On Our March for Palestine
The November 4 mobilisation was a success. We planned for about 50 persons to show up, but over 200 persons did. Our march was a part of a broader global effort to demonstrate solidarity with Palestine. Similar marches took place all over the world on the same day. A few issues were brought up but immediately dealt with on the spot, allowing the entire procession to be incident-free. We made a concrete set of demands from our government, and many people are proud to have been a part of this.
However, the work does not end here; we must regroup after each success, including this one, and take things with us as we move forward.
Organisation
The first thing to take from this is the power of organisation, which is what provides the sense of continuity that allows us to learn from our collective experiences in the first place.
In any sound activist effort, including this mobilisation, organisation is the nucleus of everything else. When we speak of organisation, we do not mean an event being planned well; we mean that there are interconnected networks of people that are in regular contact with each other in some way so that information moves among them quickly and so that they know what to expect from each other.
Even without the turnout of any other group, LANDS already knew that it could count on its own base for a certain number of people to show up. Three other organisations also participated, with each turning out numbers from its own base. The people in any given organisation regularly confer with each other so lasting relationships of trust have been built. It is easier for someone to answer a call to action if it comes from people who they trust, and if they expect enough other people to be there with them.
Many individuals also showed up, but they looked to the organisations for general direction and continue to look to us for the next steps. Many people, both those who attended and those who did not, are eager to hear the next activity we have planned because they look to us to lead. They know, whether overtly or subconsciously, of the benefits of having something backed by an organisation.
We call upon our own base to remember the discourse, on what it means to be organised, that we began in public in 2020 and aimed to codify through months of internal discussion in 2022. We also call on people who are not already organised to become organised. Being organised does not mean registering an NGO or dealing with bureaucracy; some people are already somewhat organised with their friends who they regularly interact with, because they share their views with each other and know what to expect from each other. Form groups of 5-20 people, set aside time to discuss things that you care about, come to consensus on different issues, and coordinate with other groups to plan actions.
Agency
The next thing to take from this is the importance of agency. Many persons refuse to recognise their own agency. Many want to see action about specific causes, but refuse to do the work themselves to make these things happen. We have been asked why we haven’t protested for specific causes, by persons who do not want to protest these things themselves. We must ensure that we never become like these persons.
If we have an issue with something, we must take the initiative to do something about it ourselves. If we see an organised group doing something, we must never complain that they are not doing what we want them to do. We have to be the change that we want to see.
If you want to see LANDS address something in a specific way, propose it in your base meetings. Speak up when you want to raise an issue or propose any line of action. Make sure that your actions are not vague. Some external persons ask “what about Haiti?” and want us to protest “about Africa” without being able to explain what exactly is happening there and what demands we should make and who we should make them from:
Some persons have asked us to protest against murders in Jamaica. Who would we protest against and what demands would we make? We have investigated and found that many of these same persons are supporters of the government, and would not welcome us protesting against the government to say that they have been ineffective in fighting crime.
In meetings across multiple groups in LANDS over the past 2 years, we have been talking about the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where people are being violently displaced for resource extraction. We have not identified any demands that we could make of our government on the situation in the DRC. Those who claim to care about the DRC more than us could come forward with positions and invite us to support them.
LANDS has been talking about the situation in Haiti from 2017, and we have taken a firm position of opposing foreign military intervention in Haiti. We have relations with Haitian activists both in Haiti and the diaspora. One of our leaders was even a speaker for a teach-in about the situation in Haiti, hosted by the Black Alliance for Peace (a Pan-Africanist organisation). A protest against Jamaica’s involvement in foreign intervention in Haiti would likely not get support from the same persons asking us to protest about Haiti.
LANDS has been concerned with the situation of the Essequibo border dispute from 2017, and we have shared information on it. Many persons did not care enough to even learn about it until a few weeks ago.
These are all causes that we should be concerned about, but what should we do about them? We have to decide that collectively. Protests and demonstrations aren’t the only forms of action; we have to take ownership of how we manage our time and energy, and responsibility for whatever we propose or do. A series of constant protests and demonstrations will easily lead to burnout for a movement and the people in it, which is why we have to organise ourselves to manage our time and energy.
While there are persons who opportunistically bring up Haiti, the DRC, Sudan, or other situations to undermine solidarity with Palestine, some people genuinely care about those causes and look to us to help to lead them. Some were at the demonstration shouting solidarity with Palestine, while bringing up the other things they care about. We have to engage these people, teach them how to organise, emphasise that they have agency, and help them in whatever other ways we reasonably can so that they can bring visibility to the causes that they want to champion.
We hosted a demonstration where we barely spoke, where we did not promote our political ideology or platform, where others who are not in LANDS spoke and addressed the crowd for a majority of the time. Our role was just to put things in place and bring people together, to brief people at the beginning and end but not to dominate the entire procession with our own ideology and values. We are able to do this because we are organised, but many people who benefit from organisation are not yet organised themselves.
Our duty, then, is to step forward as an organisation and do things that can get other people to realise their own agency and see the benefit of organising themselves. We can host more events, like teach-ins and rallies that are not necessarily demonstrations, to bring people together to air their concerns and discuss their common values. In the same way we tell people that they need to be the change they want to see, we can help them along the way by giving a bit of a headstart.
Our efforts have always been towards enabling people to organise themselves. In the same way we do this for people directly involved in LANDS, we can help to kickstart it for other groups outside of LANDS.
Local Visibility
Some persons have unfortunately fallen for the misconception that we are only concerned with foreign causes but nothing local. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We have supported and taken up multiple local causes over the years, but we have intentionally kept a low profile for the most part.
It is ironic that we have now been accused of only caring about Palestine to follow a trend or to be in the limelight. However, both this and the misconception that we are only concerned with foreign causes is a sign that we need to be more visible in general.
Positions on land and transport, that have been taken up by the PNP, are things that we pushed heavily for when we had a series of meetings with them. The Sexual Harassment Act, that was passed in 2020, includes provisions that we proposed and debated in parliament. We are currently still engaging parliament about 2 pieces of anti-corruption legislation and we have been a leading voice in the constitutional reform process. We are very much concerned with local issues, and we have never done anything just for the sake of seeking hype and the limelight.
Before the demonstration on November 4, other organisations and groups had already been begging us to step forward and occupy public space. Our involvement in the constitutional reform process requires us to step out of the underground. Following the demonstration for solidarity with Palestine, people outside of LANDS are calling on us to lead more actions for both local and internationalist causes.
Internationalism
One thing that we must understand is that our local struggles are connected to the global struggles that we concern ourselves with. Persons have been claiming that the situation in Palestine has nothing to do with Jamaica so we should not care about it, and some are saying that Palestinians do not appreciate what we are doing; both of these things are plainly false.
The same technology being used against the Palestinian people may be used against us next, if we do not take a stand to oppose what is happening to them and how it is being facilitated. Israel is known for its arms manufacturing and its surveillance tech, the latter involving spyware that targets journalists and activists. The Jamaican government has “cybersecurity agreements” with Israel.
The idea that we should not care about Palestinians because they supposedly would not care about us is both silly and false. Please note these 3 things:
Jamaica has a history of opposing colonial oppression around the world. We took a firm stance in opposition to South African apartheid from the 1950s until it ended, in support of Angolan independence in the 1970s, and in condemnation of the imperialist-backed coup in Haiti in 2004.
Palestinians helped Black activists in the US to resist police violence, because some police in the US receive training and equipment from Israel. There are large murals dedicated to George Floyd in Palestine, and Palestine has always seen itself as connected to African liberation.
Palestine sent material aid to Dominica after the devastating hurricane in 2017 and quickly responded to the volcanic eruption in St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 2021. Jamaica itself was rocked by an earthquake less than a week before the March for Palestine, the strongest earthquake that everyone in our movement has ever felt in their lives. It should have been a sobering experience, reminding us of how vulnerable we can be and that we may need international help at any time despite the best efforts of our own government.
We hope that the Jamaicans who say that we should not be concerned with things on the other side of the world do not have to eat their words if the tables turn and we need help. Like our national pledge declares, Jamaica must play its “part in advancing the welfare of the whole human race.” The division of people by borders is a relic of colonialism. In the same way it hurts us when our own children face violence here, it should hurt us when hundreds are being killed per week in Palestine.
On the matter of whether our march mattered to Palestinian people, please rest assured that it did. Our demonstration on November 4 served the purpose of expressing our solidarity with them in their struggle against occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Before the march, we interviewed a Palestinian from the West Bank and met with others from the diaspora, who all appreciated the fact that there are Jamaicans who understand their struggle well. They asked for a global demonstration of solidarity and they have already thanked us for being a part of the effort to give that to them.