Russell Rickford

Remarks to rally/funeral procession in honor of Palestinian Martyrs

Cornell University, 9 May 2025

In 1960, at the independence ceremony for the newly liberated Congo, the great African patriot Patrice Lumumba vowed that his people would never forget the wounds that Belgian colonialism had inflicted.

We have seen our lands seized, Lumumba said.

We have suffered. We have endured exile. We have lost many brothers and sisters.

Today, like Lumumba, we pledge to never forget.

We are the children and grandchildren of the colonial experience. That agony, that torment, is inscribed in our DNA. Our families hail from India, the Dominican republic, Ireland, Lebanon, Quebec, Ukraine, Colombia, Zimbabwe, and Palestine itself.

When they ordered us to stop marching and chanting, when they tied themselves into knots trying to justify repression and intimidation, how did they think we would respond?

I am starting to suspect that no one in Day Hall reads anticolonial literature.

In the end, the real horror is that Palestinians are merely people.

They are neither noble savages nor pure martyrs. Nor are they tragic victims, mindless terrorists, inscrutable exotics, or curious holdovers from a premodern era.

As the whole world beyond the imperial core knows, they are inexorably, heroically human.

Today we salute and mourn.

If we muster any pity, it is for the Western ruling classes and their proxies!

You have devoted so much energy, over so many years, to convince us that Palestinians do not exist, and that if they DO exist, that they are no more than administrative nuisances to be managed with the cold efficiency of apartheid or the untidy techniques of extermination.

How spectacularly you have failed!

You have made us love the Palestinian people even more.

For Palestinians are no more or less than the Congolese in the 1890s or the Cherokee and Seminole in the 1830s and 40s or the Kikuyu in the 1950s or the Herero of Namibia in the early 1900s.

They are dispossessed, displaced, colonized, tortured, slaughtered. They encounter empire in its naked violence. In other words, they are US, the exiled, the captive half of the planet, in the moment of our most profound suffering.

They are the essential human subject, not because they are unique or mystical, but because your technologies of starvation and death have made them so.

Their names are engraved in our hearts.

And we will continue to utter those names, even when the colonialists and their apologists remind us, in mass emails or casual hallway conversations, that things would go much easier for us if we did not. We choose discomfort over slimy indifference.

You are on the wrong side of history. You are on the wrong side of history. If this you do not currently understand, you soon will.

In the final analysis, no nation that rests on the misery and destruction of other nations can prosper. That is why we must replace settler projects and racial mythologies with true Democracy, here in North America and in every other occupied land.

As Lumumba stated back in 1960, let us commence a new struggle that will lead to justice. Let us end violations of free thought and human rights. Let us institute a peace resting not on guns and bayonets but on equality and brotherhood.

So peace to Gaza.

Peace to the Rohingya and the Uyghurs. Peace to Bosnia and Rwanda. Peace to the victims of the Holocaust. Peace to the Philippines. Peace to the Taino and the Arawak. Peace to all the indigenous people of the Americas, Australia, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Peace to my enslaved and indentured ancestors in Guyana, South America.

Peace to the antiracists and anticolonialists of all lands.

We will never forget your names. We will never forget our wounds. We will not stop until Palestine is free!

Thank you.