October 7, 2024: From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free
Berkeley Law Jews for Palestine
October 7, 2024
We write as Jewish students at Berkeley Law to reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. We reject all exclusionary nationalisms and stand instead in the proud Jewish tradition of fighting for universal emancipation. We reject the privileging of white Jewish suffering above all others. And we reject the “both sides” rhetoric that flattens the profoundly asymmetric and fundamentally colonial nature of the struggle through cowardly invocations of “complexity” and moral ambiguity.
As historian Gabriel Winant wrote nearly a year ago, Israel is a machine for the conversion of Jewish grief into violence: “The Israeli government doesn’t care if you, a principled person, perform your equal grief for all victims,” writes Winant. “[I]t will gobble up your grief for Jews and use it to make more victims of Palestinians, while your balancing grief for Palestinians will be washed away in the resulting din of violence and repression.”
A year ago, hundreds of Israeli civilians, including 36 children, were killed — some by Israel’s military, others by the Palestinian resistance. One year after these deaths, we seek to overcome their root causes. We refuse to decontextualize October 7, to treat it as though it occurred in a vacuum. The events of that day were a tragic consequence of an ongoing, much larger catastrophe: the Nakba — the decades-long process of dispossession, dehumanization, and genocide of Palestinians on which the Zionist project was founded.
The violence perpetrated by the Zionist state, before and after October 7, is orders of magnitude greater than that which it suffered on that day. Expert estimates of the actual death toll in Gaza following October 7 range from 118,908 to nearly 400,000 and counting. Increasingly unhinged and riven with internal contradictions, Israel continues escalating into a regional conflagration that endangers the whole planet. We say hands off Lebanon, hands off the Middle East.
Steadfast in their refusal, Palestinians have exercised both a legal and moral right to armed resistance. Zionists’ racist narratives construct Palestinians as “human animals,” “roaches,” and “cancerous manifestations.” Palestinians are presented with fig leaf proposals that have only normalized settler expansion. Palestinians are expected to acquiesce to their own erasure — and the rest of the world is expected to look the other way.
Despite Israel’s refusal to permit an independent investigation into the events of October 7, the most lurid and racist narratives about what occurred that day have been definitively debunked as fabrications and projections. These faleshoods legitimate Israel’s actual violence against Palestinians, which includes many acts that Israel has falsely accused Palestinians of: the routine decapitation of children, systematic mass rape, and the use of civilians as human shields. Israel’s callous disregard for human life extends to its own citizens, evidenced by its murder of Israeli hostages and persistent refusal of a ceasefire deal — not to mention the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in its torture camps. At least 3,340 of these prisoners are “administrative detainees” who were essentially kidnapped and held without due process.
Israel has killed 11,355 identified Palestinian children since October 7, including at least 710 babies under the age of one, with tens of thousands more children estimated to be crushed under rubble or otherwise unidentifiable. Forty-five American doctors and nurses who volunteered in Gaza wrote that on a daily basis, they all “treated pre-teens who were shot in the head and chest.” Israeli snipers deliberately and systematically continue to execute Palestinian children. As Yasmin El-Rifae reminds us, the killing of Palestinian children is fundamental to the Zionist project: “Israel has bent this world into one in which it can wage a war on children because they represent the future and contain the past, and those are two elements it denies Palestinians. For Israel, Palestinians can only exist in the present, the tense and temporality of domination.”
Israel’s bombing is the most destructive in modern history, annihilating the vast majority of Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure. In 2012, the UN predicted that Gaza would become “unlivable” by 2020 due to conditions imposed by Israel’s now 17-year-long siege of the occupied territory. Now, Gaza is definitively “uninhabitable” for its 2.3 million residents due to Israel’s large-scale bombing of civilian housing and water infrastructure as well as its systemic attacks on medical personnel and deliberate weaponization of starvation. According to the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, “Never in post-war history ha[s] a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as … the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.”
Israel claims its wanton violence is an exercise of “self-defense.” But its conduct in the past year is categorically not self-defense under international law — it is genocide. Israel does not have a right to self-defense against the people it occupies. Israel also does not have a “right to exist” as an ethno-supremacist state. People have rights, not states, and Zionism’s animating principle is the denial of the right of Palestinians to exist in their homeland. Netanyahu is not solely to blame for the ongoing atrocities — they are intrinsic to the Zionist enterprise. We stand for the rights of all people to live with freedom and dignity, and accordingly call for reparations, truth, and reconciliation in a Palestine that is equal and free, from the river to the sea.
We demand an immediate arms embargo against Israel, in accordance with the United States’ obligations under international and federal law: the Genocide Convention, the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, the Leahy Laws, and the Foreign Assistance Act. “Complicity” does not begin to describe the role of the U.S. in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians: the U.S. has given Israel over 50,000 tons of weapons and military equipment in the past year alone. As retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick has stated, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
We wholeheartedly reject Zionism’s weaponization of our ancestors’ historical persecution in the service of imperialist ends. In the words of Barnaby Raine, “Zionism’s project involves inserting Jews into one global coalition and removing them from another; it wants us to join the league of nations, of men with castles and bayonets to defend them, and so it hopes to cut us out of the league of the stateless, the league that loathes the violence of property and empire. This is not a credo to end anti-Semitism but to manage it, and implicitly to fuel it by insisting awfully on Jewish enmity towards the suffering.” We refuse to allow the Zionist project to drive a wedge between our people and the overarching fight against white supremacy. Instead, we honor our ancestors and strive to embody tikkun olam (repairing the world) by standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, against Zionism.
The struggle for Palestine is the struggle for the world. The destruction of Gaza portends the fascist violence that will define the century to come unless we rise to oppose it. If tikkun olam means anything, it must begin with dismantling the structures of settler-colonialism and imperialism that sustain this ongoing catastrophe. None of us are free until Palestine is free.
