Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 25, 2021

Amin Husain, a core organiser for Decolonize This Place, a movement in New York City, thinks that BLM has undeniably helped the Palestinian cause.

He said: The BLM movement has cracked a certain ceiling around radical politics. Once you start talking about Black freedom and Black liberation, you are talking about something that is not meant to be talked about. During that you open up space for Palestinian freedom.

Across the world, white and non-Black people of colour actively engaged in supporting the BLM movement, and big corporate companies offered support and solidarity, as well as money and pledges to change.

In the weeks after George Floyds death, BLM content regularly went viral on social media, and in the past weeks we have seen a similar trend with Palestine solidarity content, if not on the same scale.

For those wanting to learn about Palestine it is important to know its history and the ties it has to colonialism. The letter sent to Lord Rothschild by the then British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in 1917, known as the Balfour Declaration, pledging Palestine as a home for Jewish people, is key to understanding the current crisis.

I think there is now an appetite to learn about British colonialism. For some reason people seem to forget that Palestine is part of that story. The UK promising to give a place away that it did not own, had no right to give away, set us on this disastrous course that we are in now. The UK bears some responsibility, said Al-Qattan.

Following the murder of George Floyd and the global BLM protests that ensued, people realised that the status quo on racial equality had to change. And with social media flooded with posts and stories about BLM, there was a renewed hope for that change.

There are concepts and ideas embedded within BLM that are helping people to understand a bit more deeply what Palestinians are experiencing. I think people are understanding, not just about Gaza but about the entire regime of oppression which dominates all Palestinian communities wherever they are, explained Al-Qattan.

The BLM movement ignited a passion in people globally that has seldom been seen before. Palestinians, like most communities across the world, also came out to support BLM.

Colonialism and systemic racism are part of regular vocabulary now and the same language is being used to fight for the freedom of Palestinians. Words like genocide and apartheid are openly used to describe Israels treatment of not only Palestinians in the Occupied Territories but Palestinian citizens of Israel too.

In a tweet, the Black Lives Matter organisation expressed its support for Palestinians and said: We are a movement committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms and will continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation. (Always have. And always will be).

More:

What do Black Lives Matter and Palestine solidarity have in common? - Open Democracy

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