Ashamaa dear readers and friends,

This week’s newsletter will be a shorter one, as unlike last week I didn’t find the energy to embark upon something more creative and ambitious.

As I mentioned last week, the contemporary global border regime – with its constant tragedy of millions of people being displaced, dispossessed, exploited, dehumanized, detained, and abused – was consolidated from the 1940’s onward, based on the the ‘globalization of the ethnically purified model of the nation­ state’, as historian Mark Mazower put it. The founding of the United Nations, the various huge displacements and migrations in Europe/Asia following WWII, the start of apartheid regimes in South Africa and Namibia, the Nakba and the partition of British-ruled colonial India, all coincided during the second half of that decade.

The ongoing suffering and genocide of Palestinians was thus in a sense one of the founding moments of this horrendous international system, and this week the horror continued. Based on extremely doubtful allegations many Western states cut funding to UNRWA, which for all of the UN’s faults, literally constitutes one of the only resources of life-saving aid and support for Palestinians. Even were these allegations not fabricated by Israel in order to temporarily distract Western countries from the genocidal massacres and destruction it is committing, this decision would be unjustifiable based on the direct death toll it’s clearly going to provoke. As in other (settler) colonial contexts from Kashmir to West Papua, the daily regime of surveillance, checkpoints, terror and abuse that displaced Palestinians – i.e. the vast majority of Palestinians both in and out of Gaza, and for multiple generations at that – face are the most brutal culmination of the border logic. For those that aren’t (yet) massacred, after being brutally displaced by Israel, they will face the inhuman barbarity of the rest of the world’s borders, for instance being pushed back in the Aegean sea by Greece’s coast guard.

For poor migrants – including children – homelessness is a permanent threat/risk, for instance following last year’s brutal decisions by the UK’s Home Office, 48% of homeless people in the streets of London are migrants (source: CHAIN reports). This is today’s surplus humanity from the point of view of capital, states and empires.

Links/Readings:

Apologies for the shortened newsletter,

I’ll see you next week, in the meantime and as always: Solidarity Forever!