Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has killed over 38,000 Palestinians and counting. The war is being waged in response to Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, which killed around 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and took 250 others hostage. At the time of publication, the U.N. estimates that 1.9 million people — 90% of Gaza’s population — have been internally displaced. 

Israel’s intensified blockade of food, water, fuel, electricity and medical supplies to Gaza has led 100% of Gazans to face acute food insecurity and to the collapse of Gaza’s health care system. The International Rescue Committee has warned of an imminent outbreak of infectious diseases. On October 15, 2023, during Israel’s initial airstrikes ahead of its full-scale invasion, a report from the Palestinian Ministry of Health stated that 47 families, comprising over 500 civilians, were completely erased from the civil registry, meaning that every single member of those families had been killed.

On December 29, 2023, South Africa accused Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). On January 29, 2024, the ICJ ruled that “the facts and circumstances mentioned above are sufficient to conclude that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible.” 

In March 2024, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories released a report stating that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” Moreover, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has filed for arrest warrants against senior Israeli and Hamas officials for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The sheer scale of the violence, coupled with anger at biased media coverage towards Israel among major western outlets and western powers’ apparent unwillingness to stop funding and arming Israel, has sparked a worldwide wave of protests in support of Palestine.

Following the invasion of Gaza, protests calling for a ceasefire were also held all over the western Balkans.

While some regional leaders were slow or dispassionate in their reactions, Sarajevo Mayor Benjamina Karić said “Sarajevo has always been on the right side of history and fought for justice and truth” at a protest on October 25, 2023. 

In Prishtina, the Feminist Collective for Thought and Action, along with the Social Space for Deconstruction, have been the driving force behind this recent wave of activism. Together they have organized protests, film screening, talks and a performance of the Gaza Monologues at community-run center Termokiss. They hung a Palestinian flag in the city center, in collaboration with Dylberizm, which the Kosovo Police swiftly removed. In Tirana, grassroots collective Palestina e lirë — Free Palestine — has organized public actions and rallies in solidarity with Palestine. The collective launched an Open Letter to Cancel the Israeli Cultural Week in Tirana and declared June as a Palestine cultural month

Amidst the ongoing protests, encampments have sprung up on university campuses in various countries. These protests have demanded divestment from financial entanglements between educational institutions and companies alleged to be profiting from the war and called for academic boycotts, among other requests.

K2.0 spoke with readers and contributors from the region’s diaspora communities around the world — students, lawyers, activists — who are advocating for the rights of Palestinians. We wanted to know more about what drives their activism, how they have been involved and whether ties to Kosovo and the broader region have influenced their involvement.

Hana Marku, 36, immigration lawyer, Toronto, Canada

I and two other immigration and refugee lawyers in Toronto, Damey Lee and Debbie Rachlis, are suing the Canadian government over its slow and opaque handling of Gazan immigration files. Our litigation group is doing this work pro-bono on behalf of approximately 40 Palestinian families in Gaza.

In December 2023, Canada announced a special immigration pathway for Canadians with immediate family members in Gaza. A Canadian anchor relative under this pathway can submit an expression of interest to the government to bring over their loved ones from Gaza. Then the Canadian government should, in theory, give each family member in Gaza a unique reference code. The family members in Gaza can then apply for a visitor visa with their unique reference code. They must provide all the required forms and documents and pay visa application fees. They must be in Gaza when applying for the visa.

The pathway was launched in January 2024. It has been a failure. There are approximately 40 Palestinians who made it to Canada under this pathway. There are about 45,000 Palestinian-Canadians, which should give you a sense of the scale of the failure here. Some families have gotten special codes and some have not. The Canadian government has said codes will be issued on a first-come, first-serve basis, but that has not been the situation for our clients. 

All visa applicants under this pathway are required to share all phone numbers they ever had, all email addresses they have ever had, all their social media handles and descriptions of scars on their bodies and where they got them. Canada makes no secret of the fact that they share information about applicants with the governments of Israel and Egypt. Colleagues of mine have told me that medical professionals under this pathway have been asked if they have ever treated a member of Hamas. I have also heard of applicants being asked to send photos of their scars to Canadian immigration officers. The Canadian government’s special pathway for Gazans is the most invasive and degrading immigration pathway I have ever encountered.

Gaza’s borders are closed. Even in peacetime, getting a visa with a Palestinian Authority passport is incredibly difficult. Before the invasion of Rafah [May 6, 2024], it was possible to pay huge bribes to Egyptian travel companies to get out of Gaza and into Egypt. These bribes were typically going at about $5,000 per individual to cross from Gaza into Egypt. Now that Israel is in control of the Rafah crossing, I think that practice has come to an end. Based on the information I have, even when the government of Canada sends names of Gazans who have been invited to continue their visa processing in Egypt, COGAT — an Israeli agency that administers security and civilian issues in Gaza and the West Bank — does not authorize their exits. There is no way out. Gaza is a prison and a killing field right now. 

In the litigation, we are asking the Federal Court of Canada to order the government to issue codes and finalize decisions on visa applications. We are also asking the court to set aside improper refusals of applications. Litigation moves slowly and I fear what will happen to our clients while this grinds through the court. 

Gaza is a small strip of land with two million people living on it. Kosovo is a small country with two million people living in it. I try to imagine what the Kosovo war would have looked like if the borders were closed. All of the families we represent are ordinary people. Many of them have very young children and very old parents. They had houses and jobs and were going to school and getting married, in a place that hasn’t had a free election in almost twenty years and that has repeatedly been called an open air prison. Our clients have lost everything and have been made scapegoats for crimes that they had no involvement in. This is unbearable. 

Njomza Dragusha, 31, educator and community organizer, Zurich, Switzerland

In Zurich, the initial reaction from institutions was quite intense. Many movements for Palestine faced backlash, with accusations of antisemitism. Public discussions often targeted pro-Palestine groups as antisemitic and “violent.” Recently, the mobilization of students and academics within educational institutions has brought to light much more about how these institutions reacted.

I had other experiences while working at a collective restaurant in Zurich, where we took an anti-Zionist stance by boycotting Israeli products. This decision led to significant conflict among team members, some of whom viewed the action as antisemitic. By joining a chain of restaurants across Switzerland that boycotted Israeli products, our restaurant received many threats and our space was vandalized.

People in Western contexts often cannot reflect on the situation in Palestine without considering their own history of anti-Semitism in Europe. This means they struggle to separate anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. Even if they can make this distinction, they feel threatened to open that box and have an honest discussion. There has never been a genuine reflection in Europe on the creation of Israel as a colonial project.

Azra Muftić, 31, University of California, Santa Barbara alum, California, U.S.

I was back in the states for a few months this spring, and during this time I went to a couple of large protests and marches organized in the Bay Area, mainly San Francisco. Police were always present at every event I went to, and did use pepper spray, batons and tear gas at some point of the march and protesting. I also started going to the encampment more regularly at UC Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley]. I could see that the students were definitely experimenting with horizontal structures of organization; [they were] trying their best to keep things well organized and functioning, and the goals of the encampment clear and concise as the main driving force. I had a lot of hope for the student movement because it felt like a hugely tangible internal movement in the U.S. that would eventually reveal the brutality of the police, and the state, and show the violent lengths the state is willing to go against its own people, students no less, in order to protect and promote Israel’s fascist and genocidal campaign.

Social media and the way the internet works, as much as it can surveil and control us, has also revealed in real time to people what genocide looks like — that it’s not some conceptual, theoretical thing that we read about in history books. Violence unfolds on everyone’s phones daily now, and there is no hiding the brutality. What is seen cannot be unseen, and there’s serious power in that, and no going back to the way things function today thanks to mass connectivity and technological advances available to the public. We will see what U.S. citizens have to say about all of this in the coming years and what Gaza will mean for U.S. domestic and international policy.

Ervina Bajrami, 27, student, Lund, Sweden

Lund Students for Palestine is the anti-genocidal pro-Palestinian student movement in Lund University, which has been protesting almost every week and has been writing petitions and sending emails since October 2023, but all in vain. This movement has no leader and it functions with democratic decisions made by the students who want to participate in its activities and protests.

My concern and knowledge about Palestine has increased since 2021 with the bombardments they underwent during that time, and especially with Sheikh Jarrah atrocities [in 2021, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered Palestinian families to leave their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers]. Even though I did not protest back then, the knowledge I was gaining began changing me and I became more ready when this October came. Enough is enough! I do not want to see nor ignore this bloodshed anymore.

I am heartbroken with what is going on in Palestine and especially in Gaza right now; I am heartbroken to see how evil people can be and how much noble people at heart can suffer from the madness of, in this case, the Israeli state. I am heartbroken also by the academic world, which has taken a fake authority of knowledge. When it comes to compassion and human values they are so devoid of it. That is why I protest.

Gresa Rrahmani, 29, student, Lund, Sweden

Lund Students for Palestine renamed Lundagård as Palestinagård. Photo credit: Gresa Rrahmani

Since October 2023, I have been active in Kosovo’s Collective in Solidarity for Palestine, which consists of independent persons and members of the Feminist Collective and Social Space for Deconstruction. Thus, when I returned to Lund in February 2024 to finish my master’s thesis, I naturally joined the protests in Sweden and later on the encampment. There, I also met Ervina [Bajrami] and as two Kosovar Albanians we embarked on this journey of resistance and solidarity together. The encampment in Lund was initiated by Lund Students for Palestine joining the global call of students in solidarity with Palestine. 

After October, I realized how ignorant I had been and that this was merely the tip of a giant iceberg of systematic oppression, humiliation and injustice inflicted upon the indigenous Palestinian people. After October, images and videos of Palestinians forced to flee their homes to the south of Gaza flooded social media. Watching Palestinian women and men, young and old fleeing their home with very few personal belongings triggered in me my own memories and experiences of war. My first memories of life are of war, forced out of our home in Prishtina by the Serbian forces and then becoming refugees first in Bllacë and then in Albania [during the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo]. In one of these memories, I close my eyes and I see my father putting bottles of water in front of our home for what seemed an endless stream of soon to be refugees going through the street to take.

As an adult now, watching a genocide livestream in our social medias, everything takes a new perspective. It has also made me have so much more compassion about my parents and all Kosovars really, to reconsider their experiences through an adult lens, the horror and the fear must have been unimaginable. No one should have to go through this; Palestinians should not have to go through this. It feels so absurd to have to argue that a genocide is wrong and that we have to do everything in our power to stop it.

Arber Gashi, 27, writer and curator, London, U.K.

I have attended both local events in my area of East London and larger activities organized by groups like the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. I have organized in my own way to show my support for the Palestinian people. I co-founded an events-based collective known as the Balkan London Collective in 2023; it is primarily focused on hosting events aimed at showcasing Balkan diaspora joy. In late 2023, we organized a fundraising event for the Palestinians, and we raised over 400 pounds for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. 

My decision to get involved was primarily driven by my shared humanity with the Palestinian people. I also see parts of my intergenerational history in the plight of the Palestinians. I descend from a family that has experienced multiple instances of displacement, dispossession, and oppression. I mention this not to shift the focus away from the Palestinian people, but rather to urge those who descend from communities that have faced oppressive ideologies historically to think more critically about the position they hold.

This article has been edited for length and clarity. The conversations were conducted in English.

Feature Image: Ervina Bajrami.

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