GRuB Solidarity with Palestinians
At GRuB, our mission is to grow healthy food, people, and community. As an organization, we recognize that unequal access to health, food, land, and wealth is rooted in oppression. We know in order to accomplish our mission, we must name and act when we see harm occurring. We are therefore called to take a stand and to make a statement against the ongoing violence towards Palestinians. We want our community to know we stand with Palestinians and Israelis who call for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine and a permanent solution to the ongoing violence. We do not support further military funding or military action by the United States in the region. We ask our community to see and hear how the struggle of Palestinians is connected to a broader struggle against inequality in the world as well as in our own community.
Naming the Violence
The violence in Palestine and Israel is incredibly devastating. We need to acknowledge the many impacts of these events, especially the tremendous loss of life. Many of us in Washington in locally impacted communities are in an extended period of grief, mourning, fear, and anger in response to the escalating violence. Here is a brief summary of the horrific violence faced by Palestinians and Israelis, and we expect many of these numbers to change as the war is permitted to continue:
- Over 1,200 Israelis were killed when Hamas attacked on October 7th, 2023.
- Between October 7th, 2023, and January 22nd, 2024, over 25,000 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military. This death toll continues to rise at alarming rates.
- Over 100 Israeli hostages taken on October 7th have still not been able to come home.
- In Gaza, a relentless campaign of bombing has left over 70% of homes in ruins.
- The current blockade of Gaza by the Israeli military is contributing to a deadly shortage of food, water, and medical supplies. Water access has been reduced by 97% since October 7th, and 93% of the population of Gaza is at crisis starvation levels.
GRuB Affirms Palestine’s Right to Peace and Sovereignty
GRuB affirms that Palestinians have the right to peace and sovereignty. Beginning in 1948 with the formation of the state of Israel, Palestinians have been repeatedly forced out of their homes and communities destroyed. The first wave of this displacement is referred to as the “Nakba”, which translates to “the catastrophe.” Since then, Palestinian territory has been reduced as Israel has occupied more and more of the region. Although Gaza and the West Bank are internationally recognized as Palestinian territories, Israel has continued to exercise undue power and influence over Palestinians in these regions. Between 1967 and 2012 alone, Israel demolished more than 25,000 Palestinian homes. Since 2006, Israel has coordinated a blockade of Gaza, resulting in high rates of food insecurity for Palestinians even before October 7th, 2023.
Now, Israel is restricting Palestinian access to water and food and has been flooding Hamas tunnels with seawater, which is ruining the fertile soil of hundreds of acres of farmland. Additionally, Israel has cut down over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees in orchards that were hundreds of years old. These acts of violence to the land destroy Palestinian capacity to grow food. Over 22% of Palestinian farmland has been destroyed. The power imbalance between Israel and Palestine is further illustrated by the difference in loss of life throughout this history. The United Nations has been tracking deaths in the conflict since 2008, and its data shows that 6,390 Palestinians died between 2008 and September 2023. Meanwhile, 308 Israelis died during the same period. We reject racial violence in any capacity and offer these statistics not to undermine the death of innocent Israelis but to impress the disproportionate violence Palestinians have faced and continue to face during the ongoing genocide justified by the assertion that Israel has a right to defend itself. These acts of violence against people and their land mirror the disparities that GRuB aims to address in our own community.
Given what we know of the violence against Palestinians, GRuB demands that the United States cease military support for Israel, funded by our tax dollars. Since 1948, the United States has provided $260 billion in military and economic aid to Israel. The United States provides approximately $3.3 billion per year to Israel, with occasionally larger amounts to support major military projects. Currently, the United States Congress is considering $14.3 billion in emergency military aid to Israel. This sort of funding of violence, which includes food restrictions and the destruction of Palestinian farms, is not only a war crime but also directly opposes our organizational mission and vision. We are therefore called as an organization to take a stand against the United States' ongoing support of these war crimes and crimes against humanity.
GRuB Condemns Local Racist Speech and Acts
Locally, hate speech and acts against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and Jews have increased since October 7th. This is connected to a longstanding struggle against racism and white supremacy in our society. GRuB sees it in our own community at all levels, such as school bathrooms with swastikas scrawled on the walls, and threats delivered to mosques and synagogues. GRuB strives to be a multicultural organization and truly believes everyone has a place in doing the work of co-creating an equitable world. In this moment of heightened anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Semitic racism, GRuB affirms the lives of the Palestinians in our community and the broader Arab community of this region; the lives of our Jewish community members; and the lives of our Muslim community members. Our vision of a world where all people can learn, lead, and thrive requires us to work to end racism of all forms.
GRuB Recognizes the Struggle for Palestinian Freedom as Part of a Larger Struggle
In the local, national, and global organizing taking place with and for the Palestinian people, we are witnessing many groups coming together and acknowledging this struggle as connected to their own. We see local Indigenous water protectors showing up in solidarity with Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews locally. We see labor unions–from teacher unions to United Auto Workers–voting to support calls for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine. We see South Africa–a nation with a history of racial apartheid and repair efforts–bringing a genocide case against Israel to the United Nations. We see Jewish Israelis, including former Israeli military members, organizing for Palestinian sovereignty. We see Jews in the United States organizing for Palestine. GRuB is called to look critically at how our country is supporting occupation and genocide abroad. We recognize that standing up and speaking out for Palestine is an important step in the broader local and global struggle for justice.
GRuB also wants to create space for accountability in our work. One way we hold ourselves accountable is to name when we observe violence occurring and work towards ending and disrupting that violence.
We recognize the Palestinian struggle as well as the ongoing and historical genocide of Indigenous people and destruction of their lands worldwide and here in the United States. We acknowledge the land on which GRuB resides, farms, and gathers is the ancestral home of the Steh-chass people of the Squaxin Island Tribe. Through our programs founded in social justice, food access, anti-racism, equity, and community building, GRuB is on the long journey toward decolonizing our relationship to the land, its peoples and cultures, true history, plants, and wildlife.
In doing this vulnerable work, we inevitably face disagreement, we name impacts, and we work to build understanding and trust through conversation. We are open to community feedback on this statement as this helps us create opportunities to grow together toward our vision: to create an equitable world where we all are nourished by healthy relationships, resilient communities, and good food.
We invite you to join us in this complicated and heartfelt work of building the world we want together.
Appendix
About Hamas - https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hamas
About Zionism Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism#Pre-state_self-defense
About Christian Zionism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism
Zionism, Jewish Voice for Peace perspective https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/zionism/
Israeli Human Rights Perspectives https://www.btselem.org/
Former Israeli Military Speak out for Palestine https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/
Live Tracker of Death Toll
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker
Pro-Palestinian Visual Data Project https://www.visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/food-sovereignty
Data on Casualties
https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties#
