Ethiopian migrants waiting to cross over to Saudi Arabia in the town of Haradh, Yemen (courtesy Khaled Abdullah/Reuters).
The peoples of this world will never see true liberation and peace until we are free of the shackles of U.S. and Western colonial domination.
Originally published in Black Alliance for Peace.
Gaza dramatically stripped away the murderous hypocrisy and deadly intransigence of U.S. and Western imperialism’s commitment to maintaining global hegemony by “any means necessary,” including using the weapon of genocide. For the Black Alliance for Peace, we have not been surprised by the barbarism of the U.S. and Israeli settler states. In fact, everything that has transpired since our founding in 2017 was predicted, including the jettisoning of all pretense to any commitment to so-called liberal values by the White West as it pursued its military-first strategies. We were not confused because we have consistently grounded our analysis and political work in our best understanding of the objective material realities that we are forced to operate in. We have rejected as irrelevant any analysis based on the psychology of any individual from Biden to Trump or Netanyahu. For BAP, the analysis of objective class and social forces is the only element that guides our social and political practices.
That is why we were ready when the South African state filed its case against the Israeli apartheid state at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). We understood that the Genocide Convention was going to be invoked and that it would provide another significant weapon for further exposing the true nature of the Western colonial project in general and in Palestine specifically.
When the case was filed at the ICJ, BAP was instrumental in launching a new coalition, the International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Gaza. BAP has always been clear that persuading the criminals running the various Western states to change their minds is a naive strategy. Instead, taking advantage of the inevitable mistakes of the oppressors to build alternative People(s)-Centered power must always be the real objective. Therefore, we understood that the South African legal challenge could help facilitate the development of the real material force – the organized global peoples – the only force that could compel the Israeli fascists to end the colonial oppression of the Palestinian people.
It is this understanding of the challenges that the historical moment presents that has informed our work, from our opposition to the invasion of Haiti to organizing against the intensifying efforts to militarize the domestic police forces occupying our communities in the U.S., imposing and preparing themselves for even more draconian control over the population- cop-cities! The crazed response to the declining power of the U.S. and the West is to engage in the politics of death with their commitment to violence operationalized through the U.S. and its military-first policies from Atlanta to Ukraine. We must be prepared for this intensifying war on the people.
The campaign to establish the Americas as a Zone of Peace that BAP launched last April 4th is another example of the formation recognizing the inherent vulnerabilities of the oppressor when it has to rely on the naked power of militarism and other illegal measures. The peoples of our region are prepared to eject the U.S. state from our region politically and physically in the form of closing the 76 U.S. bases in our region.
BAP is clear. From the streets of Atlanta and Baltimore to Haiti and Palestine, there can be no peace without justice and justice is an impossibility while subjected to racist colonial/capitalist domination. This is a central ethical principle of our work.
With the People(s)-Centered Human Rights Framework and Black Radical Peace Tradition as our guide, we say:
“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.”
This is our task and responsibility. Join us, support our work, donate your resources, your time and your physical presence.
Mary Hooks is National Field Secretary with the Movement 4 Black Lives based in Atlanta.
Brooke Floyd is co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People's Advocacy Institute.
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