On the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Melissa Peterson discusses the interconnections between the global struggles for disability justice and Palestinian self-determination.

The question of disability justice in Palestine cannot be adequately explored without an analysis of the political and historical context of Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land and the central role of the United States in sustaining this occupation. In The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar shines a light upon the debilitation of bodies caused by ongoing actions of the US-based Israeli Defense Force. Puar uses the term debility to demonstrate how a state can make an entire population available for mass injury. Debility, here, refers to a complete denial of disability justice. While Israel has adopted the United States’ and Western European framing of disability rights and pays lip service to the elimination of ableism, it is causing debility to Palestinians on a daily basis.

This debilitation of Palestinian lives by the Israeli occupation operates at multiple levels. In its most overt manifestations, the bombing of infrastructure during Israel’s various military incursions into Gaza, including the current genocidal campaign, makes mobility impossible for disabled Palestinians. The world has also seen in recent weeks how the IDF deliberately and systematically targets unarmed Palestinians. Increasingly, Palestinian civilians – disproportionately children – have been bombed while at school, at home or in hospital and this has maimed and killed the most vulnerable, from premature newborns to the very elderly, in a devastating way.

Beyond the most spectacular images of Israeli military violence, this genocidal and ableist logic also runs through the slow violence of colonial occupation. The continuous siege of Gaza since 2006 has led to a dire economic situation for Palestinian inhabitants, depriving Palestinians of food, water and electricity. Israeli restrictions on the movement of people and goods across both Gaza and the West Bank causes further problems of access for Palestinians seeking health care, clean water and food supplies as well as medicines and mobility aids. The Israeli military has also conducted widespread drone surveillance and large-scale spraying of farmland in Gaza with the aim of deliberately destroying crops and food supplies.

There has, as a result of this daily maiming of Palestinian people by the Israeli military and the structural violence of the occupation, been a growing percentage of disabled people in the Palestinian population. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported in 2022 that the number of Palestinians with disabilities in the occupied territories was about 93,000, constituting 2.1 percent of the population and 52 percent of these live in Gaza.

In all of this, Israel has at its disposal the most advanced technology in existence to kill, maim and incapacitate Indigenous Palestinians. More than $10 million of US military aid goes to Israel each day. Gaza is a testing ground for weapons and drones and the production of debilitated bodies is, in part, a source of profit for arms manufacturers. British and US defence companies stand to extract wealth from the Israeli military’s newly tested high-tech weaponry, hardware and surveillance systems.

The oppression of disabled people in Palestine and the United States, and the struggle against this ableist colonial order, are hence instrinsically connected in Puar’s account. The Israeli military have been sharing tactics and technology used in ‘counter-terrorism’ operations with the United States for over two decades. Following on from these exchanges, the Israeli military and the US police have worked closely together to share tactics of repression and surveillance against Black, Indigenous and other racialized people. The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 that led to nationwide protests against racist police brutality must be seen in light of this broader expansion of racial state violence. In challenging this violence, the Black Lives Matter movement and the struggle to end Israeli occupation of Palestine exist in solidarity with disability justice movements across the world.

Disability activists have a common interest with Palestinians in fighting for the liberation of Palestine. The United States military continues to spend military aid on the settler colonial project of Israel while underinvesting in vital supports for disabled people in America. Insofar as some humanitarian aid reaches Palestine, the administration of this aid to disabled Palestinians by NGOs can in conditions of continued colonial occupation be used to further Israel’s control over Palestinian lives, such as when Palestinian families are separated from their children for them to be sent across checkpoints to special needs services.

A politics of disability justice in solidarity with Palestine must demand liberation for Palestinian people while opposing the complicity of our own government in imperialism and militarism. The continued support of the Palestine solidarity movement, unions and civil society for the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is imperative to help bring an end to the military occupation.