We, as activists, employees, and former employees of civil Search and Rescue (SAR) organisations and No Border networks in Europe, in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, denounce the silence of our organisations and collectives about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and address the systematic stifling of every initiative within our community to break the silence around Israel’s violence in Gaza, the vicious Israeli attacks across Palestine, occupied Syria, Southern Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq, and the complicity of Western colonial powers like Germany, US, UK, Italy, and France.  

The chilling effect on solidarity with Palestine

We have witnessed the systemic silencing of people who express their solidarity with Palestine within the SAR community, especially in German organisations and collectives. This has become obvious in many situations: the censorship of articles, the vetoing of statements, the silencing of members and employees, and at times threats and people being removed for expressing solidarity with Palestine. People have been extorted and coerced into fearing for their financial livelihood, their social network, and access to the structures necessary to carry out the work (vessels, funding, etc). This has been an open secret within SAR networks for a while and the source of much distress for many within the community.  

Many of us have been made to feel a constant and growing unease in talking about Palestine in SAR groups, be it on the ships or in online meetings. The silence of these organisations, their political positioning, and the atmosphere of fear and discomfort, are making members reconsider their involvement in the SAR rotations and organisational work. It is infuriating to witness organisations, networks, and activists who come from the grassroots and claim to foster politics of horizontality, use tactics of intimidation and fail to address the abuse of power and the practice of silencing. Any criticism of the Zionist entity and its crimes has led to distorted accusations of antisemitism. Initiatives to write and publish about the genocide, and even about Israel’s leading surveillance and weapon industry, first tested on Palestinians and then sold to repressive regimes worldwide, including the murderous border regimes in Europe and the Mediterranean, were met with uncommunicated top-down shadow banning and censorship. 

Whiteness and abuse of power

The SAR community has extremely valuable members from racialised communities and from Global Majority countries who are sadly forced to do tireless work on top of their tasks to address racist, colonial, and white gazes and practices within our groups and across the network. It is not a hidden fact that we have a very serious and chronic problem in power dynamics, hegemony, and whiteness within and across our groups. It is blatantly obvious that the SAR community is predominantly cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, and white, Northern European to be exact. Disgracefully, this has manifested unapologetically during the past ten months of Israeli genocide, with some organisations exploiting their financial power and privileges to coerce a political discourse inconsistent with our commitments to justice and freedom for all. 

It is high time to address these power dynamics and create structures to tackle them now and in the long run. There have been attempts here and there, but we are far from doing the much-needed work. Just like on many other issues, Palestine once again inspires us to take action even in our own groups. Critical whiteness workshops and awareness briefings are not enough, specifically when they are not completed by action. We can no longer be silent in the face of the hegemonic uncritical whiteness in our networks, and we refuse to allow some of those in positions of power abuse their privileges to further their own political agendas. 

Creating a safer space for No Border activists from Global Majority countries and from racialized communities in Europe cannot happen if we do not challenge the dynamics of power and continue to reproduce them. It cannot happen if we are practising only selective solidarity based on the identity of the coloniser or the colonised. While public stands have been taken and encouraged for Ukraine, Kurdistan, Iran, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and other just causes in the world and against other forms of state-sponsored violence, silence around the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Israel’s ongoing crimes expose the double standards in our networks and the inherent anti-Palestinian racism, especially in countries like Germany. 

We refuse to allow the Palestinian people to be reduced to victims and forced into defencelessness to pamper Germans using them to reckon with their past and present, weaponizing the alarming rise of antisemitism in Europe to silence those in solidarity with Palestine, including anti-Zionist Jews. In our committed fight against antisemitism, we cannot accept the despicable policing and attacks against anti-Zionist Jewish comrades, who do not fit the dominant white European narratives. We cannot fall into the state’s racist and Islamophobic fabrication of “imported antisemitism,” and underplay the role of white supremacist, right-wing, and nationalist European groups. Our fight is intersectional, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist, for all! Never again means never again for anyone. We can no longer be silent in the face of the staggering and hegemonic whiteness in our networks. 

The comfortable silence of “This is not our issue”

On top of the deafening silence against a raging genocide, except for liberal statements of both sides which violate the core of our politics on each and every issue other than Palestinian liberation, SAR networks have also remained silent on the active involvement of their governments in the genocide and their complicity with a settler-colonial regime, which has internally displaced and made refugees out of millions of Palestinians. Largely, these organisations have also remained silent against the aggravated criminalisation of solidarity with Palestine and the brutal police and racial violence we face in countries like Germany. They continue to be silent in the face of escalating racist and Islamophobic attacks on racialised people who are active in Palestine-support networks, be it from European governments and media or German institutions and organisations. Even on issues which are at the core of our work, the majority of these organisations opted to remain silent as governments weaponise the right to residence and deportations as a tool to stifle Palestine solidarity. Even when members of these groups were targeted on the streets for their solidarity with Palestine. It is very clear to us how the dominant class within our organisations wants to portray our work as “single-issue” politics, and to selectively exclude Palestinian liberation. We can no longer remain idle as our politics and efforts are hijacked to further politics and crimes we condemn. 

This is very much our issue. It is our tax money, our politicians, and our governments who are funding and supporting this genocide and the occupation of Palestine. This is very much our issue because the bombs which killed over 39,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, and the bullets and bulldozers maiming and killing Palestinian people in Gaza and the so-called West Bank, are partly coming from our governments and from European companies. If anything, this genocide is effectively European - and not only because of Zionism’s European roots and identity. 

We believe in the intersectionality of struggles and causes. We do not see our No Border activism as separate from our fight against colonialism, capitalism, racism, extractivism and environmental destruction, war, dispossession, forced displacement, and the violation of human rights. Our activism is for sure not separate from our firm stance against war, occupation, militarisation, and ethnic cleansing. 

We say enough! 

Palestine is at the heart and core of our work. To fail to understand this, or to marginalise this reality, is complicity. This is not a conflict, and “it’s complicated” is not valid in the face of genocide! 

It is on those of us Europeans, in the network, to do the needed work to fill our gaps of ignorance. The “I am not well-informed” can no longer stand as an excuse. Get informed! Palestinians, Palestine solidarity groups and activists, journalists, scholars, artists, and human rights organisations have been doing insurmountable work for decades. Being “uninformed” is a choice. 

Our fight for the liberation of Palestine is connected to our fight for freedom of movement and for a life of dignity and safety for everyone, wherever they are or wherever they choose to be. It is also connected to other social justice and liberation struggles. We refuse the use of other struggles to water down statements on Palestine to comfort European sensitivities. 

We also refuse to be silenced about Israel’s crimes beyond Palestine, to accommodate European guilt and selective solidarity. We will call Israel out for its crimes. The Zionist state is infamous for its surveillance, police, weapons and military industries, which are first tested and developed on the bodies and lives of the Palestinian people. It is a leading profiteer of surveillance technology used against human rights defenders in countries like Saudi Arabia and Mexico (the Pegasus spyware), and against people on the move in complicity with Frontex. Furthermore, Israel is implicated in providing weapons and training both to the militias and the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo, profiteering of the resulting chaos (Source: Military Africa), as well as human rights violation cases, such as the one involving Tomas Zeron’s, to whom Israel offers protection (Source: Multiple Sources). 

We will not be silenced, and this is only the beginning

Seventy-six years of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, theft of land and resources, administrative detention, torture, and premeditated plans to crush the bodies and the souls of the Palestinian people. Seven million Palestinians currently live in a forced diaspora, and many live internally displaced in refugee camps on their own lands. Around 70% of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from other Palestinian territories due to the so-called 1948 partition, who are still waiting to go back to their homes. All of this has now developed into a full-blown genocide. (Sources : Rashid Khalidi’s “The Hundred Years War on Palestine”  and Ilan Pappe’s  “The Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine”). Every major international human rights organisation has denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Furthermore, representatives of the Zionist entity are currently being persecuted for war crimes and genocide at the International Court of Justice in Den Haag. The ICJ recently published a detailed report on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Yet our SAR community remains largely silent. Not only that, some of those in power, paradoxically in a network which alleges horizontality, are actively working to intimidate and silence those who speak up against Zionism and Israel’s genocide.

The horrors committed by European governments and societies against the Jewish, Roma,  Sinti, and other communities in Europe, and against many populations around the globe, should be a constant reminder for us to speak up and to take action. 

Our fight against borders and the violence they create is and will always be rooted in radical anti-racist, anti-colonial, and intersectional politics.

We demand an immediate end to, and revocation of, any punitive measures taken against members of SAR organisations and No Border networks due to their support for Palestine. We demand an end to this culture of fear and environment of intimidation.

We demand a clear positioning from SAR organisations and No Border networks against the Israeli genocide. Failing to call it a genocide, and watering the language down through wishy-washy statements like “killing”, “violence”, “conflict”, “topic” is failing the plight and the suffering of the Palestinian people, and it is in itself a political positioning pandering to Israeli and Western narratives. 

We call on you, and on everyone in the SAR community, to join us in expressing firm and unwavering support for the Palestinian people. 

We call on you to join us in denouncing Zionist settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of  Palestine, ongoing for more than a century.

We call on you to join us in supporting the Palestinian right of return to their land, their right to resist military occupation as guaranteed by International Law, and their right to resist colonialism.

We call on you to join efforts in your organisation to address and take action to challenge dynamics of power and hegemonic whiteness. We call on you to create a SAR community where denouncing genocide is not silenced, but is rather at the core of our politics. 

Our demands are rooted in our commitment to the politics of justice, freedom and liberation for all. This is why we demand a free Palestine and that Israel be held accountable for genocide. 

This open letter intentionally addresses, although not limited to: AlarmPhone, CivilMRCC, CompassCollective, LeaveNoOneBehind, Louise Michel, Mediterranea Saving Humans, Mission Lifeline, Pilotes Volontaires, Refugee Rescue, ResQ-People, RESQSHIP, r42-SAR, SARAH, Sea-Eye, Sea-Watch, Sea Punks, SOS Méditerranée, SOS Humanity, THEBACKLASH, Zusammenland, and AURORA support group.
While other SAR-involved organisations, such as Emergency International, Médecins Sans Frontières, Proactiva Open Arms, Maldusa and Salvamento Marírimo Humanitario have advocated on the current situation in Palestine, we call upon them to adopt a stronger and continuous position against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.