Statement from the Ukraine Solidarity Network
We Stand with Ukraine. We Stand with Palestine.
End the Genocide in Gaza!
President Biden has asserted that just as the United States stands with Ukraine in its war with Russia, the United States needs to stand with Israel in its war with Palestine. But we in the Ukraine Solidarity Network believe that he has got things exactly backwards.
The real parallels between Ukraine and Palestine became strikingly clear when Benjamin Netanyahu came to the United Nations waving a “map of Israel” including all of Gaza and the West Bank – obliterating Palestine’s existence – exactly as Vladimir Putin claims that “Ukraine was never a real country.”
Commentators on Russian state television saying that Ukrainians are “Nazis,” who need to be eradicated, match with the Israeli president’s proclamation that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” In both cases these statements unmistakably indicate genocidal trajectories.
We support Ukraine’s right to receive weapons from any source to defend its national survival. We do not support U.S. military subsidies to Israel, which fuel its decades-long dispossession of the Palestinian people, and its “crimes of apartheid and persecution” identified by Amnesty International.
We hold the United States government’s policies responsible for Israel’s continual destruction of Palestine and its killing and injuring tens of thousands of Palestinians by military attacks, starvation, thirst, and the collapse of medical services.
None of this can be justified or lead to any progressive outcome. We oppose all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and Palestine.
The first casualty of war, it is said, is truth. Today Israeli and U.S. propaganda dominate much of the media. A new McCarthyism leads corporate donors to pressure universities to shut down discussion and debate, silencing professors and students, forbidding protests, and canceling public events. We oppose discrimination against Arabs and Jews, as we do against Ukrainians and Russians, and we demand protection for freedom of assembly, press, and speech.
The violence of the occupier and that of a people resisting occupation can never be equated. We support the struggle of the Ukrainian people to compel Russia to withdraw its military forces from Ukraine and end its occupation of Ukrainian territory. We support the global struggle to stop Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, compel Israel to declare a ceasefire, lift its siege of Gaza, admit the massive humanitarian aid needed for its people’s survival, end its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and dismantle its apartheid system.
Nov. 5, 2023
Other resources:
Ukraine-Palestine Solidarity Group, “Ukrainian Letter of Solidarity with Palestinian People,” Nov. 2, 2023.
Daria Saburova, “Why Ukrainians should support Palestinians,” Open Democracy, Oct. 19, 2023.
Ukraine Solidarity Network, “From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime,” webinar, Nov. 2, 2023
Speakers: Dana El-Kurd is a non resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. Daria Saburova is a PhD candidate at Paris Nanterre University and is a member of the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU). Joseph Daher is a Swiss-Syrian left-wing activist and author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God. Ramah Kudaimi is a Syrian American and has an MA in conflict resolution from Georgetown University.
The Commons Journal, Dialogue of the Peripheries, webinar, Nov. 4, 2023.
Speakers: Dana El Kurd, Palestine; Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen, Vietnam-Indonesia; Brian Hioe, Taiwan; Volodymyr Artiukh, Ukraine. Moderated by historian and activist Hanna Perekhoda. Organizer — Taras Bilous.