From the Jordan River to the Caribbean Sea: Building Solidarity
From the Jordan River to the Caribbean Sea, our advocacy is intersectional, actively engaging with all forms of (in)justice, understanding that our work as feminists is work in solidarity. Last Saturday, Caribbean Feminist hosted a teach-in session (the first of a series, stay tuned for more!) about solidarity with Palestinian communities undergoing what is now day 564 of an escalated genocide.
With workshops by Saajid from the UWI IGDS Ignite student club, Batoul Hamzy from Climate Sirens and sharings by Comrade Libre and Bisan Owda, we engaged with what solidarity means, how the current Palestinian conflict and genocide is a feminist and Caribbean feminist issue, and what we can do, individually and collectively, at whatever level of advocacy and activism we are at.
At time of finalising this post, it is day 566 of the recent escalation of an over 77-year long occupation. The zionist regime is actively compounding acts of inhuman colonial violence, and doing so almost entirely unchecked by Western (neo)imperial systems.
[04/2025, graphic courtesy of Visualising Palestine database]
And yet, globally, every day actions express that… ‘in our thousands, in our millions, we are all…. [we done know how to finish this cry]’, therefore how do we understand Palestinian oppression and resistance within a Caribbean intersectional feminist positioning, what are some key takeaways from Caribbean Feminist’s first teach-in?
During the teach-in, Batoul asked us what solidarity means to us, by her own definition something active, requiring us to show up. From an intersectional feminist positioning, we experience acting in solidarity as a constant exercise in (un)learning, connecting issues and causes, thinking laterally across communities and organising…
The realities of Palestinian women, individuals, communities (of which we can only approximate a fraction from what seeps through into media platforms) in the everyday violence fracturing disrupted lives and societies, the different traumas provoked by brutal gender-based violence, the survival in hostile environments stripped of the elemental, meaning basic access to food, water, shelter, any relative satisfaction of menstrual health, reproductive rights and care…these are all feminist issues
But let's be clear: the ongoing genocide in Palestine - as many other conflicts - is not just a feminist issue, it is a global issue.
Organising to free an occupied, assaulted Palestine under the most “well-documented genocide in history” (in Libre's words) must be intentionally understood and engaged with as a feminist issue as the liberation we mobilise for must be collective, for all, never to the detriment or dismissed and ‘tolerated’ repression of another.
Feminism does not practise disposability, completely different from what Verges calls ‘white femo-imperialism’ (ie white feminism/imperialism). The outlook of white feminism that ‘saves’ some and determines how liberation must be organised without more than a glancing understanding of how a patriarchal and imperial framework affects and harms in distinct ways, this outlook is itself formulated within imperial vocabulary and mindset. A part of feminist praxis (ie, how we practise and experience knowledge, theory, discourse…) is consistent learning what decolonising our work looks like in order to better act across intersecting issues and communities.
Bisan Owda, a Gazawi documentarian from Beit-Hanoun (in the north of Gaza) - in her words, ‘a piece of heaven’ - records and tells the stories of Palestinian communities, ‘making hakawatya from the camp’. Since October 7th, her work has also become recording and sharing the daily realities under an escalated genocide. Her storytelling as praxis is perhaps what I will keep as my biggest takeaway from this session - how we must keep telling our stories, sharing other stories, putting a voice to how these are connected, using our storytelling to imagine and build a world where we aren't talking about entire communities, cultures, lives and societies in past tense. In entirely distinct ways, Caribbean peoples and communities were and are subject to vast efforts in erasure, wiping out entire histories to preserve a certain social order - what kept our resistance together, a Caribbean trajectory even amid brutal fragmentation, was how we told our stories.
[image courtesy of Abigail Hadeed, Carnival 2024 Trinidad and Tobago, Vulgar Fraction ‘Isabay Bear With-Ness’, designed by Robert Young]
How could we begin or continue to engage ‘making hakawatya [stories/storytelling]’ as praxis in our feminist advocacy?
Palestine, as people, culture, community, and environment, has a centuries-old history that I will not do justice to in a brief paragraph, please see more below. In recent history, the story of mass dispossession, ethnic cleansing and systematic oppression of Palestinian peoples starts with colonisation and colonialism.
During the teach-in, Saajid highlighted that “our own history [ie, Caribbean histories] is an example in settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing…our history does not exist in isolation…the Caribbean is a region produced on imperialism”. Let’s unpack that a bit. Our countries, communities, and even our region, would not exist as it does today without the bloody stamp of colonisation. The violent and extractive processes that were implemented through the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation estates in the Caribbean manufactured processes of racialisation and extractive capitalism. The Caribbean region was a lab ground for these models of violent displacement, dispossession, extraction, and waste. We must (un)learn and confront how our histories and present realities of imperial and patriarchal frameworks are connected.
Therefore when we consider the history of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine in the early 20th, afterwards accelerated by the British mandate and occupation of large areas in Palestine and neighbouring areas, cleansing land (land, not environment or natural surroundings, land to be excavated for profit) of indigenous populations to satisfy the necessary dehumanising of colonial and imperialist ideologies, we engage with the intersections between our histories, more especially with the shape-shifting infrastructure of extractive racial capitalism.
This - extremely - brief unpacking of Saajid’s statement during the Ignite workshop builds from generations of revolutionaries and thinkers that elaborate on all the dimensions of empire - see some suggestions in the reading lists below. Shifting these contexts to an intersectional feminist lens, what is key is not to build bridges of solidarity through connecting histories of oppression - although these are extremely valid connections, perhaps good entry points into developing solidarity links - but to practise bridges of solidarity as an imagination of what kind of world we want to build, need to build to live together without living to the detriment of another ecosystem, human or non-human.
Activism looks very different, there are multiple roles involved in organising, all of which are necessary. For instance, during the teach-in, Saajid encouraged us all to pick up a piece of chalk and find somewhere to start raising community consciousness. Libre reminded us that, in other instances of global conflict where there was a glaring lack of cohesive government action (or any at all), such as in South Africa's apartheid regime, economic sanctions forced the coloniser's hand: we need to organise so that “they [the Zionist regime and all Western powers and companies funding it] cannot afford to colonise anymore”. Bisan emphasised that "[we] need to be ready to tell the truth" daily, emphasising that our actions will directly impact government, corporate, social response. Bisan also suggested a few other actions, listed as follows:
Keep up on our learning, "accumulate your knowledge" so we get even better at framing things, connecting events, issues, causes together,
Understand our power as individuals - “what is politics? People are politics” and collectives; how we move is political, where we need to push to a point in our advocacy and rendering-visibility where what is said and applied at government and other executive levels of power is proportionate to what is actually happening, pushing to (finally!) global state action that embodies that "you [the Zionist regime] are not doing anything human...you are not welcome in our world...halas"
The actions we can take as individuals and parts of multiple communities are and continue to be important. To the best of our capacity, we can use our buying power to hit corporations at their bottom line, use our voices on media to ensure that global attention to this conflict never goes silent, be consistent in our own “accumulation of knowledge” to make better connections across our own advocacy…posting, speaking, discussing, writing, taping a reel, being intentional about our consumption…these are everyday actions that shift how we act in solidarity, and, collectively transitions to a different global consciousness.
Please see below for some further reading, toolkits/reading lists, organisations we can engage with to keep up with being informed and active for Palestinian freedom and decolonisation.
Further Reading:
US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
Buttu (2023), ‘When Palestinian lives are so dehumanised, Palestinian suffering is normalised’, DAWN
Ihmoud (2022),
Kelley (2019), ‘From the River to the Sea to every Mountain-top: Solidarity as Worldmaking’, Journal of Palestine Studies 48 (4): 69–91
Salamanca et al (2013), ‘Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1, 1-8,
Toolkits and reading lists:
Palestinian Feminist Collective Digital Toolkit
BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement)
Organisations:
Returning to Batoul’s central question of what solidarity means to us, Libre remarked that;
“Solidarity is not comfortable...it is a redistribution of wealth that allows everyone to have basics...beyond saying free Palestine, we have to make Palestine free…”. Libre continued, noting that what is allowed to happen in Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, in Ayiti... those will be the limits of what is allowed to happen to us. From the previous - again, too brief - indications of how our histories are connected, our present and futures are too. We are one of several populations, communities still subsumed in imperial wirings as in some way disposable, dismissible or in/sub-human. What can we individually, as part of collectives, groups and active parts of society, do or learn or talk about or act on in ways that undo a global framework of disposability?
It may be evident at this point that I keep referring to actions taken now - with necessary urgency - for the long term. The echoes of Caribbean feminists, historians, revolutionaries, activists around the world remind, that this is a movement and not a moment. The actions we take need exercise, we need to practise our solidarity and keep figuring it out, keep up with our praxis individually as well as collectively and within community. If there is any reminder to take away from this teach-in, it is to say, once again, that feminist work is work in solidarity, and that means building for the long-term. If we engage with solidarity as a practice towards building a gender-just, climate-just, socially-just, perhaps our advocacy becomes day to day, a part of how we move, breathe, love, care…
I return to (paraphrasing!) Comrade Libre’s analogy of how we, from wherever we are in the Caribbean, must be as fierce about Palestinian liberation as we are about who makes the best curry goat or oil-down (no Jamaicans, it is NOT rub-down) - Trinis or Jamaicans? (trick question - everyone with a brain cell must know is Tobagonians, please and thanks). What is unspoken here, but was beautifully expressed by Libre, is that all the things we love and care about are linked to what we do about this genocide, and all conflicts - whether they are in our or our neighbour’s backyard.