I was asked if I wanted to write a text as the SPARK DEI Chair for ENAR Foundation. I hesitated a bit, I wasn’t sure what I could write about that hadn’t already been written. I remember hearing as a child that if you had nothing to say, you should just stay silent.
Unfortunately today, I have a lot to speak about.
I sat down to write at a time when people in Gaza still live through bombardment, siege and hunger in front of cameras and in front of governments that claim to defend human rights. I know for some people, it feels far. Yet, it is happening inside Europe too, in every parliament that votes for weapons, in every deal that protects trade, in every press conference that speaks about law while bodies lie under rubble.
Human rights organisations have named the regime that Israel imposes on Palestinians as apartheid for a while.
Many scholars, lawyers and movements have named what happens in Gaza as genocide for a while.
As an Algerian, whose country was the first one to recognize Palestine, I stand with that naming. I see a project that treats a whole people as a problem to remove, not as a people with land, memory, present and future.
States in Europe do not stand outside this project as I wrote. They approve arms exports and training. They sign contracts for surveillance and border technology. They use their voices to shield Israel in international arenas. In the same breath they talk about humanitarian concern, they talk about restraint, they talk about peace. At the same time, they back the conditions that give Israel the means to keep bombing, keep starving, keep uprooting people in Gaza and across Palestine.
The so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza shows this clearly. Leaders used this word and celebrated a step toward “peace”. Many spoke as if killing had stopped. Gaza tells another story. Since the ceasefire agreement, Israeli forces have carried out repeated attacks, again and again. People in Gaza count new graves, new injuries, new loss. Ceasefire on paper is not safety for the people.
It becomes a word that helps Europe wash its hands. The killing continues, only with a different label. And as a consequence, people stop looking at what is happening over there.
For me, this is not an abstract debate. I work on racial justice in European spaces every single day. I watch institutions invite racialised people to talk about inclusion, belonging, equity, while at the same time they keep silent on Gaza, or they repeat official lines that erase the word Palestine and erase the word genocide.
That choice is violence. It sends a clear (yet hidden) message. Some lives can be destroyed in real time, and those lives still sit outside the circle of lives that count. If Europe continues to arm and shield this regime, every statement about equality rests on ground built on Palestinian death.
The same logic appears when we look to Sudan and to the Democratic Republic of Congo. For years, the European Union and its members have pushed their borders far into African land.
Through the Khartoum Process and similar platforms, Europe pays and trains security forces in Sudan and in nearby states to stop people from moving. These programmes speak about migration management and stability. While in reality, they mean raids, detention, blocked routes, people stuck in camps and prisons long before they reach a sea or a land border near Europe. When violence cuts through Sudan and people flee, the main concern of Europe remains numbers at its own frontier, not safety for those people.
In Congo, cobalt and other minerals come out of the ground and travel into batteries, phones and cars that drive an energy transition in the global minority. Reports describe mines where children work, where people dig with bare hands, where collapses wipe whole groups away, where armed groups and company guards control territory and bodies.
European companies publish due diligence reports and codes of conduct. They show care in documents. Meanwhile the basic pattern remains. Raw material leaves Congo under violent conditions, profit and comfort appear in Europe and the rest of the world. The relation rests on old lines of empire and extraction that never ended.
Europe talks about climate responsibility and about partnership with Africa. At the same time, it locks people from Sudan out through border deals, and it builds green projects on Congolese land and labour. Sudanese lives and Congolese lives carry the weight of choices made in Brussels, Paris, Berlin. These lives become buffers in a border regime and in an economic order that serves Europe first.
Inside Europe, the story continues. Roma communities live with school segregation, raids, evictions, whole settlements on the edge of towns without fair access to water, work or services. Reports show Roma children placed in separate classes. Many end up in schools for children with disabilities even when no such disability is present.
Labels and tests become excuses that move Roma children out of mainstream education and into pathways that limit options. Housing rules, police operations and local politics work together to keep many Roma families in spaces with poor infrastructure and constant risk of removal.
Black and Brown people, people of African, Asian or South-American descent, Muslims and people read as migrants move through streets under heavy watch. Police controls, stop and search, raids in workplaces and homes, data collection, detention and deportation shape everyday life for many.
Racial profiling is not an exception. It is practiced every single day. It aims to make us believe who is suspect by default. It shows us whose presence in public space stands on thin ice. It reminds us who must always carry proof, who must always be ready to explain why they are here.
At the same time, institutions run programmes on diversity and inclusion. They organise events on bias, on culture, on language. These efforts can help, yet on their own they can sit on the surface.
Bias workshops do not stop bulldozers from moving into Roma settlements.
Storytelling sessions do not stop border guards from beating people at fences.
Listening circles do not stop deportation flights.
Inclusion without shared power is a way to talk about harm without touching roots.
Representation without real influence is unpaid labour.
Diversity without redistribution keeps the same groups at risk.
This is the ground on which I place SPARK DEI and the wider SPARK community. For me, SPARK DEI is not a network within a safe bubble. It is a place where people who carry these realities meet and think together.
Sudanese or Congolese advocates, Palestinians, Roma activists, Black and Brown diasporas, Muslim communities, queer and trans people, disabled people, migrant workers, many others, all bring knowledge that comes from life under structural violence and from long histories of resistance.
Our work is to draw lines between what Europe does outside its borders and what it does inside. I insist that anti racism in Europe must include clear positions on Gaza, on weapons exports, on border deals with regimes that abuse people on the move, on extractive contracts in Congo, on school segregation, on racial profiling and on the use of public money in projects that harm racialised communities.
I refuse a version of DEI that stays inside corporate walls and never touches the policies that decide who can live, move, learn and breathe.
We do this while building spaces of care and connection. People who work inside institutions sit with people who organise outside them. Experience travels in both directions. Knowledge from policy, from law, from internal processes, returns to communities so that strategies can adjust. The goal is not dialogue for its own sake. The goal is alignment for action.
Europe now faces a dilemma.
It can keep arming and protecting a state that destroys Palestinian life. It can keep outsourcing its border to Sudan and other states, with all the violence that follows. It can keep building prosperity and energy projects on Congolese land and bodies. It can keep Roma children in separate classes and camps. It can keep Black and brown communities under constant watch. It can then speak about equality and claim progress…
Or, it can listen to the people who live the cost of these decisions and transform power in real ways. This means ending complicity with genocide in Gaza. It means tearing up border deals that turn African states into guards for Europe. It means ending extractive contracts that strip land and people for profit. It means ending segregation and racial profiling. It means handing real power, resources and decision making to those who have been kept at the margins.
Until such changes take place, communities like SPARK DEI remain vital. We carry memory that institutions prefer to forget. We speak with language that does not blur harm. We build links across struggles so that Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Roma settlements and European city streets sit in one field of vision.
We remind institutions that racial justice is not a theme for a month or a slide. It is a line that runs through every budget, every partnership, every silence, every word. And we repeat one thing again and again. No one is expendable. No land is a sacrifice zone. No people are collateral.
