Lessons on disability justice and Palestine solidarity

As a Palestinian-led educational organisation, our approach at Makan is grounded in a belief that education is a liberatory act that can lay the ground for structural change. As such, we understand that education is an ongoing process, not just for the people we work with, but for us as educators. We’re always learning. 

We regularly re-assess the role of education in what we do, thinking about how it impacts and directly supports the work of the wider liberation movement. Initially, the organisation was hesitant to move beyond Palestine to a global lens, because of a fear of not knowing enough about other struggles, as well as being targeted in a hostile environment. But this really began to change during the Unity Intifada, a moment that marked a shift in the global solidarity movement as understandings of the interconnectedness of our struggles developed and grew. 

In this article we are going to reflect on our process as an educational organisation of expanding the scope of our work to contextualise Palestine within wider liberation struggles. Specifically, we want to focus on our experience with educating people about disability justice and Palestine, and what we can learn from these experiences. 

Expanding the scope of Makan’s work 

Our focus on contextualising Palestine within other struggles came as a result of shifts like the Unity Intifada, but it also started, as it often does, from a place of our lived experiences as individuals.

We’re continually working to create an organisational culture where people can bring more of themselves into the work. In other words: what kind of education would we have needed and benefitted from throughout our lives, and how can this question help guide our pedagogical approaches?

While lived experience can be a great place to start, though, so much of our learning and actions begin to move beyond just ourselves. You begin to consider how important it is that our struggles are different, and connected. 

Collectively, we are constantly trying to re-evaluate our motivations and impact in the work we do. Recently we started centering not only a local lens using the settler colonialism framework, but a global lens using imperialism as a framework for understanding Palestine. This has been happening in tandem with our work contextualising Palestine within wider struggles of queer liberation, women’s liberation, disability justice, and climate justice. 

Engagement in disability justice 

In 2023, in collaboration with the Disabled-led organisation Diversity and Ability, we first created and delivered our workshop ‘Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Justice in Palestine’. 

Our observation over the last few years, when we’ve hosted this training, is that it receives much less interest and application submissions than our other public workshops, and it isn’t requested as a tailored training as often. The workshops are always generative, with wonderful, engaged participants, but they have been consistently almost exclusively with people who self-identify as Disabled. 

Within the wider Palestine movement, amongst people who aren’t or don’t necessarily think of themselves as being directly affected, disability isn’t something that’s being prioritised. This isn’t to cast judgement, but to identify that there’s a gap in transformative education on disability justice that we need to talk about openly, to encourage that conversation. Part of our role is trying to figure out how to encourage our audiences to centre disability, not to look at it as an afterthought, but as core to the Palestinian liberation movement. 

Early in our attempts to centre disability justice, we had calls and conversations with Disabled Palestinian scholars and activists on the ground in historic Palestine and living abroad. Something that came out of these conversations is a lack of conceptualisation about disability justice within Palestinian society broadly, as well as critiques of Western-led attempts to apply concepts without fully contextualising the frameworks to the conditions Palestinians are experiencing. 

A lack of funds and structural support for this work in Palestine also gave rise to questions around how to anchor what disability and debilitation looks like for Palestinians subjected to imperial, settler colonial and apartheid violence.

On the other hand, attendees to these workshops tend to be familiar with mainstream ways of conceptualising and approaching disability, but are less familiar with decolonial ways of thinking about disability. There is clearly room for growth within disability movements by bringing in Palestine and decolonial thinking (more on this later).

From pinkwashing to disability justice, all issues are connected

At Makan, we work to strengthen people’s ability to talk about Palestine in a simple manner and to be able to situate Palestine within the context of other human rights, social justice, and global liberation movements.

Currently, our other main workshops connecting Palestine to other struggles are our Gender and Sexuality and Climate Justice workshops, which both receive a lot of interest. 

Gender and sexuality is at the forefront of people’s minds because of Israeli pinkwashing and purplewashing: in other words, because Israel is weaponising feminism and LGBTQI+ people as a propaganda tactic, even those who may not be directly affected are interested because they recognise it as propaganda, and want to know how to combat it. 

Sometimes this interest is limited to debunking pinkwashing and purplewashing, and might not necessarily go deeper into an interest in combating homophobia, transphobia or misogyny. In the case of disability, Israel isn’t spending millions on a propaganda effort to create the image of itself as being disabled-friendly, so there isn’t so much interest. However, this means that instead of the conversation being led by Israeli propaganda, we can set the terms of the conversation ourselves. 

When it comes to climate, in contrast to disability, people are increasingly aware of how they are affected by the climate crisis. It’s increasingly affecting people in the Global North – for example with wildfires in Los Angeles and floods in North West England – and is being felt as an existential threat. Many people might not think that disability affects them. But we need to encourage an understanding that we are all affected by disability: as a lot of disability scholars point out, if you live long enough, everyone will become disabled at some point. 

Now, we are not all Palestinians! As Mohammed El-Kurd writes in his article, despite the solidarity and the chants of “In our thousands in our millions, we are Palestinians”, there is a huge chasm in the experience and level of sacrifice between us and Palestinians on the ground. But while it is important for us to understand the differences in our experiences and material conditions, we can find certain points of resonance, and one of these is in the ubiquity of disability. 

We all need healthcare, so many of us know, although of course to a varying degree, how it feels to be dehumanised and have our autonomy taken from us in this way through our experiences with our healthcare system. When we can draw the connection between Palestine and disability in this way, this can give us an avenue for thinking about our own liberation and about solidarity with Palestine. 

Palestinian and disability justice beyond charity 

Disability can push forward or challenge our thinking about Palestine in a lot of ways. For example, in studies on disability, the two main models that have been identified as defining hegemonic approaches to disability are the medical model and the charity model. The medical model configures disability as an individual, medical problem, seeing people as disabled by their mental or physical impairments. 

The medical model works in tandem with the charity model, which frames Disabled people as unfortunates in need of pity and charitable services, engaging them through the lens of victimhood. These models actually also dominate the ways the international community engages with Palestinians broadly and Disabled Palestinians specifically, and is one way of examining the connection between the two struggles, in particular the dehumanisation and disempowerment at play in both. 

For example, the prevailing response to the genocide in Gaza, which is also a mass disabling event, is often to donate to medical and humanitarian aid charities. This is important in the short term, but it encourages a cycle of dependence, and it doesn’t tackle the settler-colonial structure, which is in itself a debilitating structure that will also only continue to disable Palestinian people and ensure their continued reliance on aid. 

This parallels a broader structural issue facing the Palestinian struggle which is NGO-isation, where NGOs take over political life. These international NGOs, that rely on foreign – usually Western – funding, diffuse and subdue political anger and resistance by providing services via an apolitical framework. 

It is a systematic way of subduing and weakening political resistance by turning these issues into social issues that can be fixed through simply changing people’s attitudes, or donating, or tackling small environmental factors, rather than tackling the overarching political structure that creates and exacerbates these issues. 

In a circular way, it manufactures continued dependency on charities and NGOs because the lack of political approach makes it difficult to actually build autonomy and agency for Palestinians and Disabled Palestinians, and so they are made dependent on these structures that harm them long-term.

Disability and Debility

Centering settler colonialism as the structure which disables and debilitates Palestinians is key, as Jasbir Puar puts forward in her book The Right to Maim. Israeli settler colonialism exploits disability, creates disability or disables people, and creates a debilitating environment for all Palestinians. 

When we talk about Israeli settler colonialism disabling people, we mean that it creates mental and physical disabilities for many Palestinians. For example, the Israeli Occupation Forces uses maiming or a so-called “shoot to maim” policy as a military tactic. The reason for this is that maiming is good for Israel’s public image, as maiming is understood as less violent or sensational than killing, and, as Puar puts it, the “injured do not count in the ‘dry statistics of tragedy.”

Moreover Israeli settler colonialism creates a debilitating environment, even when it is not creating an immediate recognisable or easily definable ‘disability’. In Puar’s words: “The term “debilitation” is distinct from the term “disablement” because it foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled.” In other words, even when Israeli colonisation is not inflicting and creating what is typically understood as a disability in Palestinians, it creates a prevailing debilitating environment which slowly wears populations down and in the long-term will cause poor health outcomes and most likely early death.

As one example, there are countless long-term physical and psychological health impacts from malnourishment, water restriction, lack of sanitation and insufficient medical care. Such slow and normalised violence has been a tactic of other colonial regimes. As another, the intergenerational effect of colonial famines in South Asia continues to affect South Asians’ vulnerability to heart disease and diabetes. 

All of this benefits settler colonialism as, at its core, it works to limit the Indigenous Palestinian population’s capacity for steadfastness and resistance. We can see how the genocide in Gaza not only disables and debilitates human beings but also infrastructure, with much of the work done by Palestinians on the ground being destroyed. 

We might think of the goal of settler colonialism as the complete elimination of an Indigenous population, but Israel’s tactics show that greatly reducing, debilitating and disabling the Indigenous population is an efficient way for the regime to subjugate them. 

One big takeaway from all of this is that as anti-colonial activists we must think of disability justice as a key component of our struggle – as creating and exploiting disability is a clear key tactic for the forces that oppress us.