On October 28th—as Israel cut internet and electricity in Gaza after two weeks of aerial bombardments that had already killed more than 7,000 people—representatives for the family members of people taken hostage by Hamas approached Benjamin Netanyahu with a simple demand: “Everyone for everyone.” The Israeli government, they said, should meet the terms laid out by Hamas and release the more than 5,000 Palestinians in its prisons in exchange for hundreds of hostages. “Your first and only commitment is to return them all home,” one of the representatives told the Israeli government. “Everyone for everyone, and it doesn’t matter what price.”
In insisting that safety is necessarily a collective project—that the safety of some at the expense of others is not, in fact, safety at all—abolition insists that we take safety seriously, both on its own merits and because carceral and militarist solutions prevail when alternative structures of community care atrophy. It offers an orientation toward a transformational shift—one that addresses the root causes rather than a temporary and partial alleviation of the symptoms.