By: Heidi Kwok, Staff Writer
Content warning: mentions of genocide, forced sterilization, and embodied and psychological trauma.
On September 12 at the Harbour Centre, the Disability Justice Network of BC and the SFU Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies (CCMS) hosted a panel of five speakers who shared how the fight for Palestinian liberation is closely tied to disability justice. The Peak attended the event to learn more.
Adel Iskandar, an associate professor of global communication at SFU and director of the CCMS, opened the event by stressing the importance of “centring Palestine in the discussion around decolonization” and disability justice. “Israel has actively tried to render Palestine a non-existent entity, in every sense of the word, and to disable, dismember, and eventually dismantle and annihilate all that makes Palestinians human beings.”
Jasbir K. Puar, a distinguished faculty of arts professor at the Social Justice Institute at UBC, provided context for the talk, describing how the ongoing genocide exacerbated the existing amputation crisis in Gaza. According to Al Jazeera, an estimated 50,000 people already lived with disabilities in Gaza due to Israeli violence before October 7, 2023. Since then, the Gaza Health Ministry has recorded 4,800 cases of amputations, of which children made up 18% or 800 cases, “while about 24,000 of those injured required rehabilitation.”
“Gaza is living through a mass debilitating, maiming, and disabling event on a historic scale.”
— Jasbir K. Puar, UBC professor in the faculty of arts
“with a health system near collapse, an engineered famine, almost no humanitarian aid, and forced evacuations,” said Puar.
“It is genocide in slow motion. Palestinians in Gaza were living through genocide then, as they are now, through manufactured states of chronic debility and episodic maiming.” She referred to the first intifadah in 1987 — a large-scale uprising in the occupied Palestinian territories characterized by mass protests and harsh retaliation by Israeli forces, which wounded more than 130,000.
Bana, a Palestinian disability justice advocate, grounded discussions on the state of Palestinian political prisoners who have been maimed, amputated, and tortured in Israeli prisons “beyond recognition.” Lara Sheehi, a research fellow at the University of South Africa’s institute for social and health sciences, followed up by offering her perspective as a clinical psychologist: “Political prisoners are the heart of our struggle” and “have always intimately understood the targeting of bodies and the psyche as a central part of the working machine of settler colonialism.
“The psychic terrain being a place to be stolen as well,” she continued. “It’s the fact that oftentimes the entire industry of trauma wants to talk about trauma without ever linking it up to the system or the condition, like settler colonialism, that creates the trauma to begin with.”
Bana also shared the challenges of realizing disability justice when people with disabilities back home have been intentionally subjected to exclusion. “One thing about disableism” is that we choose “who to see and who to focus on.”
Sarah Jama, a community organizer and former member of provincial parliament for Hamilton Centre, drew parallels between the exclusionary systems that enable the systemic mistreatment of disabled people both here in Canada and in Palestine: “Because we live in a society that says disabled people, sick people, chronically ill people don’t deserve to live in public, we have to warehouse them and send them away, and that continues to kill people.”
Calling to issues like Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act, in which Indigenous women were forcibly sterilized, Jama said these issues “cannot be removed from the question of, do Palestinians have the right to exist in their public space.”
For Siling, their project Crips for eSims for Gaza offers an accessible way for disabled folks to help Palestinians restore internet connectivity amid Israel’s targeting of vital telecommunications networks in Gaza. So far, over 160 volunteers from around the world have helped raise more than $3 million for eSims.
Speaking on how disability relates to Palestine, another panellist named Siling said: “There is a clear connection between how disabled people are dehumanized, rendered ‘less than’ or ‘non-human,’ and the way that Palestinians are dehumanized. Everyone in Palestine is disabled or set to become disabled because the conditions of genocide are disabling.”
