To all of our comrades and friends,

Taking in the stream of images that have emerged from Palestine and the wider Arab region over the past week threatens the onset of a kind of vertigo. There were the photographs of hundreds of Palestinian hostages released from Zionist dungeons, clad in the characteristic grey Israeli prison sweatsuits, falling into their loved ones as they are united. In one of these, a young man in Khan Yunis is so impatient to embrace his relative that he scales the sides of a prison bus before it has fully parked. In Ramallah, similar reunions take place, some between relatives kept apart for decades. 

Between these pictures of joyful reunions, we behold photos of the martyred journalist Saleh Aljafarawi. Even writing the word “martyred” before his name confounds — he was just with us. He had announced the ceasefire while it was still dark out; he’d filmed himself reuniting with dear friends in the North, celebrating. Saleh survived two years of Zionist genocide only to be gunned down by an Israeli-funded militia in Gaza. 

Add to this stream Donald Trump flanked by Israeli flags in Jerusalem doing stand-up to a room full of beaming genocidaires bragging, it would seem, about the weapons he sold to kill Palestinians.

And now in what feels like the only inevitable development, Israel has restarted its bombing campaign of Gaza, claiming with an eye-watering audacity that it merely responds to Hamas violating the ceasefire. In fact, reporting shows that IOF soldiers retaliated against only their own victimhood mythology and incompetence: Two Israelis were killed in an explosion they themselves set off in Rafah. In response, a renewed campaign of bombs and lies about tunnels emerged from the sky against Palestinians.

Our work, clearly, is far from over. A new form of forever war is taking root — the funding of militias to sow chaos and division among a depleted population; an endless victimhood that claims every brazen attack is just self-defense for a hapless and morally upstanding army; American and British businessmen plotting as usual on administering a land which does not belong to them. 

If the Gaza ceasefire in any way resembles the one in Lebanon, drones will come to administer a new kind of occupation, where surveillance and assassinations punctuate daily life. The great charade headed up by Trump indicates the U.S. and Israel’s desire to wash their hands of Gaza’s blood, to rehabilitate their image and exonerate themselves of genocide. 

Two years after the onset of the Gaza genocide, with tens of thousands still buried beneath the rubble, our role is to hold the perpetrators of this fascist colonial violence to account. 

The Israeli project lays disrobed, exposed for the death cult it has always been. And so our task remains: to tirelessly support the survivors, both by donating on the ground and by helping Palestinians displaced from Gaza resettle in other countries; to intervene in the ongoing narrative war in the press and in the halls of our institutions; to reject the one-sided peace our leaders are so keen to celebrate. 

In short, the task ahead is to do our part to keep alive the dream of Palestine’s liberation.

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Don’t fall for the spectre of Palestinian statehood

The present renewal of calls for a two-state “solution,” and accompanying “statehood” recognitions from various European states and America do nothing more than put a liberal mask on calls for Palestinians to relinquish their rightful claim to their land.

Journalist and revolutionary political leader Ghassan Kanafani was sounding the alarm about the capitulation inherent in the two-state solution as early as 1971. Kanafani wrote that cooperating with the occupation under any variation of this scenario would effectively surrender responsibility of the Palestinian cause to its adversary in his essay “The Spectre of the Palestinian State.”

As the 54 years since Kanafani’s writing have demonstrated repeatedly, “Israel has no practical interest in a Palestinian state that does not further its goals in infiltrating and dominating Arab political realities.” Kanafani rallied against the dangers of disarming the resistance and prophetically understood how any agreement of peace and reconciliation would only provide further cover for the development of military settlements in the West Bank.

Kanafani wrote the essay in the aftermath of Black September in 1970, during which thousands of Palestinians were killed after the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and other militant factions rose up against King Hussein in Jordan, a known collaborator of Israel and accessory to the occupation. 

So long as the cowardice of Arab states conspired against the resistance, Kanafani wrote there could be no representative Palestinian nation. The essay expounds that a “major effect of the September massacres has been a mass-psychological sense of bleakness that can be fully exploited to present and embellish the idea of a ‘Palestinian state’ as some sort of salvation.” 

Renewed calls for statehood play a similar role: They position political surrender as though it were the compromise position, and demonize the resistance when it refuses. 

Reject calls for disarmament

Disarmament is antithetical to the logic of a “ceasefire” and achieves nothing towards liberation. Throughout history and across the world, decolonization has been an armed struggle for liberation. Never has an occupying state offered freedom in exchange for arms.  

“[Colonialism] is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence,” Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth. 

History shows us what happens when Palestinians give up their arms. 

As part of the negotiated end to the IOF’s brutal 1982 siege of Beirut, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization agreed to give up its weapons and go into exile. In return, the Zionist regime and U.S. interlocutors promised safety and security for Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon. 

Days later, Zionist-backed militias entered the Shatila refugee camp and adjacent Sabra neighborhood in Beirut and murdered thousands in a heinous massacre. IDF soldiers backing the militias illuminated the sky with flares and stationed themselves at the camp’s exits, murdering those who tried to flee. 

Now Zionists and their U.S. backers beat the drum of disarmament once again. A genocidal army surrounds and expands into Gaza, demanding the disarmament of Palestinians as a condition of peace. 

But there is no peace or certainly no freedom to be found in defenseless people surrounded by their would-be murderers. 

Reject the logic of disarmament! No people or nation on earth would agree to it willingly. Palestinians must have the means to defend themselves and their people.

Resistance brings freedom

Despite the occupation’s open threats against public celebration, the last week held moments of collective relief and defiance for the Palestinian people. 1,968 Palestinian hostages have been announced for release. 250 among them faced life or decades-long sentences, and another 1,718 were abducted from Gaza in the past two years and held without charge or trial.

What we are witnessing is both beautiful and devastating: an emotional, bittersweet moment as Palestinians emerge from Israeli torture camps. Many return home only to find it reduced to rubble, to learn of the martyrdom of loved ones, mourning anew. In parallel, after years apart, families are seeing one another for the first time: hugging, kissing, laughing, crying, grieving, eating together. It is a fragile joy, carved out from the cruelty of Zionism.

The freedom of Palestinian prisoners is neither a blessing nor a miracle. It is the result of struggle, sacrifice, and the unbreakable will of a people who refuse to be erased. 

Political prisoners stand at the front lines of every struggle for liberation, confronting the occupier directly and bearing the costs of repression on behalf of an entire population. They keep the heart of the movement alive, sustaining resistance both inside and outside the prison.

Resistance brings freedom, and it is our obligation to stand with those who carry the struggle forward  across every border, against imperialism, apartheid, and occupation the world over, until every cell is emptied and every prisoner of conscience is free.

FREE THEM ALL!

Glory to the martyr Saleh Al-Jafarawi

After two years of covering the atrocities and genocide committed by Israel in Gaza, 27-year-old Palestinian journalist Saleh Al-Jafarawi was targeted and assassinated by an Israeli-funded militia while reporting in Gaza City.

Despite relentless Zionist threats on his life, Al-Jafarawi reported in the North so that the world could bear witness to the full extent of Israel’s crimes. Al-Jafarawi’s assassination is a calculated effort by Israel to extinguish the last embers of truth still burning in Gaza, and to inflict collective punishment against Palestinian journalists for risking their lives to broadcast the genocide to the outside world.

A video of Saleh early in the genocide making an infant laugh after a hospital bombing captures how we will remember Saleh. He was a humble, good-natured soul who smiled in the harshest of circumstances, and always encouraged those around him, especially children.

Like his colleagues Hossam Shabat and Anas Al-Sharif, Saleh’s wish for his supporters in the event of his martyrdom was for them to keep the struggle alive: “Stay with Gaza, even after the war ends.” As we mourn the immeasurable loss of another one of Palestine’s great journalists, we pledge to honor their memory and their ultimate sacrifice by upholding the principles for which they have their lives: the unyielding pursuit of truth, in service of the Palestinian people’s liberation.

We leave you with Saleh al-Jafarawi’s last words:

"I urge you to uphold the resistance…  

The path we have walked, and the approach we have believed in.  

We have known no other path for ourselves, nor found meaning in life except in steadfastness upon it."