Photo by Jericho Tran-Faypon/Outwrite
Content warnings: discussion of violence, police brutality, genocide and homophobia
1.0 Pride Month: Remembering Stonewall
For the last 25 years, queer people in America have celebrated Pride Month in June to honor the six-day-long Stonewall Uprising and the continuing legacy of queer resistance.
At Stonewall, the American LGBTQ+ community took up radical queerness in praxis. The uprising was a turning point in the fight for queer liberation after decades of heavy policing of queerness and queer spaces like the Stonewall Inn.
Michael Fader, a Stonewall Inn patron present during the uprising, describes contemporary sentiment: “We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. . . . Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us.”
1.1 Stonewall’s Legacy, the Nature of the State, and Our Continued Fight
Stonewall serves as a reminder of the power of the masses to disrupt an oppressive status quo.
Still, the fight took time and continues today. A court ruling that outlawed sodomy, a euphemism for cisgender male homosexual sex, was only overturned in 2003. Same-sex marriage was federally legalized in 2015 — only nine years ago.
Despite these landmark cases, we still face state violence in the form of institutional oppression. Since 2015, the number of anti-transgender bills in state legislatures across the U.S. has risen exponentially. Transgender, gender-nonconforming, and genderqueer people of color and queer women of color are incarcerated at higher rates compared to straight, cisgender people. Even with the progress of sex and marriage equality, we face continued and increasing state violence.
The contradictions of equality for queer people reflect the state’s role as a tool of oppression. These rulings and laws could be reversed and repealed as easily as they were created. Because the state, as a system, does not serve us, what protections do things like marriage equality really grant us? Should we attempt to reform a system in which we must fight for what is freely given to others, or should we turn our energy towards abolishing it entirely?
2.0 Why the Fight For Palestine Is Our Fight: On State Violence
In a 1918 lecture entitled “Politics as a Vocation,” sociologist Max Weber deemed the state as the only “form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory.”
Let’s break down this definition. “State” refers to a governing body of a particular territory and is characterized by a centralized bureaucracy that is meant to protect its inhabitants. The construction of a state requires the construction of an “us” and a “them” — those who are governed and protected by the state and those who are not. These distinctions create the conditions that allow self-justified state violence against villainized others: war and colonial violence against external others, and policing, political repression, and discrimination against internal others. “External others” refers to people outside the state’s borders, and “internal others” refers to people who threaten the state.
“Monopoly” refers to the state’s control over the means to extract the labor and resources to execute violence. In America, for example, this monopoly takes form in Congress’ responsibility to allocate our tax dollars toward different aspects of governance. Though our government is meant to represent us, we have little direct control over how the state uses our labor and resources. The globalization of the American military and the militarization of the American police force reflect America’s continued monopolization of physical state violence.
It’s true that this monopoly is not total. We resist despite not having the same resources or organization — it is through pooling our resources and organizing that we resist.
“Legitimate physical violence” goes hand in hand with monopoly. Illegitimate physical violence — in this context, resistance — is deemed illegal and viewed as unwarranted and anarchistic. The construction of resistance as illegitimate by deeming such violence illegal serves the state’s goal of monopolizing violence. People are unable to “legitimately” defend themselves against violence enacted by the state.
In modern social studies, state violence is broadly defined as direct political violence: discriminatory legislation, police brutality, genocide, and state neglect, to name a few. The parenthetical “successfully” thus begs the following questions: For whom is state violence legitimate, and who does it benefit?
2.1 Stonewall and State Violence on Campus
The events of Stonewall parallel our experiences with police brutality against pro-Palestine demonstrations and the Palestine Solidarity Encampments at UCLA and college campuses in the U.S. and internationally.
At Stonewall, patrons were brutalized and arrested as police performed a routine raid. Early in the morning of June 28, 1969, patrons refused to disperse and instead united in their anger. The collective outrage described by Fader materialized into the uprising.
People began to fight back, forcing the police to barricade themselves inside the bar. The following night, police returned to disperse patrons and supporters, beating and tear-gassing protesters in an act of state violence. For the next four days, people took to the streets outside Stonewall and rioted in the face of blatant police violence.
At this point, I hope the way in which our experiences with police brutality on campus mirror the events of Stonewall does not need an explanation. If you are reading this and don’t know about what’s been happening on campus, I implore you to input a combination of “ucla,” “police,” and “palestine” into your search engine of choice.
2.2 Legacies of Resistance: Stonewall and Palestine
The Stonewall Uprising was a spontaneous and energized act of resistance after decades of state oppression enacted by the police.
Pro-Palestine actions resist 77 years of Zionist state violence, genocide, and settler-colonial occupation of Palestine perpetrated by the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF), the military arm of Israel. The police response on the UCLA campus only further reflects the interconnectedness between our domestic resistance to state violence and Palestinian resistance to international state violence.
The cops and the military are tools of state violence. Stonewall was a resistance against police violence; pro-Palestine actions are resistance against military violence.
2.3 American Police, Police Militarization, and Israel
State violence by American police and the IOF are more than theoretically intertwined; American police and the IOF are collaborating entities. Since the 1980s, the LAPD has maintained ties with Israeli forces and pursued “a shared goal of fighting extremism inside their borders.” The police department studies Israel’s border patrol, bomb squad, and “counter-terrorism” operations.
The LAPD also uses artificial intelligence surveillance technology by Cobwebs Technologies. Founded by two former IOF special operatives and a former Mossad (Israel’s CIA equivalent) official, the company is part of the “billion-dollar surveillance industry in Israel.” This technology gathers data, including “geographic locations, social media posts, and online communities,” to create profiles on people who are deemed at risk of perpetrating violence — a misnomer for resistance against the state.
Beyond the LAPD, law enforcement officials “from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training,” Amnesty International reports.1
Police militarization projects across the U.S. have increased following the 2020 protests that arose after the police murders of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. The Atlanta Police Department and Cop City are particularly connected to Israel through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. The program funnels taxpayer dollars (via Georgia State University) to train law enforcement agencies worldwide, including the U.S. and Israel.
3.0 The Bigger Picture
The violence we’ve experienced on campus at the hands of state-made tools of oppression represents the same arm of fascist and imperialist systems that use state violence against communities at intersecting social margins of indigeneity, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, socioeconomic status, etc. — locally and abroad.
State violence, intended to overwhelm and dehumanize us, looks like police brutality against queer people. It looks like Israel’s occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. It looks like the our universities’ weaponization of cops against us.
As part of these systems, we see how contemporary American queer existence, particularly in the wake of Stonewall, is fundamentally intertwined with Palestinian liberation. The cisheteropatriarchy oppresses queer people; it also opportunistically justifies settler colonization and imperialism with state-granted queer rights (see: pinkwashing). Israel perpetuates colonization and imperialism. These interlocking structures of power oppress all of us.
The struggle for Palestinian liberation is, therefore, our struggle. As we celebrate Pride Month and its roots in resistance against state violence, we must acknowledge that fighting for Palestinian liberation from Israel is part of queer liberation. And that’s beyond the fact that queer people do exist in Palestine; queer Palestinians and their unique desires are necessarily a part of our collective struggle for liberation.
Just as the aftermath of the Stonewall Uprising exposed divisions within the queer community based on divergent commitments to our collective liberation, the violent repression of student activism on our campuses forces us to confront a critical question: are you willing to fight?
3.1 All Resistance is Queer
Hoping for a better future is queer. Fighting for a liberated future for Palestinians is queer. Rejecting the normalization of violence and oppression and dehumanization is queer. We, as UC students, are stakeholders who fund the current genocide of Palestinians through $32 billion of UC investment in companies that fund Israel. Although we have the privilege to be indifferent to our role in genocide and colonial violence, we must resist. Our resistance is queer and necessary.
To be queer is to be against oppression of all forms. Our queerness unifies us with the fight for Palestinian liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people under a daily resistance to our collective struggles.
Let the violence on our campus and in Palestine help you realize that these fronts are intertwined — that if you are angered at one, be angry at it all.
And turn that anger into action.
4.0 Reject Normalization: Do More (As Much as You Can)
A key part of the project of liberation from oppression includes redistributing our time and resources to do anything that can help. Consider your positionality and what resources you have.
4.1 Talk about it
Say “Palestine.” Say “genocide.”
If you don’t know what’s happening, ask those who have been more vocal and politically engaged in your networks. If you have been keeping up with everything, know that the people around you might not know what’s going on.
If you’ve resisted engaging with information related to the genocide, ask yourself why. Your feelings of discomfort that surround the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and maybe the discomfort that arises from “politics” in general, is your body telling you something. Listen.
4.2 Educate yourself
In the age of digital technology, we have unprecedented access to information.
“First steps to stand for Palestinian freedom” is a quick read by Jewish Voice for Peace that includes hyperlinks explaining recent and historical context for the fight for Palestinian liberation.
“Palestine 101” by the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights offers context and demystifies the “complicated” nature of Israel’s violence against Palestinian people.
It’s particularly important to engage with online information critically: Patrick Gathara’s “Decolonise how? | Biased Gaza coverage is the tip of a much larger media iceberg” dissects the biased coverage of the genocide.
Below is a list of Instagram accounts to follow. Some of the images on these accounts are graphic. Know that the list is not exhaustive.
Accounts on the ground in Palestine:
- @wizard_bisan1
- @joegaza93
- @byplestia
- @eye.on.palestine
Accounts dedicated to education about Palestine:
- @palestine.academy
- @letstalkpalestine
- @jenanmatari
Organizations engaged in Pro-Palestine activism:
- @nationalsjp
- @jewishvoiceforpeace
- @palestinianyouthmovement
On the note of social media…
4.3 At least a repost
All you have to do is tap your screen three times to share a post. Use the micro-platforms that we all have access to. Reposting things on social media is certainly qualified by the quality and purpose of reposting. Do not repost AI-generated images. Do repost content that has offered something valuable to you so that it may do the same for others.
I recently ran into a friend who told me that they receive their news and information about events on campus and in Palestine through my story posts. I was shocked; I didn’t believe that the little things I did had an impact. I realize, though, that it is the accumulation of our collective action that continues the project of liberation. In the age of social media, our actions can take digital forms.
4.4 Contact Your Representatives
Pressure your representatives to say “genocide.” Demand divestment. Tell them what’s happening so that they cannot claim plausible deniability. Take action against legislation that seeks to further enact state violence by repressing the movement.
Links to resources with a centralized site for information regarding contacting representatives, calling for a ceasefire, and demanding that the U.S. stop funding Israel can be found here.
4.5 Support local actions
This takes many forms.
You can participate in a rally or a protest, attend jail support actions in the wake of arrests, and provide material support such as food and water to demonstrations and local Palestine solidarity encampments. Again, reposting allows people who are able to attend and support to be informed to do so if you cannot.
4.6 Get involved otherwise
On campus, a handful of student organizations fighting for university divestment from Palestine exist, including, but not limited to, UC Divest, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, and Jewish Voice for Peace at UCLA.
4.6. Boycott
Boycotting is yet another easy way to help. Since we are constantly consuming things, consider simply no longer consuming specific things. Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-organized movement that seeks to use economic means “to pressure Israel to comply with international law.” It identifies the following brands and products to boycott: Hewlett Packard (HP), Siemens, AXA, Puma, SodaStream, Ahava, Sabra Hummus, and produce labeled “Produced in Israel.”
4.7 Donate
You can use the power of the dollar in yet another way.
The following are links to donate to reputable organizations taking action to aid Palestinian people:
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
And — social media strikes one more time — many links are circulating on Instagram by Palestinians themselves where you can donate directly to families in Palestine and Palestinian refugees. Here’s a Linktree with a centralized, rotating list of such fundraisers.
4.8 And through it all, center Palestine.
What many of us often forget in social movements is to acknowledge and center the voices of those for whom we are fighting. It is a gross disservice to co-opt social movements for anything other than the needs of the people for whom the movement exists.
As the genocide continues, we must remember what we are fighting for.
5.0 From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
- Missing citations are a result of links that have been taken down or are unclear.
Credits:
Author: Jericho Tran-Faypon (They/Them)
Artist: Jericho Tran-Faypon (They/Them)
Copy Editors: Gwendolyn Hill (She/Her), Gracie Bitting (She/Her), Emma Blakely (They/She/He)