This is a long, but hardly thorough, description of why I wrote "free Palestine by any means necessary" on The Fence, intended for CMU and my hearing officer to consider as part of the investigation into my June 9th Fence painting. In the interest of good faith, I am also posting its precise contents on my public blog, so that it's clear I'm not filtering who I am or what I believe when showing myself and my world to CMU for this inquiry. Most of this is context intended to put myself and whoever it is who's reading this on the same page. It's a difficult task, seeing as this is the most divisive issue of our time, one where information, history, and words themselves are front lines bitterly fought for.
To start us off, I'm going to define how I use some words and phrases, so that (ideally) nothing I write later is misunderstood. First off, I'm going to draw a distinction between regions, states, and nations.
A region is a piece of land, neutrally, usually without hard borders. Regions can overlap, and regions can go by many different names. Depending on which name someone uses for a region, you can sometimes get a sense for how they view that land in a political or cultural context, but typically the region itself is not something with politically contentious boundaries. You and I could fight a war for control over, say, Appalachia, but it stays in roughly the same place no matter who controls it and what wars are fought over it.
In this document, I'm mostly going to talk about one region. Roughly, that region is the land east of the Mediterranean Sea, mostly west of the Jordan River, mostly north of the Sinai Peninsula, and mostly south of Lebanon and Syria. Don't focus too much on those as precise boundaries. Historically, the neutral term for that region is "Palestine," and it's the term you'll find in encyclopedias. In the case of Wikipedia, there's distinct pages for "Palestine" (the state) and "Palestine (region)". As the latter article states, "[o]ther names for part or all of this region include Canaan, the Promised Land, the Land of Israel, the Holy Land, and Judea." None of those are in common use to describe precisely the same region, and "Palestine" is widely accepted as the neutral term for the region, so that's what I'll use.
A state, for the purposes of this document, is a political entity with sovereignty, a government, policing, and defined borders which it defends. (I'm not a geographer or a political theorist, but I think that definition should be serviceable.) Unlike regions, states cannot overlap.
In the region of Palestine, there are roughly two states: (the state of) Israel and (the state of) Palestine. I say "roughly" because, unlike regions, it is a political question whether something is a state or not, and the statehoods of both Palestine and Israel are contentious on the world stage. When I say "Palestine" or "Israel," I will be explicit if I'm referring to a state rather than a region or nation.
Lastly, a nation, for the purposes of this document, is a group with a common identity with a tie to a region. Like regions themselves, nations do not have hard borders, and can overlap in physical space. Since nations are composed of people rather than land, nations can be distributed far across the world, and individual people can consider themselves parts of multiple nations. All that must be true is that those people all have a shared identity associated with that nationality, and that the identity is tied to some region.
At least two nations have strong ties to Palestine (the region), under this definition. One group, the one we're usually talking about when we say "Palestinians," describes Arabs native to the region of Palestine. Although Palestine has gone through numerous wars and upheavals over centuries, there is a strong Palestinian cultural identity associated with the region. At the start of the 20th century, Palestinians were some 90% of the population of the region, but millions have been displaced since 1948.
The other group you could describe as a nation with strong ties to the region of Palestine would be whichever nation that Israel, the nation-state, is intended to correspond with. This is complicated, because Israel, the state, is built on the idea that Jewish people collectively form one nation, tied to Palestine. Judaism originated in Palestine, and a Jewish population has lived in Palestine since antiquity, but the idea that Palestine is a homeland for the whole of the Jewish people is not a universal idea. In practice, many Jewish people do not claim Palestine as a region that their identity is uniquely built around, and Israel has its own cultural identity (though, being quite young for a country, some criticize its originality). In practice, when people say "Israeli," they almost always are describing the citizens of the state of Israel rather than any sort of standalone nation, so I will do the same.
The concept of the "nation-state" describes a state which occupies the same physical space that a nation is rooted to. But more than that, since its introduction, the concept of nation-states has brought with it an assertion that states and nations should correspond in a one-to-one relationship. If nations did not overlap, this might work beautifully: if I have a tie to a piece of land, a tie that I share with thousands, millions, or billions of others, along with similar culture and identity, it would be lovely for us to be recognized as the proprietors of that land, for us to defend for ourselves and govern in accordance with our shared ideals. But, nations do overlap, and states cannot.
When two nations overlap (as is the case at basically any point on the surface of the planet), the idea of nation-states fall apart. Both nations might be comfortable living in the same state (or with no state at all), which is ideal, unless more nations overlap and disagree. But if just one of the nations wants its own state (or worse, both), then issues arise, and usually war.
From the middle ages to World War I, Palestine was under Ottoman control. It was mostly Palestinian Arab. Broken down by religion, it was mostly Muslim, with a Christian population of about 10% and a small Jewish minority. It was largely (though not fully) safe for people of all Abrahamic religions. Around the start of the 20th century, a political movement formed around the idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Calling itself Zionism, the movement was upfront about its goal of colonizing Palestine, acknowledging that it would have to displace the native Palestinian population.
During the course of World War I, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917, describing its intent to support the Zionist project. For Britain, which would assume control of Palestine at the conclusion of the war, supporting Zionism was a strategic move, not one motivated by solidarity with the Jewish people.
After World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations decided that Palestine would be partitioned. Following a year of civil war, 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were violently displaced and dispossessed of land and belongings, including through massacres of civilians and the use of biological warfare. This is known as the Nakba. On top of Palestinians' homes, farms, and towns, the state of Israel declared its independence.
Over the following 75 years, the number of displaced Palestinians swelled into the millions, and civilians continued to be killed in the tens of thousands.
Following October 7th, 2023, which killed around 800 Israeli civilians, over 70,000 Palestinians have been directly killed by Israel. No schools or hospitals in Gaza still stand untouched by bombs. It is well-documented that Israel intentionally targets medics and journalists. Around 80% of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces are civilians, and 20–30% are children.
I recognize that this presentation is not unbiased. If you already know about the history of Palestine and Israel, or you pay attention to news or political discourse surrounding Palestine and Israel, you may largely agree with this framing, or strongly object to it. If it's the latter, I do think you are wrong, but my goal isn't to try to change your mind in a handful of pages. I will do my best to write in a way that accommodates a variety of worldviews.
Regardless of which side, if any, you consider yourself to align with, you will understand the depth of violence and horror which has been inflicted in Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of cumulative civilian deaths is an unfathomable number. It is difficult to imagine huddling in a bomb shelter as blasts shake the ground and cake concrete dust on your skin, no matter which side of the border you personally imagine yourself sheltering in. I personally think of the young children who have lost parents in Palestine. I think of medics and journalists who grew up aspiring to save lives and bring truth to light, and who died by sniper bullets or double-tap drone strikes. I think of the men and women who have faced torture and sexual assault at the hands of so-called Defense Forces. Maybe you feel deeper pain thinking of Israeli hostages, or young adults at a rave being shaken out of their music-induced dissociation by gunfire. If so, you still undoubtedly understand the depth of the pain and trauma that has come from the violence in Palestine, the region.
In spite of its initial purpose, the state of Israel does not increase the safety of the Jewish people. The bombing and starvation and settler violence inflicted on Palestinians incites violence against the soldiers and civilians of the occupying state. The borders sit as permanent scars. None of this is necessary. The splintering of the land into two states is unnecessary. Jews, Muslims, and Christians can live side by side. People of all races can live side by side. Living side by side does not mandate violent occupation, or segregation. It is possible to migrate without colonizing, without injury to those who already live there. It is possible to build a multiracial democracy which is safe for Jewish people. For fuck's sake, that's what all of us should aspire to, in all places!
When we say "Free Palestine," that is not a call for Palestinians to do the same thing to Israelis that Israelis did to Palestinians. You can't undo the damage of colonialism using the tactics of colonialism. "Free Palestine" is a call for a number of things, like the right for Palestinians to return to the homes and towns they were displaced from and dispossessed of, but it is first and foremost motivated by grief and rage for lives lost for a concept, for lines on a map. The "Free Palestine" part of my "Free Palestine by any means necessary" is a statement fundamentally opposed to violence.
If "Free Palestine" is as opposed to violence as I say, it might seem contradictory to pair it with "by any means necessary," a phrase which, interpreted literally and outside of any historical context, could be construed as a declaration of support for limitless violence. But I did not choose those words out of thin air.
When Malcolm X spoke the words "freedom by any means necessary," it played into his already-controversial public image. The next February, after acknowledging his controversial reputation, his eulogy would ask, "Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him."
Malcolm X would die without seeing the freedom he spoke so defiantly to secure. In poems and reflections written after his death, a recurring theme is that what struck you listening to Malcolm X, just as much as his controversial words, was his unapologetic dignity: a strength and confidence which he did not ask permission for, but instead built for himself. Maybe Malcolm X did say those words imagining his listeners taking up arms against their oppressors. But what I take from his words when I see them, and what so many writers describe in his time, is not a directive to fight one particular way or another, but instead a reminder that we do not have to run, hide, or fight according to the rules we impose on ourselves.
When you're a college student, just some kid, who chooses to bear witness to the depths of the world's suffering and oppression, you're confronted by unbearable powerlessness. How can you study in a bubble of fern-green lawns and Kittanning brick towers for four years, a drop in the ocean, while people are dying? You find yourself caught in a sort of fight-or-flight instinct. You can run from the world's problems, or try to shoulder them, desperately battling the guilt and trauma of failing to save the world. When you're boxed in like that, those controversial words don't say "fight a violent campaign of resistance," because you don't have a violent resistance campaign to fight. You have picket signs to paint, and a Student Government to bother, and classmates to inform, and skills to pick up, and friends to care for, and those are the means you have, and they are necessary. The hard way to fight isn't with guns; you can put a 17-year-old through a couple weeks of training and have a soldier. But it takes guidance from the strongest people in history to stare down forces you are near-powerless to stop for year after year, doing the "any means necessary" that you have available.
I hope that when most of my classmates saw "free Palestine by any means necessary," they too were jolted out of their flight response. I hope they thought about the means that they couldn't bring themselves to wield: scrolling through a news article, flipping through a dense book, having a hard conversation, holding a sign alone outside the University President's office, organizing a painting on The Fence, bringing a group of classmates to a protest.
So, was it anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli to paint "free Palestine by any means necessary" on The Fence? No, as I've described above. But, to go a step further, those words are the opposite of confrontational toward my Jewish or Israeli classmates. My Fence painting standing up for Palestine was directly inspired by Jewish resistance to injustice, particularly in Palestine.
When I need strength to continue fighting for things I believe in, when it becomes difficult as it inevitably does, I have a few places I tend to look. I've discussed some of those already, like the history and notable figures of the Black Power movement. But another one of those places is the continuing work of Jewish organizers, writers, and thinkers. In his short book "That precious strand of Jewishness that challenges authority," Leon Rosselson reflects on the intersections of Jewish identity, injustice, persecution, and resistance. He describes historical Jewish resistance to chattel slavery, 20th-century Fascism, and apartheid, among other grave injustices. He is clear in describing those not just as actions taken by people who happened to be Jewish, but as acts of solidarity thoroughly intertwined with, urged on by, Jewishness. "I thought of my parents' teaching that Jews should always be on the side of the oppressed," Rosselson writes at one point. "Sara Roy writes that to her parents, who were Holocaust survivors, Judaism meant bearing witness, raging against injustice and forgoing silence. It meant compassion, tolerance, and rescue. And there's this from Isaac Babel: I am a Jew because of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and the exterminated." (Sara Roy is a Jewish scholar and pro-Palestinian advocate, and Isaac Babel was a Russian [and later Soviet] Jewish writer executed by the NKVD.)
To be clear, I'm not Jewish. I came to CMU after living the first 18 years of my life in a suburb in the South, where I never once met someone who described themself to me as Jewish. In the two years since arriving as a blank slate, I've seen firsthand the precious strand of Jewishness that Rosselson described — I've seen it in the protests where Jewish Pittsburghers show up to loudly side with the oppressed, to use their physical presence to scream out "not in our name." I've gone to the occasional Shabbat dinner or Klezmer concert. I've read dozens of books and hand-folded zines — some long and dry, some short and punchy, some beautiful and vivid, nearly all containing songs. I have not seen a Jewishness which would cower from "freedom by any means necessary," I have seen a Jewishness which has the unique strength and moral clarity to carry centuries of tragedy and persecution not as a burden to silently shoulder, but instead a well of resilience with which to nurture hope in the moments when fighting back for one more second seems more than the spirit can bear.