Free Learning for a Free Palestine

A Palestine Liberation Education Starter Kit

Image source: Unknown artist, from Palestinian Affairs vol. 35 (July 1974)

The goal of education is to correct the march of history. For this reason we need to study history and to apprehend its dialectics in order to build a new historical era, in which the oppressed will live, after their liberation by revolutionary violence, from the contradiction that captivated them.

— Ghassan Kanafani

Introduction to this project

To work collectively toward the liberation of Palestine, we must organize transnationally. A first step to building transnational organization is collective education—education that teaches us who has power, how power is maintained and used, and how we can challenge it. Israeli propaganda would have us think that what is happening in Palestine is hopelessly complicated, too historically and politically complex to take a side. It is not. We offer this list of resources, freely available to all, as a starting point. We are not the first or only group to compile educational resources on the genocide in Palestine, but this starter kit represents what we’ve found most helpful and what pertains to our specific areas of expertise.

Palestine has been colonized since the early 20th century. Israel and its imperial allies, like the United States and the United Kingdom, are continuously and actively profiting from the exploitation and dispossession of Palestinians. We can trace the development and creation of the Israeli colonial project in Palestine through history, looking at moments where power was institutionalized at the expense of Palestinians. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for example, European powers shaped a Middle East subservient to the imperial accumulation of wealth. The Balfour Declaration committed the British Empire to Israeli colonization of Palestine. The Israeli state’s institutions, leaders, and practices emerged from militias and terror groups like the Irgun and Haganah over the years leading up to 1948. Methodical programs, like Plan Dalet, were planned and carried out to displace Palestinians, take their land, and build a supremacist state predicated on religious (Jewish) superiority. Since 1948, the Israeli state has continued its assault on Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, as it seeks to permanently replace them with its own ideal citizens through illegal land seizures and settlements. As the examples above indicate, such structures of extreme violence and exploitation are evident historically. Yet, crucially, those structures still exist and are, in fact, constantly expanding, as current (Dec. 2024) Israeli plans for the annexation of northern Gaza and southern Lebanon demonstrate. 

Hasbara, which literally translates to “explaining” in Hebrew and is colloquially understood to mean Israeli state propaganda, remains at the forefront of Israel’s tactics of obfuscation and genocide justification. Hasbara and the normalization of Israel’s colonial project in Palestine have been historically very successful in the United States. Billions of dollars in foreign aid, and billions more in military and economic trade, flow from the United States to Israel each year. Both the Democratic and Republican parties, save for a small group of dissenting politicians, have been uncritical, staunch “supporters of Israel” since its establishment. Police departments in the United States send officers to Israel to learn violent suppression techniques and test the latest developments in weaponry. American universities work with Israeli weapons manufacturers and send students on study-abroad trips to bolster the American-Israeli military-industrial complex. 

The question of why the United States and other imperial powers have always sided with Israel is not one of mere ideological commitment. The United States does not send Israel billions of dollars simply because U.S. politicians just happen to like the idea of Israel. Capitalism has made the colonization of Palestine profitable. Forcibly taking Palestinian land, bombing Gaza and Lebanon, and building Israeli settlements in the West Bank—these are all highly profitable endeavors. Indeed, the colonization of Palestine has always been profitable for some. It is not in the interest of imperial powers, like the U.S. and Great Britain, who are actively accumulating wealth, to stop accumulating wealth. The liberation of Palestine is a deeply unprofitable prospect for those at the top of the global political and economic hierarchy. U.S. companies involved in the manufacture of weapons sent to Israel profit. Politicians who receive money from pro-Israel lobbying groups accumulate power and wealth from their support for the destruction of Palestine.

How, then, do those of us situated in the imperial core unite in solidarity with Palestinian liberation in the face of nuclear weapons, gargantuan militaries, and extreme state violence? There is an active movement in Palestine and Lebanon which, through armed resistance, is working towards the liberation of Palestine. We, alongside millions, support decolonization by any means necessary—including armed struggle. Palestinians on the ground and in the diaspora are also engaged in unarmed resistance through extensive and targeted economic campaigns to make Israel less profitable, as exemplified in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). All support and solidarity from the belly of the beast stem from a shared understanding of what must be resisted and overthrown. This is why radical education—the building of critical consciousness paired with collective action and reflection—is so important.

Educating ourselves about the Israeli colonization of Palestine is simultaneously a de-education of what we have been taught. We must not only be aware of the specific ways in which power operates in Palestine, but we must also think about our place in those power structures. The U.S., after all, is a settler colony just like Israel, itself a system of ongoing genocide and displacement of the Indigenous communities of Turtle Island and the extraction of the land’s natural resources for exploitation and profit. Only by engaging in deep, critical thought about the conditions of our lives with others can we begin to make material impacts. The resources in this starter kit will help you understand what is happening in Palestine.

We have organized the freely accessible resources here thematically and by media type so you can begin wherever you’d like. For example, if you are interested in why many Black and Indigenous activists also support Palestinian liberation, begin with our Solidarity & BDS section. If you need a primer on historical events like the Nakba of 1948, or just want to better understand settler colonialism and how it applies to Palestine, visit Zionism & Settler Colonialism. The beauty of these resources is that they are highly interrelated. You will learn about the history of Palestine when you read about solidarity. You will understand solidarity when you read about feminism and queer liberation. While we’ve tried to keep things simple by organizing each source under just one thematic heading, all of the pieces are in conversation with the others. 

We hope to support a collective education on Palestinian liberation. Education that is critical of mystification is itself liberatory. It teaches us that we, as social actors, are agents capable of generating radical change. Education on Palestinian liberation can be liberatory itself, but in the process of interacting with and learning from the resources here, we begin to ask the question, What can we do? There are many ways to get involved, but here is a place to start: Take what you learn and share it with your communities. Studying a resource and discussing it with others is a longstanding, highly effective method of building political consciousness and organization. Think of each resource in this kit as one piece of a larger puzzle. As more pieces are gathered and arranged next to each other, a picture emerges. We learn not only who profits from the colonization of Palestine but also how to overthrow them. And we must learn these truths together.

How to use this starter kit

The starter kit can be navigated by topic (e.g., anti-Zionism) or media type (e.g., books). Below, under the question, What types of media are you looking for?, you will see buttons for each type of media. Similarly, under the question, What topics are you interested in?, you will see buttons for each topic. When you click one of these buttons, you will be directed to a webpage listing related resources from our starter kit. These webpages are organized by media type (for topic pages) or topic (for media type pages) with buttons to jump to the corresponding section of the webpage. Each listed resource has a hyperlink that, when clicked, will take you to the resource on a new webpage. 

Let’s say you are interested in listening to podcasts. You start by clicking on the Podcasts button under What media are you looking for? Now on the Podcasts page, you see buttons for each topic available and a list of podcast episodes organized by these topics. You’re interested in Resistance podcast episodes and click on that labeled button. Now you’re further down the webpage and see one podcast episode listed under Resistance. Now you click on the episode hyperlink and are taken to a webpage wherein you can listen to that episode.

Content warning: Please be aware that due to the nature of colonization in Palestine, much of the linked content contains descriptions and discussions of violence, including sexual violence.

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