Disability Activist Alice Wong Stands in Solidarity with Palestine & Lebanon in Her MacArthur Fellowship Acceptance
The MacArthur Foundation announced its 2024 fellowship class on October 1, including writer, editor, and disability justice activist Alice Wong (Disability Visibility, Disability Intimacy). An outspoken advocate for collective liberation who centers disabled perspectives in her work, Wong used the spotlight to make a powerful statement in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon.
“I am accepting the MacArthur Fellowship amidst the genocide happening in Gaza and indiscriminate terroristic attacks in Lebanon by the state of Israel on the 76th year of their occupation of Palestine,” she says in her acceptance. “I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle for freedom and self-determination. Disabled liberation is intertwined with the liberation of all people. By being in community with others, I learned that mutual aid and community organizing are acts of love.
“I also learned that activism isn’t supposed to be palatable or convenient. Change cannot occur without friction in resistance to systems and institutions centered on accruing power,” she continues. “As a disabled person in a nondisabled world, I do not have the luxury to be apolitical. My writing is a form of activism—presenting ideas that provoke, inviting readers to interrogate their beliefs, and prompting action against ableism. Everyone has a voice and collectively we can move mountains.”
Wong shared her statement in a thread on Twitter/X, which spread quickly across the platform. Among thousands of “likes” and comments congratulating Wong for the honor were detractors accusing her of anti-Semitism and worse. In a follow-up post on Tuesday, she wrote, “I’m just one writer speaking out against genocide & yet my statement was described as a screed & I have been called an antisemite & other hateful, ableist names. A statement isn’t an invitation for debate.”
Not only is Wong’s statement excellent, but her follow-ups in the ensuing 24 hours since the MacArthur announcement have been just as good. She shouldn’t have to defend herself for disavowing a genocide—but she’s long had to field these types of comments from Zionists, their enablers, and those who have unwittingly bought into the Israeli propaganda machine. In her “Palestine X Disability Justice Syllabus,” she writes that in the days after the October 7th Hamas attack, she was even criticized by her disabled peers for speaking out against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and its attacks on Gaza.
“It is not antisemitic to be against genocide and the dehumanization of an entire people,” Wong writes. “There are many in the disability community who claim disability justice yet overlook the principle of collective liberation. The silence from major disability-led organizations and disabled leaders in the United States denotes their complicity in a mass disabling event and the deaths of thousands of people.”
Gaza’s Health Ministry announced in August that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in the last year, at least 16,456 of them children, as reported by Al Jazeera. Requests have been made with the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the arrests of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and two Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, per Reuters, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has charged Israel with violating the 1948 Genocide Convention.
However, the Israeli military hasn’t slowed down—largely thanks to the U.S.’s unwavering support. On Tuesday, Israel began a full ground invasion of Lebanon after days of bombing its capital, Beirut, in an escalation against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah per Vox. In that time, the IDF has killed more than 1 thousand Lebanese people, injured more than 6 thousand, and displaced at least one million others.
In the last year, Wong co-founded Crips for eSims for Gaza, which aims to get eSims into the hands of Palestinians so they can connect to the Internet and communicate with the world, and Disability Divest, a “collective of disabled individuals who have joined together to call for a free Palestine and the end to the U.S. disability establishment’s partnership with war profiteers and complicity with genocide and colonialism.”
Wong’s dedication to collective liberation is foundational to her work, which is why the MacArthur Foundation has inducted her into its 2024 fellowship class. There is no way to separate the fight for disability justice from the call to dismantle a genocidal nation-state because they are the same fight. Wong’s centering of this fact, especially when accepting a major honor, demonstrates why she’s deserving of it in the first place.
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