My Story by Victoria Frausin
I am Victoria Frausin, from Florencia, Caquetá, Colombia - an area heavily affected by internal conflict. I moved to Lancaster with my son and British husband over a decade ago, and I have spent most of this time as one of the coordinators of Sewing Café Lancaster, a grass-roots project advocating for socially and environmentally just textile practices.
Currently, I am doing an MPhil at Lancaster University on waste colonialism, which includes lives rendered as disposable. In this context, the case of Palestine could arguably be the quintessential example.
I first learned about Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine while I was in Mozambique in 2014. The capital city of Maputo had posters around the city demanding a Free Palestine. A few years later, when I started working with refugees and asylum seekers in Lancaster, I had a conversation with a lecturer knowledgeable on the subject. I expressed that I needed to learn more about the conflicts in the Middle East, to which he replied: "The first thing you need to understand is that Israel is evil." At the time, I thought he was exaggerating. He wasn't.
In Colombia, we are so immersed in our internal conflict that international issues only make it into the media or educational curriculum if they fit the government's agenda. Until recently, this agenda has oscillated between right and centre-right, focusing on the precariats of Cuba or Venezuela, as if the rest of the world lived in a paradise shaped by neo-liberal policies.
After witnessing the escalation of the disproportionate cruelty of the genocide committed by the state of Israel, the sympathy of corporations and governments, and the complicit silence of regular citizens of the world, I decided to channel my frustration into action in the way I know best: through textiles and the community of Sewing Café Lancaster. We organised a Tatreez workshop and an exhibition of Palestinian textile heritage to highlight the invaluable culture that is being erased. We also designed a watermelon brooch with an easy-to-follow tutorial and made several banners to support different demonstrations in the area. This is the one I mean...
The Palestinian struggle represents the brutality and unsustainability of the endless greed driving the world towards mass extinction. I believe we can live in a better world - one of justice, freedom, and love - where all children and their communities, regardless of religion, skin colour, or class, have access to a good life.
The way the Palestinian struggle is approached reveals which side corporations, governments, and people are on, it also exposes them and their hypocrisy. Whether it be academics who have built their careers researching colonialism, governments that preach freedom, Citizens advocating for human and environmental or feminists advocating for women's rights, all have failed to adhere to their knowledge, laws and advocacy rights when addressing Palestine and the gross violations of international laws committed by Israel. As though such research and human rights rulings were not intended for this race?
As it has been previously said: this is the most widely documented genocide in history, and no one will be allowed to say they didn't know.