Kimalee Phillip is a Grenadian migrant currently living on the stolen lands of Tkaronto (Toronto) where she works as a labour human rights representative and organizes with the Caribbean Solidarity Network. She is also a trustee with the Groundswell Community Justice Fund and a facilitator with the Toronto Jam. Kimalee loves spending time co-designing and co-facilitating spaces and processes that facilitate change on all levels.
In her collection of political essays, ‘Moving Towards Home,’ Ancestor June Jordan wrote,
I was born a Black woman
And now
I am become a Palestinian
Against the relentless laughter of evil
There is less and less living room
And where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home
This past week we have seen Palestinians, Jews and all those engaging in civil disobedience take to the streets while mourning all civilian lives lost in Palestine and Israel. They insist on honouring all humanity while rejecting settler colonialism and demanding an end to apartheid. As I follow their hearts, I implore you to not be stumped. Do not be debilitated by sentiments such as “I don’t know enough to intervene”; “this is such a sensitive issue”; “this is an argument between Muslims and Jews”; and/or “this is a religious issue, it’s not my place.”
These sentiments are rooted in myths and false narratives about what is really happening. They are also false narratives about who you are, and about who you can be. This is not a fight over religion – it’s a fight about power, oppression and settler colonialism; and this is a fight about race.
If you are fearful or nervous to speak, to intervene or to take a position, I know what that feels like. I have been there. There is no denying that many people have lost their jobs and live and work in fear of retaliation for taking a position, any position, in support of Palestine. In Canada where I live and beyond, it is happening within our workplaces, labour unions and community organizations at this very moment.
I did not have to take a position. I’m currently watching people around me, people who I respect like African-Canadian Member of Provincial Parliament in the Ontario Legislature Sarah Jama, vilified, shunned and ostracized for calling for a ceasefire; for naming apartheid and for calling for an end to the occupation.
Before arriving in Canada and attending Carleton University, I was unaware of settler colonialism, much less the ongoing occupation of Palestine. I knew a bit about colonialism, the little that was taught in primary and secondary schools in Grenada. I remain grateful to the organizers who facilitated events like Israeli Apartheid Week and to the incredibly brave student activists like Yafa and Suha Jarrar who organized with Students Against Israeli Apartheid. They helped fill the gaps in my formal university education. I had no idea that the founding of the State of Israel led to the violent and forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to create a Jewish-majority state. This made at least 750,000 Palestinians refugees in their own lands.
That fear of not knowing enough, subsequently hindering you from not intervening as we watch a genocide unfold in Gaza, is doing exactly what Desmond Tutu has cautioned us against – that to remain neutral in situations of injustice is to choose the side of the oppressor. I know that that is a heavy pill to swallow but we are not only talking about life and death, we are talking about the annihilation of an entire group of people.
I write as a Caribbean woman, knowing that boatloads of Haitians fleeing the collapse of their country were denied access at the Jamaican border just two weeks ago, in contravention of international human rights law. I reach out to you through these words as a woman of African descent, knowing that less than 24 hours ago while writing this, over 6 months of brutal violence erupted again in Sudan, where the official death toll has reached 9000 and over 7 million have been displaced according to the UN. As we connect over these words, Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda lives under constant threat in Honduras as the Garifuna people demand justice for their lives and the protection of their territories. And Canada, the US and other imperialist states collaborate with Kenya and CARICOM member states to occupy Haiti once again, this time by a Kenyan led force, a plan voted by the Un Security Council on October 2; even as Haitians say no, your last so-called peacekeeping mission led to a cholera outbreak that killed 10,000, an outbreak Haitians are still reckoning with.
We live in a world where there is systemic violence and harm. But we also live in a world of ongoing struggles for liberation. It is crucial that we recognize the interconnectedness of our lives and the interdependence of both global violence and global freedom making.
I write as a Grenadian, in the month that marks the 40th anniversary of the collapse of the Revo. It was March 13, 1979. Grenadians were fed up and somewhat hopeless of the iron grip that the first elected Prime Minister, Eric Gairy, had had on their lives. After years of organizing and mobilizing, a group of young Grenadians decided that enough was enough and they led a coup d’etat while the Prime Minister was off the island.
This led to the 4-year Grenada Revolution – a revolt and rejection of the status quo and an attempt to truly centre the working classes of the 348.5 sq km island. Under the leadership of Maurice Bishop and many other leaders, Grenada experienced an enormous shift in the material realities of the everyday person in addition to an eruption in self-determination and collective liberation. Radical Guyanese feminist, Andaiye, referred to the revolution as a “living experience of the possibility of transformation and the reality of the region.” On Oct. 19, 1983, much of those gains came collapsing down as Maurice Bishop and others were taken from their homes by civilians after being under house arrest, and were later killed at Fort George by armed forces.
The People’s Revolutionary Government remained in solidarity with Palestine; at the 1981 “First International Conference in Solidarity with Grenada”, among the list of attendees were representatives from the Palestine Liberation Organization. Palestine was with Grenada. And Grenada was with Palestine. What will it take for the Grenada of today, for the Grenadian government of today, for Caribbean people in general, to stand with Palestine?
As fear swells up in my throat, in my chest, I could choose to disconnect and say that my life, my struggles have nothing to do with Palestine. I could say that Palestine is not in my backyard. But my spirit will not let me. My blood memory will not let me. Palestine was everywhere I turned.
My brother-in-law, one of the kindest men I know, worked for G4S. G4S – a huge British security company and is the world’s largest security company. G4S Israel, (now called G1 Secure Solutions after being sold in 2016), provides equipment and services to Israeli prisons, where political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to torture. The company has contracts with the Israeli government to provide equipment and services to checkpoints that make up the apartheid wall, crossings that enforce the siege of Gaza.
In 2015, a Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine landed in my inbox. The statement identified important connections between Black liberation and Palestinian liberation. I had to sign on. A paragraph from the statement read:
“US and Israeli officials and media criminalize our existence, portray violence against us as “isolated incidents,” and call our resistance “illegitimate” or “terrorism.” These narratives ignore decades and centuries of anti-Palestinian and anti-Black violence that have always been at the core of Israel and the US. We recognize the racism that characterizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is also directed against others in the region, including intolerance, police brutality, and violence against Israel’s African population. Israeli officials call asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea “infiltrators” and detain them in the desert, while the state has sterilized Ethiopian Israelis without their knowledge or consent. These issues call for unified action against anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Zionism.”
You see, our struggles are deeply interconnected. Our liberations are dependent on one another.
We cannot continue to stand by as one group demands and is awarded the right to be unquestioned and entitled to dehumanize the other whom they misrepresent as “a threat,” indifferent to the pain they cause and the long-term negative consequences of their actions. Israel is not above the systems of legality, justice and human rights – as flawed as they might be – that many nations and civil society groups have tirelessly fought for.
Resistance to harm, systemic violence and colonial structures is unevenly recognised and seen as transformative for some and not for others. In fact, we see this happening right now with state leaders saying that Israel has a right to resist and defend itself, yet Palestinians do not have a right to resist in response to settler colonialism.
These narratives dominating the media waves fail to tell the story of Palestinian nonviolent resistance that has been occurring for decades. Instead, the media has chosen to produce skewed and false narratives. Hamas is not Palestine. Palestine is not Hamas. The media has chosen to amplify singular and racist representations of Palestinians to paint the ongoing narrative that they are barbaric terrorists.
As physician Dr. Tarek Loubani has reminded us, there is no one bearing witness who has nothing to add. You, dear reader, dear witness, you can do something. Audre Lorde said to us:
“Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair.”
I end with this poem by Palestinian writer, Khaled Juma.
Oh rascal children of Gaza.
You who constantly disturbed me
With your screams under my window.
You who filled every morning
With rush and chaos.
You who broke my vase
And stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back,
And scream as you want.
And break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers.
Come back.
Just come back….
