In Latin America, Palestine not only represents the struggle of a people refusing to submit to subjugation and dispossession, but also evokes the spirit of perseverance, resistance, and the desire to live a dignified life.
A long legacy of women freedom fighters connects liberation struggles across space and time, animating solidarity movements between occupied and colonial territories today.
The notion of security applied by The New York Times in its disucssion of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and Israel-Palestine obscures much more than it illuminates. In both cases, it helps to legitimate occupation and the associated forms of violence.
Though different, there are many important and striking similitarities between the U.S. enforcement of its border with Mexico and the Israeli pacification of the Palestinian people. One such similarity is the companies involved. For example, Israel's Elbit Systems not only supplies the Israeli state with electronic detection systems along the wall of separation with the West Bank, but also won a contract to provide the same equipment on the Mexico-U.S. border.
Maintaining inequality and injustice requires work, and the policing of the associated boundaries between the privileged and the disadvantaged. Increasingly, young people are involved in the project of exclusion—in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, and Israel-Palestine.
