Read time: 10-15 minutes
Almost everyone who works in fashion remembers the watershed moment in April 24, 2013, that was Rana Plaza, when a factory in Bangladesh collapsed due to unsafe working conditions. There, in the rubble, among dead bodies, were clothing tags that belonged to the most recognizable names in fashion. Many, including myself, found images from Rana Plaza to be so haunting that it pushed me to commit to a career advocating for a more ethical, just, and sustainable fashion industry.
Today, a different set of images haunt me.
Like Rana Plaza, there are bodies trapped and buried in the rubble. Except instead of a single factory, it’s an entire city obliterated. The images are so gory and gut-wrenching, it’s hard to believe they are real. The unfiltered videos and images of dismembered body parts, maimed limbs, and blood soaked clothes from civilian men, women and children from Gaza that young journalists like Motaz Azaiza have shared to the world have rocked me to my core. I never thought we would witness a genocide unfold from our phone screens, in real-time, in this day and age.
What is the common thread between a collapsed factory in Bangladesh and the genocide in Gaza?
Colonialism and capitalism.
According to the Palestine Trade Center, the Palestinian textile and garment sector was the largest sector in Gaza and the third largest in the West Bank in the year 2000. However, it sharply declined over the last 15 years because of Israeli restrictions on the movement of people and goods within the Gaza Strip, and restrictions on accessing the foreign market. By forcing Gaza manufacturers to only work within their local market, they are unable to grow new business, develop local design talent, or access modern production technology, leading to its demise.
Furthermore, the majority of Gaza’s garment and textile factories were subcontracting for Israeli companies, where they were involved in the most labor-intensive operations with the lowest profit margins: sewing, pre-washing, ironing, and packaging. Meanwhile, Israeli contractors normally control high-profit activities: design, marketing, and distributions. 50% of electricity in Gaza is also controlled by Israel, which means that Gaza suffers from chronic blackout outages, increasing costs for already struggling factories. [Source: Palestine Trade Center]
To top it off, equally skilled workers in Gaza are paid significantly less than their Israeli counterparts. Gaza workers report receiving $15 per day, while workers in Israel can get up to $150 per day. Unemployment rates in Gaza stand at 45% [Source: IMF, 2022], and most recently, the UN has estimated that 80% of the population are living below the poverty line. Given this situation, workers and manufacturers are forced to accept any working condition.
This is the epitome of colonialism at play.
Though we have begun to hear the realities of colonialism as part of the sustainable fashion discourse, there is still a lot of discomfort around naming it. But as we interrogate the systemic dysfunctions in the fashion supply chain, we constantly come back to the same root: a legacy of colonialism that has perpetuated the exploitation of human labor and the acquisition of land & resources at the expense of local populations.
Rana Plaza and the Palestinian garment industry is proof of this in action. It demonstrates the power dynamics in the fashion supply chain in which companies from the Global North take advantage of the vulnerable financial positions that manufacturers in the Global South are in, imposing unfair contracts that manufacturers are forced to accept despite very little protections. It is not uncommon for these contracts to place the burden of production costs on manufacturers, with loopholes that allow companies to cancel contracts without any financial responsibility. Today, responsible purchasing practices (how brands engage with manufacturers/suppliers) is a vital part of the industry conversation.
Even still, as the industry works to create a sustainable and ethical transition of the fashion supply chain, the power dynamics that exist between brands in the Global North and manufacturers in the Global South are real tensions rooted in that very same colonial legacy. Of course, there are also corrupt manufacturers that abuse their power and take advantage of workers, but again, this is tied to the same legacy. After all, as my sustainability peer Dhawal Mane shared with me, a colonial mindset knows no color. There are those who adopt this hierarchical belief regardless of race, religion, gender, or otherwise, so I call us all in to be self-aware of our own unconscious biases as we do this work.
A manufacturer once told me that we can’t create real solutions if we aren’t honest about the problem.
So I’d like to invite us all to stand in recognition of this truth: that a colonial legacy fueled by a hyper-extractive capitalist system is the root of the world’s worst problems: wars, genocides, and the erosion of our planet.
The genocides being inflicted in multiple places have something in common: Gaza has gas, Sudan has gold, Congo has cobalt*. The deliberate acquisition of these natural resources for financial gain has completely disregarded human lives, not to mention the land that the resources live on. And we see this mirrored in the fashion supply chain.
At a recent protest in Amsterdam, youth climate activist Greta Thunberg chanted, “No climate justice on occupied land”, upon which an adult man grabbed the mic from her to retort, “I’ve come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view.”
Yet climate is political, and environmental oppression is very real.
When an occupying settler denies indigenous populations access to clean water, this is oppression. When Israeli settlements dump their waste water to pollute Palestinian villages and corrupt their farmlands, this is oppression. And for those of us who work in sustainable fashion, we can link this to our industry through the awareness that rivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh have turned black to make colorful fast fashion. As COP28 recognizes, the Global South have contributed the least to the climate crisis, and yet are the most climate-vulnerable, bearing the brunt of floods, droughts, and more.
When we understand that all the dots are connected, then we understand that our collective liberation is dependent on our ability to be intentional about dismantling old systems to create a world that truly respects the sanctity of human lives and our planet. Denying this only perpetuates old cycles.
Disrupting colonial legacy means intentionally building transformational relationships, rather than transactional ones. Instead of building only profit, we must focus on building community, and actively transform systems of oppression into systems of care.
This is why I call on my peers to demand a permanent ceasefire and support the fight for a Free Palestine.
The Palestinian cause is connected to climate justice, to human rights, to indigenous rights, and all that we are advocating for when we demand a more sustainable, ethical, and humane fashion industry.
“In a real sense, all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly...This is the inter-related structure of reality.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fighting for a Free Palestine liberates all of us, a common thread that unravels the violent entanglement of the past, allowing us to break old patterns to stitch together a world that clothes us all in dignity and a shared humanity.
“Demanding for a free Palestine is not Anti-Semistic, but Pro-Liberation. [We] can support Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety, and the two can and MUST exist.”
-Dianne Guerrero, actor & activist
*via @drkarimwafa
To take action:
Keep “liking” & “sharing” Palestinian voices and journalists on your social media. When Western media controls the narrative, we don’t see the full story. We must keep amplifying. Voices I follow include: @motaz_azaiza | @wizard_bisan1 | @jenanmatari
Download the app 5calls to call your representatives as much as you can to demand a ceasefire. We have to keep applying pressure. Here is a sample script for ease.
Educate yourself:
I invite you to reference this summary by Amnesty International for more about the Israeli occupation.
This talk by Dr. Gabor Mate, trauma expert and Holocaust survivor, is also a great place to start.
And since this is for the fashion crowd, perhaps hearing it from Cynthia Nixon (Miranda from “Sex & The City”) may be more relatable, so I’ll go ahead and leave this right here too.
Keep connecting the dots, raise your consciousness and awareness, and be intentional about the steps you’re taking to participate in building a world that aligns with your values and beliefs. When this is your North Star, you will always go in the right direction.