Welcome to The ELSC Blog
Dear reader,
We are excited to welcome you to The ELSC Blog – a space for political reflection, strategic discussion, analysis, and collective learning from and with the Palestine solidarity movement across Europe.
The blog emerges at a time of escalating anti-Palestinian repression in the face of the rise of a mass, popular, anti-genocide movement, in solidarity with Palestine – a movement that states, corporations, lobby groups, universities, and media actors are working hard to contain, silence, and delegitimise.
This repression is neither accidental nor isolated. It is systematic, coordinated across sectors and countries, and operating through the weaponisation of legal and administrative systems to silence dissent, criminalise solidarity, and disable the very capacity to mobilise against settler colonialism and genocide in Palestine – and against European complicity in both.
Alongside sharing insights into our legal and advocacy work as an independent organisation defending and empowering Palestine solidarity across Europe, this blog is intended as something broader: a collective space for strategic reflection and the exchange of experiences, tactics, and lessons across the movement to continue mobilising for Palestine.
The ELSC Blog – A space to discuss solidarity, repression and resistance
Since 2019, the ELSC has worked to defend those who stand in solidarity with Palestine, to expose anti-Palestinian repression, and to disrupt and challenge European complicity and impunity for Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights.
We understand that to fight repression we must first make it visible. What we confront is not a series of isolated incidents, but an institutionalised and systematic regime of anti-Palestinian repression across Europe – one that functions as a key stage in the larger project of erasing Palestinian history, presence, and struggle from public consciousness and institutional memory.
In our daily work, we encounter court rulings, legislative changes, government measures, university policies, policing practices, and institutional forms of complicity which all too often pass without public attention, despite their cumulative impact across sectors and borders.
Through our legal case work, research, monitoring, and advocacy, we have built knowledge that we believe must be shared. More importantly, we work alongside individuals, groups and organisations targeted by systems of repression and refusing to be intimidated or silenced, and who continue to organise, speak, and resist under intensifying pressure. Their experiences are not only evidence of repression, but a testimony of solidarity and persistence; they tell stories of a movement that continuously evolves, reshapes, and reorganises against the forces of erasure.
This is precisely why we are launching The ELSC Blog.
It is an open space for insights into our work and the numerous efforts of the wider Palestine solidarity movement across Europe. The blog will host contributions from both the ELSC team as well as comrades and partners in the wider movement – sharing analysis, strategies, reflections and learnings, and connecting them to the lived practices of resistance for the liberation of Palestine.
The ELSC Blog seeks to build a collective and historical record not only of repression and complicity, but of how they are and can be resisted. We want this knowledge to not only be preserved, but to circulate – to become collective and transformative, and to strengthen our capacity to work strategically together and build the structures we need to resist, endure, and grow stronger.
Our first contributions
We are launching this project with three contributions that reflect both the work of the ELSC and wider movement experiences.
In Block the boat: ELSC’s role in disrupting individual arms deliveries to Israel the ELSC’s Crimes & Complicity team reflects on the European legal landscape vis-à-vis weapons transfers to Israel and our efforts to stop them.
In “Hostile” Symbols & Slogans: The Attack on Palestinian Identity in Europe, the ELSC’s Monitor and Research Department traces the intensifying criminalisation of Palestinian symbols and slogans across Europe, situating these attacks within a longer history of Zionist genocidal efforts not only to criminalise but to eradicate Palestinian presence itself.
And in our first guest contribution, Institutionalisation from Below: A Testimony from Exposing Zalando, organisers from the ExposingZalando campaign reflect on strategy, mobilisation, and movement-building in the German context.
Call for contributions
We hope these first readings spark reflection, discussion, and further exchange across the movement and inspire you to contribute your own experiences and analysis.
We warmly invite organisers, affected individuals, lawyers, journalists, researchers, workers, students, artists, and communities across Europe to contribute to the blog. To submit a contribution or get in touch, contact us at blog@elsc.support.
This space is open to those directly targeted by anti-Palestinian repression to share testimonies, experiences, and political reflections.
It is open to organisers and campaigners to reflect on strategy, coalition-building, tactical debates, and the challenges and learnings for sustaining mobilisation and community under intensifying repression.
And it is open to lawyers, journalists and researchers analysing the structures, mechanisms, and political implications of anti-Palestinian repression, European complicity, and Israeli impunity.
We offer this space as a platform for testimony, strategy, solidarity, and collective struggle.
In solidarity,
The European Legal Support Center