Palestinian Lives Matter
From Planet 243
by Kandace Siobhan Walker
Kandace Siobhan Walker recounts what first sparked her consciousness about the situation in Palestine, and the long roots of solidarities between this struggle and the Black liberation movement, recommending resources for informed activism.
In Culture and Imperialism, Palestinian-American author Edward Said writes, ‘The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.’ When I was a teenager in the late noughties, the narrative I had received about the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ was that it was an ancient struggle in a faraway part of the world. The messaging of this narrative was both hyperbolic and dismissive: Israel-Palestine was too complex for us in the West to understand; it was merely a land dispute; each side had committed atrocities; and only Israel’s claim to sovereignty had merit. I had internalised the idea that a two-state ‘solution’ offered the clearest and most peaceful resolution, and that Palestinians, because they were largely opposed to this ‘solution’, were opposed to peace.
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