The release of Israeli hostages from Gaza has been widely covered by the Western press. But what about the hundreds of freed Palestinian hostages, and their stories of trauma and suffering?
Five years ago this past summer, global uprisings against police brutality and the murders of George Floyd and other Black Americans brought “defund the police” into mainstream discussion. The concept of “defund” is simple: a preponderance of evidence shows that policing does not bring about public safety. And even if it did, the costs borne to society by the use of violent, armed agents of the state to inflict brutality, killings, torture, arrest, and mass incarceration onto the population are too high. Instead, by the logic of “defund,” we should take money away from police budgets and redirect it into community-based programs that get at the root causes of crime. By dealing with things like poverty and education, the idea goes, we can prevent crime and violence from happening in the first place, rather than focus on punishing people after the fact. “Defund” is part of a larger vision of police and prison abolition, which encompasses a total rethinking of the notion of public safety and advocates for a long-term political project of moving away from austerity, policing, and prisons and toward a system of justice that doesn’t use violence and caging to address the harms that people commit against each other.