Sri Lanka’s Selective Solidarities
Sri Lanka condemns Israel’s military actions in Palestine while maintaining military control and settlement programmes in Tamil territories.
Friends of Free Palestine at a pro-Palestine rally in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Oct.13, 2023. Image: AFP.
In Arugam Bay, a striking transformation has occurred. This Sri Lankan coastal town, once adorned with Hebrew welcome signs, has become a notable centre of Palestine solidarity since Israel’s war on Gaza beginning October 7, 2023—a conflict that has claimed over 50,000 Palestinian lives, and continues to date despite failed ceasefires and repeated calls for peace. Pro-Palestine stickers mark signboards, local activists coordinate Gaza education campaigns, distribute boycott lists targeting Israel-linked enterprises, and challenge Israeli businesses operating without proper permits. In October 2023, the Mass Movement for Social Justice alongside the Tamil National Green Organisation organised a protest in Jaffna calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, with demonstrators holding signs declaring “It was Mullivaikkal then, now it is Palestine!” A few months later—in February 2024—dozens of Muslims gathered in the Eastern province of Kalmunai calling for a “Free Palestine!” But it is Colombo that has emerged as the movement’s vibrant hub. Since October 2023, a series of protests have unfolded in the capital, with English-language social media campaigns coordinating demonstrations and fundraisers, including the most recent on April 23, 2025, organised by the People’s Movements Against the Genocide in Palestine.
“This contradiction reveals a disturbing pattern of selective enforcement showing who may express solidarity and whose suffering merits acknowledgment. ”
However, as I witness this surge of important solidarity—especially Colombo’s rallies to social media campaigns expressing outrage at the ongoing genocide in Gaza—I confront a dissonance central to Sri Lanka’s post-war reality: How can a country practicing its own form of settler colonialism—a system which perpetuates the destruction and elimination of indigenous peoples—passionately condemn similar practices elsewhere? The tactics are structurally identical: land seizure, demographic engineering, militarised control, and cultural erasure—the very practices denounced in Palestine—are actively deployed against Tamil communities in Sri Lanka’s North and East. This contradiction reveals a disturbing pattern of selective enforcement showing who may express solidarity and whose suffering merits acknowledgment. What follows is not a critique meant to diminish Palestine solidarity—especially as Gaza's devastation continues—but an examination of contradictions that, if confronted, could strengthen such movements.
Beyond domestic inconsistencies lies an official policy paradox. Sri Lanka projects a forceful diplomatic stance on Palestine—chairing the UN Special Committee on Israeli Practices, supporting UN resolutions for a two-state solution, and signing the joint letter defending the UN Secretary-General against Israel’s persona non grata declaration in October 2024. Yet since 2023, the government has sent migrant workers to Israel to replace banned Palestinian agricultural workers. This willingness to maintain economic ties while condemning Israeli actions mirrors Sri Lanka’s approach to internal colonisation—championing reconciliation internationally while systematically orchestrating demographic changes through state-sponsored resettlement schemes. This duplicity was exposed when a senior government official overseeing the country’s oldest development project, a key instrument in demographic engineering, stated: “Presidents come and go, but whatever happens, our work goes on.” These words reveal that the machinery of internal colonisation operates with remarkable continuity beneath changing administrations, immune to electoral shifts or international scrutiny, entrenched in a permanent bureaucracy outlasting each government.
Israeli Minister of Interior Moshe Arbel and Sri Lanka's Ambassador to Israel Nimal Bandaranaike
The Invisible Occupation: Inside Sri Lanka’s Settler Colonial Project
To understand this contradiction’s magnitude, we must excavate Sri Lanka’s settler colonial project—a sophisticated system operating through mechanisms condemned in international discourse about Palestine. This internal colonisation proceeds under the guise of development and security, masking ethno-nationalist aims beneath technocratic language and obscuring true intentions.
“Notably, these plans were influenced by Land Commissioner C.L. Wickremesinghe (grandfather of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe (2022-2024)), following his visit to Jewish settlements in Palestine. ”
Sri Lanka’s post-colonial trajectory exemplifies Frantz Fanon’s (1963) diagnosis in The Wretched of the Earth: “The national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European settlement,” where “its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism”. Within years of gaining independence from Britain in 1948, the state initiated an internal colonisation project—marginalising Tamils through disenfranchisement, pogroms, and state-sponsored settlement programmes—replicating colonial divide-and-rule tactics while cloaking them in sovereignty and national reunification language.
Post-war Sri Lanka intensified these strategies, empowering its military which remains one of the world’s largest and best funded. Under President Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005-2015), the military became active development partners, primarily resettling landless Sinhalese in the north and east. Under his brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (2019-2022), the military’s mandate expanded to urban development, water management, land reclamation, and construction. During COVID-19, the military established quarantine centers, ran vaccination sites, and implemented contact tracing—further normalising military involvement in civilian life.
Central to this military-backed resettlement is the Mahaweli Development Programme (MDP). Launched in the 1960s, the MDP is Sri Lanka’s oldest development project, first conceived by Prime Minister D.S. Senanayake as agriculture minister during British rule (1815-1948) and consolidated by his son Dudley as Prime Minister. Covering almost 40 percent of the country and planned over 30 years, it was “presented as the driving force behind the island’s economy, the nerve-centre of village life, the life-blood of its peasantry without which life would wither” (The Times of Ceylon, March 20, 1970). Notably, these plans were influenced by Land Commissioner C.L. Wickremesinghe (grandfather of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe (2022-2024)), following his visit to Jewish settlements in Palestine. Like Israel’s settlement expansion presenting itself as development rather than colonisation as proposed by the head of the World Zionist Organisation’s Settlement Division, Matityahu Drobles, in his “Master Plan for the Development of Settlements in Judea and Samaria, 1979-1983,” the MDP cloaked ethno-nationalist aims beneath benevolent progress rhetoric. Despite being declared a “failure” by the World Bank after six loans, the project continues unabated.
The parallel between the MDP, and Israeli settlements such as Ma’ale Adumin or Ariel, reveals how settler colonial projects globally employ similar justifications—framing territorial appropriation as natural expansion, demographic engineering as addressing housing shortages, and militarisation as necessary security. In Sri Lanka, the MDP serves as a sophisticated mechanism for demographic engineering and territorial control aimed at permanently altering the north and east’s ethnic composition. A senior military official I interviewed stated explicitly: “The military-Mahaweli partnership is necessary for this. And we [the military] have the people and power to make it happen”—a candid admission revealing how development initiatives function as colonisation vehicles, with state institutions implementing demographic change under progress guises.
“What casual observers see as “development” is, upon closer examination, a sophisticated colonisation framework.”
This military-development partnership manifests vividly in Sri Lanka’s north and east, specifically in Weli Oya—originally Manal Aru until renamed in 1988—where I witnessed firsthand the sophisticated mechanisms of this militarisation-development nexus. Buddhist temples and paddy fields create a pastoral tableau embodying the romanticised “real” Sri Lanka—an idealised Sinhala-Buddhist agricultural community. This bucolic facade masks a calculated political project paralleling practices condemned in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where settlements similarly present themselves as organic extensions of nationhood rather than territorial control instruments. Entering this village required passing a large military camp with soldiers checking identification—a continuing everyday occurrence. Military personnel operate checkpoints and run farms, restaurants, and businesses throughout the region. “We do not even realise they are army,” my tuk-tuk driver Weerakoon remarked, revealing how deeply militarisation has been naturalised, no longer perceived as extraordinary but as ordinary life.
What casual observers see as “development” is, upon closer examination, a sophisticated colonisation framework. Since 2013, military personnel have clandestinely transported landless Sinhalese—mainly from Hambantota province (the former ruling Rajapaksa family’s stronghold)—into Tamil-majority areas. One senior military official candidly told me: “We give these people transport, material to build a house, and make sure they do not leave,” confirming direct permission from former Presidents Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa as part of a long-term plan “to make the Sinhala man the most present in all parts of the country.”
Recent evidence confirms this pattern’s persistence. In April 2025, the Tamil National People’s Front denounced the Lower Malwathu Oya Project as “Sinhala colonization in disguise.” This initiative will transplant thousands of Sinhalese settlers into traditionally Tamil regions. This mirrors earlier patterns in Mullaitivu, where Tamil activists in 2023 condemned the Department of Mahaweli Development Programme’s expansion of the ‘L Zone’ (where Weli Oya is located) that would appropriate an additional 4,186 acres of Tamil lands for Sinhalese settlers—revealing how, nearly a decade after my initial fieldwork, the development apparatus continues functioning as the principal vehicle for demographic engineering, demonstrating settler colonial logic’s durability even as its mechanisms evolve with changing political circumstances.
The Choreography of Colonisation
While projects like the MDP, or the Lower Malwathu Oya, represent the visible face of Sri Lanka’s settler colonial enterprise, the underlying mechanics—the how rather than merely the what—reveal a far more sophisticated system. My extended fieldwork in Weli Oya, perhaps one of the most contested and emblematic sites of state-sponsored resettlement, uncovered a systematic process unfolding not as random opportunism but as a deliberate sequence. This settler colonial project advances through four distinct yet interconnected stages—a carefully orchestrated choreography mirroring colonisation efforts globally while adapting to Sri Lanka’s particular historical context.
First comes normalisation. Military checkpoints, soldiers in villages, and army involvement in daily civilian activities gradually make militarisation seem natural rather than extraordinary. Between January 2018 and December 2019, 353 instances of military presence and involvement in schools were recorded (mainly from the North and East). In April 2025, the Tamil Guardian reported that the Sri Lankan military has intensified its presence in Tamil schools under the innocuously named “Clean Sri Lanka Program”—military personnel regularly entering schools to conduct programmes ostensibly focused on cleanliness and environmental awareness. These activities, “make military ideology more acceptable and palatable,” thereby contributing to a pervasive militarisation that establishes and cements conditions for demographic change.
The second stage positions the military as benevolent protectors and providers. They transport settlers to new homes, distribute food and building materials, and offer emotional support when newcomers face hardship. “Without this, we all might have actually left,” one settler named Vijay told me, crediting military officers for convincing him to stay when considering returning to his hometown of Hambantota. This welfare function transforms the colonisation project into a humanitarian initiative, casting the military not as occupiers but as caregivers essential to community survival.
“The monk leading the sermon proclaimed that through the military’s work in the north and east, “the country can be the proud Sinhala-Buddhist nation it was long ago and always should be.” ”
The third stage blurs boundaries between military and civilian life. In 2016, I discovered a newly constructed housing scheme called Ranavisipura (“army village”) with fifty homes allocated to military families. This cantonment strategically placed military families among civilian settlers, creating the impression that soldiers are “just like everyone else”—neighbours rather than occupiers. This militarisation of civilian life continues unabated, with military personnel in Jaffna and Kilinochchi districts operating businesses ranging from farms to restaurants to whale-watching tours. This integration further normalises military presence and creates dependencies deeply entrenched in community structures.
The final stage sanctifies these activities through religious ceremonies and nationalist mythology. This religious framing transforms development into a sacred duty, positioning colonisation as historical destiny’s fulfilment rather than a contemporary political project. At the Buddhist stupa of Ruwanweli Maha Seya in Anuradhapura, I witnessed a ceremony where military officials were compared to mythological “giants” who helped ancient Sinhalese kings defeat invaders. The monk leading the sermon proclaimed that through the military’s work in the north and east, “the country can be the proud Sinhala-Buddhist nation it was long ago and always should be.”
These religious justifications for military expansion are not merely ceremonial but translate directly into territorial claims as systematic dispossession practices continue to evolve across Sri Lanka's north and east. In March 2025, Buddhist monks, accompanied by military escorts, seized 3,820 acres of lands by declaring it to be “pooja lands” (sacred lands). Families who had farmed these lands for generations suddenly found themselves dispossessed through religious claims backed by military power. A few weeks later, land belonging to the people of Thaiyiddy, Jaffna, was forcibly acquired to build a Buddhist temple—mirroring how religious narratives justify settlement expansion in contested territories around Jerusalem.
Buddhist temple under construction in Thaiyiddy, Jaffna. Image: Tamil Guardian.
These four stages—normalisation, benevolent protection, civil-military integration, and religious sanctification—operate not merely as sequential phases but as mutually reinforcing mechanisms constituting a comprehensive territorial control system. The parallels between Sri Lanka’s colonisation of the North and East, and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, extend beyond rhetoric into concrete dispossession practices reconfiguring geographical and demographic realities. Yet these incidents generate minimal domestic outrage compared to passionate responses to distant conflicts—a disparity revealing how solidarity itself has become selective, contingent on political convenience rather than consistent principles, pointing to fundamental questions about how solidarity movements operate in a world of competing narratives and selective attention.
The Hierarchy of Grief and the Politics of Selective Solidarity
“The irony is striking—the same memory suppression mechanisms condemned in the Palestinian context are deployed against Tamil communities with minimal domestic protest. ”
The contradiction between Sri Lanka’s official government declarations of Palestinian solidarity at international forums, and its internal colonisation practices, reveals a profound dissonance in how suffering is acknowledged and which injustices merit public outrage. In February 2025, Tamil families demanding truth and justice for missing relatives—the Families of the Disappeared—reached 3,000 days of protest in Vavuniya, maintaining their vigil for over eight years. Despite years of peaceful demonstration, the state has provided no meaningful answers. Their persistence stands in stark contrast to attention given to distant conflicts, highlighting the hierarchy of grief rendering some suffering visible and other suffering invisible within the same national discourse.
Families of forcibly disappeared Tamils portest in Vavuniya. Image: Tamil Guardian
This selective solidarity creates a “hierarchy of grief” —where certain deaths and suffering are publicly mourned while others are ignored or erased from collective consciousness. The state actively suppresses Tamil remembrance through war memorial destruction and criminalisation of commemorative events like Maaveerar Naal. This erasure parallels Israel’s attempts to suppress Palestinian memory through village demolition, blocking Nakba commemorations, and rewriting historical narratives. The irony is striking—the same memory suppression mechanisms condemned in the Palestinian context are deployed against Tamil communities with minimal domestic protest.
This selective recognition operates not only through state policy but also through who is permitted to express solidarity and whose voices are heard. For the Sinhalese-Buddhist majority, solidarity with Palestinians requires little personal sacrifice, making it politically expedient. This stance allows them to position themselves against Western imperialism and colonialism while avoiding any reckoning with the Sinhalese-Buddhist state's own role as colonisers within their borders. Condemning Israeli actions serves as a convenient distraction from examining similar practices at home—reflecting a politics of convenience rather than principle. This selective moral outrage exemplifies a broader global pattern where indignation is curated according to geopolitical interests. The colonised recognise it for what it is: settler colonialism.
These contradictions mirror a global phenomenon most evident in Western liberal democracies, where establishment positions frequently diverge from grassroots sentiment. While student movements and progressive activists across American, British, Canadian, and European campuses rallied for Palestinian rights—often facing severe consequences, as evidenced by the wave of international student visa cancellations and disciplinary actions against hundreds of protesters in the United States—their liberal establishments, from mainstream media conglomerates to political leadership, have maintained largely unwavering support for Israel, creating a striking disconnect between grassroots activism and institutional positions. This split reveals how institutional power shapes which causes receive legitimacy. Unlike Sri Lanka, where state rhetoric superficially aligns with popular sentiment on Palestine while contradicting it in practice, Western establishments often explicitly oppose Palestine solidarity movements while claiming to uphold universal human rights principles. Both contexts demonstrate how solidarity is either politically embraced when politically expedient or contested when challenging existing power structures or demanding internal reflection.
This selective recognition of suffering demands a more principled approach to solidarity transcending political convenience and nationalist frameworks. As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider (1984), “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Her argument suggests true liberation requires recognising oppressions’ interconnected nature worldwide, and her solidarity vision demands transcending nationalist frameworks arbitrarily determining whose suffering merits acknowledgment. This approach describes Sri Lanka’s fundamental contradiction—a formerly colonised country perfecting oppression techniques against its Tamil population, while Palestine protests often fail to acknowledge the parallels with what is happening within.
A poster symbolizing solidarity between the Palestinian and Tamil liberation movements. Image: Third World Approaches to International Law Review.
Beyond Performative Activism: Towards Authentic Solidarity
The struggles of Palestinians and Tamils share profound interconnections, linked through global systems that enable their oppression.
“From India—where despite some leaders’ support for Palestine, the government, media, and majority remain largely pro-Israel—while simultaneously militarising Kashmir, to Pakistan’s pro-Palestine diplomacy alongside its operations in Balochistan, to Turkey’s condemnation of Israeli settlements while displacing Kurdish communities—a pattern emerges of states, and its people, weaponizing distant solidarity while replicating the same oppressive structures at home.”
While it is important to heed cautions against hasty analogies when comparing the oppression of Palestinians and their resistance to the state’s repression of Tamils and the rise of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka, we must recognise that both populations confront settler-colonial projects characterised by militarised development, demographic engineering, and cultural erasure. In both contexts, ancestral lands undergo transformation through systematic state policies that alter demographics under the guise of security and progress. Acknowledging these parallels allows us to move beyond selective outrage toward a more consistent ethical position that challenges colonisation in all its manifestations. And, if decolonisation is to have any substantive meaning, it cannot be applied selectively. Sri Lankans opposing settler colonialism must also confront their state’s actions in Tamil regions. Otherwise, their Palestine advocacy becomes not a principled stand but a convenient gesture—allowing them to be choice defenders of justice while disregarding comparable suffering in their midst.
Sri Lanka’s stance is hardly exceptional in the global landscape of selective solidarity. From India—where despite some leaders' support for Palestine, the government, media, and majority remain largely pro-Israel—while simultaneously militarising Kashmir, to Pakistan's pro-Palestine diplomacy alongside its operations in Balochistan, to Turkey's condemnation of Israeli settlements while displacing Kurdish communities—a pattern emerges of states, and its people, weaponizing distant solidarity while replicating the same oppressive structures at home. What distinguishes these contradictions is not their fundamental nature but their visibility within international discourse. These states employ anti-colonial rhetoric in global forums while implementing colonial logics domestically, rebranding identical practices as “development,” “security,” or “territorial integrity” when conducted within their own borders. This semantic transformation allows formerly colonised nations to participate in solidarity movements without confronting their own role as colonisers —a contradiction revealing how settler colonial techniques have become standardised statecraft.
These contradictions demand our attention not to diminish solidarity with Palestinians—which remains more vital than ever—but to strengthen it through critical self-reflection. By acknowledging the structural similarities between seemingly disparate struggles, we can construct movements against settler colonialism that transcend geographic boundaries and challenge the hierarchies of grief that determine whose suffering merits acknowledgment. After all, as Moshtari Hilal and Sinthujan Varatharajah say, “It should be possible for us to shift away from a romanticised view of solidarities in order to have these uncomfortable conversations—conversations that acknowledge the pain of the many who are forgotten or considered irrelevant in this world.” And such “uncomfortable conversations” must commence with recognising the parallels between condemned actions abroad and sanctioned policies at home—understanding that decolonisation cannot be outsourced or performed selectively. Authentic solidarity demands recognising interconnected struggles to challenge injustice regardless of its proximity or political cost. This means standing against settler colonialism whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or the militarised villages of post-war Sri Lanka with equal conviction. Only through such moral consistency can solidarity movements transcend performative gestures to create genuine change. This change must be built on ethical clarity, not political expediency, and must foster a decolonial practice that begins locally and extends globally—one that refuses to replicate the very hierarchies of visibility and erasure that colonial systems depend upon.
Thiruni Kelegama (Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, UK) examines how development projects reshape power, space, and identity in Sri Lanka. Her forthcoming book, Central Margins: Sri Lanka's Violent Frontier (Cambridge University Press 2026), analyses how postcolonial states pair narratives of benevolent development with territorial control.