Palestine: Reimagining Solidarity
A Conference of Butterflies
Sunday May 23rd 2021
| First Movement 66 min. starts at 0:00:00
- Reem Shadid A.Y.A. Munir Fasheh Rolando Vazquez Walter Mignolo Valiana Aguilar Mahmoud Al-Shaer |
Second Movement 78 min. starts at 1:06:20
- Mays Albaik Nazan Ustundag Sabu Kohso Franco "Bifo" Berardi Judith Butler |
Third Movement 62 min. starts at 2:24:00
- Lamia Abukhadra Peter Makhlouf Havin Guneser Silvia Federici Sherene Seikaly |
| Fourth Movement 77min starts at 3:26:00
- Salem Shamia Amira Silmi Decolonize This Place Andrew Ross Michael Rakowitz Marz Saffore Amin Husain Nitasha Dhillon |
Fifth Movement 87 min. starts at 4:42:48
- R.D.G. Nicholas Mirzoeff Samera Esmeir Robin D.G. Kelley Manolo Callahan |
Postscript 25 min. starts at 6:10:30
Iain Boal Anjalika Sagar Adania Shibli Amira Silmi Alita and friends |
| additional contributions by: | ||
| MPA, Simon Leung, Oraib Toukan, Alan Smart, Peter Linebaugh | ||
Call / Invitation / Convocation
We convene this modest, virtual conference as first and foremost an act of solidarity.
We would like to gather together, affirm, and renew our commitments to ending the conditions of occupation and apartheid imposed on Palestinians.
Second, we would like to convene this conference in this moment of rupture - between the growing awareness globally of the structural racism and violence being committed against Palestinians by Israel since its inception and paradoxically the growing sense of impunity and immunity with which it is able to continue committing crimes of international law, human rights, and whatever settled norms or international agreements.
Third, in this moment, despite the immense killing of civilians in Gaza and the bombing of civilian infrastructures and buildings, despite the violence of the Israeli military and police against protestors in all parts of Palestine, we see the unprecedented linking of struggles of Palestinians within 1948 Palestine, within the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, a Gaza under siege, and among communities of refugees both within and outside Palestine.
Sensing that we are on the precipice between catastrophe and a planetary Intifada, we are reaching out to a community of thinkers both within and outside Palestine who we find to be doing critical work, to share thoughts, questions, positions on what this very vulnerable moment may call for and open to? We are not searching for what is to be done, as much as what is to be asked? With whom? And which are the questions that may open further the paths of struggles and converging of struggles?
How do we end the complicity and hold accountable those institutions which continue to support the mass incarceration, segregation, control and destruction of Palestinian Life? What does solidarity with Justice and Freedom in Palestine look like in affinity and convergence to other struggles in our midst: Feminist struggles, struggles of indigenous communities across the planet, struggles for Black Life, for abolition of police, prisons, and the carceral state?
How to situate the struggles in Palestine within the wider struggles for ecological and environmental justice, for commons and communal control and care of our means of reproduction, subsistence? How to conjoin Palestine to other struggles and communities fighting for self-determination and exploring modes and processes of decolonization?
What does solidarity in the intersectionality and transversality of these movements look like? How to name it? How do we act and further mobilize in consort? Which tools to build further a planetary movement that confronts the incredible violence of racial, surveillance and disaster capitalism, while respecting difference and the singularity of each place, context, history, community?
Following this upcoming Saturday’s global day of action, we would like to host this virtual conference as a critical moment to think together about what solidarity looks like today for, in, through, with Palestine in the horizon of planetary unrest, warming, uprising.
