INCITE! is a national organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue, and grassroots organizing.

Women of color in the United States daily survive racist and colonial violence through economic and social injustices like police brutality, poverty, attacks on immigrants, and reproductive control. Many of us also experience U.S. economic, political, and military invasions in the lands where we come from. We reject all efforts to colonize land, steal resources, and terrorize indigenous people. Furthermore, we question the legitimacy of nation-states that were founded through colonization efforts – such as Israel and the United States of America. Therefore, we put the words “Israel” and “U.S.” in quotes to question the legitimacy of these “states” and to call out that these “states” were created by colonizers who massacred indigenous people and stole their lands and resources.

INCITE! condemns “Israel’s” apartheid racist colonization of indigenous Palestinian land and people. INCITE! condemns the violence directed at Palestinian women and communities, including rape, torture, imprisonment, destruction of homes, and the intentional maiming and murder of children in cold blood. INCITE! condemns the “Israeli” military’s direct targeting of pregnant women at checkpoints. INCITE! condemns these practices because they are part of “Israel’s” larger project of ethnic cleansing the Palestinian people. INCITE! also condemns “Israel’s” colonial and racist violence because it gives rise to domestic violence and sexual assault within Palestinian communities. We stand in solidarity with Palestinian women’s resistance and we support their struggle for a self-determined liberation.

Background information on the Palestinian struggle

• The Zionist movement was born in Europe in the 1880’s. Most of its members were European Jews.

• The Zionist movement sought to establish an “Israeli” state for Jews only on Palestinian Arab land.

• Zionism is the ideology that holds that “Israel” should be a Jewish-only state and exclude the original Palestinian inhabitants. Any state that defines itself on racial terms must necessarily support racial apartheid policies against those who do not fit the preferred racial status. Thus, we hold that Zionism is a practice of racism.

• In 1948, the Zionists invaded Palestine and established the Jewish-only state of “Israel” on indigenous Palestinian land with support from the British government.

• We follow the lead of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, San Francisco Chapter, who describe Zionism as a racist political, cultural, and economic project that works to remove and exclude indigenous Palestinians from their land.

• “Israel” was created through a process of colonization, massacre, and war by destroying Palestinian villages, taking away Palestinian land and encouraging Palestinians to migrate through the use of violence and fear.

• At every point of its development, and continuing today, the Zionist project was influenced and supported by 19th century European colonialism and its white supremacist racist way of thinking.

• “Israeli’s” project of taking more and more land from Palestinian people through the use of violence, force, massacre, murder, pillaging villages, and demolishing homes continues until today.

• Today, 70% of Palestinian people have been displaced from their homes and villages.

• Israel is a racist, exclusionary state because it is for Jewish people only and excludes the indigenous Palestinian people from their land.

• “Israel” is committing genocide. It inflicts physical, economic and psychological violence on Palestinians daily.

• Since September 2000, 2500 Palestinians have been killed–1/5th of them children–and 41,000 have been injured. Over 1/3rd of the injured are children.

• Over 9/10ths of Palestinian lands have been confiscated and 5.5 million Palestinians have been expelled from their lands.

• “Israel” is no longer just a third-world settler-colonial state. It has been transformed into a regional, economic, military global power with the help of the “U.S.”

• The “U.S.” gives over 6 billion dollars of taxpayers money a year to support “Israel.”

• The “U.S.” benefits from supporting “Israel” because “Israel” serves as the “U.S.'” watchdog over the Middle East region and its resources, such as oil, labor, and other valuable resources.

• Corporations are also responsible for the colonization of Palestine. They are investing in “Israel” and benefiting from their investments at a very high level.

• The Zionist movement and “Israel” are extremely powerful within the “U.S.” They play a major role in the “U.S.” media, education, travel, labor, non-profit industrial complex, etc.

• The Zionist movements and their friends in the “U.S.” government and “U.S.” corporations have hidden the true, racist nature of the “Israeli” state through a propaganda system that distorts history and blames the victims (the Palestinians) and celebrates the victimizer (“Israel”).

• The “U.S.” corporate media and government misrepresents the reality of Palestinian suffering and struggle and presents overwhelming images of “suicide bombers” without showing the historical conditions of violence, colonialism, and racism that have produced “suicide bombers.”

• The “U.S.” and “Israel” use terms like “suicide bombing” and “terrorist” to condemn all forms of Palestinian resistance (regardless of the form this resistance takes) and to mask the terrorist actions of the “Israeli” government against Palestinians. These terms also present the false picture that “Israel” and Palestine are two nations that have equal power to use against each other. The reality is that U.S. funded military resources of the “Israel” so far exceed that of Palestine that it is able to systematically destroy the peoples of Palestine.

• Since 9-11, “Israel” has used the “war on terror” to justify more and more ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people. More and more, “Israel” and the “U.S.” have labeled Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” as an excuse for killing more and more Palestinians and taking away more and more Palestinian land.

• White feminist thinking in Europe and the U.S. that stereotypes Palestinian women as “super oppressed” victims of a “super sexist” Arab culture is racist and sexist. This white feminist thinking justifies invasion and occupation of Palestinian people and lands by saying that Palestinian and all Arab women need to be “saved” by the West. Military colonial invasion has never “liberated” indigenous women. We honor the long history of Palestinian women resisting “Israeli” occupation.

• As women of color living in the “U.S.,” we stand in solidarity with Palestinian self-determination. We do not set or steer the agenda for Palestinian resistance. We affirm that it is up to each resisting people to determine its own tactics of resistance. We respect and affirm Palestinian self-determination and the resistance of all indigenous peoples in their/our struggles for liberation and we condemn the conditions that oppress them/US. We stand in solidarity with Palestinians fighting to end the take-over and colonization of their land and their lives.

Incite! Points of Unity

• We support Palestinian self-determination and de-colonization of Palestine.

• We demand the right of return for the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees who have been displaced by “Israeli” invasion. We call for their safe return to their villages of origin and we demand that they be compensated for their losses.

• We support the movement to “disinvest (or divest) from “Israel.” We join the call for divestment from all corporations that do business with “Israel.” We join the call for boycotting “Israeli” products and divesting from financial ties that support the military industrial complex of “Israel.”

• The “U.S.” government must STOP $6 billion from US every year to finance “Israeli” colonization.

• We insist that the voices of Palestinians surviving and resisting occupation be heard.

• End all forms of violence committed against Palestinian women and families including rapes and still-births at checkpoints, political imprisonment and torture, and housing demolitions.

• STOP THE GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

For more info about the Palestinian struggle, see Electronic Intifada and Palestine Monitor. For more info about the Radical Arab Women’s Activist Network (RAWAN), e-mail  radicalarabwomen@yahoo.com.