No pride in genocide: Disability rights activists demand justice for Palestine

Somerville, Massachusetts — Dozens of disability justice and pro-Palestine activists gathered outside Somerville City Hall, on July 11 to demand an end to U.S support for the ongoing Zionist genocide in Gaza, which has killed and disabled hundreds of thousands of people. Disabled Palestinians are being disproportionately harmed, lacking even basic medical treatment in a health care infrastructure decimated by Israel Occupation Forces’ terror bombing.

One sign read: “The Gaza Strip has the highest rate of child amputees anywhere on the planet.”

All children in Gaza require mental health treatment to deal with the trauma inflicted by the Zionist genocidal war. According to a study published July 5 in the Lancet, a British medical journal, it is “estimated that up to 186,000 deaths” in Gaza are attributable to the occupation forces. But the study’s authors acknowledge that even this estimate is conservative, and the number of those killed and disabled continues to rise. (tinyurl.com/2bds7sbh)

Organized by Somerville for Palestine, the action took place at the town’s Disability Pride Flag Raising. Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne, attended in a supposed display of support for the disabled community, even as she and other liberal bourgeois politicians remain complicit in the mass murder and mass disabling of Palestinians.

End wars to obtain ‘disability justice’!

As a Somerville for Palestine Instagram post declared: “Disability justice is not possible without an end to war and occupation!” (tinyurl.com/bdefzkrw)

An organizer with autism shared the story of Ahmad, a 13-year-old Palestinian who has lost his entire family since October 7. “Reading this story, I thought about how, as a disability rights advocate, fighting for increased resources for autistic people doesn’t just mean resources for autistic people like me, it also means increased resources and safety for autistic people like Ahmad, and it means justice for all disabled people,” they said.

The speaker continued: “The systems that hold disabled people back are also the same ones that hold Palestinians back. As we know, there is no pride in genocide and especially no Disability Pride. Disability justice means an end to settler colonialism and violence against oppressed people everywhere!”

The protesters confronted Ballantyne, demanding that she condemn the racist and ableist violence inflicted on Palestinians and support the complete divestment from and boycott of the companies arming and supplying the Zionist settler regime.

Brian Shea, a Somerville resident and decades-long disability rights activist, said, “There’s no disability pride or disability justice in the imperial core here, where people have access, however grudgingly, to tech or other things like that, while there’s this kinetic active genocide going on.

Shea emphasized: “Settler colonialism has traditionally disabled and maimed people; it has done that to subdue groups of people indigenous to whichever countries that were taken over. That started here in Turtle Island — in Canada and the U.S.; the Belgians did it in the Congo; the African diaspora that’s here, that came from West Africa. Of those who made it across the Middle Passage, a lot of them were maimed and tortured and killed. Disability has been a part of settler colonialism and a part of capitalism.”

Engels on capitalism and ‘social murder’

As Shea stressed, the dehumanization of disability is fundamental to capital’s logic — a phenomenon defined by Friedrich Engels as “social murder” in “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845). Shea explained: “What social murder has come to mean is a calculus that is made by the capitalist class, by the owners of capital, that certain people amongst those who produce their wealth and own none of it, that it’s okay if they don’t live.”

Ed Childs, a longtime union organizer in UNITE HERE Local 26 and a Workers World Party member, highlighted the essential role of disability justice in the global resistance to imperialism, which he linked to the fight against austerity and for disability justice in the U.S.: “The money they’re taking from disabled people is used to disable people. The disability movement here is no different from the fight for disability justice in Palestine and all other regions devastated by U.S imperialism. We have the same enemy.”