No free spaces without a free Palestine
Amsterdam, October 21st – We have squatted these 2 buildings (Prinsengracht 804 et 806), despite the city’s (and the police’s) best attempts to make it very difficult, because we believe that ADEV(Amsterdam Danst Ergens Voor – Amsterdam dances for something)’s call to ‘disown stupid property’ is a call to action.
These buildings, owned and left empty by a massive american investment firm called Blackstone, some (though not all) of whose crimes you can read on the banner, are definitely, by all definitions, stupid property. But we want to stress that, in a capitalist system that puts corporate giants over human life and dignity, ALL PROPERTY IS STUPID AND ALL PROPERTY IS THEFT.
In our fight against the housing crisis in the Netherlands and our celebration of the so-called ‘free spaces’, we cannot forget that we are fighting a much broader struggle – the struggle for land rights worldwide & against capitalist dispossession. As we dance here today, Gaza is running critically low on food and water, and its starving population is being bombed to extinction. The number of people killed had reached nearly 4000 as of Thursday, and the number of displaced persons mounts to 1 million.
It is the same logic, the same colonial capitalist system that causes the displacement of people here as it does elsewhere. Blackstone has not only nearly singlehandedly created the housing crisis in Europe. It also invests in Israeli tech, now deployed heavily by the military to commit war crimes, and has pledged millions to ‘support’ Israel days after the latest siege against Gaza began. Blackstone has direct ties to war criminals in Saudi Arabia through infrastructure megaprojects and works with the US Immigration and Customs enforcement in tracking, racially profiling and detaining people on the move. Blackstone has employed kids as young as 13 to work in slaughterhouses & owns more than half of the company that has cut down and destroyed parts of the Amazon rain forest, leading to deadly forest fires in 2019/20 in which nearly 50 000 square kilometers of rainforest were lost.
As this long list of Blackstone’s crimes shows all too clearly, capitalism is a death cult. As we stand in front of numerous irreversible tipping points, too many already passed, what we have to lose is nothing less than life itself. From the mass extinction of species, extreme weather events and large parts of the earth becoming completely uninhabitable, to the many people directly or indirectly killed by climate collapse.
Capitalism in crisis also means an intensification of violence. As the colonial empire is coming to its end, as capitalism enters another cycle of economic crisis, the fear of people’s self determination and collective strength leads those in power to intensify repression. Land defenders everywhere are facing increasing criminalization – in the Amazon rainforest, nearly 200 environmental activists were murdered in 2020 for resisting the Blackstone-funded projects that led to the forest fires. In Chiapas, people are facing large-scale forced displacement; forced disappearances; land divestments; assassinations; torture; espionage and criminalization of social protests at the hands of the Mexican state and industrial megaprojects. And right now, in Palestine, we are witnessing the colonial Israeli state committing a genocide against the people of Gaza with the full consent and support of the Dutch government. When our leaders and mass media is trying to justify the indiscriminate murder of thousands by painting Palestinians as savages or terrorists, staying silent means being complicit.
Our struggle for housing and dignity is fundamentally a struggle for land, a struggle against exploitation, displacement and the destruction of this planet. Our solidarity with comrades around the world, in the struggles we have mentioned here and those we have not, can therefore never be just symbolic. Their struggle is our struggle. How many more times are we going to stand here and say enough is enough? how many more people need to die? Too many lines allready crossed and lives lost. Enough happend and the global socialist revolution did not come. Might not come, Might not come in time to stop the destruction of life as we know it.
Capitalism is death.
Israel is death.
still
The time seems never quite right to act. We are still waiting for someone to save us, making demands from governments, hoping for technocratic solutions to stop climate collapse, we look at the united nations and cry out that genocide is against international law, while every 15 minutes a child is murdered in gaza.
Our words are followed by actions. We have to do it ourselves. It is here in the Netherlands, in Europe, that the companies are based that fund and produce the weapons that are used against the people of Palestine. It is here in the global north, where the warmongering vultures sit in their ivory towers as they line their pockets with the profits of death and destruction. Let us show them that they are not invincible, that they can be targeted, harmed, that there actions will not go unnoticed and that there will be consequences.
We call upon you to show up to the next Palestine protest; inform yourself on the companies and states that drive the destruction of land and dispossession of people worldwide. Destroy these companies, help bring the death machine of capitalism to a halt by whatever means necessary. Check in on your comrades from and in the middle east. Show some love to the people around you that are struggling, build community, share your knowledge and skills. Anyone of us hold the capacity to act. to Fight back. to resist. it is not going to be easy and there will be repression. We too, are afraid, but we cannot let our fear stop us from acting. We must be strong. Because if the people of gaza can find the strength and power to resist against all odds, under impossible circumstance,then we can too.
There are no free spaces without a free Palestine !
No one is free untill we are all free.
Fuck blackstone !
Anarchist Emma Goldman famously said “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution” and we agree that our joy in this world is also resistance. But as we dance here today, let us not forget the struggle to make this revolution happen.
Press statement
On Saturday, October 21st, during ADEV 2023, we revealed that we have squatted two buildings owned by the American private investment giant, Blackstone.
Blackstone owns 1700 houses in the Netherlands and is almost singlehandedly responsible for the housing crisis in Europe.
Cultivating empty houses for profit while people struggle to find a roof over their head is not the only activity Blackstone is involved in; Blackstone uses child labor, destroys the amazon rainforest, collaborates with the USA immigration force ICE, violently evicts tenants and funds the Israeli genocidal state.
With our action we want to especially put focus on the situation in Palestine and Blackstone’s involvement in it. Not only does Blackstone invest in Israeli tech companies that have direct contracts with the Israeli military; they have also donated to different organizations in support of Israel, days after it began its violent siege against Gaza. One of these organisations (UJA of New York) sponsored an event promoting settlements in the West Bank in the past and today their emergency fund is not just used for humanitarian aid, but also to fund charter flights for Israeli reservists.
As of the day of ADEV, Gaza is running critically low on food and water and its starving population is being bombed to extinction – a genocide that the Dutch government openly supports. This is not something we can forget or ignore as we dance against ‘stupid property’ and the housing crisis, because the struggle for decent housing is fundamentally a struggle for right to land and against state and capitalist dispossession. As the example of Blackstone shows, our struggles are borne of the same root poison – capitalism. Our solidarity with land struggles worldwide, therefore, must be more than just symbolic.
We call upon everyone to show up and take action against the genocide in Palestine.
Some squats in the Netherlands: https://radar.squat.net/en/groups/country/NL/squated/squat
Groups (social center, collective, squat) in the Netherlands: https://radar.squat.net/en/groups/country/NL
Events in the Netherlands: https://radar.squat.net/en/events/country/NL
Indymedia https://indymedia.nl/node/53909
