We unreservedly call for an end to military action in the context of Israel and Palestine. Military action will only exacerbate generations of poverty, inequality, and suffering. Our evidence shows interventions with such a limited view, fail everywhere in the long term. Global policy must change to acknowledge complex trauma and uplift local voices for justice and dignity.
We are the Rights for Time network, a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project of researchers all over the world charged by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK-AHRC) with helping redefine humanitarian protection so it can be more sustainable.
The current escalation has already destroyed our partners’ community rooms and centres in Gaza. Colleagues have lost homes, and family members have been killed. Yet our partner, the Palestine Trauma Centre, continues to tend to the unending mental health crises.
In the West Bank, the Palestine Writing Workshop shares heartrending accounts of endless loss. A story called “Unbreakable” by a 9-year-old child tells of a girl born in the 2008-9 war on Gaza who finds solace in her grandmother’s love and resilience over 15 difficult years. It reminds us human life is fragile and must be handled with care, however stubborn the politics.
Our project partners in Palestine, as well as many other organizations, are already developing models of repair, lexicons for understanding and making sense of atrocities and injustices they have lived through and are living through today. These models, these vocabularies, these ways of understanding have become essential for Palestinian survival but also provide the new ‘roadmaps’, the new, better ways out of the current paradigm of violence upon violence upon violence. It is with this work that we stand and again call for an immediate end to military interventions and violence.
These considered, evidence-based insights demand new solutions. Short-term militarism cannot address decades-long occupation, nor achieve freedom with dignity. We cannot stay silent when military aid enables more repression and inequality.
On behalf of our global network, we urgently call for nonviolent policies addressing root causes. Leaders must find diplomatic paths to justice and collective healing. The world’s response must match this crisis’ complexity.
Please contact our experts for more details on this urgent need for change.
*This statement reflects the network and not necessarily those of our funders*