Lessons From Abolition on the Violence/Non-Violence Binary and the Palestinian Struggle for Liberation

This article examines how social work and public health professionals have engaged with calls for a ceasefire in Palestine following October 7, 2023, and how these calls, in failing to interrogate the structural conditions of occupation, reinforce dominant frameworks that racialize resistance. We first analyze how social work and public health fields have historically operated within a limited framework of violence that centers on individual acts while obscuring structural violence, including settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperial warfare. We then examine how Palestinians have historically navigated state repression, focusing on how non-violence has been weaponized to delegitimize resistance while state violence remains normalized. Through a historical analysis of Palestinian liberation movements, we examine the implications of overlooking structural violence on the understanding of resistance in social work and public health. This article highlights how professional social work and public health organizations have reinforced carceral logics through their framing of violence and non-violence, and how an abolitionist framework can reorient these fields toward a more radical approach to solidarity.