We need New Strategies

Speech at the Palivision concert, 17th May 2025


24/05/2025

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Comrades,

We are living through a turning point in global history –  a moment of unbearable horror, but also of enormous possibility.

Right now, Gaza is being starved, bombed, and buried alive. Over 54,000 people have been killed. Israel calls this new phase of atrocity Operation Gideon’s Chariots. That name says it all. A chariot isn’t just a weapon –  it’s a symbol of empire. It’s what Pharaohs rode into battle. It’s what Gideon rode in the Bible – a divine machine of conquest. This isn’t just militarism. It’s mythology. It’s theology turned into airstrikes. A fantasy of domination dressed up as defense.

Israel’s goal: to crush the Palestinian resistance against the genocide, to cut Hamas off from a prisoners deal, to seize the land. They have already started to expand the buffer zones – areas they won’t return. They are trying to break gaza into isolated pieces. Palestinians are once again pushed to the South, their movement is restricted, Aid is conditional and hunger is the settlers most powerful weapon. They are encouraging what the settlers are calling “voluntary emigration”. We all know it is ethnic cleansing. This is Israel’s blueprint: 77 years of ongoing Nakba. 

And like every empire before it, Israel believes it can crush a people’s will — to live, to fight, to dream. But Gaza has not been defeated nor can it ever be defeated.

That is the contradiction at the heart of this moment. After nineteen months of total war, Israel has not disarmed Hamas. It hasn’t broken the resistance. it has lost in ront of the eyes of the whole world. It hasn’t even secured its own soldiers.

If they invade Gaza again, they’ll meet what they met in Rafah, Shuja’iyya, Khan Younis, Beit Hanoun: organized, armed, living resistance. 

The misbelief that through absolute destruction and death, resistance will end. But every bomb creates more resistance.

And the cracks are spreading far beyond Gaza.

The Arab regimes that normalized with Israel – the same ones Trump paraded around under the so-called Abraham Accords – are exposed. Their people are in revolt. Protests in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain – not just against Israel, but against the regimes that collaborate with it. And let us not forget Yemen’s friendship and resistance next to Gaza. 

Even Netanyahu’s strongest allies are showing strain. The Trump administration is back – louder, crueler, and openly aligned with Israeli apartheid. This is the man who moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, normalized ethnic cleansing, deports Palstinian Students and now dreams of turning Gaza into a “freedom zone” – a casino economy built on genocide – while floating plans to deport Palestinians to Libya.

European leaders hedge. They talk peace while signing weapons contracts. We demand liberation while organizing against militarization and fascism. And even the western media, after decades of painting Palestinians as terrorists, is slowly but finally showing the truth: massacres, famine, ethnic cleansing, genocide.

But don’t be fooled. This didn’t come from journalistic integrity. It came from the streets of this world. From the student occupations. From striking dock workers. From migrant protests. From you. From us. From below.

Because Gaza bleeds, Israel imposes a hunger blockade. Starvation is being used as a weapon. Children are dying not just from bombs — but from thirst, from a lack of insulin, from bread that never arrives. This is not a natural disaster. It is a calculated system of extermination. And the world watches as Israel tries to find its very own final solution. 

And what do we get from our governments? In Germany, we get bans on protest and special treatments by cops, we get riot police in university halls, we get defamation. You know of all this that is happening.

But let me be clear: We don’t need their permission. We don’t need different slogans. We need new networks. New alliances. New strategies.

We need mass-based, revolutionary, anti-imperialist organizing — not hashtags, not managed grief. But real internationalism from below:

From workers who can shut down weapons shipments.

From students who can occupy the institutions of war.

From tenants, migrants, and the unemployed who can’t be co-opted or bought off.

Because this system that starves Gaza, it can starve all of us. If it can bomb Rafah, it can bomb Khartoum. If it can lie about Palestine, it can lie about all of us.

We need more than protests. We need coordination:

Demonstrate in a connectable way. 

Blockade the weapons factories.

Strike the supply chains.

Occupy the offices of war profiteers.

Refuse to let the state define what solidarity means.

Our solidarity must be loud, determined and unapologetic.

And let me say something personal here. For me, Palestine was never just a political issue. It was the place where I first saw and understood empire – and resistance.

Let Palestine not be a victim. Palestine is a teacher. A school of revolution. Gaza is showing the world that even when starved, people fight. Even when buried, they speak. Even the many who are dying – they will live. Through Gaza. Through the child pulling rubble off a sibling. Through the poem smuggled out in the margins of a notebook. Through the fighter who won’t surrender. Through the chant echoing from the streets to campus walls to refugee camps. Gaza is not only where they fall. It is where they rise. Not just in memory – but in our movement. So let us at least bring them honour and glory.

The future will ask us: Where were you when Gaza was burning? Let our answer not be  silence. Not a thought. Not a tweet. Not a hashtag.

Let it be a movement.

Free Palestine – from the river to the sea – not in theory, not in words, but in struggle.

Thank you.