It was July 2014 when Israel launched its seven-week carpet bombing siege of Gaza & July 2016 when a six-month Indian military siege tried to crush the uprising after the execution of BW, the man whose name & image are censored on FB but whose funeral was attended by over 600,000 people. Those two sieges (they can hardly be called events) were a living hell just to witness so words fail in describing what it must have been for Palestinians & Kashmiris to endure.

Facebook draws up our archives every day & images from Gaza 2014 & Kashmir 2016 are now appearing. It may be worthwhile to repost some of them because the extremes & the forms of violence have not ceased in either place.

They are monumental struggles & some say hopeless struggles. They are only hopeless if we continue to let them stand alone against such massive military might. But even without phalanxes of international support their intransigence is not defeated. Like indigenous tribes in Brazil fighting neoliberal scorched earth economics & Syrian revolutionists against the Assad dictatorship, Palestinians & Kashmiris are teachers of social transformation. Their struggles are our struggles because solidarity is not a one-way street of noblesse oblige. It is the iron law of social transformation.