Clare Grady’s Statement, with Jessica Stewart, on the Attacks on Palestine.

The horrific killings, home expulsions, and human rights abuses we are witnessing right now in Palestine are the actions of a settler colonial state, Israel, for whom No Palestinian lives Matter. The same rapacious politics of death that has in the past and still animates US government behavior and policies toward Indigenous people of this continent drives Israel’s attempts to, in the words of Bezalel Smotrich, a member of Israel’s parliament, “flatten the (Gaza) strip” and drive residents from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

The same brutal police techniques deployed against Black Americans are used against Palestinian civilians. The political ideas and the physical techniques of oppression are the same. Commentator Bari Weiss recently called the killing of children in Gaza “one of the unavoidable burdens of political power.” Such a view sums up the politics of death that characterize American and Israeli policy. We must resist such callousness wherever we see it.

The American political establishment, Democratic and Republican, supports Israel because one settler colony recognizes and supports the other. Both are nuclear powers bent upon wielding the bully stick of omnicidal power. In fact, The U.S. sends $3.8 billion dollars of military aid and supplies the F-16s and other lethal armaments that the Israeli Army is currently using to kill and terrorize Palestinians. Just as empires executing imperial wars cross borders with weapons, resources, and ideas, struggles for liberation must cross imaginary borders. Solidarity is the path to liberation from white supremacy, colonialism, and war. #FreePalestine!!!

— Clare Grady is incarcerated at Alderson Federal Prison until September 2021. In 2018 she participated in a symbolic disarmament of Trident nuclear weapons at Kings Bay Naval Station. She was sentenced to 12 months in prison for that act of civil resistance.
Jessica Stewart assisted with this statement and is a former member of the Ithaca Catholic Worker living on Mount Desert Island, Maine.