A dignified people, and a dignified land, demand a dignified leadership

This past weekend, Palestinians, young and old, marched in Ramallah towards the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, the Muqata’a to protest the Palestinian Authority’s ongoing failure to represent and protect Palestinian rights.

Marchers responded to the planned reception of Shaul Mofaz by the Palestinian Authority, and by its head Mahmoud Abbas. This is not the first time that the Palestinian Authority plays host to thugs, war criminals, and Nakba-deniers, and while such meetings may become imperative, within the existing context of an ongoing settler colonial project, they are without justification.  To invite Shaul Mofaz, a war criminal who orchestrated the massacres in Jenin in 2002, and who besieged the very leadership set to receive him in that same Muqata’a, rather than file petitions for his arrest abroad is an affront to Palestinian collective dignity.

Palestinians marched under the banner “Palestinians for Dignity,” mobilizing and bringing together people from across the ideological spectrum. Expectedly, the Palestinian Authority greeted the protestors with vicious brutality and violence, once again demonstrating its disregard for Palestinian lives, lands, and rights.

The US Palestinian Community Network stands with our brothers and sisters in Palestine. We are one people, and it is as one people that we will continue to reject the humiliations of Oslo whether in the streets of Ramallah or in the scattered corners of our forced exile. The statehood project, now entering its second decade, has devastatingly proven its inability to end an ongoing settler-colonial project, inherently marked by racial segregation, discrimination, and domination.

We condemn the PA’s continuous undignified political machinations, its complicity, security and economic coordination with a dominant and violent colonial apparatus, which has not relinquished its veritable grip on dominant privilege. We echo the demands of Manara Sqaure and call on all our people to develop a resistance strategy capable of achieving the aspirations of our people for liberation and return.

We pledge to support the heightening of this demand across the shatat, and to mobilize our communities until we can live in dignity without exposing it to daily and structural threat. This amounts to defeating the colonial regime imposed upon us as well as those associated institutions, which afford it reinforcement.

Until liberation and return