Solidarity, Struggle & Palestinian Liberation
Anti-colonialism must be at the heart of our struggle. We are writing, as Platform, to affirm our collective’s solidarity with the Palestinian people’s 76-year-long struggle for liberation and return.
Platform is a climate justice collective based in the UK, a country that has presided over the disenfranchisement and dispossession of the Palestinian people. We join with citizens and civil society institutions across the country and around the world mobilising alongside Palestinians as they confront a genocidal campaign.
As preliminary steps towards Palestinian liberation, we demand an immediate and lasting ceasefire, open humanitarian access to Gaza and divestment from Israel’s war machine.
“This is our memory. It is the history. It is the land. It is the sky.”
– Fadia’s Tree (2022)
The current genocide
The scale and force of the current assault on the Palestinian people mirrors the mass expulsion of the Nakba, or ‘Catastrophe’, of 1948, which saw over 750,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced and dispossessed. This is the sixth major assault since the imposition of the illegal blockade. Israel has killed over 186,000 Palestinians since launching its latest war on Gaza, according to The Lancet, with the true number impossible to calculate amidst ongoing aggression.
Thousands remain buried under rubble, with no hope of rescue amidst relentless bombing. Well over one million Palestinians have been rendered homeless, most of whom were already refugees as a result of previous Israeli aggressions. Access to water, food, electricity, and humanitarian aid has been entirely cut off, prompting the outbreak of famine and disease. The United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other international bodies describe the situation as an ‘unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe’, akin to a ‘death sentence.’
Israel’s brutality is not limited to the Gaza Strip. Throughout the occupied territories, Palestinians are kidnapped from their homes and abused by the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) in inhumane prison camps. In the West Bank, at least 502 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops and settlers since the onset of the current aggression on Gaza, with over 5,000 arrested, as they continue to resist apartheid and settler violence during what was already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank
The olive trees cry
Israel is committing ecocide in Gaza. The current aggression has intentionally corrupted Gaza’s air, water and food, weaponising pollution and disease to make conditions unlivable. Ancient Palestinian lands have been decimated through bomb and bulldozer, with recent satellite imagery showing the destruction of 38-48% of tree cover and farmland in Gaza.
As one Palestinian said – “There is almost nothing to recognise there. No traces of the land we knew. They totally erased it.”
Long before the current aggression, Israeli Occupation Forces destroyed Palestinian agriculture by contaminating water supplies, persecuting farmers in Gaza and the West Bank, and spraying toxic chemicals on Palestinian farmland. The occupation actively prevents any possibility of food sovereignty to people in Palestine. Held in open-air captivity, 96% of people in Gaza are forced into chronic food insecurity, Palestinian olive trees and water pipes are destroyed, and crushing restrictions are imposed on fishing boats, limiting their yields.
Israel weaponises environmental destruction as a tactic of suppression. It is unconscionable for a colonising entity to forcefully separate a people from their land and desecrate all forms of sustenance. Palestinian life, like all life, is sacred and must be defended, alongside their right to steward their own land through traditional agricultural practices, songs and harvest festivals. We must lean away from paternalistic codes of support and instead stand alongside the Palestinian people in solidarity as they resist efforts to dispossess them from their homes and land.
We recognise that the Israeli settler colonial project is also deeply connected to the historic and current exploitation of Palestinian oil and gas resources. We call out the complicity of global fossil fuel companies, many of whom have links to the UK. No company with licenses to operate in the UK North Sea should be aiding and abetting genocide – whether through partnering with Israeli-owned companies, supplying jet-fuel to bomb Palestinians, or accepting licenses from Israel to explore for gas in Palestinian waters.
We support Palestinian groups fighting the illegal exploitation of their natural resources – by Israel or global fossil fuel capital – and endorse all demands from the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine.
Britain’s complicity
As organisers in the belly of the beast, we will always stand against the devastating repercussions of Britain’s colonial machine. We will always stand against Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism and all forms of oppression.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a catalyst for the 1948 Nakba. Britain’s then-Foreign-Secretary Arthur Balfour declared his aim to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. But this land was never Britain’s to give away.
Britain’s complicity began with Balfour, but it remains vigorous in the present day. In line with former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s ‘unequivocal’ support for Israel, the UK has consistently sold arms to Israel, with Campaigns Against Arms Trade reporting that UK industry provides 15% of the components in the F35 stealth combat aircraft that are currently being used in the bombardment of Gaza. A third of Conservative MPs and twenty per cent of Labour MPs have accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups. Israel lobby groups have paid for sitting Conservative MPs to visit Israel on 187 occasions, and for Labour MPs to visit Israel on over 50 occasions since 1999.
Senior Metropolitan Police officers are also regular attendees at a think tank closely associated with Israel’s military and intelligence services. In addition, the UK is a valued customer of Israel’s weapons and weapon technology industry. By investing in Israeli companies such as Elbit and Rafael, who market their weapons around the world as “combat-proven” and “field-tested” (on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories), the UK is further complicit in Israel’s gross abuse of Palestinian human rights.
We mourn the unconscionable loss of human life, dreams and loves in Palestine. Stewards of the land do not destroy it with bombs and toxic chemicals, they tend to it with generations of careful hands and devotional song.
Our demands
We stand with the demands of Migrants Organise, co-signed by Land In Our Names, Sisters Uncut, BLM UK and 103 other social justice organisations. We have also added demands to this list.
These are our demands:
- That the British Government calls for an immediate ceasefire and protection of medical facilities, lifting the siege and ensuring unrestricted humanitarian access to save lives in Gaza.
- That the British Government withdraws all diplomatic, military, economic and material support to Israel as it commits crimes against the Palestinian people, and that it imposes sanctions and a two-way arms embargo on Israel.
- That the British Government takes active steps to promote the rights of Palestinians to freedom, self-determination and return, as enshrined in international law.
- That the British Government heeds the call of Palestinian Groups, Unions and Environmental Organisations for a total global energy embargo against Israel until it ends the genocide and its regime of apartheid and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people.
To bring these demands about, we call on:
- Civil society to unite in a focused campaign to end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, and to end British state support for Israeli crimes.
- Trade unions and workers to heed the call by Palestinian trade unionists to stop and hinder the trade of arms with Israel and take concrete action against arms companies and other companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege.
- Workers, environmental activists, human rights groups and civil society to take immediate action to stop all energy exports to Israel; end all imports of Israeli energy; and divest from extraction projects, and joint ventures with Israeli energy corporations.
- Organisations and communities in the United Kingdom to unite in a campaign for anti-colonial justice, and create shared demands for apologies, reparations and an end to British imperialism overseas, and criminalisation at home.
Platform’s commitment
At Platform, we believe that ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’. For transparency, we have adopted an internal policy that translates our solidarity with Palestinian liberation into tangible action. This policy includes:
- An organisational commitment to boycott funding streams, goods and services tied to Israel.
- A regular Palestine solidarity working group that will oversee the incorporation of Palestine solidarity into our long-term strategy and work, at both organisational and projects level.
- A commitment to staff training on the history of Palestine and Zionism.
- A comprehensive language guide for staff on how to properly identify the ongoing situation as a settler colonial project, not a ‘war’ or ‘conflict’.
‘I accuse the oil companies of genocide in Ogoni’
– The words of Ken Saro Wiwa inscribed on the Remember Saro-Wiwa public sculpture
Platform has had a long commitment to supporting liberation struggles over the past four decades, particularly struggles in places impacted by oil and gas extraction, or by the deep history of British colonialism. In the mid-1980s, Platform members took part in the boycotts and demonstrations against Apartheid South Africa. In 1994, we became engaged in the Ogoni battle against Shell, who had been despoiling their environment and communities since the late 1950s.
The appalling judicial murder of Ken Saro Wiwa and eight Ogoni activists on 10th November 1995, as a consequence of their resistance to Shell, had a catalytic effect on Platform – inspiring us to undertake solidarity work consistently over the intervening thirty years.
This work has ranged from multi-faceted public arts projects – Remember Saro-Wiwa (2004 – 2010) and Action Saro-Wiwa (2014 – 2016) – to the publication of books including The Next Gulf: London, Washington and the Oil Conflict in Nigeria (2005), reports such as Counting the Cost: Corporations and Human Rights Abuses in the Niger Delta (2011) and a volume of poetry No Condition is Permanent (2009). We continue to support our allies in Ogoni and the wider Niger Delta region through diverse acts of allyship.
Beyond Nigeria, we have assisted other struggles from the Kurdish community inside Turkey and those resisting the authoritarian regime in Azerbaijan (2001 – 2015), to the First Nations in Alberta fighting the Tar Sands projects of Shell and BP (2008 – 2015), and those in the uprisings of the Arab Spring (2010 – 2012).
We can utilise our relative stability as an organisation to commit to long term, intergenerational, solidarity. We ground our commitment to Palestinian liberation in this belief, in the experience of several members of the Platform community who have lived and worked in Palestine over the last 25 years, and in our ongoing support of Palestinian activism – including research, demonstrations, boycotts and direct action.