Empathy to fight colonial abhorrence and amnesia: global solidarity with and disability justice in Palestine, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as moral imperative

Empathy to fight colonial abhorrence and amnesia: global solidarity with and disability justice in Palestine, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as moral imperative

 

Nelly Bassily

 

Dying daily—or waking up daily—to colonial violence is NOT normal. It should NEVER be normalized. One gruesome example amongst many is how we have miserably failed the children of Gaza and by extension, the children of the world and our collective future. According to Al Jazeera Plus, Israel has killed an average of 30 children in Gaza every day since October 2023. That is 1 child killed every 45 minutes.

“[March 19, 2025] was one of the deadliest days for Palestinian children in history. Over 170 kids died in their sleep in less than 50 minutes, in a city that already has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world—as 10 children lose a limb every day. Gaza, to those who don’t know it, and who never will, is a city of children. They own the city; they are 50% of its population. They are always in the front lines: a demonstration, a wedding, almost every picture coming out of Gaza has children. One could easily argue that they are the sole reason we continue resisting this historical injustice: to save the children.” — @mqudaih_

One of the most egregious and deliberate forms of violence currently being inflicted on Palestinians is the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Israel’s blockade, bombardment of agricultural infrastructure, and obstruction of humanitarian aid are systemic acts of deprivation intended to break the will of the population and forcibly displace survivors. Right now, 85% of Gaza has been declared a red zone. According to Gazan journalist, Anas Al-Sharif, “85% of Gaza’s population have entered the “fifth stage” of malnutrition — the most critical and dangerous phase, which is often irreversible even if food becomes available in the future.” Israel is slaughtering people coming for aid through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is essentially a death trap. Gaza’s bakeries, farmland, water systems, and food warehouses have been repeatedly bombed. Humanitarian convoys carrying flour and baby formula have been denied entry or attacked. Children are dying not just from missiles but from malnutrition and dehydration.

Bisan Owda, a Palestinian from Gaza who starts most of her updates from Gaza with “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive…” is now talking about the deadly consequences of starvation on children in one of her latest posts. As Bisan explains it:“For five months of starvation now, people had some food that they stored. Their immune systems and their bodies were able still to hold on. But now, we have nothing more to consume and our bodies are already exhausted. So, over the past five months, over 80 children passed because of starvation. But this number will definitely, definitely double many times just because now, our bodies have been starving for a long time. We are talking about 70,000 children are at risk of death now. Not at risk of famine because they are already starving for months and now, you will just start hearing about mass deaths.”

This strategy is not new. It echoes a long history of settler colonial regimes weaponizing hunger against Indigenous populations. Starvation is not a byproduct of war—it is part of Israel’s war strategy, designed to target the most vulnerable: children, the elderly, and those already wounded or disabled. But now the starvation is so severe that no one is spared. Not only does this violate international humanitarian law, it further exposes the complicity of global powers that fund, arm, and diplomatically shield Israel. The scale and intentionality of this starvation campaign is genocidal not just in consequence, but in design.

As of July 17, 2025, we are at 650 days into Israel’s genocide against Palestinians (some are arguing for calling what is happening the Holocaust of the Palestinian) and more than 77 years into their displacement, aggression, dispossession, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, imprisonment, cultural appropriation, and brutal occupation. It is time to reaffirm that Palestine lays bare the brutality and barbarism of imperialism and the urgency of collective liberation.

I’ve been struggling to write down my thoughts and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why until I read Mohammed El Kurd’s book, Perfect Victim and Politics of Appeal. In the notes, El Kurd writes: “It is not only grief that makes writing in the time of genocide a torturous task: it is, more so, one’s recognition of the written word as shamefully insufficient in the face of 2000-pound bombs.” Reading this helped me understand that the level of Zionist depravity constantly outdoing itself is meant to keep us stuck in a constant loop of terror and shock at the inhumanity of it all. Just when you think the dehumanization, disfiguring, dismemberment, disappearing, displacement can’t possibly get worse, it somehow does. As I write this, I watch and re-watch footage of bodies flung more than 20 meters into the air above a devastating cloud of smoke from a bombing meant to exterminate Palestinians. There is also footage of the decapitated body of yet another child. His name was Hamza Abu Issa. His parent’s entire universe. And through the tears, I keep repeating: It’s not normal. It’s not normal. It’s not normal. None of it is normal.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote to a friend: “2025 is the year of ceasefire, the undoing of the Zionist propaganda and killing machine, and liberation from all tyranny.” ALL tyranny—because as Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa wrote after imperialist bombs fell on Sanaa, Yemen, in January 2024 (and still again in 2025, the US is bombing Yemen):

“The US & UK are bombing Yemen [but] we don’t have to accept living in a world where the richest, most powerful nations get to destroy and murder poor Brown nations because they take a moral stand against genocide of other persecuted Brown nations. Remember, Yemen’s only demand is for the slaughter of Palestinians to stop. Their crime is being human.

Speaking of the “crime” of being human, one video haunts my every waking thought about how we are not able to stop the dehumanization and indescribable suffering of Palestinians. In the video that haunts me, a doctor in northern Gaza is forced to amputate his 14-year-old child’s leg in their kitchen, without anesthesia or sterile equipment, using only a needle and thread to stitch her up after amputation. The Israeli Occupation forces (IOF) had bombed their home and besieged them inside, preventing them from reaching a hospital for fear of being sniped on the way. The horrific story of children being amputated without anesthesia and in many cases dying is unfortunately too common. This video should have brought the world to an absolute standstill before Israel’s barbarism created more victims — and yet, here we are — descending into dystopia.

It is impossible to truly comprehend the magnitude of Zionist cruelty. That’s why empathy and resistance are imperative in order to bring us back to our collective humanity in the face of settler-colonial imperialist abomination. As Karim Kattan writes:

“Gaza is not an abstraction. It is shores and beaches and flowers and markets and streets and it is children, women, and men who have aspirations, who are artists. For those who have disappeared, we will never know their works of art.”

Empathy as Resistance Against Colonial Amnesia

Today and every day, we must talk ad vitam aeternam about empathy in the face of colonial abhorrence. Empathy is the antidote to historical and ongoing denial of Indigenous existence, the violent rewriting of histories, and the silencing of systemic injustices—forced displacement, mass disablement, and genocide. It allows us to see the struggles of the oppressed not as distant tragedies but as interconnected battles for survival, justice, and liberation. Without empathy, colonial violence becomes normalized, erased from mainstream discourse, and framed as inevitable or justified.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca P. Albanese, reminds us that empathy is not passive but an active force binding us in solidarity against oppression. As she stated in an address to a packed audience at McGill University: “Empathy […] is the glue that makes us stand united as humanity.” In her latest report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, Albanese exposes the political economy of genocide and how corporate profiteering sustains Israel’s settler-colonial project. For example, Albanese names, among many companies, Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. She states: “the ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture. The 65 percent surge in Israeli military spending from 2023 to 2024 – amounting to USD 46.5 billion, one of the highest per capita worldwide – generated a sharp surge in their annual profits.” This underscores how deeply the private sector is embedded in enabling the violence.

While governments fail their obligations, private companies have fueled illegal occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Holding these actors—especially corporate executives—accountable under international law is essential. This is a necessary step to end the genocide and dismantle the global system that has allowed it.

As Nishnaabeg scholar and author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates in her work on colonial amnesia, Indigenous resistance movements aim not only to dismantle settler colonialism but to bring forth alternative ways of being rooted in ancestral knowledge and land stewardship.

On Turtle Island, the machinery of settler colonialism has long worked to erase Indigenous presence while extracting wealth from stolen lands. The resistance against this erasure is ongoing. For example, the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en people against natural gas pipelines going through their unceded territory have brought about renewed solidarity with Indigenous struggles for land back. Land back not just as a trending hashtag or theory but as a concrete way to return the unceded lands to their rightful Indigenous owners. When land is returned to Indigenous people, it is maybe then that we will have a fighting chance to decelerate climate chaos and give the earth time to start to heal the rampant abuse it has endured.

As Betasamosake Simpson powerfully observes in her book, As we have always done : indigenous freedom through radical resistance, “Colonizers wanted the land, everything else, whether it is legal or policy or economic or social, whether it was the Indian Act or residential schools or gender violence, was part of the machinery that was designed to create the perfect crime, a crime where the victims were unable to see or name the crime as a crime.” In other words, obscurantism is integral to sustaining the colonial system, yesterday and today.

Fighting Colonial Amnesia Across the Globe

Colonial amnesia is a transnational affliction. To resist it in Palestine is also to resist it in Canada, in the United States, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Sudan, in Yemen, and beyond. Feminist struggles in the Global Majority highlight the shared fight against, as coined by bell hooks, the imperialist white supremacist patriarchal destruction.

Feminist resistance movements in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) also demonstrate the power of confronting colonial amnesia.

In Sudan, women have been at the forefront of resisting military rule and the colonial legacies that shape gender-based oppression. For example, the Sudan Solidarity Collective (SSC) was formed in response to the outbreak of war in Sudan on April 15th, 2023 (that’s over TWO years ago). As SSC explains it:

“Armed conflict erupted between two rival factions [the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)] in Sudan, resulting in heavy fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and other parts of the country. Since the conflict began, the death toll is reported to be over 13,900; thousands of people have been injured, and thousands more are missing or held captive by either of the warring parties. Sudan is currently experiencing the worst refugee crisis of our time. Since the conflict began, there have been over 10.7 million people displaced internally and in nearby Egypt, Ethiopia, Chad, South Sudan, and Uganda. It has been named the worst displacement crisis in the world. The World Health Organization stated that 4 million girls are at risk of sexual violence in Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of children in Sudan are malnourished and at risk of death, with over 70% of healthcare facilities rendered non-functional due to the fighting.”

The Collective has been working tirelessly to fund Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), resistance committees and labour and farmer unions. It has also helped shed light on the complicity of imperial powers, particularly the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in fueling the current genocide, with external powers trying to control Sudan’s resources and quash the revolution that started in December 2018. The UAE, in particular, has turned Sudan into a battleground for its imperial ambitions, arming militias (the RSF) that terrorize people, displace millions, and subject women to unimaginable violence.

Sudanese feminist activists continue to resist on all fronts the military junta, militia groups and foreign imperialism by emphasizing that the fight for justice must be decolonial and intersectional. And, as Sudanese feminist Reem Abbas emphasizes in the article Sudanese Feminist Sisterhood: At the frontline of radical resistance and solidarity: “Sudanese women’s experiences, needs, and solutions are uniquely shaped by the challenges they have faced on the ground, making them invaluable architects of feminist peace.”

Similarly, feminist resistance in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been vital in confronting the extractive economies that drive the ongoing genocide. In March 2025, UNICEF was reporting “The resurgence of conflict in the province of South Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has forced more than 850,000 people—nearly half of them children—to flee their homes. Many are living in precarious conditions, taking shelter in schools, churches, or in the open, with limited access to clean water and sanitation, healthcare, and education.”

Congolese women’s movements have long argued that the plunder of natural resources—fueled by multinational corporations and foreign governments—sustains cycles of violence and displacement. The activism of grassroots feminist organizations has been essential in documenting these crimes and pushing for international accountability. Nobel laureate and Congolese gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege has exposed how sexual violence is used as a weapon of war in the region, often linked to corporate and state exploitation of the country’s vast mineral resources.

To this day, the ongoing genocide in the DRC highlights how colonial violence continues to shape global economic systems, but also how local resistance movements persist in the face of immense brutality.

For Palestinians, the fight against colonial amnesia is made all the more harrowing by the active erasure of their suffering, even as undeniable and well-documented evidence of genocide mounts. The international community willfully keeps failing to address the death, destruction and dispossession, with mainstream media narratives often obscuring or outright denying the reality of Israel’s crimes. Nada Elia, a Palestinian feminist scholar and activist, reminds us in her book Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, “the importance of discussing Palestine as a decolonial struggle and an anti-apartheid struggle cannot be over-emphasized. And the most distinguishing characteristic of settler colonialism is that it is land theft. As such, decolonization in a settler colonial context simply cannot be achieved without land restitution. Decolonization is not an abstract concept, ‘it is not a metaphor,’ as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue. Instead, as they write, decolonization, ‘as a process, would repatriate land to Indigenous peoples,’ and ‘Decolonizing the Americas means all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless.’”

The genocides in Palestine, Sudan and the DRC highlight the urgency of fighting erasure by all means necessary. And therefore to think through how disability justice can help us understand the path forward.

Thinking through disability justice and collective liberation

With that in mind, here are five key reasons why global solidarity with Palestine, Sudan and the DRC must remain central to our fight for collective liberation and disability justice.

1. The Systematic Disabling of Palestine, Sudan, and the DRC: Genocide as a Disability Justice Issue

The Israeli state is not only killing Palestinians—it is actively disabling them through structural violence. Bombings, sniper fire, and military raids cause mass amputations, traumatic brain injuries, and permanent disfigurement. But disablement in Palestine does not start or end with this genocide.

For decades, Israel has:

• Targeted Palestinian limbs through a “shoot-to-maim” policy, deliberately inflicting life-long disabilities on protestors.
• Imposed medical apartheid, systematically denying Palestinians access to healthcare, mobility aids, and rehabilitation.
• Bombed hospitals and disabled care facilities, ensuring that existing disabilities worsen into life-threatening conditions.
• Used chemical weapons that cause lasting neurological and developmental disabilities in children.

In Sudan, where genocidal violence has displaced millions and rape has been systematically used as a weapon of war, disablement and intergenerational trauma is both a byproduct and a strategy. People are being maimed by airstrikes, cut off from medical infrastructure, and left with untreated injuries that become permanent physically and mentally.

In eastern DRC, entire generations have been disabled by warlords, militias, and multinational corporations fighting over coltan and gold. Sexual violence, mass amputations from landmines, and malnutrition-induced disability are epidemic, and largely invisible to a world that only sees extractable resources instead of seeing a population under brutal imperialist capitalist control.

Disability justice demands that we see these bodies, these survivors, as central to our resistance—not as collateral. These are not isolated atrocities; they are systemic forms of disablement that uphold global capitalism, racism, and imperialism.

2. Erasing Disabled Resistance is Erasing Liberation

The Western gaze sees disabled people only as victims, never as leaders, revolutionaries, caregivers, knowledge keepers or survivors building the infrastructure of liberation. But disability justice shows us that disabled people are not passive victims.

In Palestine, even though there are statistics like every day in Gaza more than 10 children lose a limb, 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza are currently displaced, and 15% have a disability, disabled resistance is a long-standing reality. During the 2018 Great March of Return, disabled Palestinians were on the frontlines of resistance. Organizations like the Palestinian General Union of People with Disabilities have fought for both national liberation and disability justice under occupation.

In Sudan, disabled people joined the 2019 revolution and are facing persecution under the current genocide. In the article, Overcoming Barriers: Disability Rights in Sudan, Asala Salah paints the harrowing reality of war: basic essentials like water, sanitary pads, and diapers for people with disabilities and the elderly being completely unavailable and families forced to make heartbreaking decisions about who could flee for safety and who had to stay behind. But activists like Tarig Abuzaid, who lost mobility while rescuing others from a bombing in Omdurman, shows us that disabled people can lead community kitchens and aid networks, refusing to disappear into the margins.

In the DRC, the widespread use of sexual violence has significantly contributed to the increase in disabilities within the Congolese population. Survivors often suffer from fistulas, sexually transmitted infections, and other debilitating conditions. Furthermore, the stigma associated with rape leads to social exclusion, economic hardship, and barriers to accessing healthcare and rehabilitation services. But survivors of rape and war are building peer networks to support each other, challenge stigma, and demand justice. Despite little international attention, disabled Congolese people are resisting erasure.

To ignore disabled resistance in these places is to erase entire epistemologies of survival and struggle. It is to ignore the possibility of liberation that is being forged by disabled folks under the harshest conditions.

3. Disability Justice Demands Abolition and Decolonization—Everywhere

Disability justice is not reformist—it is abolitionist. There is no accessible version of a settler-colonial state. There is no liberatory version of a war economy.

The same forces that disable Palestinians—militaries, borders, occupation—also brutalize disabled people across Sudan and the DRC. Imperialism functions through proxies, starvation sieges, militarized resource theft, and weaponized displacement.

Canada, the U.S., and the E.U. remain complicit. They arm the Israeli military. They turn a blind eye to Sudanese airstrikes and Congolese massacres as long as their mining profits are protected. They fund the very regimes that manufacture disability through war.

Disability justice means the abolition of the entire system that permits these genocides. It means no more “inclusive” genocide. No more “diverse” war machines. No more colonial extraction dressed up as humanitarianism. Abolition and decolonization or nothing.

4. The Struggles of Disabled People Under Occupation and Colonialism are Interconnected

Palestine is not the only place where colonialism disables. The struggle of disabled Palestinians is intimately linked to:

• Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, where environmental violence, displacement, and incarceration disable entire generations.
• Black communities fighting against medical racism and state violence.
• Disabled people in Sudan, the DRC, and beyond, resisting war, famine, and neglect with nothing but their communities and will to live.

Disability justice is about refusing isolation. It is about refusing the idea that some bodies are grievable and others are not. It is about linking struggles from Gaza to Khartoum to Goma and saying: we will not let you disappear us!

5. Survivors are Reshaping Disability Justice in Real-Time

Newly disabled survivors are teaching the world what justice means. They are building community amidst rubble, resisting, and refusing to be erased.

For exemple, in Gaza, children who have lost limbs are already learning to care for each other and even cook for themselves and community to sustain themselves during genocide. In Sudan, survivors of RSF attacks are building schools for blind and amputee children in refugee camps and kids find joy and ways of playing.

They are not asking for pity. They are showing us what revolutionary disability justice looks like: interdependence, refusal, resistance, and care that is not performative, but a stubborn and steadfast insistence on existence beyond survival.

That said, I don’t want to romanticize resistance in the face of colonial abhorrence. Above everything, the violence of colonialism and occupation must end. As my friend Samar Alkhdour, a Palestinian feminist activist, says: “Fuck resilience. Stop this madness. We didn’t ask to be heroes.”

Toward Collective Liberation

Palestine is not a distant struggle. Neither is Sudan. Neither is the DRC. They are the mirror reflecting what must be undone everywhere: genocide, imperialism, ableism, reproductive violence, and carceral colonialism.

As decolonial Lebanese feminist, activist, and writer Jessica Jamal Khazrik brings us to think about in an instagram reel: “How come we have become a post-nuclear society and still militarization is what dominates our global economy? Still systems of genocide are what rule the world and have created the nation state system that is still colonial … our bodies are not meant to be melting and flying into the air because of anthropogenic horror…yet we have all been bearing witness not even to genocide at this point but to omnicide for over a year and a half and the world continues running with business as usual.”

But business as usual should never have been possible and certainly can no longer be possible. As Francesca Albanese’s report notes: “Corporate actors are deeply entwined in the system of occupation, apartheid and genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory. For decades, Israel’s repression of Palestinian people has been scaffolded by corporations, fully aware of and yet indifferent to, decades of human rights violations and international crimes.” Palestine, Sudan and the DRC teach us that empathy must move beyond outrage to action. That liberation is incomplete if it leaves anyone behind. That children should never be amputated in kitchens. (read that sentence again because the fact that I’m even writing this sentence should give us all mind-numbing chills)

And finally, that wonder, even in times of horror, is a form of resistance that will bring us back to our shared humanity.

“It can feel foolish to pause to marvel at the stars when the world is burning. Or to find the world beautiful when you’ve known it to betray you. But wonder is a liberation practice. A reminder that we contain more than tragedy. Beauty is our origin and our anchor.” — @BlackLiturgies

“They want us to look away because they understand that the longer we look, the more we will begin to recognize the common face of the oppressor. But we who’ve inherited suffering know that any distance between us is merely an illusion.” — Cole Arthur Riley

So, the question remains: Are we ready to follow the lead of Palestine, Sudan, the DRC and all indigenous struggles that ask us to insist on remembrance, resistance, and reclamation of the most marginalized lives as sacred? Much like Patrice Lumumba, assassinated former president of the post-independence DRC, we need to be uncontrollable and incorruptible. We need to still believe in humanity and that we will change the world in our path to collective liberation!

.mmABOUT

Nelly Bassily is a queer disability justice advocate, intersectional feminist, and anti-racism and sexual rights activist with over 15 years of experience driving transformative change in the non-profit sector. A dynamic media maker, she works at the intersections of disability justice, decolonial feminism, and collective liberation, amplifying the voices of marginalized communities and building movements rooted in care and solidarity.

Born in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal to Egyptian parents with Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian roots, Nelly’s activism is deeply shaped by the realities of immigration, diaspora, and decolonial struggle. She has led groundbreaking initiatives advancing gender and sexual rights, built inclusive frameworks for equity and accessibility, and developed leadership spaces for racialized women, queer, and disabled communities.

In 2021, she was recognized among the Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada for her leadership and advocacy.