‘I had to get out’: the US military officers filing for conscientious objector status over Gaza

Alice Speri

THE GUARDIAN
Fri, November 1, 2024 

Joy Metzler.Composite: Joy Metzler

For Joy Metzler, a second lieutenant in the US air force, joining the military had felt like answering a calling. An adoptee from China who was raised in a conservative Christian family, she believed she owed a debt to the United States.

But the Hamas attacks in Israel last year, and Israel’s war that followed, rocked Metzler’s convictions. Within months, she filed for conscientious objector status, one of a small number of US military personnel seeking to end their service because of their moral opposition to US support for Israel.

“I didn’t know Palestine was a place before October 7,” Metzler told the Guardian.

“All of a sudden it felt like a light clicking on for me.”

As the war in Gaza enters a second year, some disillusioned members of the US military have turned to the Vietnam war-era conscientious objector policy to terminate their military service because of religious or moral convictions.

There are few avenues to express dissent in the army. Earlier this year, Harrison Mann, an army officer assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency resigned in protest of US support for Israel. In a far more extreme gesture, 25-year-old US airman Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in February.

The conscientious objector route is a seldom-invoked alternative that few service members are aware of – though some advocates say there has been an uptick in interest in the last year.

The defense department referred questions about the number of conscientious objectors to each branch of the military. A spokesperson for the air force said that it has received 42 applications since 2021 and granted 36. Applications since 7 October “are on trend with pre-conflict averages”, the spokesperson added. (The army, navy, and Marine Corps did not respond to requests for comment.)

But while the numbers remain relatively low, the war in Gaza is top of mind for those service members who have considered conscientious objector status this year, said Bill Galvin, a Vietnam-era objector and director of counseling at the Center on Conscience and War, one of a handful of groups that helps military members navigate the complex bureaucratic process.

Galvin said his group helps roughly 50 to 70 applicants a year, across military branches, and that there’s been more interest than usual this year.

The US has subsidized Israel’s war in Gaza to the tune of nearly $18bn over the last year, and is growing more deeply entangled as the conflict spills into the broader region. The Biden administration recently announced the deployment of 100 troops to Israel to man a missile defense system in anticipation of an escalation against Iran.

“Almost everyone that I’ve talked to has at least cited what’s happening in Gaza as a factor in causing them to rethink what they’re doing,” Galvin said. “Some have actually said: ‘I know that the airplane that I’m doing maintenance on is delivering weaponry to Israel and so I feel complicit.’”

***

Metzler said she was raised to believe that Israel is “the nation of God’s chosen people” and “terrorists were morally bankrupt people, who hate us because of who we are”.

When the war in Gaza started, the images of Palestinian civilians’ suffering disturbed her, but it wasn’t until Bushnell’s self-immolation that she started reading about the history of the conflict and the role of the US government in it. “A lot of the things I had been told about the US’s role in the world were wrong”, she said.



The war pushed Metzler to re-evaluate her time in the air force academy. She recalled laughing with her classmates as they watched footage of people running from a drone – she wasn’t sure in which country. She felt ashamed.

“I had come out of the academy glorifying the act of warfare,” she said. “There’s a certain disregard for human life that you just have to have to be a member of the military.”

Metzler learned about the conscientious objector option when she met a group of veterans at a pro-Palestine protest at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she’s completing a master’s in aerospatial engineering.

The defense department first introduced the objector application process in 1962. Tens of thousands obtained the status over the following decade, as the Vietnam war, and a mandatory draft, sparked a mass antiwar movement. But since then, the number of applicants has fallen drastically, with many members of the military unaware that the option even exists.



“It’s not common knowledge,” said Metzler. “You don’t want to advertise to the people that are working for you that there’s a legal way for you to break your contract if you start to feel weird feelings.”

For the few who embark on it, the process is rigorous and lengthy – Metzler’s application filled 19 pages and she is still waiting for final word after filing it in July. Applicants must demonstrate that they are opposed to all wars and that their beliefs about military service changed after they enlisted. They have to interview with a chaplain and with a mental health professional before an investigating officer reviews their case and makes a recommendation to a committee that decides whether to grant the status. In the past, the military has approved about half the conscientious objector applications it received.

Larry Hebert, another US senior airman, said the process was “excruciatingly long”.

A six-year veteran, Hebert reached what he called “a moral break” as horrific images of Palestinian children resembling his own filled his TikTok.



During a leave from his service in Spain in March, he traveled to Washington and staged a hunger strike in front of the White House to highlight the plight of starving children in Gaza. He later applied for conscientious objector status, but as the wait became unbearable, he filed for voluntary separation, another avenue to legally end one’s service. When that was rejected, he took off his uniform and refused to obey orders. He was disciplined and is currently waiting to be released on administrative grounds

“I had to get out,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a part of any of it.”

***

Juan Bettancourt, a US airman who also filed for conscientious objector status earlier this year, told the Guardian that many of the service members he has spoken with have fear of speaking out but are privately appalled by US support for Israel. “There’s a lot of deep-seated criticism and moral disgust at the complicity of our government in the genocide in Gaza,” he said.



Because dissenting voices are so rare, the military just tries to “brush them under the rug”, Bettancourt added, noting that Bushnell’s self-immolation was portrayed by the air force exclusively as a matter of “mental health,” Bettancourt said.

The air force spokesperson wrote in a statement that the force is committed to ensuring its members “never feel compelled to resort to self-harm as a means of protest”. She added that policies like the conscientious objector process “provide a safe avenue for individuals to voice their concerns”.

But service members say voicing dissent is not easy, with a number of them incorrectly believing it’s illegal for them to do so or fearing they may get into trouble for raising questions. (Metzler, Bettancourt and Hebert all stressed they are speaking for themselves, and not on behalf of the military.)

To address that, a coalition of military personnel and veterans groups have launched an “appeal to redress” campaign, modeled after an earlier one during the Iraq war, as a way for service members to register their opposition with legislators to the US’s Israel policy.



Metzler, Bettancourt and Hebert have also launched Servicemembers for Ceasefire, offering resources for fellow members who are opposed to the war, including an explanation of the conscientious objector process.

Metzler stresses that they are not encouraging people to leave the military – they just want those with doubts to know that they have options.

“I’m not saying you have to jump ship or refuse orders,” she said. “But at the very least, pick up a book, figure out what’s going on in the world, and understand the context of what you’re doing.”

Doing Time for Palestine

Corinna Barnard interviews two of the “Merrimack 4,” activists facing jail on Nov. 14 for their direct action on a U.S. subsidiary of Israeli weapons supplier Elbit.

 (First of two parts)

By Corinna Barnard

October 31, 2024

Source: Consortium News


Activists target Elbit Systems office in Merrimack, New Hampshire, on Nov. 20, 2023. (Courtesy Maen Hammad)



Almost a year ago a photograph of two figures standing on a rooftop of a building in Merrimack, New Hampshire, attracted interest in the social-media sphere attentive to the Palestine-Israel conflict.

The people in the photograph were wearing masks and holding greenish smoky flares over their heads.

Beneath them was a sign, “Elbit Systems of America.”

That’s a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems.

The parent, Haifa-based company is a leading supplier of weaponry — military drones, artillery, munitions and electronic warfare systems — that the Israeli military, for over a year, has needed to destroy the built-and-natural environment of Palestinians while slaughtering them at a historic rate in modern warfare.

In the photo, an American flag drooped on the left side of the Elbit facility, frames the image. The sky had the delicate pastels of a nice November morning.

But who were the people on the Elbit Merrimack roof? And why were they up there?

For much of the past year a variety of people — prosecutors, politicians and reporters — have been providing the answers.

Now Calla Walsh, the one in the blue jacket on the left side of the photo, is responding to email questions from Consortium News. So is Paige Belanger.

Walsh, Belanger and two other young women — Sophie Ross, then 22, and Bridget Shergalis, then 27 — are the Merrimack 4.

On Nov. 20, 2023, they led a direct action against Elbit Merrimack.

Almost a year later, on Nov. 14 they are scheduled to begin a 60-day sentence in Hillsborough County House of Corrections, also known as the Valley Street Jail, in Manchester, New Hampshire, for their role in that action.

“Whatever the conditions are, they will be much better than those faced by Palestinians in Zionist concentration camps,” says Belanger, in an email to ConsortiumNews.

Until now, the Merrimack 4 have refrained from speaking publicly about their experience while their case was being adjudicated.

“It’s only now, after coming to plea agreements and knowing what our sentences will look like, that we feel we are able to begin speaking about our case and reclaiming our voices more generally,” Belanger says.

(Over the past year, I got to know Walsh and Belanger after following their initial political activities in October and November 2023, before the Merrimack action).
Arrested on the Roof

Walsh and two others, on the morning of that photo, had climbed ladders to reach the roof of the Elbit building in Merrimack.

Earlier, while a support team was blocking the driveway to the building, a core group broke windows, sprayed red paint and graffiti on the front of the building and barred a door with a bicycle lock.

Holding the smoke flares on the roof and creating an iconic photo-op was a triumphant gesture.

Shortly after that photograph was taken, local police arrested Walsh, then 19, along with Sophie Ross and Bridget Shergalis — the original “Merrimack 3” — on the roof.

Merrimack police involved the F.B.I. in its investigation of the incident to find any “co-conspirators.”

Two months later, in January, Belanger, then 32, was also arrested, making it the “Merrimack 4.”
Palestine Action

Palestine Action activists blockading Elbit Systems Instro Precision factory in Sandwich, Kent, on Nov. 6, 2023. (Palestine Action)

The Merrimack Elbit action followed the lead of Palestine Action, the U.K. campaign that has defaced and damaged Elbit and other military-linked facilities in that country under the mission statement: “Take Direct Action Against Israel’s Arms Trade in Britain.”

Walsh and Belanger helped form a U.S. branch of Palestine Action after Oct. 7 and the group began an Elbit-targeting spree.

They disturbed an Elbit recruitment event at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston; defaced an Elbit office in Arlington, Virginia, with red-paint graffiti: “War criminals work here.”

Between Oct. 7 and Nov. 20, the Elbit office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was targeted several times, including on Oct. 30, when both Calla Walsh and Sophie Ross got arrested, one year ago today.

Then came Merrimack.
Felonies Dropped

In September, the Merrimack 4 defense team negotiated the 60-day sentence for two misdemeanors in a legal mediation with a judge.

That outcome is a major reduction of initial felony charges that Hillsborough, New Hampshire, county prosecutors brought against them for riot, sabotage, criminal mischief, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. The charges had hung the chilling prospect of decades in jail over the co-defendants.

“The hardest part was all the months of waiting, isolation, and fear of a lifetime in prison, which is over now,” Calla Walsh told Consortium News. “Every day in jail I know I’ll be a day closer to getting back in the streets with the movement.”

Walsh and Sophie Ross have charges pending from their arrests at the Cambridge, Mass., Elbit facility. As a consequence of those arrests, their bail for the Merrimack action the following month was set higher, at $20,000 each, compared with $5,000 for Shergalis.

Walsh and Ross are both still in legal trouble in Massachusetts. But unlike New Hampshire, it is their home state. And Walsh, while now only 20, already has a political chapter behind her in Massachusetts, as a politically precocious teen who helped bring in the youth vote for Democratic U.S. Sen. Ed Markey. That may have earned her some political goodwill.

Neighboring New Hampshire is different.

Walsh knew that she and the others on the roof might get arrested, as they had been in Cambridge. But she didn’t expect the state to come down so hard.

“I was brought out into the courtroom in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, and when I saw my mother and familiar faces of comrades in the court stands, I knew I was in way deeper trouble than I realized,” says Walsh.

Based on her experience, she has advice for people considering a similar form of protest: “Always avoid arrest and maximize material impact and propaganda effect.”

In January, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella took over the case from the prosecutors with the Hillsborough County Attorney’s Office who brought the original charges.

“Originally we were all charged under New Hampshire’s sabotage statute (649:2), for hindering the U.S. or its allies’ defense capacity, a Class-A felony that carried a minimum one year in prison,” says Walsh. “No one had ever been charged with this statute before, but the state had to drop the charge because they realized it could only be used during a declared state of emergency.”

In January, Formella announced that a grand jury indicted three of them — Walsh, Ross and Shergalis — for four Class-B felonies: riot; conspiracy to commit criminal mischief; burglary; and conspiracy to commit falsifying physical evidence for climbing onto the company’s roof. Each charge carried a sentence of between three-and-a-half and seven years in prison.

A matching indictment came against Belanger in May.

It was “somewhat shocking,” says Belanger, “to experience such draconian charges for an action so morally righteous.”

By July, however, it began to look like their case might not go to trial.

In September, the state dropped all the felony charges.
Fergie Chambers

Cox Enterprises headquarters in Atlanta. (Taylor2646, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

James Cox Chambers Jr, aka Fergie Chambers, has been funding the Merrimack 4 legal defense.

Chambers is an estranged member of the Cox family, which owns the privately held, Atlanta-based global conglomerate Cox Enterprises. Forbes ranks it as the 10th richest family in the U.S.

In addition to paying their legal bills, including bail, Chambers was also a “comrade”: He helped Belanger and Walsh found Palestine Action US and participated in some of their actions.

But since the Merrimack action he’s been out of the country, in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.

A Rolling Stone profile of Chambers in March delves into his lifestyle: sex, drugs, spiritual quests, tormented family relations and his disastrous bankrolling of communal-living experiments.

But it also discusses his interest in overthrowing the U.S. for the good of the world. The problem with all that, Chambers has concluded, is the unwelcome attention it attracts from U.S. law enforcement.

Two months after that Rolling Stone profile, in May, the NH Record reported that Chambers is under an active F.B.I. investigation.

“Fergie left the country a few days after the Merrimack action, after seeing the kinds of charges being leveraged against the three girls arrested on the roof,” says Belanger.

A lot about the U.S. cultural scene generated by the Washington-backed Israeli war on Gaza recalls the period of political and social upheaval in the early 1970s, during the Vietnam War. That includes Chambers. He seems like an emanation from the ranks of the “radical chic” as the writer Tom Wolfe coined it. In today’s slang, post Occupy Wall Street, he’s a 1-percenter with revolutionary politics.

Chambers has generated a media whirlpool around himself. In addition to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and The New York Post have run their own profiles of him.

Belanger says his notoriety didn’t help the Merrimack 4.

While Chambers’ legal support has been critical, his connection to the case otherwise


“created an opening for us to be easily dismissed or maligned. We faced rumors of being groomed and indoctrinated into a sex cult, comparisons to the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patti Hearst story, and assertions that we had otherwise been led astray by an unbalanced power dynamic with an ultra-wealthy man who encouraged and enabled us to put our bodies on the line for his own platforming and political reputation.”

Both Belanger and Walsh deny all of that.

Belanger says she came across Chambers in 2020, when he was running his latest communal experiment on acreage in Alford, Massachusetts, a village about 20 miles south of her home town in Pittsfield. Since his move to Tunisia, Chambers has been selling that property off.

“He asked me to come live on the land and work towards creating a revolutionary project,” Belanger writes.


“There were not really clear parameters of what that project might entail, just that we would be aligned on a political line and seek to become a presence in the Berkshires with some political aim. There were a lot of iterations of that project in the years I lived there. My role throughout was mostly political education. I immersed myself fully into learning and teaching Communist theory and trying to figure out ways to most meaningfully put it into practice within the specific conditions of the Berkshires.”

(One local person familiar with the set-up in Alford, who did not wish to be identified, noted that Chambers’ provision of living quarters is a huge factor for young people struggling to find affordable housing in an area where rents have gotten out of the reach of many.)
Prosecutors’ Pressure Play

Meanwhile, Belanger considers the initial charges a pressure play by the state to crack the co-defendants. But it didn’t work, she says. The state “failed to intimidate someone into collaborating with them.”

Mark Moody, a New York City litigator, says that harsh prosecutorial overreach is a common tactic designed to coerce guilty pleas from those confronted by the criminal justice system.

But he sees “political flavor” in New Hampshire Attorney General Formella’s statement, quoted in his office’s announcement of the indictment, regarding the “important civil rights and public protection interests involved.”

“It looks like an attempt to criminalize conscientious opposition to the manufacture of weapons on American soil that will be used by foreign governments to indiscriminately slaughter human beings on foreign soil,” Moody said in an email.

By Nov. 20, 2023, the date of the Merrimack action, Israeli war crimes in Gaza were mounting.

On Oct. 13, 2023, Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal was already calling Israel’s assault on Gaza a “textbook case of genocide” in an article in Jewish Currents.

“Gaza death toll tops 10,000; UN calls it a children’s graveyard,” read a Reuters headline on Nov. 10.

Ghassan Abu Sittah, a physician who had worked at two hospitals that had been struck by Israeli forces, was depicting the attack on the health sector as “part of a military strategy that aims to wipe out Palestinians.”

“What has been different in this war than all the other wars I have been at – not just in Gaza, but all around the region, in Yemen, Iraq and Syria – is that the destruction of the healthcare system has been the main thrust of the [Israeli] military strategy,” Abu Sittah was quoted by Al Jazeera.

The existence of an expanding genocide in Gaza drew little recognition from the Granite State’s attorney general, local politicians or press in their various responses to the Merrimack 4’s action.
Chorus of Condemnation

New Hampshire’s Republican U.S. senator, Chris Sununu, smited the incident as anti-Semitic. He urged prosecutors to charge ahead, in a comment quoted by the NH Journal:


“The antisemitism, hate, and significant damage brought to Elbit America’s campus yesterday has no place in NH and will not be tolerated. I am confident law enforcement will work to bring those responsible for this vile act of hate to swift justice.”

A bipartisan chorus of condemnations from local politicians followed Sununu’s opening salvo.

The NH Journal enthusiastically adopted Sununu’s “anti-Semitic” term. This is their lead on a Nov. 21 article:


“If the antisemitic activists of Palestine Action US were hoping to rally support in the Granite State with their attack on an Israeli-based defense contractor in Merrimack, it appears they miscalculated.”

The smoke flares the demonstrators were holding on the roof in that photo are theatrical pyrotechnics commonly used in pro-Palestine demonstrations. Unlike “incendiary devices,” they are not weapons designed to start fires.

But for authorities steeped in post-9/11 anti-terrorism furor, masked people on a roof with smoking objects were not to be taken lightly.

After Merrimack Police Chief Brian Levesque initially described the flares as “incendiary devices,” the term stuck in the press, along with references to “smoke bombs” and “billowing smoke” from the flares.

With that kind of hyperbole, it was quite reasonable for members of the local community to assume that the young women on the top of the local Elbit building were making more than a political gesture. Did they perhaps want to blow up the building? The whole town?

By both restricting the evidence of Israel’s genocidal violence from the story and deploying inflammatory terminology, the press conjured the Merrimack 4 into young women who went around “commiting siege and riot” for no apparent reason.

They just liked smashing glass and splattering red paint. They seemed possessed. New Hampshire, after all, is in New England, home of the colonial-era witch trials.
Canary Mission

All in all, the legal, political and media response to the case might as well have been orchestrated by Canary Mission, the heavily-funded Israel-run website that tracks and smears advocates of Palestine in the U.S. through a network of anonymous informants.

James Bamford, an American journalist who specializes in U.S. intelligence agencies, describes the doxxing site as a key asset for the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a “ highly secretive intelligence organization that is largely focused on the United States, and the Shin Bet security service.”

In The Nation last December, Bamford recommended a federal investigation of Canary Mission’s funders for assisting agents of a foreign government.

Canary Mission had already blacklisted Calla Walsh before the Merrimack action for her open support of the armed Palestinian resistance and her BDS — boycott, divest and sanction — work against Israeli companies.

The site said she worked on The Mapping Project, which identifies “local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine” in Boston and its surrounding areas. Walsh says that’s untrue; all she ever did was tweet support for it.

“That’s what I was doxxed for. I would never want to take credit for those anonymous people’s work, but Zionist think tanks claimed I was an Iranian agent masterminding the entire project,” she said.

Walsh believes her Canary Mission profile affected the tenor of their prosecution.

“At my arraignment, using information that appeared to be taken from my Canary Mission page, the prosecutor portrayed me as a vicious anti-Semitic communist hooligan who was running around the country committing crimes and calling cops ‘pigs,’ ” she told CN.

All of the Merrimack 4 now have Canary Mission profiles.

Errors & Victories

Protesters outside an Elbit Systems of America facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Nov. 20, 2023. (Courtesy Maen Hammad)

Looking back on the Merrimack action, Belanger acknowledges that it may have been precipitous.

“Operating with an extreme sense of urgency,” says Belanger, “I think we bypassed a lot of grassroots development and community-building requisite for creating a powerful movement that could withstand state repression.”

The prosecution’s felony charges, meanwhile, may have worked to halt the outbreak of attacks on Elbit.

“Our initial charges for the Merrimack action were five felonies that could amount to 37 years in prison,” says Belanger.


“Especially from the vantage of hindsight, with our sentence totalling 60 days and pleading only to misdemeanors, we can see how trumped-up these charges were. The state wanted to quell these types of actions, and certainly used us as an example against engaging in militant action at a pivotal point in the escalation of the genocide.”

At the same time, both Belanger and Walsh are heartened by some of the results of the direct-action approach they adopted.

Anti-Elbit actions slowed down after the Merrimack felony charges in November 2023, but they did not stop.

In March, other demonstrators resumed actions outside Merrimack Elbit.

“Some of the protesters chained themselves to tires filled with cement and other materials to block the driveway in and out of the property of the Israel-based international defense electronics company,” ABC affiliate WMUR-TV reported.

As of early October, eight of them were found guilty of criminal trespass and awaiting sentencing.

And last August, the Elbit Cambridge office where some of them had demonstrated in October 2023 decided to move to a “more suitable location.” That decision followed a year-long campaign of demonstrations outside the building that began in August of 2023.

Walsh ranks the closure of Elbit’s Cambridge office as one of the few material wins for the BDS movement in the U.S. in recent years.

“Ultimately the resolution of our case, defeating felonies and prison time, is a win against counterinsurgency,” she says.


“I hope it makes people more willing to take militant anti-imperialist action, and to do it more effectively. Part of the goal of any action is to make possible the next, greater level of action. We did not take ‘shut it down’ to be a metaphor, and permanently closing the Elbit in Cambridge is one of the few material wins we’ve had in the U.S. in recent years.”
Responding to Genocide

“What did you do during the genocide?”

It’s a question that people of conscience have been having to ask themselves since Oct. 7, 2023,

Matt Nelson answered it with his life on Sept. 11 by setting himself on fire near the Israeli Consulate in Boston. He did not kill himself immediately. It took four days.

“Free Palestine,” Nelson said at the end of a statement he posted to social media beforehand.

Nelson joined two others in acts of extreme self-destruction.

U.S. active-duty Airman Aaron Bushnell killed himself on Feb. 25 outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to avoid complicity in the genocide.

Before then, on Dec. 1, 2023, a person not identified self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.

Nelson expressed a world view that seems compatible with that of Belanger and Walsh.

“We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care. The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians,” he said in his statement on social media.

And then he set himself on fire.

Four young women in New England took a different approach. Instead of turning their anguish inward, the Merrimack 4 took action.

“I didn’t want to serve time in jail,” Belanger says, “but I have no regrets about being incarcerated for materially disrupting the flow of weapons to Palestine, and I will forever be proud that I took a stand against genocide, especially because it meant putting my own freedom on the line. Standing by and doing nothing simply wasn’t an option.”

This is the first of a story in two parts.

Corinna Barnard is the deputy editor of Consortium News. She formerly worked in editing capacities for Women’s eNews, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. At the start of her career she was managing editor for the magazine Nuclear Times, which covered the 1980s anti-nuclear war movement.

 

‘Long live Intifada’: Why decolonisation and protests still matter for Palestine

From the struggle of Palestinians to worldwide protests over the past year, decolonisation takes various forms and is essential for the freedom of Palestine.

Muskaan Mujahid | Sabrina Haider Published October 9, 2024  

As Gaza has been in the spotlight for a year now for the death and destruction wrought by Israel, Western media has often framed the narrative as beginning from just Oct 7, 2023.

For the West, the Oct 7 Hamas attacks “sparked the conflict” in Gaza. It may be more apt to refer it to as “recent conflict” instead, to acknowledge that the story goes decades back and has a layered history.

Under Israel’s settler colonialism — fully backed and catalysed by the West — Palestinians have been controlled, displaced, and killed. Their land has been occupied, bulldozed, and made barren. Their lives have been destroyed, dehumanised, and traumatised.

Yet, Palestinians have persisted. Time and time again, they have pushed against Israel’s colonial crimes. They have shown resistance — an act that is the basis of decolonisation.

This piece looks at the various forms in which decolonisation occurs in Palestine’s context — from the struggle of Palestinians to worldwide protests over the past year. The ongoing process of decolonisation is the journey that would one day culminate in freedom for Palestine.

Colonisation of Palestine

While colonies may sound like a thing of the past in today’s post-colonial world, the people of Palestine are not just under direct occupation of Israel but also subject to the violence and oppression inherent to colonialism.

According to a UN expert, Israel’s occupation is illegal and indistinguishable from a “settler-colonial” situation, which must end as a pre-condition for Palestinians to exercise their right to self-determination.

Settler colonialism is an ongoing system of power that “perpetuates the genocide and repression” of indigenous peoples and cultures. The Israeli occupation has been termed settler-colonialism with similarities to South Africa’s apartheid regime.

It can be traced back to 1917 when Britain — our very familiar colonial empire on which the “sun still never sets” — pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, Al Jazeera explains.

The infamous ‘Balfour Declaration’ was included in the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine, which AJ describes as a “thinly veiled form of colonialism and occupation”. It was a carte blanche for the creation of a state that would occupy land belonging to the people there and use oppressive tactics and violence to maintain its stronghold.

According to the United Nations, the British mandate lasted from 1922 to 1947, during which “large-scale Jewish immigration” took place, mostly from Europe — changing the territory’s demographics.

“What the political concept of a Jewish state in Palestine needed to give it reality was to transfer people to Palestine,” the UN’s records note. They were to occupy a land that was not theirs.

Interestingly, France was also officially awarded its mandate over Syria and Lebanon at the San Remo conference in April 1920, which as history professor Carol Hakim writes, “helped establish an image of France as an archetypal colonial power”.

Coming to Israel as a colonising entity, it not only indulges in settler colonialism but also other oppressive tactics inherent to colonialism.

Elia Zureik writes in Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: “Colonialism has three foundational concerns — violence, territory, and population control — all of which rest on racialist discourse and practice.”

Zureik lists that settler colonialism is “intrinsically associated with the dispossession of indigenous populations through violence, repressive state laws and practices, and racialised forms of monitoring (currently referred to as racial profiling)”.

He describes surveillance as an “indispensable tool of governance”. While Israel uses AI in its recent onslaught on Gaza, years-old instances of monitoring tech, facial recognition and drones have been reported as well, including in occupied West Bank.

Palestinians carry aid unloaded from a truck, in Gaza City on March 23, 2024. — Reuters/File

Another example is Israel calculating Gaza’s daily calorie needs during its 2007-2010 blockade, claiming it was to prevent malnutrition. However, Israeli advocacy groups Gisha and Hamas alleged it was to restrict the quantity of food Israel allowed in the enclave. These and numerous other methods to control the Palestinian population are also inherent to colonialism.

‘From the river to the sea’: Freedom means decolonisation

The phrase ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is frequently heard at pro-Palestinian rallies and protests.

While this phrase originates from the 1940s referring to the liberation of the entire land that used to be historically Palestine, it has become a subject of debate regarding its interpretation, with Jewish groups claiming it is anti-Semitic.

‘From the river to the sea’ is a call for an “imagined future of peace and freedom”, “end to [Israeli] occupation” and “ability to return [to their historic land]”.

People march for Palestine in downtown Chicago, US, on Oct 8, 2023. — Reuters/File

However, as Mark Levine writes in AJ, the other side perceives it in “exclusivist terms” — equating the call for freedom to a violent destruction of Israel and “dehumanisation” of Israelis.

According to Eleyan Sawafta’s article in Middle East Monitor, decolonisation in the Palestinian context aims to address “structural, cultural and direct violence”, which does “not mean dehumanising individuals”.

It is the long-term answer to the conflict which must be viewed in “a wide historical lens encompassing global struggles for freedom as well as the enduring complexities of Israel as a settler-colonial, apartheid and occupation state”.

Freedom for Palestine necessitates decolonisation to dismantle the perpetual colonial violence that existed even before Oct 7, according to Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology at Canada’s Mount Royal University.

Palestinian struggle to decolonise

Where colonialism exists, there also exists a struggle against it. And Palestinians have maintained their struggle against it for decades.

After more than 20 years of military occupation, a “spontaneous popular uprising” took place in the Gaza Strip and West Bank from December 1987 to September 1993 — known as the First Intifada.

According to the UNRWA, the movement was “marked by demonstrations, boycotts, tax resistance, strikes and largely unarmed protests”.

Later, a wave of protests and violence from 2000 to 2005 — sparked by the storming of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound — became known as the Second Intifada.

Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who recently won an Emmy award for her documentary on her life in Gaza, has narrated the colonisation of Gaza in a video she released in March.

“How come a coloniser who had never lived in the land nor his great grandparents steal this land from an Arab Palestinian Cannanite farmer — whether a Muslim, Christian or Jew?” she asks, while seated among children and an old man.

Referring to the British Mandate of Palestine, she says ‘mandate’ was a “legal term that embellishes the idea of colonisation”.

“The brutality and terror of the coloniser can never force me to leave my land, to surrender or to lower my spirit or voice,” Bisan wrote on X last month.

While the Palestinian resistance is diverse, many welcome the armed resistance of Palestinians, saying it is the materialisation of decolonisation.

Some even consider last year’s October 7 attacks as an act of decolonisation.

According to an article by a researcher from the University of South Africa, the “use of violence is unavoidable for both colonialism and (genuine) decolonisation” and decolonisation uses “counter-violence” against colonial violence.

Frantz Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth, highlights how a colonised group is only left with violence as a tool to decolonise its land.

He writes: “From birth, it is clear to him (the native) that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.”

Fanon further says that the violence that has “ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, […] that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native”.

While addressing the ICJ in February, China stated that Palestinians’ use of armed struggle to gain independence from foreign and colonial rule was “legitimate” and “well-founded” in international law.

On the other hand, the West employs “terrorism” to describe Palestinian fighters, even when Israel’s military offensive has killed countless civilians, including children.

Global Palestinian movement

The Palestinian cause has gained support from all parts of the world over the past twelve months, since Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza in the name of “defending itself” against Hamas’s Oct 7 attacks.

From Africa to Europe, South America to the Middle East, people have marched in solidarity with the Palestinians who are facing bombardment, displacement, and death on a daily.

The humanitarian plight of the Palestinians and the barbarity of the Israeli campaign against them has prompted massive outpourings, even in otherwise aloof Western cities and capitals.

But the most vocal support — in terms of public support as well as diplomatic — has arguably come from Latin America, where many countries have borne the brunt of European colonisation themselves.

There are some 700,000 Latin Americans of Palestinian origin, living in fourteen countries of South America, according to a 2020 research published in a peer-reviewed journal of Edinburgh University Press.

According to an article by researchers from Denmark’s Roskilde University, the Gaza conflict has become an ideological position transforming into a global leftist cause. For many Palestinian supporters, imagining a free Palestine is contingent upon decolonisation.

Meanwhile, Pakistanis across the country have shown solidarity through numerous protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

In Lahore, Pakistan’s Progressive Students Collective (PSC) marched outside the US consulate in April. They were joined by diverse groups of students, social and political activists, academics, artists, and concerned citizens — all demanding justice and freedom for Palestine.

In fact, students have led many pro-Palestinian protests across the world but were met with strict actions taken by their university administrations.

The student groups were suspended in places such as Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and other colleges. The British police arrested about a dozen Oxford University students and scuffled with some during a pro-Palestine sit-in at the university premises in May.

These vocal pro-Palestine protests have multiplied despite facing all kinds of repression. This raises an important question: What is so global and radicalising about the Palestinian struggle?

Muneeza Ahmed is a Pakistani activist who has organised pro-Palestine protests in Karachi. Speaking to Dawn.com, Ahmed highlights that the Palestinian movement “has been able to transcend borders and become a global discourse”.

The reason behind the movement’s global reach is “resistance and work that Palestinian activists and their allies have done over the years in different countries”, she says.

Marcelo Alves de Paula Lima, assistant professor at Morocco’s Al Akhawayn University, compares Israel to South Africa’s apartheid regime.

“South Africa is a country that underwent an apartheid regime that resembled a lot the Israeli state today. Indeed, the white settler colonialism that segregated blacks in South Africa until 1994 served as an inspiration for the Israeli segregation of Palestinians over the years,” he tells Dawn.com.

“Another sign of how the Palestinian struggle is part of a decolonisation movement is the decision of other non-western countries such as Brazil and China — both of which were victims of Western imperialism in the past — to speak up against Israeli actions,” Lima notes.

‘Beyond colonialism’: Roles of modernity and Western hegemony

Speaking about the West’s role in extending Israel’s colonial reign over Palestine, Lima highlights that Israel’s creation was proclaimed in 1948, which was a “moment when Western colonialism in Africa and Asia was starting to retreat”.

“Hence, many authors see the state of Israel as an outpost of Western colonialism in the Middle East in a moment when Western domination was fading away,” he adds.

Lima stressed that Israel did not only receive financial and military support from the West but also “intellectual/ideological” support. He highlighted how Israel was “often portrayed as an ‘oasis’ of freedom, tolerance, and progress amidst an allegedly backwards and authoritarian Arab world”.

“When looking at Israeli modernity — urbanisation, democratic political system, respect to LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalist policies, technological advances, etc — one must never lose sight of the colonial pillars on which that modernity was built (just like Western capitalism was built slavery),” he states.

Ahmed, the protest organiser, looks at the massive demonstrations through a slightly different lens that still ties in with coloniality — that of modernity and Western interests.

She believes that the Pakistani pro-Palestine movement lacks an informed narrative.

“Many people who show up to protests don’t necessarily know the history of Palestine,” Ahmed says, adding that the “outlook is more about Muslim solidarity”.

She further asserts, “Western powers, who have supported Israel, must be called out by our people, government and the establishment.

“In Pakistan, there isn’t enough political activism around what [those in] the US has been doing with Israel,” she notes.

In February, a US airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in protest over the assault in Gaza. The 25-year-old had filmed himself shouting “Free Palestine” as he lit himself on fire.

This act drew attention to the US’s unending support to Israel. Several US officials resigned following Bushnell’s act, in protest against Washington’s support for Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The US annually provides approximately $3.3 billion in aid to Israel. It has also shown unwavering support to Israel in the Gaza conflict with providing $8.7bn just last month.

Many argue that the pro-Israel lobby in the US is responsible but this idea overlooks that the US has its own economic and strategic reasons for supplying military aid.

Ahmed emphasises the need to understand “why Israel gets the support of the West”, which was absent from the Pakistani discourse.

The activist says: “One of the biggest reasons the US supports Israel is because they want an ally in the Middle East. It is also quite a bit about capitalism; that narrative is missing.”

“How can you talk about decolonisation without talking about modern capitalism?” she asks.

Muneeza describes the Gaza conflict as an “extreme military occupation and complete genocide”. She says: “Settler colonialism as a word cannot describe what happened in Gaza for the last 20 years, since Hamas [formed the] government.

“It is beyond colonialism. Gaza struggle is a struggle for survival, life, freedom, identity and land,” Muneeza highlights. She states that what modern capitalism and the US hegemonic structure have done is “worse than traditional colonialism”.

However, the global Palestinian movement is “not a decolonising one”, according to Muneeza, as “the aims are not so centralised”.

According to the activist, there would “always be a connection and alliances between people who have been colonised and people of colour” but, she adds, the worldwide protests and activism “do not necessarily show a collective struggle against colonialism”.

Muneeza says that the Palestinian movement is “more localised”.

“It is more about Palestine, which is okay. It is okay to also have localised struggles, and have solidarity between them, but it is not a global takedown of US imperialism or Western colonial powers,” she adds.

The colonial project is further propagated by the Western world, including the United States — Israel’s most ardent ally. For example, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has criticised calls for a ceasefire and also pledged Israel the support it needs to “win fast”.

On the Democrat side, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, when asked if he supported a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran, said getting the hostages was fundamental “but the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute necessity for the United States to have a steady leadership there”.

Argentinian scholar Walter D Mignolo points to the same in his book The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. He states that the “colonial matrix of power is the very foundational structure of Western civilisation”.

“Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity—there is no modernity without coloniality,” he writes.

Way forward

The International Court of Justice in July ruled that “Israel’s continued presence in the Palestinian Territories is illegal”, adding that it was under an obligation “to evacuate all settlers”. In September, the United Nations also passed a resolution demanding the end to Israeli occupation.

While these demands cannot be forcefully implemented, they are an indictment of Israel’s colonial actions — now coming from across the world. They also echo wider support for Palestine as an independent and free state, forming part of a global decolonising project.

Human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber, in his recent opinion piece in Mondoweiss, termed the UN resolution as indicative of a new era in which the “foundations of Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid and ethnonationalism have begun to crumble”.

While Israel has been persistent in defying calls for a ceasefire — and is instead adamant on wreaking havoc in the entire region — international condemnations continue to highlight its rogue behaviour.

As protests and slogans have conveyed: a ceasefire is not the solution to Israel’s settler colonialism of Palestine.

An enduring solution and halt to the war crimes being committed by Israel lies in the creation of an independent State of Palestine.

The world must keep up its protests to amplify the voice of Palestinians so that the West — the torch-bearers of so-called modern values of equality and freedom — is forced to pressure Israel into allowing a viable solution to the Palestine issue.

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Header image: A man carries a Palestinian flag, as students walk out of classes in what they call “one year of genocide on the people of Gaza”, as they demonstrate at the University of California, in Irvine, California, US on Oct 7, 2024. — Reuters