Radical Sharing Forum 2024

Solidarity with Palestine 

                                                                                   Photo credit: London for a Free Palestine

 

Earlier on 20th April this year we had another edition of Edge Fund’s Radical Sharing Forum.

The Radical Sharing Forum is a space for Edge Fund members (current and past grantees) to meet up and share with each other about their work, organising strategies, problems, aims and achievements. It’s a space to build up solidarity among radical grassroots organisers and campaigners with the aim to continue cultivating networks of support and collaboration as all our struggles are interconnected! 

This time we tried a new, different dynamic where we focused on a specific topic and asked attendants to reflect on how their groups engage with Solidarity with Palestine in the UK. Having allocated an emergency fund for Palestinian led groups in the UK in December of 2023, we wanted to keep learning from the Palestinian struggle and discuss how to better support it. Thanks to EF members Isis Amlak and Jannat Hossain for bringing people together to work on this emergency fund, and to Jannat also for moderating the Radical Sharing Forum

 

Palestinian Youth Movement (Britain chapter), Parents For Palestine and Let's Talk Palestine, all EF’s grantees and members, came to open the discussion with attendees by touching upon three main questions: 

1. What would you like other activists to know about Palestine that you think is missing from the narratives we are hearing (including even in the more indy/radical media)?

2. What can groups do in solidarity in this moment but also in the longer-term, knowing that our issues are connected? What advice would you give to people about staying in the movement for the longer-term amidst all the messiness that comes from being part of social movements?

3. How do we stay hopeful? Why is hope important? What are the stories we must carry with us to remind us? What are the visions which should guide us?

This edition of the Radical Sharing Forum also had the participation of Palestinian musician, Kareem Samara, who shared two pieces of music with us and told us a little bit about the experiences behind them.  

We also want to say thanks to all the attendees for sharing a little bit about their work and how they stand in solidarity with Palestine in their own campaigning, showing how interconnected our struggles are. 

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Here we are sharing Edge Fund’s notes from the conversation with Palestinian Youth Movement (Britain chapter), Parents For Palestine and Let's Talk Palestine:

What would you like other activists to know about Palestine that you think is missing from the narratives we are hearing (including even in the more indy/radical media)?

 

• We have to recognise that Palestinians are victims of one of the most brutal genocidal fascist regimes in the world but we cannot fail to recognise that Palestinians are mainly active participants in their own struggle as even some of the left-wing media misrepresent. 

• Palestinians must be present in the media as people with their own stories.

• Palestinian resistance is not a mere explosion of anger and violence but the result of a longer historical process for liberation and political agency. 

• Media has to be more vocal about all the victims, not only children, women and the elderly, as if only some peoples’ suffering matter.

• On Israel, many people think that the problem will be gone as Netanyahu leaves office, but we must remember that left-wing zionists and liberal parties are also responsible for policies going on for more than 60 years. The problem is not about one leader or party, but a whole structure that is zionism. 

• Ceasefire is an important demand but this is where the struggle begins. It’s the first step. Protests must not end or go away as soon as we have a ceasefire. We need to be better prepared to combat the structure that made these genocidal practices possible in the first place. 

• The Arab dimension of the Palestinian struggle: when mass protests in solidarity with Palestine are repressed in Arab countries by authoritarian regimes (Jordan or Egypt for example), the wider attempt is to kill or suppress the political life that Arab communities have. 

• Protests in solidarity with Palestine are suppressed with the intention to stop or contain a wider mobilisation by Arab communities against the repression they suffer at the hands of their own regimes. 

• We must translate Pan-Arab solidarity into denunciations against the complicity of multiple regimes with Israel and its stance on Palestinian liberation. 

• Pan-Arabism counters colonialism.  

• We have been lectured for years about Western democratic values, about being taught how to govern ourselves, about moving forwards… about having to become more like western countries… and now we have the disadvantage that Arab governments are allies of so-called Western democracies… The contradiction between Arab communities having an active political life and Arab repressive states is a contradiction that we have to overcome rather than an inner contradiction we have to accept.

Photo credit: Parents for Palestine

What can groups do in solidarity in this moment but also in the longer-term, knowing that our issues are connected? What advice would you give to people about staying in the movement for the longer-term amidst all the messiness that comes from being part of social movements?

 

• For the work we do in Britain, it’s critical to create room to support Arab communities protesting against Israel and against their own repressive regimes. Our organising must make space for solidarity between Arab communities. We don’t put our faith in government or leaders but in communities. 

• Another aspect of the local struggle here in Britain is to uncover institutional and economic realities for those in Britain, showing what is at stake for them too by revealing how much energy and money Britain spends in arms which support Israel instead of guaranteeing housing, education and other rights to those living in the UK.  

• Also, noticing that since the 1930s and the suppression of Arab revolts, Arab countries became a laboratory for repression and counterinsurgency techniques that were later brought back to Britain.

• We also need to look at the difference in social movements between mobilising and organising. For an effective long term work we need both: mobilising is bringing people to specific actions, protests, demonstrations, campaigns, and this is what most of us have been trying to do for the last seven months. But building a movement that can effectively stay for the long term and that is not merely reactive requires building up infrastructure and community, aiming at developing or nurturing a base of people, which is very much about outreach and recruitment, and also about consciousness building and political education. Otherwise our groups run the risk of being exhausted responding to urgent situations.

• As organisers we need to take the serious task of following up and connecting with people attending protests and events, finding ways of bringing them to the work that were are all doing. But in order to do that we need an infrastructure able to take and distribute tasks. This is what people now are focusing on in terms of strategy, considering your aims and objectives to guide the structure you want to have in place, coordinating with other groups, building up coalitions to sustain long term campaigns and to avoid duplicating efforts by multiple campaigns.

• Understanding how interconnected our struggles are means to understand that our actions are not only in solidarity with Palestine but for the own good of our communities: when we confront the weapons industry benefiting companies and governments around the world, we are acting for our own, diverse causes and not only for Palestine, because this is an issue for you too. The money going from the British government to support Israel is money that is not at work for the benefit of people in this country, for children, for migrants. Especially as parents, some of us focus on wellbeing and protecting and supporting others, and in thinking about the wider situation of how people have nowhere to go now both in Palestine and in other places around the world, all affected in different ways and at different scales by the same structures of power.

• As the genocide goes on less people are covering it, it’s not on the media as at the beginning of the last 9 months. We need to engage in informing and build up solidarity 24/7 and make sure it is sustainable, developing answers to questions like How can we promote boycotts even when the bombing stops or when we are not in the headlines? Also, how to communicate that Palestine is the gateway to a lot of different systematic oppressions that radicalise so many people in different struggles, like anticolonialism and others? We need to show the interconnectivities between struggles. When we speak about wording, it’s crucial not to adapt our struggle to the language of the media.

• In regard to producing and circulating information, try to keep things short and simple. Emphasis must be not only on growing in numbers of supporters but also in the quality of the work we do: promoting our culture, our achievements, our communities. 

Photo credit: Palestinian Youth Movement 

 

How do we stay hopeful? Why is hope important? What are the stories we must carry with us to remind us? What are the visions which should guide us?

 

• This is a very difficult question, depending on who is speaking and who you are addressing. For many of us in the movement we need to consciously remember those who came before and upon which we are building the struggles that we are having today. 

• We can draw hope and inspiration by learning from the history of anticolonial movements and revolutionaries worldwide, experiences of Vietnam, Algeria, which faced one of the most powerful military powers of their time and yet achieved liberation. 

• History reinforces our belief that resistance is an ongoing journey. We need to maintain hope and not be disheartened by the times, as we need to understand that our collective resistance is built up with time. 

• Keeping in mind the questions of children and young people: they have information and are aware of the situation, so they ask how they can participate. That is a source of hope too as we see a new generation engaged with the Palestinian struggle, learning from other generations and with their own questions. 

• When feeling exhausted, look at history, look at our sisters and brothers in Gaza to draw strength, hope. If they can do what they are doing in these difficult times we can also get stronger. History also shows that liberation may seem to be distant but every movement shows that things are not simple and that despite difficult circumstances people emerged out of those systems of oppression.

 

We call on Palestinian-led, Palestinian-centred organising groups in the UK and Ireland to apply to our Funding Round 16 (from the 12th August-13th of September 2024):

Apply here

Please note we have extended the deadline for the rapid response fund by two weeks - All applications must now be sent in by 5pm on Tuesday 8th September 2020

Following our COVID-19 Emergency Fund, Edge Fund is now launching our first Rapid Response Fund! We will be funding 30 groups with grants of £750 each. Of those, we will be paying special attention to groups doing anti-racist work, and fighting for Black/Afrikan liberation.

Read more