Solidarity and Interconnectedness That Cut Through Time and Space: Laos and Palestine

By Justina Poskeviciute

On this International Youth Day, I can’t help but solemnly reflect on the lack of care much of the world is giving to the suffering that young people are facing. How horrible it is to say that this should sound familiar: bombs tearing children’s bodies to pieces, thousands of lives either destroyed or permanently altered, and a continuous, collective trauma that spans generations. Racist narratives are used to justify it all, built upon a complete disregard for human life.

Now, this is what we’ve been seeing on our screens for over 20 months in Gaza. Sixty years ago, completely hidden from the international community, it was what Laos endured. A secret war and a brutal bombing campaign whose legacy is, tragically, still alive. 

Let’s fast-forward back to 2025: arches in hundreds of thousands, university encampments, and disruptions of ships carrying weapons to Israeli ports. We are witnessing the rise of a global conscience–milllions of individuals connecting the dots through an intersectional lens, seeing how systems of oppression operate, how power insulates itself, and how the ones in power (or with power) would rather keep everyone numb, frightened, or completely unaware.

I want to invite you to extend those parallels further if you haven’t already. One of them is the destruction of two places by relentless bombing campaigns: Gaza today and Laos over five decades ago. 

Perhaps the most glaring parallel is whose bombs are being dropped. In the case of Gaza, these are mostly US-supplied weapons, followed by Germany, Italy, and the UK. It was also American bombs that rained upon Laos for nine years in secrecy, unknown even to most of the US Congress itself. Not that its approval would have made it less criminal or abhorrent. Although decades apart, it is the same war machine that has benefited from the destruction of Laos and now, Gaza. In reality, it is the same war machine that stands to benefit from any war.. Let’s not forget that in the case of Gaza, the US is not only the weapon supplier: it is a major actor supporting, enabling, and shielding the Israeli government from accountability – just like it had to shield its own illegal aggression against Laos by keeping it as a secret for as long as possible.  

But it’s not only the actors behind the bombs that mirror each other – the second parallel between Laos and Gaza is the scale of destruction and the size of its impact. In Gaza, the scale of destruction is beyond describing; it is apocalyptic. There’s barely anything left: over 90 percent of residential structures are damaged or destroyed; crop fields leveled, most schools and universities damaged or completely destroyed; water towers, electricity grid, and water desalination plants targetted.By the amount of explosives used, Laos used to be called the most bombed country on Earth. Between 1964 and 1973, more than two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos, leaving potentially deadly unexploded ordnance (UXOs) all over the country. The size of Laos is 236,800 km squared. The size of the Gaza Strip is 365 km squared – only 0.145% the size of Laos, or 686 times smaller.  Yet over 100,000 tonnes of explosives were dropped by the Israeli army on its tiny territory. The destruction is total. It is intentional. And it does not discriminate by demography. 

That includes Gaza’s most vulnerable: its children. Before October 2023, 47.3 percent of its population was under 18 years old. Twenty-one months later, Israeli attacks have killed over 17,000 and left 33,000 children injured, according to UNICEF. Gaza also has the most child amputees per capita in the world - yet another index of the immense harm inflicted on children. This is the harm that the children of Laos know too well: even when the bombing itself is long gone, UXO still kills and maims Lao’s most precious demographic. Since the end of the war that saw 200,000 people killed by US bombardment, over 25,000 people have been killed, more than 40 percent of all victims being children. So it is not only the scale of destruction but who is being destroyed - by murder, maiming, and inflicting trauma of witnessing mass murder - where we can draw a parallel in terms of source of our outrage, solidarity, and, hence, support.

The third parallel lies in the impunity that surrounds the bombings. In the case of the US secret war on Laos, no major investigation followed, no truth commission was established to engage in anything that would resemble a historic reckoning of the criminality, brutality, and destructiveness of this nine-year-long bombing campaign. No major US politician has been indicted for destroying an entire country, a piece of information that is hardly surprising. Let’s not forget that Henry Kissinger died peacefully - at least as the saying goes - in his bed in 2023, having accumulated an impressive collection of atrocities committed and supported across the globe.

In the case of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, impunity still stands. Even when arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court were issued for and are legally awaiting Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, we are yet to see any meaningful arrests of any Israeli politician or military leader. It means only one thing: we, as an international community, will either continue organizing and taking political action, or we will witness yet again how one can bomb a country mercilessly and never face any consequences. As if the world doesn’t care.

Yet the world cares. And if the bombing of Laos hadn’t been done in secrecy during times when dissemination of information was challenging and costly, the world would have cared so much more then, too. This is one of the starkest differences between Laos and Gaza: how accessible and live-streamed the mass murder is now. And how that access is mobilizing millions to rise.

So if historical parallels are clear and if the lens of intersectionality puts Laos and Gaza at the center of a Venn diagram of various injustices we’d like to undo, how do we do that on the ground? What does standing in solidarity mean when the massacres are still happening and what it looks like when they have finally stopped? 

In Palestine, it is demanding accountability, pushing our leaders to uphold international law, and creating all the pressure we can to break the siege of Gaza as soon as possible, as it is difficult to imagine anything more urgent than to stop an occupying power using starvation as a method of war onto people it is besieging and bombing daily. Here and in general, we should remember that being anti-fascist in an unapologetic way is the only way to be an antifascist. 

In Laos, standing in solidarity means listening to the people of Laos, understanding their calls for healing, and supporting the organizations that advocate for the funding and tools they need. That includes extensive demining programs, education initiatives related to cluster munitions,  and access to healthcare and victim support. It means making sure this forgotten war is never forgotten again.

To stop the harm and to support the healing–the world needs both, happening at the same time, made possible by our collective action. Palestine and Laos serve as painful illustrations of where that work needs to go. Let’s do it the only way possible: together.