2 Years (v.204)

In a sample of US disability organizations, 60% have said nothing about Gaza. What does silence say?

the top 2 “most popular” issues of this newsletter are both about Gaza, including the essay i published on this awful anniversary last year. this shows me something i try to keep understanding: Palestinian liberation is disability justice. today, i’m offering some reporting and analysis that, maybe you’ve already gathered, might press on some tender points.

thanks for being here.

-k

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Disability Solidarity Against Debilitation and Genocide

Before October 7, 2023 was already the deadliest year on record in the West Bank. Before October 7, Israel counted calories to determine how much food to allow into Gaza, the largest open-air prison on the planet. Before October 7, there were 76 years of apartheid.

This catastrophe didn’t start on October 7. Neither did disability solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Scholars and activists in the occupied territories and globally have offered an array of ways to approach ‘disability’ in Palestine, including…

• Rita Giacaman’s decades-long participatory action research and her 2021 literature review of conceptual frameworks for disability.

• Other work by scholars at Birzeit University, like Mouna Odeh Salem’s 1992 study of the Arab Society for the Physically Handicapped.

• The Disability Under Siege network.

• The Abolition and Disability Justice Coalition’s 2021 “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine.”

• Jasbir Puar’s 2017 book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, expanding a landmark 2009 article called “Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility and Capacity.”

What’s been published in the last 2 years, some of which is collected in the Disability Visibility Project’s “Palestine X Disability Justice Syllabus” (June 2024), builds on this work.

The message cannot be missed anywhere:
What makes settler colonial violence so lethal and mass-disabling in Palestine is tolerance of the same structures of ableist power elsewhere.

Organizational Discourse

Yet today, disability discourse struggles to offer meaningful support to end the genocide. As organizers Lyla Adwan-Kamara and Aman Ahluwalia-Hinrichs recently wrote of the UK context “organisations led by disabled people remain largely quiet.”

To understand this better, I analyzed 37 disability organizations in the US. I used a sampling rubric that included well-established and heavily-funded nonprofits, as well as newer organizations with little or no funding.¹ I reviewed their public digital communications over the last 2 years, looking for any language that addresses Israel’s genocide.²

60% have said nothing.

Of the 40% that have addressed Gaza, several articulated a collectively authored position through open letters like the one organized by the Disability Justice for Palestine Collective.

10 of the organizations in the sample include ‘disability justice’ in their mission language. For these organizations, the balance flips: only 2 have said nothing.

This analysis reveals a status quo where organizations that speak in the name of disability have nothing to say about Gaza. Some even maintain relationships inside the Zionist war machine.

Sources of Silence

Statements alone, with weak ties to a single political analysis, do not make good organizing. Hubris lurks in the focus on saying something. And none of this is to diminish those working tirelessly on disability justice for Gaza.

But when we zoom out, the silence is telling. So what do we think it says?

Part of it comes from the lack of recognition of the anti-imperialist basis of contemporary disability organizing. It’s convenient to think of disability-oriented anti-Zionism as rarefied and radical when the legibility of ‘disability justice’ within major institutions is outpacing the lasting changes disability justice calls for within those institutions. Thinking “it’s not our place” or “we can’t do much” becomes a way to dilute and misdirect what disability organizing means. This is often a betrayal of an organization’s own methods and mission and ‘theory of change,’ shocking for how casual it is.

But there is a deeper incompatibility: rights-based frameworks that dominate global disability discourse don’t make sense in Gaza. How someone in the US uses the word “trauma” or “PTSD” or even “health” cannot accurately account for the systemic and historical forms of debilitation that define life under Israeli terror. (For more on this, see the Crip News plainer language translation of Jasbir Puar’s writing published on Oct. 23, 2023).

“Everyone in Palestine is disabled.” This statement makes sense for those who take disability as an analytic of justice. You cannot claim disability justice without supporting Palestinian liberation.

“Everyone in Palestine is disabled.” This statement also makes sense for those who see disability as life unworthy of living, for those who will not understand disability as inherently political, for those who find any way to weaponize and maintain ableist violence.

Such is the funhouse mirror of disability discourse as the genocide enters a third year.

But it warps toward hope too. Right? Watching a world that lets so many die falsely can be the basis for hope as a practice. I think of Mosab Abu Toha’s words:

Go to your bed
and, in your sleep,
begin to memorize
your dream.

If you have the headspace this week, the team behind the film Severed, the story of Mohamad Saleh, has put a call out to gather your crip fam and register a screening.

I know there are many more calls, many more actions, many more things to read. Please drop them in the comments.

1. The sample included organizations/groups that meet all of the following criteria:

1. Work on advocacy, education, or organizing (not solely or mostly service provision)

2. Articulate a cross-disability perspective (not specific to impairment categories)

3. Have a national or international focus; and

4. Have been active in the last 2 years.

The sample is not exhaustive, but I believe it offers an accurate representation of US disability organizations.

2. I used a 3-prong method with the search terms “Gaza,” “Palestine,” “Palestinians,” “Israel,” and “genocide”:

1. I used the search function within the organizations’ websites.

2. I searched the organization’s website using Google (site:example.org + search terms) to find cached or indexed materials that may have been hidden or unlisted.

3. I searched the organizations’ names with the search terms on Google to find any record of communications hosted by other sites.