"In our thousands,
in our millions,
we are all Palestinians"
A Message for 2024
Genocides are processes – they start incrementally as everyday violences
in discourses, in narratives, in stereotyping of others as the Other
before bursting into flagrant ‘superior’ gun and air power
to bury under the rubble the right to self-determination,
the right of diverse communities to co-exist
We join in the call, ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’
in solidarity against the ongoing complete destruction of Gaza
in solidarity against the intensification of systematic ethnic cleansing
by Zionist settler colonialism in Occupied Palestine
Aided and abetted by Western imperialism
As we do so, we also remind ourselves of
the Brahmanical supremacist settler colonialism project in Kashmir
the ethnic cleansing in Sudan, in Manipur and Nuh
the persecution of Muslims and Uighurs, the forced disappearances in Balochistan
Operation SAMADHAN Prahar in Chhattisgarh
the Yezidis still leaving Sinjar
Ukraine, Congo …
All of these are just a few of the many sites past and present
of the incremental processes of genocide --
In the face of people’s refusal and resistance,
the systematic ghettoisation, the forced displacement, the dispossession,
the brutal attempts of colonial ‘final solutions’
The Nakba was never about ‘voluntary’ exit
Underpinning much of these inhuman acts is the greed of a few
to exploit the Earth’s natural resources
bulldozing over everyone’s right to access them for subsisting
alongside our fellow living creatures also distressed in the Anthropocene Epoch
We salute the Palestinian people’s resistance
to refuse a burial under growing mounds of rubble
We salute all communities who have refused their erasure though genocide
And we stand in solidarity with labour that enhances life on Earth, not destroys it.
Lotika Singha