Statement in Solidarity with the Palestinian People

Abolition 2 Abundance unequivocally stands on the side of the Palestinian people against Israeli settler-colonial violence, whether that violence is commited by official state forces or extralegal Zionist lynch mobs. We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah, and Israel’s heinous bombing campaign against the people of Gaza. We condemn the attacks by Israeli police and extralegal Zionist extremists on the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. We condemn the United States for enabling — through economic, military, and political support — Israeli state brutality and cruelty against Palestinians. We condemn the Israeli state’s racist apartheid policies, and its ongoing Nakba against the Indigenous people of Palestine. 

As abolitionists in the United States, we recognize the connections between state violence here — in the forms of policing, prisons, border control, and settler-colonialism — and Israeli state violence in Palestine. We recognize that the same technologies that the United States uses against Black, brown, Indigenous, migrant, and poor people are used by the Israeli state against Palestinians. We recognize that many U.S. police departments with histories of abusing and murdering Black people are involved in programs in which they send officers to train with Israeli forces who abuse and murder Palestinian people. We recognize the colonizing tactics of the state of Israel because they are used by the U.S. government, past and present, against Indigenous people around the world. For these reasons and more, we assert that decolonization, including the decolonization of Palestine, is necessary to realize the abolitionist project. 

We affirm that the Palestinian people have a right to exist as a people. We affirm that Palestinian people have a right to defend themselves from Zionist aggression. We affirm that Palestinian refugees and their descendants have the right of return, and the right to get the land back from the Zionist settlers who currently occupy it against international law and against basic human decency. We affirm that Palestinians have the right of free movement within the entirety of historic Palestine, without being subject to the unconscionable oppression of walls, checkpoints, and armies. We affirm that Palestinian people have a right to resist apartheid policies, ethnic cleansing, land theft, expulsion, containment, and extermination. Indeed, the Palestinian people have a right to resist genocide.

As people living in the United States, we call on the United States to cease all support for Israeli aggression, including Congress’s $735 million weapons sale to Israel, which the Biden administration recently approved. We call on Congress to enact H.R. 2590, “To promote and protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.” We support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, and call on other organizations and institutions in the United States to do likewise. 

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.