Description
On October 27, 2023, following twenty days of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of an immediate humanitarian truce between Israel and Hamas. The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a country with longstanding colonial ties to the U.S., voted against it, a move decried by many Marshallese activists. Given the RMI’s own historical struggles for self-determination, their voting record on Palestine provokes two key questions: First, what are the limits and possibilities of contemporary anticolonial and decolonial solidarities across the Global South, and what bearing do extant imperial topographies have on these solidarities?
To address these questions, this paper maps a countertopography of anticolonial worldmaking that encompasses Palestine, the Pacific Islands, and Puerto Rico. It traces a history of support among U.S.-colonized peoples for Palestinian (as well as Irish) self-determination struggles from the 1970s to present. As anticolonial activists in those sites explicitly connected distant freedom struggles to their own—often facing criminalization and state repression for doing so—they created what Sara Awartani calls “a reimagined geography of liberation that simultaneously declared solidarity while also disrupting narratives of US exceptionalism” (2017, pg. 201). Attention to contemporary solidarities between Palestine and the U.S. territories should thus be understood within this longer political history.
Awartani, S. (2017). In Solidarity: Palestine in the Puerto Rican Political Imaginary. Radical History Review, 2017(128), 199–222.
