Palestine solidarity demonstration, London, May 15, 2021. Photo by Socialist Appeal on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Produced in collaboration with the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, this collective article asks people across different struggles why Palestine concerns them — revealing a common thread of solidarity against statelessness, oppression, and colonial violence.

Areej al-Shammiry, Global Movement Against Statelessness

My first ever march was for Palestine during the Second Intifada. I was in grade four [around 10 years old] in Kuwait, chanting with hundreds of students in the schoolyard: 

“بالروح، بالدم، نفديك يا فلسطين” 

[“With our souls and blood, we sacrifice for you, O Palestine”] 

At the time, I didn’t fully grasp what was happening, but I remember the image of 12-year-old Mohammad Al-Durrah, murdered on live television, and watching Palestinians resisting Israeli tanks with stones. I understood one thing: Palestine was occupied, and Israel was the occupier. And this fact alone was enough to know where I stood. As a child, I was powerless, of course, but chanting together in the schoolyard was our only way to express solidarity. 

My political consciousness of Palestine grew alongside my awareness of my own statelessness. While not identical, our struggles share conditions of dispossession, marginalization, erasure, and denial of rights. Coming from a region that has been colonized, divided, and plagued with proxy wars to uphold US global hegemony, I know well the colonial roots of our struggles. 

Palestinians embody one of the world’s longest and largest cases of statelessness. Yet, Palestine has often been sidelined in statelessness discussions. Perhaps because it reveals the limits of international refugee and human rights regimes, which focus on citizenship acquisition rather than collective rights or self-determination. Palestine shows that statelessness is not a legal anomaly but tied to colonial violence, militarized borders, and global complicity.

As we witness what is almost two years of a livestreamed Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, in what marks an ongoing Nakba that led to their forced displacement and statelessness, Palestine has exposed the most extreme forms of state violence to facilitate settler colonialism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, which deprives Palestinians of their right to self-determination, nationhood, and right of return. Talking about Palestinian statelessness demands naming the structural violence of settler colonialism, forced displacement, and genocide. 

Palestinian resistance to this structural violence has sparked global solidarities: with Indigenous peoples confronting settler colonialism, with Black liberation struggles, and various struggles across West Asia and North Africa and the rest of the world. Movements like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) show how collective action can transcend borders when governments fail to hold Israel to account, or worse, are complicit. 

Palestine thus stands both as a stark example of global injustice and an inspiration for resistance. For marginalized and stateless communities, the Palestinian struggle teaches us many lessons: to assert political agency beyond victimhood; to build solidarities as survival; and to speak truth to power despite repression. For those working on statelessness, it is also a call to reflect on our failures and commit to doing things differently. We must take these lessons seriously if we are to shape a future where this violence has no place.

Sihle Nxumalo, South African activist

The impact of the ongoing violence, destruction and systemic discrimination of the people of Palestine will have long-term consequences that will affect multiple generations in the future. South African apartheid “ended” in 1994, but the effects, trauma and its legacy still linger on today, including the continued discrimination against South Africa’s Indigenous population by white settlers. 

We can draw stark similarities between old South African apartheid policies and Israel’s discriminatory practices against Palestinians. Israel has created a brutal apartheid state in which Palestinian rights are systematically removed in favour of illegal settlers: physical segregation policies, forced displacement, and illegal seizures of lands echo the treatment of Black people in South Africa. 

The effects of these practices are still visible today, with many Black people still living in congested communities in tin shacks. White people in South Africa, who only make up about 10 percent of the population, still own around 70 percent of the land to this day, over 30 years after “democracy.” South Africa is known as having the most unequal society in the world, with severe economic inequalities persisting in the country. 

The legacy of apartheid still impacts the Black population of today with high unemployment rates, limited resources, unequal opportunities and bad living conditions.  The next generations of Palestinians will, unfortunately, have to inherit an intergenerational burden of widespread trauma and destruction, which will weigh heavily on their physical and emotional well-being. 

To end apartheid in South Africa, it took a mass internal uprising and massive support and condemnation from the international community. This pressure forced the South African government to rethink its policies and come to the negotiation table to pave the way for a free and democratic country for all its citizens. 

The global response to the discrimination and genocide in Palestine is grossly inadequate. The same support and global solidarity that South Africa received are desperately needed to pressure world powers to do something tangible, including but certainly not limited to legitimate economic sanctions and immediate cessation of arms sales to Israel. 

It is evident from the case of South Africa that ending violence and discrimination is only the first step in a long, winding road to true freedom. 

Free Palestine.

Aleksandra Semeriak Gavrilenok, former non-citizen of Latvia

Growing up stateless, as a non-citizen of Latvia, I learned early what it means when rights exist only on paper, only for those considered eligible, only for those belonging by ethnicity and not by birth. As I grew older, I learned that this exclusion was not accidental, that it is deliberately established and maintained by unjust power dynamics and by state actors who feel entitled to ignore the rule of law. 

Statelessness strips people of the sense of belonging, of social and political power, of access to justice and even of the recognition of their existence. But as a human being, I have the right to exist. That is why Palestine concerns me.

Here in Spain, I also witness the struggle of the Saharawi community. For decades, the Saharawi have been forcibly displaced and denied their right to nationality and self-determination. In both Palestine and Western Sahara, statelessness is violently compounded by colonization and systemic dehumanization, revealing how ineffective and indifferent the international order has become. 

Yes, international mechanisms exist, but they have been rendered useless. Rather than enforceable actions to prevent human rights violations and hold oppressors accountable, UN resolutions have, unfortunately, become little more than letters of condolence. Yet as someone who still believes in the UN’s founding promise “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” I want to hold onto hope that justice will prevail. That is why Palestine concerns me.

Across Europe and the world, I have been fortunate to meet a very diverse and still united community of people with lived experience of statelessness. Their stories, both beautiful and painful, taught me more about the multiple layers of discrimination and intersectional struggles. I saw how stateless people, with little resources, still challenged and changed the system. That confronted me with a truth: justice, recognition and equal rights will not come from institutions alone, but from solidarity among all of us. As a formerly stateless person, I stand in solidarity with those impacted by statelessness. That is why Palestine concerns me.

So, I’ve been asked why Palestine concerns me, but why does it not concern you?

Fawzi Abdul Fayaz, Rohingya activist

Palestine concerns me deeply because its people’s struggle resonates profoundly with my own community, the Rohingya. Both Palestinians and Rohingya have endured decades of systematic persecution, dispossession, and displacement. We are bound together not only by our shared experience of exile but also by the ongoing erasure of our identities through state violence and atrocity crimes. Palestine is not just “their” struggle; it is also a mirror of our own. Indeed, Arakan — the homeland of the Rohingya — is often described as the “Palestine of the East” because of the striking similarities in our people’s tragedies of forced displacement and genocide.

The Rohingya are often described as “the most persecuted people in the world.” Stripped of citizenship by Myanmar’s 1982 law, denied basic rights, and subjected to waves of military campaigns, we have faced ongoing genocide. The atrocities of 2017 — mass killings, systematic sexual violence, and the burning of hundreds of villages — forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Today, most Rohingya children are born in exile, in overcrowded refugee camps such as Cox’s Bazar, without ever setting foot in our ancestral land of Arakan. And yet, as with Palestinians, our bond with our homeland remains unbroken.

To be born and raised in exile is to inherit both loss and resilience. Our parents and elders pass down stories of our villages, our language, and our traditions, ensuring that our identity survives attempts at erasure. This intergenerational memory is more than nostalgia; it is resistance. Just as Palestinians preserve their keys, songs, and oral histories, Rohingya preserve our culture and name as an act of defiance against genocide.

This enduring connection to homeland shapes identity, memory, and resistance. It reminds us that displacement does not end belonging — it strengthens it. To be Rohingya or Palestinian in exile is to embody the refusal to be forgotten, to carry both the pain of dispossession and the unyielding hope of justice and return.

Abdul Kalam Azad, activist scholar working with the Miya community in Assam, India

Palestine concerns me as a human being. Human beings are naturally wired to feel empathy when they see the livestreamed genocide of their fellow human beings for nearly two years. 

It is not just me; I am sure millions across the world see the situation in Palestine as a source of unending horror. I often feel that the majority of the world shares the same helplessness while watching the bullying attitude of colonial and imperial powers.

As an activist scholar working with the Miya community in Assam, India, the situation in Palestine has influenced how I think and work today. I once had faith in the world order; with international law and global governance in place, I believed that another genocide would never be possible.

I genuinely thought that injustices committed against marginalized people, including members of my own community, could be stopped if their stories were told to the world, if our friends and allies organized, and formed a global opinion, it would help us convince our national government to uphold the constitution religiously and protect the rights of our fellow citizens. The current situation in Palestine has shattered that hope. 

Today, members of my community are subjected to both structural and physical violence. Millions of us have been rendered stateless through discriminatory laws, policies, and practices. Hundreds of thousands of our homes have been demolished; many people are languishing in detention camps or being forcibly deported to foreign countries at gunpoint. Every aspect of our lives — livelihood, food, shelter, mobility, religion, and culture — is under constant control and surveillance. Forget about forming a global opinion — hardly anyone is even allowed to speak about these injustices. 

By sharing this, I am not attempting to draw parallels with the suffering of our Palestinian sisters and brothers. What I am trying to highlight is the collapse of the world order, the further erosion of the moral compass of colonial and imperial powers, and the resultant hopelessness, which are contributing to perpetual injustice across the globe. 

That is why stopping the genocide now is not just for the freedom of Palestinians but also to keep faith in the struggle to fight against injustice.  

Concluding remarks: Lubnah Shomali, Palestinian human rights activist and advocacy unit manager at BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights

The Israeli colonial-apartheid regime has perpetrated almost two years of genocide in the Gaza Strip while fully disclosing its intentions and plans to erase the remaining Palestinian people in historic Palestine. 

And yet, states are not only failing to act but are complicit in genocide, displacement, colonization and apartheid. The Palestinian struggle for liberation has exposed this complicity, inaction, failure and sabotage of the international legal order.

What the Palestinian people have been facing and experiencing is not new nor exclusive, as the words above indicate. The reality is that colonial policies and practices are imposed in many other parts of the world, including the manipulation of the international legal order to serve the political and economic agendas of Western colonial states.

This is why the Palestinian struggle for liberation extends beyond the Palestinian people and our national homeland of historic Palestine, resonating among many oppressed peoples and groups around the world whose rights and freedoms have been denied and violated to further colonial agendas.

The Palestinian struggle for liberation reaffirms what has been historically proven and currently known: that the struggles for liberation, basic human rights, freedoms and justice require more than empty promises and condemnations, unfulfilled resolutions and symbolic gestures. 

Our struggles for liberation require that states fulfil their obligations to protect the unprotected, impose comprehensive sanctions against perpetrators of international crimes to hold them accountable and uphold the international legal order.

We also know that states will not willingly do so, especially if such actions are detrimental to their colonial agendas. Therefore, it becomes the duty of the oppressed peoples to resist, and our allies to provide solidarity. Together, through the escalation of direct actions that disrupt the colonial status quo, we will all be liberated.