this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Abolition of police and prisons

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Abolish is to flourish! Against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice.

See Critical Resistance's definitions below:

The Prison Industrial Complex

The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.

Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for "tough on crime" politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.

Abolition

PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.

From where we are now, sometimes we can't really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn't just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It's also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.

Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

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Ultimately, this “generous offer” amounted to turning the West Bank into non-contiguous cantons, crisscrossed by a network of settlements, roads and Israeli areas. Even the supposed “capital” of the Palestinian state would mostly be under Israeli control, with stipulations and conditions that stripped any real sovereignty from any area of the supposed Palestinian “state”. Not even the sky above Palestinian heads would be under their control, nor the water under their feet, as Israel still demanded access to water resources under the West Bank.

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago

TL;DR Israel's peace offers are not "generous" as often described, and they involve significant concessions that undermine the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state. The article reviews the Camp David negotiations from 2000:

  • The offer effectively annexed 10% of the West Bank to Israel, with an additional 8-12% remaining under "temporary" Israeli control.
  • In return Palestine gets 1% of desert near the Gaza strip.
  • Israel demanded control over Palestinian airspace, 3 permanent bases in the West Bank, presence at Palestinian border crossings (presumably this references border crossings to other countries) and "security arrangements" at the Jordan border which required more territory.
  • Israel was also allowed to invade at any point in case of "emergency", with no definition of what an emergency is.
  • In East Jerusalem, Palestine's proposed capital city, Israel refused sovereignty over Palestinian neighbourhoods.
  • Israel would only allow a very limited return of a very limited number of refugees over a very long period of time.

In general, the article claims that Israel's peace offer with the establishment of a Palestinian state was not actually granting sovereignty to that state, and instead sought to legitimise the Israeli occupation.