Denver DSA unequivocally stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their fight for liberation from the apartheid regime of Israel. Palestinians have endured 75 years of dispossession, colonization, desecration, torture, and confinement at the hands of the Israeli government, enabled financially, politically, and culturally by the United States. The path to liberation must include ceasing all U.S. aid to Israel, lifting the blockade of Gaza, ending Zionist settler-colonialism, and ensuring the right for Palestinians to return to their homeland.

Yesterday, a wealthy and well-funded nuclear power with the financial, political, and cultural support of the United States began forcibly evacuating 1.1 million civilians from Gaza City during an ongoing indiscriminate carpet-bombing campaign which has already killed thousands of civilians, injured tens of thousands, and displaced hundreds of thousands. Israel has cut off food, water, fuel, electricity, and medical care from Gaza’s 2.3 million citizens, half of whom are children. These civilians have been deemed “human animals” by the Israeli Defense Minister overseeing these attacks, who committed to “treat them accordingly” – an open declaration of genocide. Yet even now, the American war machine readies itself to ship more weapons and send more military funding to support Israel’s extermination of the Palestinian people for daring to resist their brutal, unlivable conditions.

Border walls, military checkpoints, crippling sanctions, restricted water and electricity, food scarcity, impoverishment, denial of medical care, and routine bombings are the material conditions that Palestinians have been forced to live under for over 75 years. Backed by the US, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) brutally murder Palestinians with impunity, over 8,000 since 2000 and thousands since October 7. The IOF detains 600 Palestinian children every year and keeps over 5,000 Palestinians imprisoned, a quarter of whom are held without charges or trial. For 16 years, Gaza has been transformed into an open-air prison, wherein the IOF concentrates 2.3 million people in an area smaller than Denver and bombs them in politically-motivated campaigns they sadistically term “mowing the grass.” 

Bloodshed is a universal tragedy. But under apartheid and occupation, some lives are deemed more precious than others. The negative blowback of apartheid should come as no shock; people who are oppressed will perpetually seek ways to free themselves from that oppression. The murder of Palestinians has been a systemically invisibilized occurrence for decades. When Palestinians quietly suffer the daily violence inflicted on them, the West calls that “peace”. Denver DSA recognizes that the only true and lasting peace must be predicated on liberation from occupation, and it is towards that goal that we resolve ourselves today.

We call on all DSA members and endorsed DSA electeds to stand unequivocally in support of Palestinian people’s right to resist. We encourage all DSA chapters to stand with the people of Palestine and organize turn-out to local demonstrations.

May Palestine be free, from the river to the sea.