revolution Advance Human Rights? Pioneered Emancipation & Universal Equality Through self-liberation and the declaration that all Haitians are ‘Black’ and free, the Revolution proved that emancipation was possible. It also demonstrated that no group of individuals were of higher importance to any other, foregrounding an understanding of equality.

Challenging Negative Rights

The Haitian Revolution also challenged negative rights, a Western invention. Instead, the Haitians established positive rights, which impose a positive duty on others to uphold said rights, such as the right to freedom. Therefore, the Revolution confronted Western understandings of rights.

Precursor Human Rights Documents – the 1801 & 1805 Constitutions

The 1801 and 1805 Haitian Constitutions were precursors to contemporary understandings of human rights. For example, Article 3 of the 1801 Constitution stipulates that “there can be no slaves on this territory; servitude therein has been forever abolished.” Furthermore, Article 4 asserts that “all men, regardless of colour, are eligible to all employment”, articulating the fundamental rights that all of its citizens are afforded.

The Hidden Currents - Why are the Contributions of the Revolution Neglected & Forgotten?

The Haitian Revolution has been characterised as historically insignificant, because of Western influences on historiography.

Using a Western Scale to Judge the Efficacy, Success and Outcomes of the Revolution Haiti emerged from the Revolution as the poorest and most dysfunctional country in the Americas, despite Saint Domingue being one of the most richest and prosperous colonies. Although, of course, this is largely because of the Haiti independence debt imposed by the French. Nonetheless, historians incorrectly characterise the transition from Saint Domingue to Haiti as a ‘devolution’. This thinking is due, in part, to structural flaws within the way the West constructs history. Here, history is understood by the West as a linear, evolutionary chain of events, with each historical event representing an advancement in human society.

White Supremacist Notions in Western Historiography

Unlike the French and American Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution was incomprehensible for white historians at the time, as its success destabilised Western constructions of race. Thus, it was unthinkable that enslaved people were capable of organising a revolution, let alone succeeding in their revolutionary aims. White historians opted to omit and obscure the Revolution’s history and thus erase what the Revolution achieved, instead promoting a colonial view that the Haitians were ‘primitive’.

Therefore, the significance of the Haitian Revolution cannot be understated. Through fully appreciating the achievements of the Revolution, we can destabilise the notion that the West are the champions of human rights, while also honouring the revolutionary spirit of the Haitians.

Photography by Ethan Floyd

STUDENT INTIFADA-

By Ethan Floyd

RIPPLES OF RESISTANCE

From Belfast to Bethlehem, from Galway to Gaza

From the Tudor Conquest of Ireland in the 16th century to the ongoing struggles in Palestine today, the histories of these two lands are marked by the enduring legacy of colonial oppression and resistance, with a common quest for justice and liberation. The expressions of colonialism in Ireland and Palestine are strikingly similar –‘Bloody Balfour’ and the Balfour Declaration, the global savagery of the Black and Tans officers, and the genocides aided and abetted by Britain. Identifying a common oppressor, this explains the Irish people’s historic solidarity with Palestine in the fight against Western imperialist capitalism.

Although undergoing conquest by AngloNormans since the 12th century, the Tudor Conquest of Ireland in the 16th century marked the beginning of the imperialist colonial project. In Black Marxism (1983), Cedric Robinson identifies the Irish and Slavs as the first peoples to be “racialised” by the British, in a process that designated them as unruly, uncivilised, and unworthy of sovereignty or equal rights and wages.

The Irish laboratory was a testing ground of British colonialism, where the Empire trialled the confiscation of land, outlawing language and culture, militaristic rule, and extractivism. As the disease of colonialism spread across the globe, history has

By Grace Street

up together against modern forms of colonialism and against Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the importance of global solidarity and a united fight against oppression is breaking down the facade of neoliberal nationalism.

Setting up plantations across Ireland, the Tudor Conquest introduced a forced assimilation by regranting land to Gaelic nobles who surrendered to them, and by outlawing Catholicism and the Irish language. The plantations allowed the English and the assimilated Gaelic nobility to force the labour of the Irish peasantry, driving demographic and economic changes that broke up and impoverished communities.

One attempt to instil English religion, culture and law was seen in the outlawing of the harp in Ireland under Tudor rule, in order to break down existing traditions and social structures. The harp plays a large role in Gaelic mythology and had been a key part of Irish courtly life, with the last High King of Ireland, Brian Boru, being renowned as a fine harpist. With the orders for harps to be burnt and harpers to be hanged, it then became a symbol and site of resistance, with the Irish maintaining the tradition. It persists today as a national symbol, carefully chosen as the emblem of Guinness and featured on the Irish coat of arms. This bears a striking resemblance to the olive trees burnt by Israeli settlers and the Palestinian olive oil sold by Israel, in a targeted offensive against this large part of Palestinian nationality, livelihoods, and connection to the land.

The three main Irish famines of 1740, 1845 and 1879 were enabled by the British, who created the conditions for and allowed mass famine and mass migration in the millions. The ‘Potato Famine’ of 1845-1852 was not just caused by diseased potato crops, but rather by continual poverty, reliance on potatoes as a cheap food source, absentee landlordism, and exports of food from Ireland to England. Facilitating ethnocide and genocide, the British government were willing to view it as ‘divine providence’ for the ‘uncivilised Irish’.

Up until 1922, Ireland endured 100 years of quasimilitary rule under the British — keeping Ireland subservient to surveillance, brutality and fear. During the War of Independence, the ‘Black and Tans’ were sent in as reinforcements from England, who became infamous for their retaliatory attacks on republican civilians, businesses and towns, with targeted looting, arson and beatings. At the end of that war and following disbandment, it may come as no surprise that at least 700 of the Black and Tans joined the Palestine Police Force, allowing them to export their bigoted brutality across the globe.

There are other common enemies throughout a shared history, notably Arthur Balfour who bolstered British imperialism and Zionism across the world. Known as ‘Bloody Balfour’ to the Irish, he was infamous for opposing Irish Home Rule (the movement for sovereignty and self-rule) and suppressing protest and insurrection in Ireland while chief secretary to Ireland in the late 1800s. As Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, he completed negotiations for the Anglo-French agreement that recognised the supremacy of Great Britain in Egypt and of France in Morocco. As British Foreign Secretary, in 1917 Balfour penned a letter to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland that declared Britain’s sympathy for Zionism and its support for the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in Palestine. Condoning and facilitating the violent expulsion of Palestinians and other Arabs in the Middle East in order to establish the State of Israel, the Balfour Declaration is credited for contributing to the growth of religious Zionism and the expansion of the Zionist movement.

Successful in the subjugation of Ireland, British colonialism would soon spread to Palestine. British forces quelled Palestinian protest against Zionist occupation which gave the green light for the 1948 Nakba. Britain now silently watches as Israel is seizing more land in the West Bank, burning more olive trees, imprisoning more Palestinian men, entrenching more of their apartheid system, and bombing more of Gaza than ever before. With much of a shared history, hatred for Britain, intergenerational trauma, and hopes for national unification and liberation, there is a strong solidarity between the people of Ireland and Palestine.

Ireland has been a pioneer in the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and is one of the

most pro-Palestine nations in the world. After all, it was the Irish who invented the word ‘boycott’, as workers went on strike and the community ostracised the English land agent Charles Cunningham Boycott in 1880 in Lough Mask. Facing proposed evictions, the first boycott was part of the Irish National Land League’s campaign for fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale of land. The ostracising of Charles Boycott reached across the island, and he was forced to sail back to England.

Of course, the story of solidarity isn’t quite that simple or straightforward. At the turn of the 20th century, there was quite an amity between Irish republicans and Zionists, with a shared vision of themselves as dispossessed nations. It wasn’t until 1937 that the coin dropped — when Zionists accepted the British partitioning of Palestine — and that solidarity with Palestine became widespread amongst the Irish.

However, it can neither be ignored that it was a Dubliner, Sir Alan Cunningham, who was in charge and oversaw the Nakba in 1948, which led to the deaths of over 15 000 Palestinians, over 500 towns and villages destroyed, and the mass expulsion that displaced more than half of the Palestinian population.

Irish-Palestinian solidarity must acknowledge and tackle the anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism that first gave Britain the ‘mandate’ to ‘govern’ Palestine after World War I, and has since allowed Zionist-led occupation, apartheid and genocide for over 76 years. Shared elements of our histories do not at all mean living the same experiences, but they do help to build people-power against the common enemy – a system of Western imperialist capitalism.

authority, and who has the right to rule. Said notes that this has

value white lives over others, and fight against the continued colonial regime.