We are a coalition of organizations and individuals from Australia, India, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Palestine, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and which aims to disseminate knowledge about Palestine in the areas and spaces termed as the Global South. Our member organizations include: Alternative Information Centre, Palestine; Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC), South Africa; Asia Pacific Centre for Integral Study of Life (Zoesophia), Republic of Korea; Badil- Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, Palestine; Centre for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality, Pakistan; the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, the United Kingdom; Global Kairos for Justice, Palestine; Global Kairos Asia-Pacific Solidarity with Palestine (GKAPS), Republic of Korea; Indo-Palestine Solidarity Network, India; International Movement for Just World (JUST), Malaysia; and Presentation Sisters, India.
We aim to educate and create awareness about historical Palestine, the 1948 Nakba, the Palestinian minority inside Israel, the Occupied West Bank, and the besieged Gaza Strip, and the plight of millions of Palestinian refugees. Our goal is to serve as a platform for informed analysis of the Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonization.
We stand firm in our reasoned conviction that “Zionism” is a form of racism. It was a position that was held by the United Nations not long ago in the past (1975). At that time, the newly decolonized world condemned institutionalized racism and colonization still practiced in two places, Palestine and South Africa. In the decade that followed, it became increasingly commonplace to denounce Apartheid in South Africa for what it was: a racist white minority rule. On the other hand, Israel managed to absolve itself from any accountability for the unjust treatment meted out to the Palestinian people. It managed to argue that “Zionism” was a movement for self-determination by a people (namely Jews), a position explained in the revocation of the UN Resolution 3379 and more recently, through a sleight of hand in the IHRA definition of “antisemitism”. As an endeavour against colonialism and racism, MLN rejects such apologetics and distortions in the service of Zionist oppression. We refuse to accept narratives based on such racist claims.
Our goal is to situate the discussion of Palestine squarely within the matric of anti-colonialism and anti-racism, and the framework of human rights and international humanitarian law. To be an anti-Zionist is to be anti-colonialism and anti-racism. With this premise, we intend to center a narrative that affirms the Palestinian struggle for liberation from ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism, from the Zionist-inflicted nakba.
Though as a coalition we are devoted to bringing light to the Palestinian condition in particular, we acknowledge that this condition of subjugation and will to resist is shared by many other communities (not in kind but in degree and spirit!) under contemporary global racial-capitalism and its demonic offsprings like military-industrial complex, prison-industrial complex, medical apartheid and climate profiteering. Each pain is particular in its roots but each suffering is universal in its reaches.