by Lea Kayali, published on Workers World, December 4, 2024
Lea Kayali, representing the Palestinian Youth Movement, gave this speech to the National Day of Mourning on Nov. 28, 2024, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
As a Palestinian, every day for the last 419 days has been a day of mourning.
In the last 24 hours, we mourned the 101 Palestinians martyred or injured in today’s massacres. We mourn the 4,000 martyrs of Lebanon and the 44,000 martyrs of Palestine who have reached hospitals, knowing the true death toll is likely in the hundreds of thousands.
Genocide — the unforgivable crime — has been wrought against so many of us Indigenous folk. This is the bloodied history colonizers try to cover up with stories like “thanksgiving” and “Israeli independence.” Today we reject these lies!
And as a Palestinian, let me tell you our truth. This ongoing genocide is more than the heart-wrenching stories that you’ve heard, the story of little Hind Rajab’s call for help, Refaat al-Areer’s last poem and Shabaan al-Dalou’s tent ablaze.
Genocide is the theft of the familiar. It’s a grotesque and unnatural contortion of what we once called life.
Ten kilograms of body parts in a plastic shopping bag, bucking hamstrings of prisoners made to stand naked for days on end without food, an ambulance shredded and left in the street like a meatball of mechanical entrails.
The low hum of the drones swarming like autonomous hornets in your eardrums.
Genocide is manufactured.
The machinery of colonialism is a mockery of natural life. Zionism has produced an unrelenting mourning that will settle into our DNA for generations. But in this gathering I am reminded: It does not need to be this way. We deserve so, so much more than this capitalist Armageddon. Today I feel in my body that I am surrounded by the folk who stare into this machinery of death and extend a hand into its gears to hold ours and to say, “I have been here, too, and we will only emerge together.”
Indigenous resistance ‘is alive and well’
As my father always reminds me, we Palestinians can never make the mistake of thinking we are the only peoples to endure and resist this mechanism of colonial oppression. For if we believe we suffer alone, we will never rise together.
So when I grieve the tens of thousands of children in Gaza who are orphaned, I mourn the generations of Native children stolen from their homes. Because, to borrow Nick Estes’s words, “The theft of the young is a theft of the future.”
When I hear of the martyrs whose bodies are stolen by the cruel Zionist regime, my heart aches for every murdered or missing Indigenous person. When I weep for Walid Daqqa, the now-martyred Palestinian political prisoner, I demand freedom for Leonard Peltier!
To be Indigenous is to be held in a space in the front lines of the war of liberation. It is a space that is ours if we promise to commit to it, to study our history.
Our Palestinian struggle against colonialism is a century-old [one]. We resisted first the British with the Great Peasant Revolt, popular strikes and guerilla attacks. Then we resisted the Zionists, expanding the mass character and tactics of our struggle over 76 years. We have tried all manner of forms of resistance, all legitimate and glorious genres of intifada: endeavors to shake off the shackles of the colonizer.
This is a resistance that is alive and well today: the resistance that tears down walls, stops Merkava tanks in their tracks and forces the occupier to retreat.
Our diasporic resistance is the focused work of targeting war profiteers like the shipping and logistics company Maersk — and just this month the Palestinian Youth Movement exposed them for their treachery and got Spain to reject three ships carrying military cargo to Israel! Our movement created chaos for one of the most profitable companies in the world, a crisis we will only escalate through our organizing.
The youth in the Palestinian diaspora are stepping into our legacy as Indigenous resisters. A legacy that spans not only the century of Palestinian resistance, but the half millennia of Indigenous resistance.
And if ever I waiver in my confidence of our path, I remember that we inherit the legacies of Lakota warriors, of Taino resistors and Wampanoag champions.
This summer I connected with comrades from Hui Aloha ʻĀina and these Hawaiian organizers shared with me a chant in their struggle that passes the message of a prophecy, an intifada where the masses will come together and strike at the heart of empire.
I don’t know about you — but every day I feel closer to that revelation.
‘An untouchable bond with our land’
Our indigeneity is a promise. It is an untouchable bond with our land. Zionists have demolished my family’s home; they have stolen my cousins; they have appropriated our culture. But they cannot steal our relationship to our land. They cannot take away the texture of my hair under the Mediterranean’s sea breeze.
They cannot rob the taste of olive oil from my lips. They cannot appropriate the way my grandmother makes sage tea to cure all evils.
The Indigenous freedom struggle is in the long middling road that has one destination: home.
As we traverse this path, we must choose every day to refuse despair. Because as Indigenous people, we, all of us, know two things:
- First —that our indigeneity is our sacred and eternal inheritance of relation with our lands,
- And second — that colonialism is the obstacle in our path to that prophecy.
And my relatives here today, that leaves us with no choice, but to end colonialism. This is not the “decolonization” of academic polemics, nor of that NGO’s mission statement, nor of white people’s veneer of land acknowledgements. This is the decolonization of the Fedayeen, the Zapatistas, the American Indian Movement.
This is the decolonization that is threatening imperialist world order. Our decolonization is a global peoples’ resistance that will not stop until the sunrise of freedom warms every inch of the earth from this long night of oppression.
So let them try to steal our children, push us from our homes and repress our culture. They will fail — because they are in our way. The future of collective freedom is our prophecy and our promise.
Nothing can stop this rising tide of resistance! The land knows her stewards, and we vowed to her that we will return, victorious!
LAND BACK from Turtle Island to Palestine!