Palestine Liberation and Caribbean Solidarity: The Ruse of Recognition from Gaza to Barbuda
What, to the Caribbean, is the meaning of Palestine liberation? Some have shared applause, delight, and relief at the recent announcements by the Governments of Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago that each will officially recognize the state of Palestine. In doing so, the administrations of Mia Mottley, Andrew Holness, and Keith Rowley backed the Palestinian Authority’s bid for full United Nations membership in a revision to its current status as a non-voting Permanent Observer.
In recognizing Palestine, have these Caribbean governments taken a stand against US empire? In a token (if not empty) gesture, Mottley, Holness, and Rowley adopt a masquerade of resistance that, in truth, is an endorsement of the existing order of things.
This apparent display of Caribbean “leadership,” this recognition of Palestinian statehood belatedly affirms a position shared by more than 140 member states of the United Nations General Assembly. Even within CARICOM, Jamaica, T&T, and Barbados were late to this particular party. To date, Palestinian statehood is endorsed by Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Suriname. We should note that none of these Caribbean statesmen, in their performance of solidarity, have uttered a single word about US foreign policy.
Despite its recent “No” vote on the matter of Palestinian statehood, the US State Department has recognized the legitimacy of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine for some time. The promise of a future two-state solution is predicated on the elevation of Palestinian elites as representatives of a future State of Palestine that will collaborate with Israel and the US on matters of military security and surveillance. Caribbean rulers, likewise, desire for Palestine what they already claim for themselves: A permanent dependent role, under the guise of flag sovereignty and independence, under the thumb of US empire. Admirably, the people of Palestine have not complied with this imperial design.
What is the substance of Caribbean recognition of Palestine at this juncture? Why have the largest nations of the English-speaking Caribbean suddenly elected to join their compatriots? What does this indicate about the relationship between CARICOM member-states and the cause of Palestine liberation? What does it clarify about Caribbean rulers subordinate status to US empire?
The Ruse of Recognition
A ruse is a smokescreen, a trick, a cunning maneuver, a contrived event. Why are Caribbean managers of subordination suddenly adopting the anti-imperialist language of Palestine solidarity?
Much can be learned from the words of CARICOM officials themselves. In a statement on Jamaica’s recognition of Palestine, Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson-Smith underscored that the Jamaican Labour Party government “continues to advocate for a two-state solution as the only viable option to resolve the longstanding conflict, guarantee the security of Israel and uphold the dignity and rights of Palestinians.” Likewise, Barbados Minister of Foreign Affairs Kerrie Symmonds clarified that this shift in policy would in no way alter the friendly relations between his Government and Israel:
Since August 29 of 1967, Barbados has had a formal recognition of the State of Israel, and the relationship between the two countries has been an exceptionally good one. We have benefitted tremendously through technical cooperation with the State of Israel in a number of fields, not the least of which is our efforts at food security and agriculture, and also assisting us with the increasing drought challenges and water-related challenges that we have had.
Johnson-Smith and Symmonds underscored their support for a liberal “two-state solution” that seeks to preserve the settler colonial state of Israel while emboldening the aspiring rulers and Zionist collaborators of the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority.
While the Palestinian Authority holds administrative oversight of the occupied West Bank, it actively collaborates with Israeli troops on security operations and deploys Palestinian civil police to contain popular liberation forces, suppress dissent, and in recent months, disperse West Bank protests in solidarity with Gaza.
In other words, the recognition of Palestine alone is not a threat to the status quo of Zionist settler colonialism and its opportunistic sponsors among the Palestinian ruling classes. Symmonds is right to be confident that his government’s recognition of Palestinian statehood will not threaten longstanding economic and diplomatic ties with the Israeli government of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu or the United States.
In the Caribbean, Israel maintains friendly relations with all CARICOM member states. None have indicated an ounce of desire to cut diplomatic or economic ties with Israel amidst the unrelenting genocidal assault on Gaza. In doing so, they demonstrate their submission to US State Department dictates that uphold Israel as a permanent arm of US empire in the Middle East.
One might expect that Netanyahu, often painted as an exceptionally brutal and fascistic Israeli statesman, might take umbrage at the audacity of Caribbean governments. In truth, Netanyahu has found common cause with his Caribbean compatriots who are desperate to forge replicas of his authoritarian police state in the Caribbean Sea. In September 2023, mere weeks before Hamas initiated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Netanyahu met with Caribbean leaders in New York City during the U.N. General Assembly.
Those in attendance included Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader, Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne, Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Terrance Drew, and Barbados Foreign Minister, Symmonds. The fact that all but Symmonds’s Barbados had recognized the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood and full UN Membership did not stop Netanyahu from pledging Israeli assistance in public health and water management initiatives in the Caribbean.
Israel’s advice to the Caribbean on Water Management? A Reason to Leave Broken Glass Everywhere
Caribbean toilers should rise up and wreak havoc at the slightest indication that Netanyahu’s Israel is advising Caribbean governments on water management. Has Israel not degraded Palestinians before and after October 7, by cutting off water supplies to Gaza? Is this how Caribbean rulers will wield the weapon of water against the people of the region?
In this regard, the recognition of Palestinian statehood does not threaten Netanyahu or his genocidal Zionist vision for the Levant. Rather, it marks the recognition of the Palestinian Authority as an active partner in this genocidal project that masquerades as a vehicle of Palestinian liberation under the banners of “statehood” and “self-determination.”
The ‘Palestines’ of the Caribbean?
If CARICOM leaders do not intend to challenge a status quo in which Israel rules with an iron fist through its military detachments and elite Palestinian proxies, why have they formally adopted the position in support of Palestinian statehood? In Barbados, recognition of Palestine arrived on the heels of solidarity protest and advocacy by Caribbean Against Apartheid in Palestine (CAAP), a civil society group that had lobbied for recognition of Palestinian statehood since 2014. In November 2023, scores of protestors took to the streets of Downtown Kingston to elevate the more ambitious demands of Jamaica LANDS (Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism) that the Jamaican government disclose all financial agreements and sever diplomatic ties with Israel. In Trinidad, Palestine solidarity protests have appeared frequently along Queen’s Park Savannah and opposite the US Embassy in Newtown, Port of Spain.
The belated recognition of Palestinian statehood upholds a tactic of containment that affirms symbolic demands while dashing away those of any material significance. Can Caribbean states that facilitate the exploitation of labor and suppression of working people at home paradoxically embody anti-imperialism abroad?
Even with the added support of Jamaica, T&T, and Barbados, the bid for UN membership by the Palestinian Authority remains stonewalled by a UN Security Council veto by the United States. In other words, Caribbean governments can make a show of their solidarity with Palestine by supporting a symbolic measure that remains dead on arrival on the floor of the United Nations.
We should be cautious, then, of claiming easy victories. But this also suggests that Caribbean ruling classes and governments have much to fear from the popular mobilizations in solidarity with Gaza across the region. The striking image of Antiguan Prime Minister Gaston Browne alongside Bibi Netanyahu should remind us that their shared interests extend beyond public health and water management.
As Israeli developers generate schemes for beachfront settlements in Gaza, Browne’s dismantling of communal land rights and sponsorship of luxury developments and billionaire residences in Barbuda comes into sharper focus. This should not be taken as a crude equivalence between the unconscionable death toll of the genocide in Gaza and the dispossession of Barbudan tenants. But it should be taken as an indication of what Caribbean rulers fear.
Barbudans recognize a moment of danger in the maps of Palestinian land loss highlighting before and after 1948, before and after 1967, and today. Will Barbuda be bisected by settlers backed by a police state that seizes property and dispossesses everyday people from their land?
To quote a famous Jamaican artiste who adopted the moniker “Gaza” in solidarity with Palestine, what will happen when Caribbean people whose “government waan fi move dem” in pursuit of extractive enterprises, highways, luxury tourist developments and housing schemes identify the parallels between their struggle and that of Gaza today? If there is common cause to be found between Israeli and Caribbean leaders, there too is common cause to be had between the refugees of Gaza and the West Bank and the downpressed who are driven from ancestral lands and subjected to state violence in urban garrisons throughout the Caribbean.
Indeed, several members of the Clash! Collective participated in a Zoom forum in October 2022 convened by two activists from the Dutch special municipality of Bonaire, Davika Bissessar and James Finies, with the title “Is Bonaire the Palestine of the Caribbean?” We should be cautious of direct analogies to the Palestinian struggle. But if we trace the contours of their claim, Finies and Bissessar are calling attention to a commonality of structure rather than form. The influx of European settlers from the Netherlands has generated property tax and price shocks and displaced Bonaire’s Indigenous and African-descended peoples who are deprived of equal provisions as their mainland counterparts.
Clash! maintains concern that Barbuda cannot continue to appeal to the British Privy Council and Bonaire to the United Nations. These bodies have never enacted a principled defense of the downpressed in the face of imperialism. The Caribbean will not advance, as Palestine has not, by seeking recognition from United States or making futile appeals to the footsoldiers of the United Nations.
Haiti Solidarity and Palestine Solidarity Must Be Rallied Together
We cannot appeal to the United Nations as a legitimate venue of Palestinian liberation at the same time we denounce the UN for its historic and present occupations of Haiti and the Caribbean. The UN has never represented the cause of autonomy for ordinary people in the Caribbean or Palestine. If we denounce CARICOM for its endorsement of a US/UN invasion of Haiti, we must understand its recognition of Palestine as another effort to prop up the UN as a legitimate arbiter of freedom and self-determination.
After all, what did recognition of Haiti’s decadent leaders in waiting on the UN-sponsored Transitional Presidential Council accomplish for everyday Haitians aside from an imperial invasion and police brutality? What has CARICOM’s recognition as independent nations done for ordinary people in the Caribbean? We do not want recognition of this sort for Palestinians by imperial or peripheral nations.
CARICOM will maintain diplomatic relations with Netanyahu and his ilk while playing in the face of ordinary Palestinian and Caribbean people alike. They will back a bankrupt and collaborationist Palestinian Authority while masquerading as champions of Palestinian liberation?
In pursuit of their own schemes of accumulation by dispossession, Caribbean rulers champion the cause of Palestinian liberation (like Haitian liberation) only when it is sure to fail but never when it counts. The Caribbean overlords will distance themselves from the genocide in Gaza only to entertain its chief architects at international summits and take careful notes from the Israeli playbook — taking note of the immense resources it receives to conquer and dispossess ordinary people.
What is the alternative to the invention of fake Caribbean solidarity masquerading as anti-imperialism? Can we rally the Caribbean popular will against these scandalous regimes?
Free the Land of Authoritarian Rulers at Home and Abroad
We must not stop rallying for Palestine. Rather we must renew the call for Palestine solidarity actions in the Caribbean. The empty masquerade of recognition can be a spark to mobilize popular democratic forces against all rulers and elites from Gaza to Barbuda, West Kingston to the West Bank. In mobilizations against the genocide in Gaza, a popular refrain has emerged: A Free Palestine Will Free Us All.
Indeed, in the process of constructing solidarity encampments on university campuses and public parks across North America, ordinary people and students have found themselves in direct confrontation with police and military in their respective states and territories. Perhaps some in their non-violent civil disobedience were not ready for the impending confrontation with uniformed police and Zionist thugs who could smell their fear. Many are shocked about the violation of their constitutional and human rights. It is time that we put the language of legal protections and safe spaces aside. The heroic cause of the Palestinian masses, indeed, must be a call to lay waste to all occupying forces and propertied elites.
Indeed, the first condition of any genuine Caribbean solidarity with Palestine will be the exposure, confrontation with, and toppling of our own government leaders who believe we are too chupid and dunce to recognize their ignoble masquerade. The transition between the old world and the new requires Palestine solidarity to center confrontation with not simply Israel but US empire.
US empire pulls the strings of Israeli Zionism and Palestinian genocide. It also pulls the strings in Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, SKN, T&T, Guyana, and Haiti with aspiring CARICOM rulers pitted against Caribbean toilers.
Clash! has cautioned against the elitist and disrespectful republican mentality among Caribbean rulers. In the last wave of Palestine solidarity mobilizations in the Caribbean, what did we find? That mild and inoffensive protests by everyday people were followed around and surveilled as “terrorists.” And yet terrorists are people who use unlawful violence to attack and intimidate civilians.
Palestine solidarity requires what Haiti solidarity necessitates. Caribbean toilers must expose and confront the confounded nonsense of all imperial or peripheral rulers.
Down with US empire and its collaborators from Israel to the Caribbean!
Down with “recognition” by US/UN imperialists!
Toward a self-directed future for Palestine and the Caribbean!
Free the Land! Down with the Charlatans and Collaborators!
From Gaza to Barbuda! From the West Bank to West Kingston!
