This past year, in the weeks leading up to the May 15 anniversary of the Nakba — the 1948 ethnic cleansing and mass exodus of the Palestinian people from their homes and lands — the people of East Jerusalem experienced the worst unrest in years. Racist Israeli settlers backed by Israeli police and army attacked Palestinians in their neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. The violence was a continuation of the settler colonial Israeli state’s policies and practices of ethnic cleansing and illegal land annexation.

The violence intensified during the holy month of Ramadan, as Israeli occupation forces — police in riot gear — raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque, gassed worshipers, attacked and arrested many Palestinians. Hamas, the political party and militant resistance group that governs Gaza, warned that if Israel did not halt its crackdown on Palestinian worshipers at the mosque it would retaliate. In response, rather than cease police brutality and stop settler lynch mobs from attacking Palestinians and shouting genocidal chants in the streets such as “Death to Arabs!” and “May your village burn!”, the Israeli military instead launched airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip — killing hundreds and injuring thousands of people.

Palestinians who took to social media to share videos of police brutality in East Jerusalem and the bombing of Gaza under the viral hashtags #SaveSheikhJarrah and #GazaUnderAttack saw their content censored. Meanwhile, Western media predominantly framed the violence in Jerusalem as “clashes” or “tensions” and framed the attack on Gaza as a “conflict” between two equal parties, suppressing the history of forced dispossession and settler colonial violence by the Israeli state. Palestinians rose up en masse in what has since become known as the Unity Intifada, uniting the geographically and politically fragmented Palestinian people across historic Palestine and the diaspora. In addition, demonstrations began to take place across the world opposing the Israeli attack on Gaza and the general brutality against Palestinians in East Jerusalem and elsewhere.

As thousands took to the streets organizers from the Movement for Black Lives, migrant, racial and climate justice struggles, LGBTQ and feminist movements joined in solidarity demonstrations. Idle No More, an Indigenous movement in Turtle Island — a common Indigenous name that refers to North America — released a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people and “against ongoing Israeli attacks and enforced settler colonialism.” In their statement, Idle No More recognized the actions of the Israeli state as an act of genocide and called upon the US and Canadian governments as well as the United Nations to boycott, divest from and sanction the Israeli government for “international crimes against humanity.” In the case of genocide, silence is complicity, they point out. The statement ends by stating that “Israel has one of the largest armies in the world today and it is heavily funded by the United States government. To call these actions a ‘war’ with two equally opposing sides is an erasure of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing.”

Like Palestinians, Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island, have been resisting settler colonial violence and the endless ways it has impacted upon their lives. Since its founding in 2012, Idle No More has been resisting the Canadian state’s violation of Indigenous treaties and the theft and destruction of unceded territories and water by the government and industry. Idle No More’s statement is the latest expression in a long tradition of political solidarity that dates back decades, demonstrating their affinity with the Palestinians in their struggle against settler colonialism.

Like Palestinians, Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island, have been resisting settler colonial violence and the endless ways it has impacted upon their lives.

In a similar fashion to the long tradition of solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation struggles, the solidarity that exists between Palestinian and Indigenous struggles is about relationality and extending kinship. One year earlier, in February 2020, the Wet’suwet’en (a First Nations people composed of five clans that live in the interior of British Columbia) rose up to refuse and resist a Supreme Court of Canada injunction that ordered them to evacuate their ancestral lands to make way for the Coastal GasLink Pipeline. Palestinian leftists and Palestine solidarity activists in Canada put their bodies on the front lines during the railway, highway and port blockades and infrastructure shutdown led by Indigenous nations. During these uprisings, the Boycott National Committee in Palestine issued a statement expressing their solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

“As Palestinians, we have first-hand experience with a colonial power, Israel’s regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid, that systemically works to dispossess, divide and strip us of our lands and resources. We know too well, from our own experience, that the TransCanada Coastal Gaslink pipeline aims to steal Wet’suwet’en land, use resource extraction to solidify control over Indigenous territories, destroy the environment and violate Indigenous laws. We also know that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) attacks, sanctioned by the Trudeau government, against the Hereditary Wet’suwet’en leadership, matriarchs and land defenders, are used to violate Indigenous sovereignty. The RCMP is employing tactics and equipment similar to Israel’s government, including Caterpillar bulldozers, to seize indigenous lands.”

The statement underscored the ways that settler colonial and imperialist forces undermine Indigenous political orders across geographies using similar structures, tactics and technologies of violence for land theft, territorial expansion, resource extraction, repression and the criminalization of resistance.

On January 28, 2020, at the same time Canada was being shut down in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en struggle, the Trump administration in the US announced the self-proclaimed “Deal of the Century,” a so-called “peace plan” for Israel-Palestine and the broader Middle East. The plan was devised by Israel in collaboration with the Trump administration and in consultation with officials from Gulf States, but without Palestinian input or consent. This plan sought to legitimize the annexation of Palestinian land, water and other natural resources.

While the world was battling against the COVID-19 pandemic — the effects of which were especially severe on the disenfranchised — the Israeli government alongside the Trump administration attempted to formalize its annexation of Palestine. Around the globe, people took to the streets in protest to express their outrage about Trump’s plan and in Canada, Indigenous activists mobilized in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

The solidarity between Indigenous struggles against colonial capitalist violence from Palestine to Turtle Island is part of a long tradition of organized resistance that has been built over many decades, as they have been resisting settler colonial capitalist regimes that have attempted to eliminate these societies from their homes, lands and life. The intensification of colonial violence across these geographies, the continuous theft of land, water and natural resources and the environmental destruction caused by the colonial regimes of Canada and Israel have led movements to build what Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Simpson calls “constellations of co-resistance.”

As imperialist capitalist violence across settler geographies is intensifying, constellations of co-resistance offer a way out of settler-colonialist thought and representation by building collective power between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities who are fighting different aspects of the same colonial and capitalist system. Decades of solidarity between the Indigenous movements of Turtle Island and the Palestinian liberation movement have affirmed that constellations of connection like direct action and popular mobilization to disrupt settler economies and governance are effective in pushing the agenda of Indigenous liberation.

At the same time, the history of Indigenous internationalist solidarity has taught us that social movements should not only look to one another based on their historical similarities, but also examine the specificities of the colonial condition within their local geographies. This helps to foster an understanding of the similarities as well as the differences between struggles, and points to the strategic benefits of conjoining struggles as comrades and peoples fighting for mutual liberation.

Settler colonial regimes

Canada and Israel are both settler colonial states shaped by racial capitalism and built on Indigenous dispossession and slave, migrant and indentured labor. Settler colonialism in each geography has been structured in analogous ways on the basis of legal apparatuses, land theft, dispossession, restriction of movement, racial segregation, denial of national status, gendered and sexual violence, resource extraction, racialized labor exploitation, policing and incarceration. The fundamental goal of a settler colonial regime is to eliminate the Indigenous people from the land — either through elimination or assimilation – and replace them with a white settler society and their systems of governance. Land theft and dispossession have played a central role in the history of capitalist accumulation, the enclosure of the commons and the privatization of land that underpins the formation of Canada and Israel as settler colonies.

Though the Canadian and Israeli states share similar tactics and strategies in their pursuit of Indigenous dispossession and racialized labor exploitation, the two states also have distinct histories of state formation and different political and legal apparatus that shape settler governance in both of these contexts. While Indigenous peoples across both geographies have been resisting settler colonialism, using various methods specific to their local contexts, it is imperative that organizers and scholars avoid conflating the two settler colonial regimes as each geography has a place-specific history and state structure.

Viewing the relations between the Canadian and Israeli states and their respective Indigenous populations through the analytical framework of capitalism and settler colonialism has allowed for a structural analysis between Indigenous resistance movements to expose how their struggles are connected. Consider, for example, the police and military technologies that are used to repress Indigenous land and water protectors across Turtle Island and Black Lives Matter activists in Ferguson and Baltimore and to surveil migrants crossing the Canada and US borders. These technologies were first used on Palestinians, then proudly marketed as “battle tested” before being exported to police departments, border agencies, homeland security, and military abroad.

Strengthening ties and mobilizing in collective action    

The most recent resurgence of solidarity between Indigenous peoples and Palestinians in Canada was predated and prefigured by a first wave of internationalist solidarity at the height of the Cold War in the 1970s. This was during the era of Red Power, anti-imperialist movements and Third World decolonization, in which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) figured prominently.

In 1970s Vancouver, an organization calling itself the Third World People’s Coalition — comprised of several organizations, including the Canada Palestine Association, the Native Study Group (NSG), the African Progressive Study Group and the Indian People’s Association in North America, among others — organized many actions and educational events. This included hosting a PLO delegation that spoke with Red Power activists in Vancouver in 1976, mobilizing support for Palestinian revolution. It also included building bonds between struggles, like at the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs conference, where Palestinian revolutionary films were screened, attendees read and circulated the autobiography of the Palestinian militant Leila Khaled and letters condemning the Canadian media’s denunciation of the PLO were distributed.

This raised the consciousness of those who were active in the political struggle for Indigenous rights. As each movement educated itself about the other’s struggles, it enabled organizers to strengthen ties and mobilize in collective actions, such as the weekly solidarity demonstrations in 1976 when Leonard Peltier — a leader in the American Indian Movement (AIM) — was detained in Vancouver before his extradition to the US. Leonard Peltier was accused — and later convicted — of the killing of two FBI agents during a confrontation between the Bureau and AIM on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. Peltier, who has always denied the charges, was imprisoned in 1977 and is still incarcerated today after 40 years in prison, despite years of campaigning for his clemency on the part of Indigenous movements, Amnesty International and high-profile figures such as Nelson Mandela.

The most recent resurgence of solidarity between Indigenous peoples and Palestinians in Canada was predated and prefigured by a wave of internationalist solidarity in the 1970s.

In 1990, during the Siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawá:ke — commonly known as the Oka Crisis, a 78-day armed standoff in the settler town of Oka, Quebec between the Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke on the one hand, and the Quebec police and Canadian Army on the other — Palestinian activists affiliated with the PLO participated in direct actions during this seminal struggle. The tactical lesson Indigenous warriors had learned from Palestinians that were waging their First Intifada in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1980s were put into practice. In particular, as their land defenders were being criminalized, the First Intifada became an inspiration and model of civil disobedience that would allow them to engage in militant resistance while avoiding retaliation by the state.

A decade later, in the mid-2000s, a new generation of Palestinian and Palestine solidarity activists further developed their relationships with Indigenous liberation struggles by making connections between apartheid systems. Activists connected settler-colonial displacement of Indigenous people across geographies, linking infrastructures of settler colonialism such as the South African pass system, Israeli checkpoints and apartheid walls, as well as carceral systems and police and military infrastructure designed by settler-colonial states that were learning from one another.

In the mid-2000s the analytical connections made between the Native reservations in the US and Canada and the Bantustan system in South Africa led organizers to identify apartheid as a core feature of settler colonialism. Organizers looked at the historical antecedents of the reservation systems in North America to understand how these logics are prevalent today in occupied Palestine. Understanding Canadian settler colonialism as an apartheid system allowed for activists to connect their struggles across colonized territories.

At the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, delegates declared Zionism as a form of racism and the Palestinian reality of living under Israeli apartheid became far better understood. The Canadian state was against the delegates’ stance on Israel-Palestine, thus Canadian political leaders labeled the conference as an “anti-Semitic hatefest.” This further strengthened Palestinian organizations and the Palestine solidarity movement in Canada to recognize the interconnections between Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism in Canada and the need to support Indigenous sovereignty struggles across Turtle Island. It also created the opportunity for pro-Palestinian groups to clarify the nature of Zionism as an exclusivist colonial and racial project, similar to other settler regimes.