In Solidarity With Palestine

Since moving back home after graduating from university, my days have been less and less of international news cycles and more of local twang. Belize is a conduit of Latin America and the Caribbean, who has a few pages in her history of occupation and a palpable territorial claim from a much larger nation that borders us to the west and south. This unfriendly neighbor certainly, given what I understand from my International Relations and Political Economy classes, has more military might than we do and a record of friendly relations with nations who have only known colonizing, not colonization. I grew up in the ghetto - pallet bridges in the swamp, zinc fences and houses, clay basketball courts - social conditions mirroring pre-Moyne that gave rise to space vulnerable to the plague of the dark economy of guns and drugs. Phyllis Dillon’s Woman of the Ghetto is a perfect hymn to help us understand. As a Garinagu woman, it goes without saying that resistance is the only way to emancipation.  For this and many reasons of personal history post the accident of my birth, I had begun to try to untangle for myself a personal politics of internationalism - this journey is deemed severely deficient without a burgeoning interrogation of Palestine. One of people, probity, and the product of peace.

This Caribbean space is said to be a place where war does not reside; we are only marked by violence and every time I would hear it mentioned it would be said in a tone that was as if “at least we’re not being bombed” but that felt odd because I know warfare. My cousins know it, my aunts know it, and my friends from my neighborhood know it. We know the sound of shots, of automatic weapons. We can tell them apart from dynamite or fireworks, we know how dead bodies look on the ground, in the pan of a police mobile, we know what it feels like to have to sleep on the floor for fear of being shot while we sleep, of parents wailing at the death of their child, of walking past last night’s blood stains on the way to school sometimes of people with whom we share DNA. We know the white underbelly of warfare.

So when I woke up on this particular day in October, Palestine did not seem so far away because I know that. My community and I, we felt that and continue to feel that. Palestine to me is not a world away. It is something that has played in my mind’s eye so much so that it is engraved in my consciousness and one cannot see that and not feel the weight of the collective human burden that violence throws at our feet as an impossible dowry.

On November 14, Belize’s cabinet, guided by the country’s unshakeable foreign policy, made a historic decision to suspend all diplomatic relations with the state of Israel as a result of the settler colonial project in Palestine and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Belize, a Caribbean and Central American state, made it resoundingly clear that Palestine’s struggle is Belize’s struggle. Although separated from Palestine by seas, Belize and Belizeans understand the threat to sovereignty, the struggle to self-determination and the threat to territorial integrity. Belize’s neighbor, Guatemala, has aggressively claimed Belizean land and territorial waters as theirs, similar to the current struggle of our dear brothers and sisters in Guyana with their South American neighbor, Venezuela. Whilst the Belizean struggle for self-determination and independence was relatively peaceful, the Palestinian people cannot say the same. Former Belizean ambassador to Belgium and the EU, Dr Dylan Vernon describes the struggle and current genocide in Palestine as “…not a significant a deviation from Belize’s reality as it may superficially appear. Think of sovereignty, think of self-determination, think of territorial integrity. These universal principles are as Palestinian as they are Belizean.”

The world applauded Belize’s bravery for its move as one of the few countries to suspend diplomatic and all relations with Israel as a result of their illegal and violent occupation of Palestinian territory. To date, Belize has been the only CARICOM state to make such a brave move, proving to the world that countries in the Global South are very much in charge of their foreign policy. Many states in our region cannot boast of such, and cower at the feet of the West. However, Belize’s position is not surprising or unexpected, as Belize has always proudly stood with Palestine; Belize has always stood on the right side of history. It is applaudable that Belize’s foreign policy and foreign policy decisions have always been rooted in principle, morality, as well as respect for international law and norms despite foreign powers and their malaligned agendas.

Understanding Palestinian displacement is to understand its complexity. The link between Belize and Palestine goes beyond politics and international affairs. It is a part of the identity of many who have called Belize home for a few generations. Former PM of Belize, Said Musa, was born to a Belizean mother and a Palestinian father. Along with him, there are many other prominent Belizean citizens of Palestinian descent and a growing Arab population that understands and shares their support to Palestine and her displaced descendants who have found refuge and a home in our Jewel. In a piece from his blog, “Time Come”, Ambassador Vernon highlighted importantly that “Palestinians supported Belize before Belize supported Palestine.” During Belize’s struggle for support for independence, Palestinians highly encouraged and pushed for a meeting with the Arab group at the UN, heavily lobbying for their support to vote in favor of Belize’s independence and later to establish diplomatic relations. Would Belize be Belize without the efforts of Palestinians at that time of internationalizing our cause for sovereignty? In the same way that giant voices like Che Guevara and Maurice Bishop supported Belize’s independence; it is the same way that Palestine and her people were there.

Belizeans across our country support Palestine’s cause for independence within its 1967 border, its capital in East Jerusalem, and the full right of return. We speak up and support the Palestinian struggle, not because it could be us tomorrow or simply to protest against genocide and injustice but, rather, because it is the humanistic and moral thing to do. How can a government and people of any country sit idly by as witnesses of a historic genocide and do the minimum? Belize’s bravery stands as a torch of light that shall never stop burning, symbolizing the commitment to freedom of all peoples, especially in our region and those suppressed by the evils of the West who continue to inflict pain to our wounds.

The politics is simple. All people must be free, in a just global society, with untethered self-determination from river to shining sea. Palestine’s freedom is our collective freedom. Palestine’s freedom depends on us. Freedom is not only theoretical, it is contextual, and material. Until we all are free then we are all, everywhere, in chains - survival by any means necessary