In the News

Our Statement on October 5th, 2024

As Montanans in solidarity with Palestine, we are proud to join today’s International Day of Action to stop Israel’s genocide. We stand in solidarity across the state: from Missoula to Bozeman, Helena, and Kalispell, as well as to our allies in New York and Chicago, and across the world to Lebanon and Yemen. To Palestinians we say, we will never abandon you. We will fight for every one of you, we will not quit, and soon we will celebrate ultimate liberation in your land. 

Our movement has grown rapidly in a year, and we are still growing. Montanans 4 Palestine are university students and high school teachers, union and church members, experienced organizers and newcomers. We are queer and trans and proud. Nobody affirms the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism as fervently as our Jewish members, and nobody knows the urgency of anticolonial organizing for land back like our Indigenous members. With diversity and determination we can achieve liberation, and if you are listening, we need your help. 

We are joining this Day of Action because two days from now, the world will grieve the anniversary of the October 7th attacks. We affirm that the loss of life that day was horrific, and we believe it’s right to commemorate the civilians as people like us, whose lives ended too soon. But we are here today because the world will not grieve October 8th, when Israel killed 230 Palestinians, or October 9th, when the death toll went over 500, or October 10th, when it hit 770. The world will not stand still for October 13th, when the first whole families were erased from the Gaza Civil Registry. The president will not speak about October 16th, when Gaza ran out of body bags, and nobody will be encouraged to be tactful about the October 17th anniversary of the Baptist Hospital airstrike. These omissions are indictments of our society’s demonization of Palestinians. Our media and political class do not think of Palestinians as humans. We must call them out, oppose them, and replace them. 

You will not hear, in two days, that under the Geneva Conventions Palestinians had and always have the right to violently resist their occupier. You will not hear that Israeli gunships and tanks caused a large proportion of the civilian deaths on October 7th, as Israel’s own media have reported. You will hear about beheaded babies and rapes, both of which are utter fabrications designed to justify genocide. You will hear that October 7th was the largest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, with no irony that Israel is now committing a holocaust. The Gaza-based Ministry of Health has only identified 41,000 victims. A Lancet study in July said the low end is 186,000. If you simply estimate 2-5 victims per bomb, as Ralph Nader did, then the death toll is over 300,000. And over 50% of the population of Gaza is children. But you will not hear about them. 

The end of the Palestinian liberation struggle necessitates the dismantling of the settler colony of Israel through re-imagining and then creating a system in which all inhabitants of the land are able to live freely and equally, working to repair the damage of decades of colonial oppression. But Israel is threatening to take the region with it, with assassinations in Iran, airstrikes in Syria, and now a ground invasion of Lebanon. That means it is essential that, as a state in the country that sustains Israel, as constituents of the senator that arms Israel, we engage in resistance, economic pressure and legal sanction, and civil disobedience until Israel ends its system of apartheid, its occupation of Palestinian land, and its genocide of the Palestinian people. When everyone between the river and the sea have equal rights, Palestine will be free. That is our goal as an organization, and on today’s International Day of Action, we ask that you make it yours, too.

With deep love and solidarity,

MT4P