Liberate All Ghettos →

The action that we recently undertook on the terrain of the old Warsaw Ghetto — to spray the words “Liberate all ghettos” in Hebrew and “Free Gaza and Palestine” in English — has been used by some commentators in Israel and the Jewish community in Poland to accuse us of anti-Semitism.

…These reactions do not come as a surprise to us. Our action was deliberately accountable which was why it was documented on film with statements of explanation. We wanted people to know who was responsible and the thinking behind it.

First, the wall we chose is already a public space of artistic expression. We have been portrayed as if we have grafittied a grave or a memorial — this is not the case. We deliberately avoided the old red brick perimeter wall of the ghetto.

…This wall cannot be compared to the memorial sites that are Treblinka and the other extermination camps in Poland. In Palestine, Gaza is a ghetto. Israel’s blockade has been described by the United Nations as “a crime against humanity.” There are towns and villages in the occupied West Bank that have been entombed by Israel’s apartheid wall such as Abu Dis and Qalqiliya. Ghettoization as a strategy of collective punishment and containment and division is being practiced daily by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people.

…History as we well know can be co-opted and sanctified and instrumentalized to serve present-day agendas of colonization and repression. Our action seeks to intervene in this kind of exploitation and ring an alarm about ghettoization in Palestine today. We all have the right to be political and to forge interventions and new representations of the contested here and now and relate it to an unfrozen past.