A Decolonial Approach to Mental Healthcare

By Aprotim C Bhowmik, Titilayo F Odedele, and Temitope T Odedele

Would the field of psychiatry hold firm against time and place? If the holy book, the DSM-5 [1], were written in a different century, in a different society, would the diagnosis and treatment of common psychiatric disorders be different? The answer, according to many, would be unequivocally in the affirmative, as psychiatry—and in particular, the DSM-5—is inextricably bound to politico-economic contexts and cultural norms/practices. So, perhaps a more specific and important question is—does the DSM-5, being a largely Western written text, contribute negatively to our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric disorders?

Psychiatric diagnosis

For those who have not cracked open a copy of the DSM-5, it consists primarily of diagnostic criteria for common psychiatric disorders—ranging from affective disorders (e.g., depression and bipolar disorder) to psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) to personality disorders, and the intersection thereof. Consider, for instance, the diagnosis of attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which can be classified into two types: inattentive and hyperactive. Diagnostic criteria for the former include difficulty following instructions, distractibility, and disorganization; for the latter include excessive talkativeness, inability to sit still, and inability to remain quiet. These symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity can be viewed as interruptions of productivity, either of the person with ADHD or of the people around them.

Consider, again, the diagnoses of depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. The diagnosis and treatment of these conditions is often indicated when activities of daily living (ADLs) are interrupted. And while that threshold makes logical sense, it would also be reasonable to ask why that threshold exists. The answer is that ADLs are often considered individual tasks, not communal or shared ones. As such, the aforementioned disorders are often brought to the attention of clinicians when occupational function is reduced—causing a decrease in productivity of both the person and the associated workforce.

Supplementary to these diagnostic criteria is the biopsychosocial formulation, a construction often used by psychiatric clinicians to understand the intersection of biological, psychological, and social phenomena that result in a patient’s diagnosis. [2] Common biological components include genetic contributions to disease, such as the heritability of illnesses like bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. And while the biological basis of these illnesses is evidence-based, there is also evidence for an environmental/social influence of these biological factors via epigenetics (i.e., the molecular silencing of DNA due to environmental factors). One example is the heritability of anxiety via epigenetic alteration, a phenomenon that has been connected to the presence of increased anxiety in the descendants of enslaved Black people in the US (dubbed “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome”). [3] 

Other social factors within the biopsychosocial formulation that contribute to the pathophysiology of psychiatric disease include neglect (which could look different in societies where responsibility for children is shared beyond the biological parents); inaccessibility to health care (which could look different if profit was not a primary motive in service provision); drug use (which often perseveres due to lack of medical care); housing instability (which could also look different if a profit motive was not attached to a basic human need); and incarceration (rates of which are distinctly high in the US due to profit motives).

In short, in both the diagnostic criteria of and the biopsychosocial formulation for common psychiatric disorders, we see two common features: (1) interruptions to productivity as an indication for diagnosis/treatment, and (2) individual, rather than communal, systems of care that contribute to illness (e.g., privatization of services that address basic human needs, and/or lack of shared responsibility for different kinds of care).

Reconceptualization of psychiatric disease

How can our understanding of these two common features of psychiatric diagnostic criteria inform our approach to mental healthcare? We might ask why these common features exist, and when—if ever—they were different. The answer: We know that productivity and the relationship between the individual and the community were different at multiple times and places throughout the past and in the present:

Before the land known as the United States was colonized, many indigenous communities lived on it, and it is well-documented that these nations and communities cared for children together, with an emphasis on the extended family. Tasks like childcare, food production, and healthcare were shared responsibilities, and everyone would receive the healthcare that was available. In the case of wrongdoing, survivors were centered, and perpetrators were moved into alternative spaces where they were provided with food, shelter, education, and other necessary elements of rehabilitation— before eventually being reintegrated into society. [4]

In Burkina Faso, between 1983 and 1987, President Thomas Sankara emphasized communal systems of care. His tenure resulted in communal food distribution, an increase in the building of hospitals and access to healthcare, and the widespread construction of wells for clean water. And within these 4 years (before being ousted and murdered by a coup likely backed by France and other Western powers), he increased the literacy rate from 11 to 73%. [5]

Similar increases in communal food distribution and healthcare access were seen in times and places like Castro’s Cuba, and currently in Kerala state in India and in Vietnam, where increased healthcare access has been connected with low COVID rates, and increased safety net programs connected with improved food distribution. Cuba in particular is still famous for its medical programs, producing physicians who are trained in the quality provision of universal healthcare (in spite of US sanctions). [6]

Because the medical conceptualization and pharmacology of psychiatric disease is relatively recent and contextually informed, objective data on the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disease before the present day is scarce—but we can confidently say that people across different times and places, such as those above, would not fit our current conceptualization. Their conceptions of productivity and individual vs. communal systems of care would result in a different need for and conceptualization of psychiatry, one that is informed by different thresholds for productivity, neglect, housing, healthcare, incarceration, etc.

Perhaps more important than highlighting the difference in conceptualization is the question of whether our current conceptualization is even appropriate? Are we over-diagnosing people due to inhumanly high expectations of productivity? Are we as a society increasing the incidence of psychiatric pathology by increasing the number of people who experience neglect, housing instability, lack of healthcare access, and incarceration? This reconceptualization of psychiatric disease is not a novel one: the field of Marxist psychiatry is one that identifies capitalism (via its emphasis on the primacy of productivity and individual, rather than communal, systems of care) as a key contributor in the incidence and perseverance of psychiatric disease. This approach has been pioneered by psychiatrists, sociologists, and anthropologists—including some who are widely published on the molecular basis of psychiatric disease. [7], [8]

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

A Marxist approach to psychiatry is anti-capitalist and decolonial, and a reconceptualization of psychiatric disease using this approach asserts the following: 

1. A lack of communal care, welfare programs, healthcare access, etc. often precipitates and/or perpetuates psychiatric disease.

2. Psychiatric healthcare in the West perseveres as a means of control rather than care for people who are already disadvantaged by the state and the capitalist class.

3. Patients of psychiatric disease are given the lowest-cost treatment to allow the continued productivity of the state.

Another Marxist approach to psychiatry involves the recognition that it is essential to a people’s mental well-being that that they be the “owners of their own labor.” Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo Freire emphasizes in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that labor “constitutes part of the human person,” and that “a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself.” [9] The capitalist mode of production compels all workers to “sell themselves” to survive. Many pre-capitalist polities and societies, such as those found on the African continent, had no knowledge or practice of capitalist phenomena (e.g., private property or excessive accumulation of wealth due to labor exploitation and privatization). [10], [11] Due to the ultimately unknowable violence perpetrated against Black and Brown peoples that began the global capitalist system [10], people have been transformed into workers who were, and are, sadistically coerced into believing that the construct of “earning wages” is normal, rather than understanding it as a method that facilitates their exploitation and destabilizes their personhood and well-being. Dr. Joseph Nahem spoke about the harm caused by the disconnection fundamental to all labor under capitalism:

Marx rooted alienation in the very process of capitalist production itself. Marx saw the worker as alienated from the product of his labor and from work itself. Since the product belongs to the capitalist, the worker's work is "forced labor . . . not his own, but someone else's." Further, workers are estranged from their true nature as human beings because their work and its product are alien to them. They cannot feel a oneness with nature and society. Alienation is, therefore, intrinsic to capitalism and the private ownership of the means of production. [12]

Human beings must be rooted to their source, to their land, to what they produce with their labor. If people are not or are not permitted to be connected to that which is theirs and that which they produce, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote that there “will be serious psycho-affective injuries and the result will be individuals without an anchor, without a horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless.” [13] If mental healthcare professionals care about the psychological wellbeing of their patients, then they will 1) stand in solidarity with those who seek to own that which they produce  and 2) pending the former, seek to reconceptualize psychiatric disease and diagnoses according to a humanizing decolonial Marxist approach that does not prioritize bourgeois cultural values like individualism, productivity, and carcerality.

Seclusion, restraint, and incarceration for psychiatric disease

Illustrated below is just one example of how the critical assertions of Marxist psychiatry rear their ugly head in the US today:

We know that people with psychiatric disease are often diagnosed and treated when ADLs and productivity are interrupted, but what happens when a patient does not respond to treatment? For many disorders, a number of medications and/or therapies is attempted, but there is a point at which patients are viewed as refractory to treatment. And for patients who are disruptive and/or violent, seclusion and restraint in padded rooms is common, despite evidence showing that these patients have PTSD between 27 and 45% of the time, along with an increase in negative symptoms like anhedonia and self-imposed alienation. [14]  Seclusion and restraint are often seen as the lowest cost, lowest-effort treatment to allow the continuation of productivity of the psychiatric unit.

When seclusion and restraint prove ineffective, incarceration is considered. Notably, 43%/44% of people in state/local prisons have a mental illness, and 66%/74% of people in federal/state prisons do not receive any mental healthcare during their stay, suggesting that there is at the very least a significant role for psychiatric care for these people. This is not surprising given that the number of psychiatric beds has decreased from 339 to 22 per 100,000 people in the US from 1955 to 2000. [15], [16]

A profit-maximizing motive is certainly present, as a psychiatric bed is $864/day, while prison is $99/day. But is it actually true that psychiatric care could decrease incarceration, or do these statistics describe people who would be incarcerated by the state regardless? A recent study matched hospital referral regions (HRRs) by zip code with jails and prisons, and looked at abrupt increases/decreases in psychiatric hospital bed capacity (by about 80-90 beds). Decreases in psychiatric bed capacity were associated with an increase of 256 inmates; increases in psychiatric bed capacity were associated with a decrease of 199 inmates—suggesting that proper, non-profit-driven psychiatric care would likely be a good fit for many incarcerated people. [16]

Studies like this one make it difficult to believe that patient care is at the heart of the US medical industry—and make it even more compelling to consider a decolonial Marxist approach. And based on an understanding of the past and present of psychiatry, it would be incomplete to assert that current psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is informed by contextual and cultural norms/practices without noting the harm that these norms/practices cause. Current heuristics of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment—and the emphasis of productivity and individual systems of care—must be scrutinized and are incompatible with adequate patient care.

Aprotim C Bhowmik (he/him) is a third-year MD/MPH student at Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research interests include social determinants of health and carceral health systems.

Titilayo F Odedele (she/they) is a PhD student at Northeastern University, where they also received their MS in Criminology and Criminal Justice and MA in Sociology. Her research interests include political economy of the world system, decolonial Marxism, and Pentecostalism in the Global South. She enjoys spending time with her family and dog.

Temitope T Odedele (she/her) is a psychology and biology student at the University of Massachusetts Boston who plans on a career in medicine. She enjoys reading history books and watching telenovelas.

References

1.      Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5 (2017). CBS Publishers & Distributors, Pvt. Ltd.

2.      Owen G (2023). What is formulation in psychiatry? Psychol Med. 2023 Apr;53(5):1700-1707. doi: 10.1017/S0033291723000016.

3.      Jiang S, Postovit L, Cattaneo A, Binder EB, Aitchison KJ (2019). Epigenetic modifications in stress response genes associated with childhood trauma. Front Psychiatry. 2019 Nov 8;10:808. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00808.

4.      First Nations Health Authority (n.d). Our history, our health.

https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/our-history-our-health.

5.      Thomas Sankara and the stomachs that made themselves heard (n.d.). Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/Y1FlZxEAAEolDkdA.

6.      Squires N, Colville SE, Chalkidou K, Ebrahim S (2020). Medical training for universal health coverage: a review of Cuba-South Africa collaboration. Hum Resour Health. 2020 Feb 17;18(1):12. doi: 10.1186/s12960-020-0450-9.

7.      Moncrieff J (2022). The political economy of the mental health system: A Marxist analysis. Frontiers in Sociology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.771875.

8.      Cohen BM (2016). Psychiatric hegemony – A Marxist theory of mental illness. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46051-6.

9.      Freire P (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin.

10.  Du Bois WEB (1947). The world and Africa: an inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history. Viking Press.

11.  Rodney W (1982). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press.

12.  Nahem J (1982). A Marxist approach to psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of

Health Services, 12(1), 151-162.

13.  Fanon F (1967). The wretched of the earth. Penguin.

14.  Chieze M, Hurst S, Kaiser S, & Sentissi O (2019). Effects of seclusion and restraint in adult psychiatry: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.0049.

15.  Initiative, P. P. (n.d.). Mental health. Prison Policy Initiative.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/mental_health/.

16.  Gao YN. Relationship between psychiatric inpatient beds and jail populations in the United States. J Psychiatr Pract. 2021 Jan 21;27(1):33-42. doi: 10.1097/PRA.0000000000000524.

Nazis! The Fraught Politics of a Word and a People Besieged

[Pictured: Palestinian women cross an Israeli checkpoint, outside of the West Bank city of Ramallah, on April 15, 2022. (Flash90)]

By Gary Fields

Republished from Jadaliyya.

Like many highly-educated individuals in Palestine today, Mohammed Q. cannot find work in his field of computer engineering, despite a master’s degree in computer science from Birzeit University, and as a result, he relies on the tourist industry to earn a living, drawing on his fluent English and knowledge of the fraught politics of the region.  In the aftermath of October 7th he was working in Ramallah at the same hotel where, by fate, I found myself as the only guest on a sabbatical that began October 6th.  Over coffee, he recounted to me an experience leading a group of German tourists to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.  As a West Bank Palestinian, Mohammed would normally be barred from entry to the Israeli capital, but because of his role on this occasion in shepherding a German tour group through the Holy Land, he was able to obtain the mandatory permit from Israeli authorities to enter the Holy City.  While at Yad Vashem, the group had a tour from one of the Museum docents who explained in detail the suffering endured by Jews at the hands of the Nazis 

As Mohammed recalls the episode, the guide described how the Nazi regime forced Jews to wear a yellow badge as a mark of identification that enabled Nazi authorities not only to stigmatize them, but to monitor and control their movements.  Alongside this measure, Nazis eliminated the rights of Jews to German citizenship, insisting that only those with “pure” Aryan blood could be Germans.  Bolstered by mobs of fascist-supporting vigilantes, Nazi authorities orchestrated modern-day pogroms against Jews including the ransacking of Jewish businesses and the theft of Jewish property designed to force Jews out of Germany.  Those Jews who tried to remain, the guide explained, fell victim to the night raids of the Nazi SS in arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps.  In areas outside Germany under Nazi rule, Nazi policy ghettoized Jews as a prelude to a genocidal campaign of eliminating them as a people, and the guide spoke admiringly of the heroism of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto who resisted these measures.  “I did not know about all of this suffering,” Mohammed admitted to me, “and I felt sorry for these Jewish victims of Nazism.” At the same time, he could not help but reflect on the parallels with his own experience as a West Bank Palestinian living under Israeli military rule. 

Mohammed thanked the guide and admitted that he had not been fully aware of the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.  He then commented to the docent that many details in his story of the Jews resonated for him as a Palestinian living in the West Bank.  After Mohammed made this admission, however, the guide became angry and demanded to know how he was able to come to Jerusalem and gain entry to the Museum.  Mohammed explained that he had received the necessary permit from Israeli authorities to chaperone the German tour group at which point the guide became extremely irate and called Museum security.  “Security personnel from the Museum came,” he explains, “and took me to the exit of the Museum where they ousted me from the building.”  In this way, Yad Vashem evicted a Palestinian from its premises for sympathizing with Nazism’s Jewish victims while explaining how, in his own experience, Israeli rule over Palestinians resembled some of the same practices attributed by the Museum to those used by the Third Reich on European Jews.  Replete with irony, Mohammed’s eviction from Yad Vashem, in the context of the forced displacements and carnage unfolding in Gaza, recalls a traceable historical arc.

Nazis Among Us?

On December 4, 1948, the New York Times published an open letter penned by a group of Jewish luminaries including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein who were protesting a visit to the U.S. by Menachem Begin, founder of the Herut (Freedom) Party of Israel.  Herut would later emerge as the foundation of the ultra-nationalist Likud Party of current Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  Authors of the letter made note of “Fascist elements in Israel” and objected to Begin’s visit because, according to them, Herut was “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”  

In support of its claim, the letter referenced the massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin committed earlier in 1948 by the paramilitary predecessor to Herut, the Zionist Irgun, labeled even by many Zionists of the time a terrorist militia.  The Irgun had come into the village, which had harbored no animus toward its Jewish neighbors, and “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem,” revealing a practice of cruelty toward Palestinians eerily similar to what Nazis did to the Jews.  Arendt was already on record as warily critical of exclusionary tendencies in the Zionist project, writing in “Zionism Reconsidered” (1943) how the Zionist movement stood for a kind of ethno-state in which Palestinians would have only “the choice of voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.” In the end, Arendt, Einstein and co-signers of the 1948 open letter proffered a warning about Herut and its Fascist roots: “from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

Apart from the reference to Deir Yassin, the letter did not specify what this kinship might portend but Fascism’s past practices highlight three themes.  First, Fascism is a mass movement animated by an extreme nationalist ethos whose adherents share a sense of collective victimhood caused by “outsiders” who are considered to have illegitimate claims of belonging to the nation and who emerge as the cause of collective national suffering. Second, Fascism channels this shared outlook of victimhood into collective hostility toward these outsiders whom Fascists consider as enemies seeking the nation’s demise.  Finally, Fascism enlists its backers to support liquidation of these enemies which drives it to untold levels of brutality and toward territorial expansion to ensure the completeness of the liquidation process, while keeping outsiders safely distant from the bounded space of the nation and those who belong to it. 

In the case of the Nazis, some of the signature behaviors that emerged from these contours and resonated so profoundly with Mohammed at Yad Vashem included Nazism’s exclusionary citizenship laws; its pogroms against Jewish businesses and property; night raids by the Nazi SS of Jewish homes along with arrests and deportations of Jews to concentration camps; and the ghettoization of Jews and their liquidation in these confined spaces. Although Mohammed recounts these practices as part of his own experience, it has become anathema, and in some places illegal even to raise the question suggested by his story:  How could heirs of those claiming to be Nazism’s most hapless victims assume the role of those who brutalized them, or in the words of Edward Said, how did Palestinians become “the victims of the victims”? 

It turns out that insight into this vexing puzzle beckons to two contemporaries from the nineteenth century with vastly different political persuasions. In his celebrated work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville asked how the luminaries of the French Revolution, with their “love of equality and the urge to freedom” ultimately crafted a system of authoritarian rule little different from the absolutism they so passionately set out to overturn.  In seeking to explain this paradox, de Tocqueville signaled a beguiling truth about these revolutionaries who he insists, “were men shaped by the old order.”  These individuals may have wanted to distance themselves from the ancien regime they so fervently wished to destroy, but years of conditioning under French absolutism had influenced their outlook and behavior.  Try as they might, these revolutionaries, “remained essentially the same, and in fact…never changed out of recognition.” Four years before de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”  In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of “dead weight” did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel? 

Lords of the Landscape

As early as 1904, Zionists in Palestine associated with the Second Wave of Jewish immigration were already signaling the future character of the State of Israel when they promoted the idea of “Hebrew Land, Hebrew Labor.” Central to this slogan was an effort to build an exclusionary Jewish society by evicting Palestinian tenants from lands they purchased, and preventing Palestinian labor on Jewish-owned land. In this way, early Zionism was seeking to create a landscape of Jewish spaces free of Palestinians. What Zionism ultimately created to fulfill these exclusionary impulses, however, took shape after 1945 in the crucible of the long shadow cast upon world Jewry by the experience of the Holocaust when the State of Israel came into being. Its signature practices with respect to the Palestinians reveal a striking, if unsettling set of parallels with what was done to Jews by the Nazis. Two seminal moments in the evolution of the State of Israel are paramount in marking the development of these exclusionary behaviors.

The initial moment encompasses Israel’s early years, 1947-50 and focuses on three defining practices designed to create Jewish ascendancy on the land and render Palestinians a subjugated people. First, during this period, the “Jewish State”—a moniker that is something of a mischaracterization since that State contains a 20% Palestinian population—evicted 750,000 Palestinians from homes within its boundaries, and in a Cabinet decision of July 1948 declared that it would never allow these evictees to return. Second, was what the Israeli Government did to Bedouins from the Naqab desert who managed to remain in their ancestral homeland following the end of hostilities in 1949. The Israeli military rounded up the 13,000 remaining Bedouin and confined them in a prison-like encampment near Beersheva known as the Siyaj (Enclosure Zone) where they were without basic services, forced to obtain permits to enter and exit the Siyaj, and prevented from building permanent housing for themselves. Finally, in the early 1950s, the Israeli State passed a series of laws on property rights, notably, the Absentee Property Law (1950) that dispossessed refugees of their lands on the grounds that they were “absentees,” no longer living in their domains. This law, however, also confiscated the property of roughly 50% of Palestinians in the new state through a macabre legal designation for Palestinians temporarily displaced from their homes who were classified as “present absentees.” In effect, what the State of Israel did in its infancy in seeking to make the Jewish State free of Palestinians by evicting, dispossessing, and confining them, had an uncomfortable resonance with the aim of the Third Reich in making Germany and the Reich Judenrein, free of Jews.

The second historical moment focuses on the aftermath of the June War in 1967 in which the State of Israel sought to extend its domination over Palestinians into territories conquered in the 1967 campaign by settling those areas with Jewish Israelis – a clear violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Convention. This practice expanded Jewish presence within the conquered space while shrinking Palestinian presence by confiscating an ever-expanding inventory of Palestinian property for settlement-building and limiting the territorial spaces accessible to Palestinians in the occupied areas. In this way, the Jewish State created a constantly growing Hebrew landscape in the areas under its military control.

Not surprisingly, the State of Israel has taken draconian measures to fortify its project of land confiscation and settlement, and to this end has created a carceral-like regime for control over a population that it perceives as hostile to Jewish supremacy on the land. In pursuit of this aim, the Jewish State has not only intensified a system of actual incarceration in which thousands of Palestinians fill Israeli jails as political detainees. The State of Israel has created a massive prison-like environment on the Palestinian landscape dubbed a “Matrix of Control,” for the subjugation of Palestinians. This “Matrix” consists of an elaborate system of checkpoints, including several large checkpoint terminals, diffused throughout the West Bank to control Palestinian circulation; guard towers situated at major transport junctions to monitor Palestinians and their movements; and a massive Wall built along a 450-kilometer route across the West Bank where Palestinian circulation is pre-empted and the territory partitioned in much the same way that Michel Foucault has described the attributes of modern prisons. These features on the land have imbued the Palestinian landscape with the unenviable moniker of “The Biggest Prison on Earth.” More critically, as Palestinians encounter these elements in queues of regimented bodies under the gaze of armed soldiers, the echoes of Nazi landscapes seem inescapable.

Added to this carceral environment is the effort of the Jewish State to weaken Palestinian presence on the land by destroying one of the primary anchors affixing Palestinians to place, the Palestinian home. At any one moment, a Palestinian home is routinely demolished, usually on the pretext of being built “illegally,” without permission, but the State of Israel also destroys Palestinian homes as retribution against entire families of alleged perpetrators of “terror” against the Jewish State. Complementing this destruction is the longstanding practice of Israeli military “raids” into Palestinian homes, casting a pall of terror over the Palestinian landscape. These raids not only witness the arrests of Palestinians who disappear into Israeli jails as political prisoners, but also the ransacking and vandalism of the Palestinian home. Such destruction of Palestinian homes and property, along with the arrests of Palestinians in these actions find resonance in the way Jews were subjected to raids by the Nazi SS and sent to prison camps while their homes were ransacked and looted in Nazi versions of the pogrom. 

In February of last year, the world witnessed a particularly savage outbreak of this kind of violence in the Palestinian town of Huwara perpetrated by settlers from nearby Israeli settlements who set fire to cars, businesses, and homes of Huwara residents and killed one resident by gunfire as Israeli soldiers looked on and even assisted the perpetrators in this mayhem. So depraved was this rampage that the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs even used the word, “pogrom,” to label this carnage, a word choice by an Israeli official that was especially poignant. The implication was that the Jews who perpetrated this violence possessed the same kind of racist animus as perpetrators of Christian and Nazi pogroms against Jews, and enlisted similar types of brutality against Palestinian civilians. At the time of events in Huwara, however, the uprooting of Palestinian croplands and the destruction of rural homes, livestock pens, and farm equipment by Jewish settlers in an effort to evict and drive out Palestinians had already become commonplace on the Palestinian landscape—with nary a condemnation by Israeli officials, and virtually no effort by Israeli authorities to prevent and punish this criminality. As it turned out, Huwara was but a prelude to the much more sweeping campaign of carnage visited on Palestinians in the aftermath of October of the same year. 

Final Solution

In a riveting documentary, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe (2016), members of the Zionist Haganah militia interviewed in the film who were active in the military campaign of the period recounted their encounters with Palestinians during that critical time when the Jewish State came in to being. Hava Kellar, a Haganah veteran, spoke glowingly about her role in the expulsion of Palestinians from Bir-es Saba, seemingly oblivious to the expulsions of Jews during the Shoah. “I came to Beersheva, she recalls, and the commander said to me: ‘tomorrow we are going to throw out the Arabs from Beersheva.’ I said ‘wonderful, of course I’m going to help.’ Next day I got a gun, and we prepared 10-12 buses. We called all the Arabs from Beersheva to come to the buses and I was standing guard to make sure they went into the buses to go to Gaza—and they are still in Gaza today.” 

What we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death.

Another Haganah veteran, Josef Ben-Eliezer, is even more explicit in admitting to the parallels of what he did as a solider and what he experienced as a boy at the hands of the Nazis. “I saw masses of people going through the checkpoint that we were ordered to oversee,” he says, “and they were searched for valuables. It reminded me of when I was a child. We were doing the same thing that people have done to us as Jews.” 

A common belief among defenders of Israel is that Jews, and all things associated with the Jewish people—including the State of Israel—could not possibly do what Josef Ben-Eliezer described as Jews imitating the Nazis. To even imagine such a possibility is to transgress into forbidden terrain. Nazism is invariably associated with humanity’s worst-ever atrocity—the elimination of the Jews as a people—a crime given the name in 1944 of genocide, and codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Among the stated goals of Nazism, for which some of its leaders were prosecuted under this law, was the idea of making Germany and the areas it occupied Judenrein, free of Jews. That Jews could be a party to such an idea is for many, completely blasphemous if not worse. Events after October 7, however, reveal this longstanding Zionist conceit to be problematic.

On October 13 of last year, the Israeli Intelligence Ministry, an opaque governmental body that produces policy research for other Israeli Government agencies, authored a document in which it outlined three options for the Jewish State in response to the breach of the barrier confining the Gazan people, and the killing by Hamas and other allied groups of Israeli military personnel, law enforcement officials and roughly 700 civilians. In this document, the Ministry recommends the third option—transfer of the entire Gaza population to the Egyptian Sinai – which document authors point out is “executable,” and will yield “the most positive long-term benefits” for the Jewish State. These authors understood how transfer of the 2.3 million Gazans into the Egyptian Sinai would entail an untold level of brutality against the people of Gaza triggering violations of the laws of war and even more serious charges, and would likely elicit broad global condemnation if not indictments. Nevertheless, the document urges policymakers in Israel to forge ahead with emptying Gaza, despite these challenges, and count on its alliance with the U.S. for backing while waging the necessary public relations campaign of incessantly portraying the Jewish State as victim. 

If there was any ambiguity about what this campaign of depopulation would entail, such doubts were put to rest almost from the start of the violence by the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. On October 9 at a meeting of Israeli military commanders at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheva, Gallant, acknowledged: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” An even more graphic specter of the motivation to eradicate the bare life of the Gazans came from Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu himself at the end of October after the Israeli Military had already killed 8000 Gazans and had evicted 1.2 million Gazans from their homes in the North of the Strip and instructed them to move South. Likening the campaign in Gaza to an ancient Biblical struggle by the Jews in the time of the Exodus to eradicate the Amalakites, Netanyahu exhorts his military and the people of Israel to “Remember what Amalek did to you” and he continues: “Our heroic soldiers have one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy.”

Two days after Netanyahu’s Biblical invocation, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, in a calculated performative spectacle, denounced the United Nations for supposedly failing to condemn Hamas and duly pinned a yellow star to his blazer, reenacting the Nazi practice of stigmatizing Jews with this disparaging emblem so that the Nazi regime could more easily monitor them and ordinary Germans could more easily harass them. But Erdan’s bizarre stunt, assuming the role of a Nazi himself in pinning the Yellow Star to his own clothing, had a more sinister propaganda aim. “Don’t forget, we are the victims”—was his unmistakable subtext. Such a message, however, is difficult to reconcile alongside images of some of the world’s most impoverished human beings, with no military, no planes, no navy, no tanks, no anti-aircraft batteries, being bombarded at will by one of the most powerful military forces in the world while trying to escape the carnage raining down on them in overcrowded wooden carts pulled by donkeys, or for those less fortunate simply walking disconsolately on bombed and destroyed roads in lines resembling Palestinian refugees of 1948. Indeed, the disconnect between what Israeli ambassador Erdan wants the world to believe, and what the world can see with its own eyes is starkly Orwellian.

In 1944, a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin coined the term, genocide to describe the campaign of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews, but he also intended the concept to be applicable to a range of other crimes against humanity committed prior to the Holocaust. Four years later Lemkin’s idea was codified in what is now known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Despite the European bias of the Convention, however, with its almost singular point of reference being the experience of the Nazis and European Jewry, and the absence in it of specific kinds of acts such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which adjucates the law with respect to countries, has repeatedly emphasized that the Convention embodies general principles. It is for this reason that the State of Israel, arguably born at least in part as reparations for the Nazi Genocide against European Jews, now finds itself on the opposite end not as victim but indeed as perpetrator. 

In January of this year, South Africa as a signatory to the Genocide Convention to prevent the commission of this crime, duly filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice charging the State of Israel with genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. In broad outline, genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention as “acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” and the Statute goes on to specify five scenarios in which the crime can be identified. Section C of South Africa’s 84-page document describes in detail the various campaigns of the Israel military in Gaza that conform to the definition of destroying in whole or in part Palestinian as a group. Among what is summarized in this section is the forced eviction of close to 2 million of the 2.3 Gazans from their homes; the destruction of 60% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip; the deliberate and almost complete destruction of the health care sector including most of the hospitals; the destruction of schools and universities; and the targeting of food-producing outlets including farms and bakeries. Part of what has made genocide so difficult to prosecute, especially with respect to sovereign states, is proving intent on the part of alleged state perperators. In its document, the South African legal team has diligently gathered the various statements of the Israeli Defense Minister, Prime Minister, and other high-ranking Israeli Government officials that admit in plain language, to the genocidal intent of the Israeli military campaign. Taken together, the deeds of the Israeli military, and the words of Israeli officials testify to the aim of eliminating the Gazans from Gaza, that is, rendering Gaza free of Palestinians.    

For the past 17 years, Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling the movement of people and goods that could enter and exit the territory, imbuing the Gaza Strip with the odious label of “the world’s largest open-air prison." Three years prior to the blockade, however, the State of Israel had sufficiently confined the people of Gaza in a walled and fenced enclosure to the point where former Israeli National Security Council Director, Giora Eiland conceded the territory to be “a huge concentration camp.” The choice of this descriptor by Eiland seems especially appropriate for a population blockaded and unable to circulate beyond the closed confines of the Strip and who are reliant on the whim of Israel for access to virtually all essentials for bare life. International law, however, suggests that a blockade imposed on a territorial space is an act of war. Even former Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban endorsed this view in reference to the June 1967 war. “The blockade is by definition an act of war,” Eban announced at the UN on June 19, 1967 in describing the actions of Egypt that supposedly provoked Israel into its surprise attack.  Israel is thus trying to argue to the world that it is defending itself in a war it did not want. In reality, the war did not begin October 7.  Israel has been waging war against Gaza with its blockade since 2007—not to mention four major military bombardments since 2006 killing thousands of Gazans—and the Jewish State presents itself as victim when the Gazans have attempted to break the siege and fight back. 

In December of last year, author Masha Gessen, in a courageous article for The New Yorker provided a different approach to framing the carceral spectacle in Gaza. For Gessen, the metaphor of the open-air prison was incomplete, if not inaccurate. In the context of the unmitigated carnage being visited upon the Gazans by Israeli military, what the Jewish State is undertaking, Gessen argued, is nothing less than a genocidal effort at “liquidating the ghetto” they have created in Gaza—much like the Nazis liquidating the Ghetto they had created in Warsaw. In this way, Gessen signaled an alternative way of seeing not only the savagery being visited on the 2.3 million Gazans, but also what Gaza had become under the Israeli blockade and bombardment—a ghetto that Israel is trying to eradicate as the Nazis did. How else is it possible to interpret a military campaign demanding Gazans evacuate their homes and move South where they have become more concentrated, and where they are still being incessantly bombed and killed?

At the moment of this writing, the Israeli military has delivered what is perhaps a final ultimatum to the Gazans. Concentrated now in the southernmost enclave in the Gaza Strip, the city of Rafah, where they have been ordered to move after a series of orders that has essentially cleared most of Gaza of its inhabitants since October, the Israeli military has now ordered the Gazans to leave—but there is no place left for them to go. Israel, in effect, appears poised on the precipice of implementing the aim of the Intelligence Ministry Report by forcing the Gazans into Egypt, or alternatively if Egypt continues to deny Israel’s request to let the Gazans into the Sinai, Israel will continue liquidating them. This is indeed an effort on the part of Israel to empty the ghetto!

What the world is witnessing in this effort to liquidate the ghetto of Gaza is shocking in the degree of violence that the State of Israel has unleashed on a defenseless group of people, but at the same time, it is explainable. Although the idea of the Jewish State committing genocide is blasphemy to those who hold that it was born as the supposed antithesis of genocide and the Holocaust, both Alexis de Tocqueville and Edward Said remind us that there is at times a cunning aspect in historical outcomes in which the oppressed somehow take on the attributes of their oppressors. In an interview of 2011, the celebrated physicist and Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer made this connection between Zionism and Nazism explicit when he said: “I saw in Auschwitz that if a dominant group wants to dehumanize others, as the Nazis wanted to dehumanize me, these dominant groups must first be dehumanized themselves…They [Zionists] have given up everything which has to do with humanity, for one thing: the state, the blood and the soil – just like the Nazis.” To those who naively proclaim the idea of “Never Again,” sadly what is upon us is that Palestinians have become the Jews, along with all of the other groups from the Namibians to the Rohingya that have suffered genocide. In this sense, what we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death. 

Resistance is Ugly: Palestine, Israel, and the Nature of Struggle

By RJ Park

October seventh, for Israel, marked a point of no return. After demonstrations by their own civilians against the country’s lack of commitment to democracy, they have now been faced with the other side of their oppressive regime. Perhaps in an attempt to win over their dissatisfied civilians in the face of a ‘greater evil’, Prime Minister Netanayahu has refused to mince his words on what he believes Palestine’s revolutionary brewings mean for his country and the people therein, stating that Hamas, the lead organization in this recent wave of resistance, has ‘launched a murderous surprise attack against Israel and its citizens.’ [1] Clearly, he does not view this conflict as a mere addition to the ever-expanding list of violent encounters between Israeli and Palestinian forces. This is a battle for the existence of Israel and, at the same time, the necessary non-existence of Palestine that is a required qualifier for the success of the entire Zionist project. [2]

For Palestine, decades of relocation, colonization, and outright murder by the hands of Israel’s military branch, the IDF, has stockpiled tensions to an unbearable degree. They have tried to be diplomatic with Israel, to no avail. They have tried to protest peacefully, and were gunned down in the streets. [3] They have tried forceful forms of resistance, and were brutalized more harshly than they had been ever before. [4] It is clear why the only path forward seems to be a full-scale overthrow of the government which has kept them under its boot heel for the better part of the past one-hundred years. That is a difficult conclusion to disagree with.

Yet for all the vocal support of Palestine that has emerged from across West’s political landscape, denunciation of Palestine’s actions in their ongoing struggle with Israel seem to be gradually gaining acceptance. This is expected of more conservative politicians and social critics, most of whom never endorsed Palestine in the first place. However, similar (occasionally identical) critiques have been adopted by individuals who previously supported Palestine in their ongoing struggle against the Israeli government. As soon as Palestinian groups like Hamas began resisting their occupation with violence, however, this support dissipated, and the same people who had called for their independence accused them of deliberately killing civilians, a claim which is a verifiable organization concocted for the sole purpose of playing into the Zionist trope  of barbaric Palestinians attacking innocent Israelis. This version of events implies that Israel’s citizens have nothing to do with the oppression of Palestinians, who are actively seeking wanton violence against Israel and all its inhabitants in order to satisfy a mindless drive for vengeance. 

When observing the history of Palestine’s struggle against Israel, both sides of this claim fall apart. Firstly, those who willingly leave their country of origin in order to live in Israel cease to be ‘innocent civilians’ the moment they step foot into the country, which is built upon occupied territory. Instead, they become active colonizers of Palestinian land, engaging in a form of violence that, although less direct, is no more forgivable than the violence enacted against Palestinians by the IDF. Secondly, it is impossible for Palestine to be the aggressor in their fight against Israel. Since they are the ones being actively oppressed, all that they do is in retaliation to that oppression. Any violent action they take is a component of their war for liberation, and their violence can only be understood in this context. Separating this violence from the history of violence committed against them by Israel does nothing but enhance Israel’s narrative of continual victimhood, which is essential to their ongoing war against Palestine.

But why have some of the most progressive voices in mainstream American politics succumbed to this narrative so easily? It seems that years of exposing Israel’s excessive use of force, their violation of human rights, and, most-relevantly, their tendency to deceive the international community by posturing as an oppressed minority despite being the most powerful country in the Middle East would have primed these politicians to be wary of any claims by Israel that their safety - not the safety of the Palestinian people - was under attack. Obviously, though, this has not been the case. These politicians have, at best, simultaneously denounced both the actions of Hamas and the IDF and, at worst, singled out Hamas as being especially malicious and bloodthirsty while excusing the actions of Israel.

Although there are many reasons for this trend, electability is a large factor. A person is a politician in the West so long as they can be elected to public office, and, as such, Westerners - including politicians themselves - view politics as a matter of marketability instead of principle. It does not appear at all odd for most of them to see a politician support a cause (such as the liberation of Palestine) while critiquing the means through which that very same cause is pursued. A degree of separation is considered acceptable between vocally supporting something and actually supporting something if the former is popular and the latter is not. 

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Observing that politicians maintain these contradictions within their individual political views goes a long way to explain why Western governments are regularly faced with deadlocks on a systemic level. Rather than electing representatives that believe in and pursue certain goals with a definite plan in mind, representatives are elected because they espouse certain beliefs without having formulated an overarching plan to put those beliefs into action, out of fear that the specifics of such a plan may have convinced less people to vote for them. So, when they actually inherit the responsibilities they were elected to wield, they have no actionable promises to fall back on. They act based on what they think will match public opinion, not what they think will help the public.

Politics do not operate like this the world over. In places like Palestine, in which the government is ostensibly subservient in the face of a military and political powerhouse like Israel, politics is a matter of on-the-ground change, not dealings in bureaucracy. Politics is a matter of life and death, not a popularity contest. Politics, ultimately,  is a very real, very definite thing, experienced consciously by every Palestinian each time they are reminded that they are in the process of being colonized, which they are reminded of fairly often. While, to the bourgeois West, political views can be divorced from the external world, Palestinians do not have this luxury. A conversation of mild disagreement between two moderates, one who leans conservative and one who leans liberal, could never take place between a Palestinian and an Israeli. The views they express are too closely tied to the nature of equality, the rights of man, and the validity of the Zionist project to be discussed in casual conversation. 

Many Western politicians, on the other hand, feel entitled to have such casual conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on behalf of the Israelis and Palestinians. No matter which group one supports, if this support is artificial, spurred on by a desire to be elected more than anything else, results in demeaning one group or the other (or both) for not living up to Western standards of compromise and decency. 

This view is rooted in sheer ignorance, namely ignorance of the fact that the Zionist project, from its inception, was explicitly hostile and violent towards Palestinians. Conflict between Israeli settlers and Gaza natives is not a recent development, emerging out of a difference of opinion as to which group is entitled to the land, in which neither opinion can be said to be more or less valid than the other. Zionism emerged as an unabashedly colonialist entity, with the intention of transforming Palestine from an Arab-majority country to a European-majority country, not through mutual agreement, but by force. Quoth Vladimir Jabotinsky, a 20th-century Zionist ideologue: ‘If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf…Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.’ [5] Clearly, the presence of violence in the establishment of Israel was never considered avoidable. Early Zionists knew that they were entering land in which other people lived, knew that those people would not be pleased with them dominating that land, and knew, because of this, that they would have to use force in order achieve their desired outcomes, yet chose to do so anyways. The recent outburst of retaliatory violence against Israel by Hamas is miniscule when compared to this decades-long ‘colonizing adventure,’ but the furious violence of Israel, which is inherent in Zionism itself and made manifest not only in military oppression by the IDF but also through avenues like property redistribution and cultural suppression, is usually ignored by the West, which will only ever briefly take note of it when it is too indefensible to gloss over. Meanwhile, the much smaller-scale violence of Palestine, which is born out of a desire for national liberation, is framed as a threat not only to Israel’s very nationhood but as a mad annihilation of innocent lives. 

All of this defamation of Palestine’s fight for freedom, all of this critique and harmful rhetoric about its methods of resistance is, once spoken by Israeli demagogues, absorbed uncritically by Western political voices, even those which outwardly express support for Palestine. The disconnect of their political imagination from the actual situation in Palestine is so severe, that, when they claim to endorse Palestinian liberation, the image they have in their mind is one of diplomacy and calm discussions in congressional halls. The actuality of liberation, the pain, the suffering, the violence, the death, comes as a surprise to them. Their fantasy of a wave of peaceful protests, meetings between community leaders, and, perhaps, an international summit of some kind being all that it takes to restore relations between the two countries (as if an amicable relationship existed in the first place) suddenly disappears before their eyes. In its place are shocking images of bombings and burning helicopters, and they are so shocked to find that the political process they imagined is not how any country can ever or will ever gain true, long-lasting freedom that they are inclined to accept the first explanation for all this chaos that somebody offers them. Unfortunately, this explanation tends to go as follows: ‘Israel is facing unprovoked attacks by Palestinian radicals.’

It is not hard to see that this explanation, beyond being overly simplistic, is also outright incorrect. In response, one may be inclined to search for an explanation through which middle ground can be found within this complex issue. Despite many popular maxims, though, the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis does not constitute a ‘complicated situation’ with ‘valid claims emerging from both sides.’ In the words of political commentator Michael Brooks: ‘It's not a complex issue. That's the big thing. It's super simple. There's one group [Israel] that has enormous power. It's the most powerful country in the Middle East. It's backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity. It is never held accountable for anything. So, there's no symmetry in the relationship, period.’ As much as American politicians may claim to  represent a reasonable middle-ground on the issue of Palestinian liberation, this proposed ‘middle-ground’ does not and can not exist. When Israel uses violence on Palestinians, it is oppression. When Palestinians fight back against Israelis, it is self-defense. That much is certain. 

Notes

[1] Dahman, Ibrahim. Gold, Hadan. Iszo, Lauren. Netanyahu says Israel is ‘at war’ after Hamas launches surprise air and ground attack from Gaza, sec.7

[2] Kayyali, Abdul-Wahab. Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins, p.110

[3] al-Mughrabi, Nidal. Israeli forces kill three Gaza border protesters, wound 600: medics, sec.1

[4] McGreal, Chris. Army pulls back from Gaza leaving 100 Palestinians dead, sec.1

[5] Jabotinsky, Vladimir. The Iron Law, pg. 26

The Crisis in the West Bank

[Photo Credit: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty]

By Sudip Bhattacharya

Republished from Counterpunch.

Although it’s been decades since he left Palestine, building a life for himself and his loved ones in the Austin area, memories of olive trees and hills, of family and him sharing meals under an orange sun, flowed through Ahmad Zamer on most days. Having been able to visit the West Bank a few years ago, Zamer could still hear the people conversing in the town square, the men and women sharing jokes, asking him how’s been, even as he sits in his house thousands of miles away, skyscrapers along the impeding horizon.

But that sliver of normalcy and good feeling has been replaced, rather swiftly, with the screaming of people buried under rubble, of others waking up each day, finding yet another building reduced to piles of bricks and twisted metal.

“You always hold out optimistic hope that it doesn’t happen to you, although it’s happened to us before,” Zamer explained, “But it’s been a different scale of violence now. It’s shocking,” he added, his voice drifting.

During Israel’s recent onslaught over Gaza, Zamer lost a dozen members of his family from an Israeli airstrike. He’d lose 35 on another day, snatched from him in a matter of mere moments.

Since the beginning of October, the number of Palestinians who’ve been killed are now over 20,000, with many others still unaccounted for, lost under the wreckage of buildings and homes. The Israeli state has also targeted hospitals, refugee camps, and even UN-designated zones, killing innocent women, children and men in droves.

“It’s a slaughter,” said Hatem Natsheh, a close friend of Zamer’s, and also someone who’s managed to rebuild his life in the U.S. Natsheh has remained committed to the Palestinian cause for liberation and for the creation of a secular democratic nation with equal rights for all. However, the last few months have been dispiriting and traumatic. Natsheh, like many Arab Americans, had voted for Biden in the last presidential cycle, and now have become embittered and frustrated over that choice. As a progressive, Natsheh himself remains committed to progressive cause of economic and political equality, of fighting for labor and human rights. However, the fact that the Biden administration has been insistent on delivering more military aid to the far-right dominated Israeli state, disregarding the critical situation millions of Palestinians find themselves in, has been painful to reckon with.

“It’s not been easy, I’m telling you,” he admitted, also in regards to Bernie Sanders having refused, until recently, to even mention the word “ceasefire”. As a delegate for Sanders, this has felt like a betrayal.

“At the beginning of all of it, I wasn’t doing too well,” said Jade, whose grandparents became refugees in the original Nakba and is studying to be a human rights lawyer in the Midwest. The images of children in shock, and others having been injured or killed, have stuck to her, like grime. “Seeing all the images of dead children has been difficult since my brother also died at a young age, so I know what the death of a child can do to a family. I can hear my own mother screaming while carrying my brother’s body when he was little, and I can hear that when seeing these images of other peoples’ children,” she shared.

The trauma, however, cannot be reduced to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, although the attacks themselves merit focus given the intensity of harm. What is occurring in Gaza, especially with the Israeli ground invasion, has been rightfully identified as ethnic cleansing, as another Nakba. Plans have been considered for Palestinians in Gaza to be moved into the Sinai Peninsula or to simply be dispersed around the Middle East.

Still, the Israeli imposition on Palestinian life has been targeting Palestinians generally, including those who have managed to remain in the West Bank.

Both Natsheh and Zamer speak to family members in the West Bank, who relay to them stories of harassment and fear.

“My family has added an extra lock to their doors,” Zamer said about some of his family members’ coping responses to the intensification of Israeli settler violence that’s been ongoing. Some of this violence and taking over of Palestinian land in the West Bank had been taking place prior to the latest Israeli assault on Gaza even.

Despite Israel’s recent decision to pull back its troops from Gaza, and some of its attempts to suggest Palestinians never wanted a real political solution in the region, the situation in the West Bank must not be overlooked, or allowed to be treated as marginal. Instead, the situation in the West Bank, from Palestinains being attacked by Israeli settlers to more Palestinian land also being taken, reflects the broader issue, which has always been about settler colonialism and an appropriation of Palestinian land and power.

NAKBA 2.0

According to scholars like Rashid Khalidi, himself Palestinian, the Palestinian situation is one shaped by disposition of land and resources beginning in the formation of the Israeli state in 1948, whereby Palestinians were forced off their land, herded into refugee camps, or compelled to find some form of dignified living in other parts of the region. All in all, this disposition, similar to what had been experienced by indigenous peoples in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and other parts of the globe, would mark the Palestinian people for decades to come, as a right of return to the land they once had would become a major part of their liberatory struggle and search for justice.

Khalidi writes in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,

For all Palestinians, no matter their different circumstances, the Nakba formed an enduring touchstone of identity, one that has lasted through several generations. It marked an abrupt collective disruption, a trauma that every Palestinian shared in one way or another, personally or through their parents or grandparents.

The crisis in Gaza is a very clear example of this continued disposition. Total the land and force people to flee, making it difficult for them to rebuild what little they might have had: that’s been the strategy of the Israeli state that has been targeting the dense region of the Gaza strip, as it imposes an embargo that leads to mass starvation and lack of basic resources. Once more, such strategies have echoes of previous colonial tactics, such as the British Empire’s decision to create policies that caused mass famine and economic instability across parts of South Asia at the turn of the 20th century and during WWII. This pattern would repeat across parts of Africa as well, not to mention the corraling of populations as a means of stealing more land, or as a means of punishing resistance, as was the case in Kenya after WWII, with concentration camps set up by the British colonial regime.

The West Bank has been part of this overall strategy too, even if it hasn’t faced the same level of death and starvation that we’ve seen for decades inside Gaza. Nevertheless, since the early 1990s, the seizure of land, and the surrounding of Palestinian life with Israeli state apparatus and Israeli extremists, has been its norm.

Legal scholar, Noura Erakat, stated in Justice for some: Law and the Question of Palestine,

As of late 2015, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank numbered more than 600,000, a 200 percent increase since the advent of the Oslo peace process in 1993. Israel’s settlement enterprise carves the West Bank into more than twenty noncontiguous landmasses separating approximately three million Palestinians into as many groups that stand apart from one another, thus undermining any sense of territorial contiguity or national cohesion.

Natsheh, who visited family in the West Bank in 2018, the first time in thirty years he’d been able to step on Palestinian land, remembered the joy of seeing his family, and of seeing the landscape brimming with greenery and life. Part of the experience of being back was fairly normal, as he made the rounds of meeting friends and family, of sharing experiences, of hugs, and kisses on the cheek.

And yet, even then, it was impossible not to pay attention to the Israeli settlements all around them, circling them.

“You can tell the settlers are armed,” he said, paying extra attention to his surroundings as he’d venture around, visiting and talking, getting to know the land once again. Israeli forces too were seen managing the movement of people, mainly Palestinians in the region, despite the West Bank being promoted as primarily controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and Fatah, a rival to Hamas.“If you’re Palestinian, you are being harassed by Israeli forces, by settlers, you have to go through checkpoint after checkpoint,” Natsheh described, “It’s tiring. It’s basically a form of hell.”

The beauty of the trees and the land can start to fade into a brutal routine of being targeted by the Israeli occupation forces and the monsters its occupation breeds. A sense of dread and disappointment can start to seep into you, said Natsheh.

Since early October, the pace of land being stolen, of Palestinians falling under Israeli state domination, has only intensified. As Israeli jets fire upon buildings in Gaza, Israeli occupation forces and settlers have increased their land seizures in the West Bank.

Bel Trew at the Independent writes, “Israeli human rights groups say this is the single biggest land grab since Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, and likely amounts to the war crime of forcible transfer.”

The situation for Palestinians in the West Bank has grown more tenuous, more dangerous over the recent months, with nothing set to change anytime soon. The strangulation of Palestinian life in the West Bank has been, at times, nearly unbearable, according to Natsheh and Zamer, both of whom remain in touch with family members, desperate for an end to the occupation and violence.

““There’s no freedom of movement,” Zamer said about his family’s situation in the occupied West Bank, “I talk to them every day. I worry that one day I will call them and no one will answer.” He paused. “That’s how I feel right now. It’s too much.”

VIOLENCE AS NORM

Ahmad Abusharkh, a nurse in Chicago, also has family in the West Bank. He explained how through the Palestinian authority, the Israeli government has managed to repress actions of Palestinians trying to exhibit solidarity with their kinfolk in Gaza. Although the Palestinian Authority aims to build towards Palestinian statehood, so far, it’s become a vessel for elements of Israeli control over the years by continuing its security cooperation with the IDF. Much like South Africa, the West Bank under the existing Fatah government has become what some would describe as a Bantustan, an area that’s designated for Arabs, and portrayed as somehow autonomous but is very much a sliver of land in which sovereignty has still been denied. In many ways, the West Bank has also become a place where Palestinians are corralled, rather than provided the resources and rights a group would need to be sovereign, or to live a just and dignified life.

“We have family members who are afraid to go out at night”, Abusharkh explained, “The settlers are terrorizing people and everybody knows that they will not be punished. Everybody knows that the settlers to a certain degree can do whatever they want. There’s a lot of fear in the West Bank about the way the repression and the genocide in Gaza will continue to spill over to them, will spill over to repression in the West Bank.”

In 2023 alone, 483 Palestinians in the West Bank were killed. In October, assault rifles had been distributed to Israeli settlers, eager to wield violence against Palestinians across the West Bank.

Yagil Levy, a professor of political sociology and public policy, writes about the situation inside the West Bank,

As Israeli military operations continue in the Gaza Strip, a parallel escalation of violence is unfolding in the West Bank. This includes intensified army attacks against Hamas targets and a reported increase in Palestinian fatalities. Alongside these developments, there has been a rise in violence by settlers, apparently aimed at pushing Palestinians from their homes and extending Israeli control in certain areas.

He adds,

The violence itself is not new, but two things are worth watching. As the attacks spread, there’s growing evidence that soldiers and settlers are working hand in hand. And there are signs that settlers are increasingly worried about a political shift after the war in Gaza—and trying to change the West Bank landscape while they can.

“They just go in and do whatever they want to do,” said Natsheh, speaking about the Israeli settlers feeling ever more emboldened. “They’re arresting people, blowing up houses, destroying infrastructure, bulldozing the streets. It has been miserable for the people living in the West Bank. Miserable.”

Zamer reiterated the fear that family members will also perish in the West Bank, or be driven out from their homes, left to fend for themselves.

“The pressure on them has been constant,” said Zamer, “They’ve had their olive trees taken by these right wing settlers. The settlers come out and act like hooligans, attacking people, taking property as they wish.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk stated in regards to the intensification of harassment and attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, “The use of military tactics means and weapons in law enforcement contexts, the use of unnecessary or disproportionate force, and the enforcement of broad, arbitrary and discriminatory movement restrictions that affect Palestinians are extremely troubling.”

The routine, nearly everyday, for Zamer, Natsheh and many others in the Palestinian diaspora has been to put aside time and learn about what’s been going on with family and friends thousands of miles away. It’s both a process of replenishing, as they manage to maintain connections with those they care about deeply, but of course, it’s a reminder of the constant horrors and troubles that so many have endured, and in the case of the West Bank, are set to experience for the years ahead, regardless whether a ceasefire over Gaza is finally implemented, however porous.

The reality has been the West Bank, despite it being controlled by Hamas’ rival, Fatah, and despite it being seen as nominally “autonomous”, has been a target of the Israeli settler agenda for decades now. Settlers themselves have consistently been moving into the territory, with the backing of Israeli state forces, and have the very clear intention of taking over the land completely for a greater Israel.

“We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand,” said Daniella Weiss, a settler in the West Bank, in a recent interview about her interests and the interests of other settlers like her.

“Palestinians already could not go wherever they wanted to go, it takes hours just to go from one village to the next,” Natsheh described, pulling from his own experience when visiting. “That’s just gotten worse. And that won’t change either.”

Zamer related to how things would deteriorate in the years to come, expressing fear over what comes next for the people he loves and those he may not yet but are part of the general Palestinian population. Zamer spoke, again, about the land, how beautiful it can be to simply step outside one’s home and see the orange sun peeking between the hills. Or to stroll into the farmland, the grass below looking neon green, the trees growing new limbs shrouded also in bright green colors.

“We need a one state that’s democratic and secular,” he stressed, “We need it before it’s too late.”

LIBERATION TIME

The West Bank serves as a reminder that the Israeli war on Gaza is a general war on a possible Palestinian state, and future.

Even if a ceasefire were to finally be realized, the Israeli state, so long as it remains controlled by such extremists and settler interests, shall persist in finding ways to seize more land and to find ways for more Palestinians to either be compelled to flee, or to find themselves marginalized under an expansive Israeli state.

The cultural theorist and popularizer of the term “Orientalist”, Edward Said, had written about a one-state democratic secular state in 1999, explaining,

I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.

This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples.

The only real solution then, for Palestinians too in the West Bank, is for the emergence and flourishing of such a state in that region. For years, such an idea has been relatively marginal in the U.S. and other parts of the “West”, itself a political construction mediated through myth-making and delusion. Still, the subject of Palestinian liberation, and the recognition of just how difficult life has also become for people in the West Bank, the sheer scale of Israeli settlements, has become more and more a part of the U.S. left’s discussion, as well as discussion among liberal and progressive groups. Over the years, we’ve seen the emergence of organizations such as Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.

In recent polling, an increasing share of Americans are skeptical about existing U.S. policy towards Israel. A large number of young people have expressed dissatisfaction with Biden and his abiding faith in the far-right Netanyahu administration.

“More people around the world are identifying with the Palestinian cause as a struggle against colonialism and for democracy,” Abusharkh said, as someone also deeply involved around socialist organizing and Palestinian liberation, “It’s definitely different than where the movement was several years ago even.”

The liberation for Palestine, as Natsheh describes, is a liberation struggle for all progressive forces throughout the world, from the cities and towns faced with deindustrialization and police harassment across the U.S. to the villages of Yemen struggling against Saudi oppression. The world as is, shaped by a contingent of U.S. capitalist and imperialist interests, along with their “allies” from inside Israel to the Egyptian junta, is a world rife with inequalities and extreme injustices, not to mention political instability.

“Israel would not maintain a system of domination without the U.S. maintaining a system of domination over the global south and working people,” Jade explained, “Our struggles are all interlinked. Our liberation is only guaranteed by uplifting each other.”

A world in which the West Bank and Gaza are free is a world in which the world has become far more open for more progressive and socialist horizons for the world’s majority, whether that is someone African American seeking financial stability in the American Northeast, or someone Asian American cleaning offices in Silicon Valley, or someone in the West Bank, finally free to grow as many olive trees as their heart desires.

Amilcar Cabral, one of the world’s most insightful anti-colonial thinkers, stressed the interlinking of national liberation struggles with the general struggle for a more humane planet. Cabral, who led the struggle for Guinea-Bissau against the Portuguese occupiers who received support from the U.S. and other Western governments, emphasized this with as many different audiences as he could, from people in Italy, to African American activists in New York City. Cabral himself believed in the Palestine cause for freedom, aligning with his own, and with the fight against apartheid in South Africa in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, prior to when he was assassinated by Portuguese agents.

In a speech on Guinea-Bissau society to an audience in Milan, Cabral would explain,

To end up with, I should just like to make one last point about solidarity between the international working-class movement and our national liberation movement. There are two alternatives: Either we admit that there really is a struggle against imperialism that interests everybody, or we deny it. If, as we would seem from all the evidence, imperialism exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate the working class in all advanced countries and smother the national liberation movements in all the underdeveloped countries, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting. If we are fighting together, then I think the main aspect of our solidarity is extremely simple. It is to fight—I don’t think there is any need to discuss this very much. We are struggling in Guinea with guns in our hands, you must struggle in your countries, as well—I don’t say with guns in your hands, I’m not going to tell you how to struggle, that’s your business; but you must find the best means and the best forms of fighting against our common enemy—this is the best form of solidarity.

Such a message of solidarity is one we must have with the people of Gaza and the West Bank, with the Yemenis, with people facing deportation procedures in Pakistan, with people experiencing police aggression across the U.S., with people finding it increasingly difficult to dream after a long day of low-wage work, regardless of skill.

The struggle in the West Bank will persist, for true autonomy and freedom, and so we must continue to find a way to remain connected with that struggle, knowing full well our rights and freedoms are intertwined, as black and brown people, as people seeking liberation, and our own version of a calm afternoon peering ahead and watching the sun descend along the horizon.

REALITY LOOMING

As the sunlight snuck past the blinds, peering into the living room, Natsheh was already on his phone, staring at the graphic images of children with their eyes wide open, of older children begging for their parents and grandparents to wake up, shaking them until others finally pulled them away. Every day, when it’s still pitch black outside, Natsheh can’t help but stir, images and doubts having piled up in his gut, his body feeling pulled apart. Every day, he makes it a point to watch the videos of what’s been taking place in the land he was born and raised in, fear and anger forming sweat on his brow.

“It’s a very…” he paused, searching for the words, as the reality of the crisis loomed over us. “It’s just very surreal. Sad, and surreal. You have to go to work. You have to do what you can to get by but with all this…happening.”

For Natsheh, he is still committed to progressive politics. He is still committed to the fight for racial and economic justice, here and abroad. But the crisis, the sheer scale of it, the Israeli bombing, the fact that even certain “progressives” such as Bernie Sanders have been so slow in calling for a “ceasefire”, has weighed on him, even as he’s trying to do “normal” things, such as go to work, or cooking dinner.

As much as there are signs of people caring, and more importantly, with increasing scrutiny and condemnation of Israel by the UN, the reality remains that thousands of lives have been lost, been taken. The reality remains, according to Natsheh, that the bombings have continued, the targeting of refugee camps, and churches. The reality is that when the bombings stop, the seizure of land shall persist, and there’s always the danger that people’s attention spans might fluctuate, losing sight of the dispossession that’s been happening in the West Bank. Based on the pattern we’ve seen over the last few decades, the land dispossession in the West Bank will only increase, with the backing of the Israeli government, as the Knesset is dominated by far right demagogues eager to take direct control of the region.

“This has been a new level of violence that won’t really end,” Natsheh emphasized.

For many too, there’s the fact that witnessing all this violence, seeing it on screens, the terrible loss and pain felt by people in Gaza and the West Bank, can also serve to demoralize.

Jade talked about a video of a young boy seen crying after another Israeli attack, that being her motivation, even though on some days, it’s just difficult to absorb everything that’s going on.

“I keep him in mind,” she said, “That kid has to get out of this, to go and have a normal life, to get ice cream, to have a crush on somebody. That kid is in the back of my mind, almost always.”

Zamer insisted on how critical it is to remember the survivors, and all those who need solidarity now. Giving into pure cynicism would mean, in effect, giving up on a world that’s better for them, and best for everyone impacted by similar issues of colonialism, exploitation and domination. The West Bank too will start to have more videos being shared of more people losing their lives, losing their land. It can be overwhelming and yet, there’s no other choice but to maintain a connection and sustain a level of activism and solidarity that could save those who will survive the Israeli state apparatus and its domination.

“There are people who are still living who need us,” Zamer exclaimed. “We cannot get too emotional right now. We must keep working to save those who are still living. We must remember that.”

How Israel Copied the USA

By Youhanna Haddad

Though Zionism has found a home in Palestine, the movement didn’t originate there. It was an exported ideology and only gained a foothold in the Middle East thanks to British patronage. Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, was a secular Austrian Jew who didn’t use theology to argue for his colonial ambitions. Rather, he argued that Jews couldn’t live freely in Gentile nations and needed their own state to escape antisemitism. 

Herzl’s magnum opus, Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), repeats frequently that the establishment of this state is a colonial endeavor. His colonial strategy revolved around the idea of a “Jewish chartered company,” similar to the infamous East India Company that plundered trillions of dollars from South Asia for the benefit of English capitalists. 

Herzl did not mince words. He used “colony” and “colonist” to describe his ambitions over 10 times in Der Judenstaat. He said the poorest Jewish settlers would become the “most vigorous conquerors, because a little despair is indispensable to the formation of a great undertaking,”. Herzl even believed European Jews would not come to Palestine without the guarantee that they would be legally superior to the indigenous Arab population:

“Immigration is consequently futile unless based on assured supremacy.”

Herzl also directly compared Zionist settlements to the “occupation of newly opened territory” in the United States. There are also uncanny rhetorical analogies. Both Zionists and Euro-American settlers claim supremacy to justify the conquering, displacement, and elimination of natives. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, for example, justified Israel’s violent West Bank settlement campaign in supremacist terms:

“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock”

Shapiro’s rhetoric mirrors that of Enlightenment thinker John Locke, who believed God created land only for “the industrious and rational.” Euro-American settlers cited Locke to justify their own violent displacement of natives. This violence is inseparable from colonialism.

Zionists could not build their state without subjugating the Palestinians. And Palestinians could not maintain their sovereignty and cultural identity under the boot of a Zionist state. So began Palestine’s struggle for national liberation, and the steady loss of Palestinian land has continued to this day.

Every nation has a right to self-determination and freedom from imperialist aggression. The Zionist entity is one of the last standing apartheid states in the world, fully backed by Western Imperialist liberal democracies. Israel and its allies are more than willing to use violence to enforce their will in the region. We therefore cannot be blinded by the fantasy of a pure, perfectly nonviolent path to self-determination for the Palestinian people. 

As Malcolm X explained, “concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” Who could he be speaking to if not the Palestinians? There is no moral equivalence between the colonial violence of the Zionist state and the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves. The oppressed have an undeniable right to resist those who openly seek to destroy them. Just as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto valiantly resisted the Nazis hellbent on eliminating them, the Palestinians are resisting the Zionist forces that seek their elimination.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Like the Zionists of today, American leaders have a long tradition of slandering indigenous resistance. The supposedly progressive president Theodore Roosevelt proudly spewed such lies to justify his conquest of the American West, saying:

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.” 

Clearly, Roosevelt had little regard for the original inhabitants of the United States. When he spoke on the United States military’s unprovoked slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children at Sandy Creek, he proclaimed it was “as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.” In his book The Winning of the West, Roosevelt ridiculed any sort of sympathy for victims of indigenous genocide:

‘‘All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes…The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages … American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.” 

It is no surprise that Roosevelt was a staunch Zionist. His belief in white people’s inherent right to violently expropriate colored lands fits perfectly with the Zionist mission. Israel’s founders held no illusions over what was necessary to create their ethnostate: total elimination of the Arab population. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, did not accuse Arab states of acting irrationally against the Zionist project. He knew the Zionist mission was directly at odds with Palestinian and Arab survival in the region: 

“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.”

While modern Zionists blame “far too many Palestinians… intent on massacring Jews” for resistance against Zionism, Ben-Gurion didn’t entertain this delusion: 

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but… [o]ur God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

Ben-Gurion’s own words shatter the lie that Israel-Palestine is “complicated.” It’s theft and genocide — plain and simple. And Zionists justify these crimes by dehumanizing the victims — much like Euro-American colonists dehumanized Native Americans. Zionism is thus undoubtedly a settler-colonial and racially supremacist ideology. We must reject it.

While corporate media continues to pump out tropes of the “Arab barbarian,” we cannot forget that all indigenous liberation movements throughout history have been smeared in the same fashion. For the moment, the establishment will smear those who stand with Palestine as antisemites and terrorist sympathizers. But history will remember us fondly, once the Zionist chapter is far behind us. 

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism.

Decolonisation Isn't Pretty Or Complicated: When Violence Is Humanising

By Derek Ford

The first pro-Palestine demonstration called after the latest counterattack by a host of Palestinian forces on October 7, endorsed by Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition and others, put matters very plainly:

Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. Catching the enemy completely by surprise, the Palestinian resistance has captured over a dozen settlements surrounding Gaza, along with many occupation soldiers and military vehicles. This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies but armed confrontation with the oppressors.

Of course, the colonisers do not want to hear such realities and hypocritically condemn them as ‘violent’ and ‘terrorist.’ In Indianapolis, we had to keep our coalition together in the face of the fear-mongering by both Democrat and Republican politicians. Unfortunately, many on the academic ‘left’ – already predisposed to conciliatory readjustments – continue echoing the same talking points as the State Department.

Henry Giroux, for example, contends that ‘The reach of violence and death in Israel by Hamas is shocking in its depravity and has been well-publicised in the mainstream media and in other cultural apparatuses.’ For a ‘critical’ scholar, it should instinctively raise questions when one finds truth in the pro-Zionist media and cultural outlets and remains merely satisfied with noting the ‘one-sidedness’ of such coverage. Giroux goes further still, calling us to do more than ‘exclusively condemn Hamas’s atrocious violence as a violation of human rights’ and to hold Israel’s apparently asymmetrical violence to equal condemnation. ‘Refusing to hold all sides in this war to the standards of international law is a violation of human dignity, justice and democratic principles,’ Giroux proclaims.

Palestinian resistance: Armed love

I recommend revisiting Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he unequivocally denounces such false equivalences. ‘Never in history,’ he writes, ‘has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators if they themselves are the result of violence?’ It is rather the oppressors who trigger violence and ‘not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror.’ Furthermore, the counter-insurgency of the oppressed, the ‘violence’ or ‘terror’ they wield, is in reality ‘a gesture of love.’

For Giroux, however, Hamas’s heroic attack on October 7 is ‘brutal and heinous’ and ‘horrific.’ To be fair, he acknowledges that Israeli Occupation Forces have murdered more children than ‘Hamas.’ Yet he swiftly returns to the equation, arguing that both Israel and Hama are united by ‘the violence done against children,’ which is apparently ‘used simply as a prop to legitimate and continue the war and the ongoing death and suffering of children, women, and civilians.’

Simultaneously, in the article titled ‘Killing Children: The Burdens of Conscience and the Israel-Hamas War,’ Giroux commands us not to equate Hamas with Palestine. Fair enough; no single entity represents an entire people. Yet Hamas is one of many resistance forces operating under a united front, along with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Resistance Committees, the Al-Quds Brigades and countless others. This is beside the point: those of us in the US have absolutely no business telling the colonised how to resist colonisation, nor what armed groups should resist and on what grounds!

One wonders what such academics would have written about Nat Turner’s historic 1831 rebellion in Virginia. In August of that year, Turner led a group of six slaves to freedom. They killed their slaver, Joseph Travis and his family before traversing plantations to free more enslaved Africans by force. Along the way, ‘free’ Blacks joined their army of about 70 people.

They took money, supplies and weapons as they moved and eliminated over 55 white slave owners and their families. Their violence was not altogether indiscriminate, and, in fact, Turner ordered his troops to leave the homes of poor white people alone. Still, they killed children in their march towards freedom.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Should we remember this remarkable uprising as a tragedy to be condemned, albeit less so than the violence of the slavers? No! We celebrate Turner’s rebellion as we do all revolts of the oppressed worldwide throughout history!

Their violence was humanising, a necessary measure to prevent them from enslaving others and part of a long tradition of insurrection that ultimately overthrew chattel slavery in the US.

No demonisation of the oppressed

After an amazingly long chase, once the slavers found and killed Turner, the white supremacist papers condemned him and his motley crew for their barbaric violence. How would you respond? ‘Yes, it was terrible, but slavery is worse?’

Things are different today. All imperialist wars are for ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights.’ So it was with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, you name it. In each instance, the propaganda is quickly absorbed by our critical intellectuals. I remember Noam Chomsky endorsing UN Resolution 1973, put forward by the ‘saviours’ of humanity like Italy and the United States on March 17, 2011, imposing a ‘No-Fly Zone’ over Libya. Of course, this only applied to the Libyan air force, not to the US and its NATO allies.

There was relentless propaganda about an ‘impending massacre’ in Benghazi when, in reality, the small armed uprising was on the verge of defeat by the massively popular (and, it goes without saying, flawed) Jamahiriya government of Moammar Gaddafi. It turns out there was no impending massacre, nor was there any validity to the accusations of ‘mass rape.’

The same is true of October 7, 2023. As it turns out, the Israelis massacred their own people. The air force admitted one commander ‘instructed the other fighters in the air to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence, and at a certain point also attacked an IDF station with trapped soldiers in order to help the fighters of Navy commando unit 13 attack it and liberate it.’ Yasmin Porat confirmed the Israeli army massacred civilians after the courageous Hamas counterattack and, moreover, said Palestinian resistance forces who ‘kidnapped’ her did not treat her inhumanely and did not intend to murder her.

For those with a cursory knowledge of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, this is not surprising.

No purity in the fight against oppression

Let’s imagine that the lies told by the State Department and distributed by their stenographers in the media were all true. Even then, why would anyone in the US or any imperialist nation that is currently sponsoring the Israeli genocide feel any need to ‘condemn’ or even denounce the heroism of those fighting back?

The answer is simple: standing up to the demonisation campaign is difficult, especially early on. Yet how many have heard the endless outrageous lies used to dehumanise primarily Black and Brown heads of state, governments, militaries, and populations? The real question is: how many of us have heard the retractions? How many of us have questioned our national chauvinism and privilege? Why would anyone entertain the notion that Hamas wants Israel to continue bombing its people and infrastructure?

It goes without saying that I don’t share a political allegiance to Hamas, and neither do the myriad forces uniting with them to defend their people – and the people of the region and world – from the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel!

Moral purity is an idealism only those cloistered in their academic offices can afford. Still, it’s a waste of money. I guess, at the very least, it shows us what critical academics are willing to criticise the oppressors and not the oppressed. Me? I’m unequivocally and proudly on the side of the oppressed.

The Imperative to Organize: What Palestine Needs from Us Now

[Photo Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu, AP]

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso and Salma Hamamy

On October 7th, the Islamic Resistance Movement — a Palestinian political and military organization based in Gaza better known as Hamas — began a multi-faceted attack against the settler colony of Israel. The operation included aerial rocket launches and on-the-ground operations. The attack marked only the latest bout of Palestinian resistance against the sieges, occupations, and ethnic cleansing campaigns that have fundamentally characterized the Israeli state, an entity built on these very atrocities since its founding in 1948. With a dreadful immediacy, Israel responded to the attack in kind, and then some.

The war crimes and genocidal exploits that have unfolded since the fighting began are too multitudinous to list in full. But suffice it to say that Israel has unleashed an endless shower of hospital and school bombings — collective punishment galore. As of December 18th, Israel has slaughtered almost 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 70% of whom were women and children. Meanwhile, the Israeli death toll stands at about 1,200. 

Immediately following October 7th, the United States predictably offered Israel — its client state — unconditional support. Soon thereafter, they expanded the gesture by offering military contributions and punishing domestic dissent. In contrast, the American public has largely opposed their government’s pro-Israel posture. An estimated 300,000 protesters marched on Washington in support of Palestine last month. The event featured speakers such as writer Mohammed El-Kurd, musician Macklemore, and lawyer Noura Erakat. It brought together groups from 22 states including California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Two of the largest labor unions in the country — the United Auto Workers and the American Postal Workers Union — have voiced their support for a ceasefire in the region.

Waves of pro-Palestine advocacy have overtaken social media, much to the chagrin of executives and algorithmic gatekeepers. Popular methods of demonstrating solidarity also include calling, emailing, and faxing politicians, donating to pro-Palestine organizations and humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, boycotting pro-Israel companies, and attending protests and direct actions such as strikes and walkouts. These tactics have all made major headway in nurturing a greater collective consciousness in the United States that supports the Palestinian cause and feels evermore compelled to apply liberatory praxis wherever systemic oppression rears its hegemonic head.

Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza worsens by the hour. The twice-renewed humanitarian pause that began on November 24th ended on December 1st, doing little to ameliorate the displacement, destruction, and brutality that Israel has subjected Gazans to for over two months now. The moment demands an additional layer of action on the part of comrades living outside the occupied territories. Beyond the more traditional forms of activism, we must also embody the organizer spirit in our daily lives. In other words, allies of the Palestinian cause must view our various social relationships and networks as breeding grounds for heightened awareness and collective action. 

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Individualized actions done in unison may spark a wave. But organized actions done in community build a tide. As agents in this transformational moment, we now have a responsibility — to our Palestinian comrades and to ourselves — to organize our immediate surroundings, ensuring that no stone goes unturned. Workplaces, friend groups, family units, neighborhoods, and the like all provide pre-established groupings within which communal awareness and collective action can grow. Beginning with the most promising group, the first step is to start organizational conversations with fellow group members.

These interactions can take many forms, such as further publicizing one’s support for Palestine, pushing back against pro-Israel rhetoric and apologia, wearing clothing that physically depicts solidarity with the Palestinian cause (e.g., keffiyeh), etc. But, generally speaking, the aim is to establish an accurate conception of the individual’s stance on the issue in question, making sure to note any potential gaps in knowledge or qualities that stand out as particularly ripe for agitation. These gaps may include an ignorance of Palestinian history, American ties to Israel, or Israeli ties to imperialist efforts abroad. Ripe points of agitation may include intersecting issues (e.g., the role of co-opted queer liberatory rhetoric in Israeli propaganda), points of reference (e.g., Israeli settler-colonialism as compared to its American counterpart), or personally relatable phenomena (e.g., labor exploitation as seen in both the occupied territories and the United States political economy).

Such efforts will provide a clear portrait of the group’s relationship to said issue. With this layout in mind, subsequent organizing conversations and broader discussions of majority opinion can begin. The hope is that, as this process unfolds, group consciousness will gradually increase, previously unaddressed imperatives will become glaringly obvious, and collective action will inevitably form. From here, discussions to determine group-wide initiatives will become ever more commonplace, until they eventually culminate in a collective decision to pursue a democratically agreed-upon program. 

This organizational method embodies the full meaning of collective action where the reach of individualized initiatives falls short. It penetrates our existence as atomized subjects of imperial capitalism by forcing a collectivization of ideology, commitment, and praxis. It also creates a sociopolitical infrastructure through which we can continue to wield collective action going forward, whether it be for Palestine or for any other issue.

The engagement with the Palestinian cause we’ve seen from Americans in the last couple of months most definitely comprises a host of noteworthy waves, many of which have significantly toppled political affiliations and institutional prestige across sectors. But, now, only the embodiment of an organizational spirit by each and every one of us will do the work of constructing a tide — one that may just push us over the revolutionary edge into a world where Palestine is free, from the river to the sea. 

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Salma Hamamy is a Palestinian student-activist and the president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Michigan, known as Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.

The Mask Has Slipped. Don't Let Them Put It Back On.

By Harry Z

In December 1964, in a fiery speech to the United Nations, Che Guevara undressed the hypocrisy of those who were attempting (unsuccessfully) to overthrow the Cuban Revolution: 

‘Western civilization’ disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals … it must be clearly established that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression of the peoples of the world, and of a large part of its own population.

James Baldwin echoed Che, just a few years later:

All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

The zionist assault on Palestine has once again exposed the dark underbelly of the west’s so-called free and democratic values. Their cynical idealism melts into hypocrisy with each American-made missile that obliterates a Palestinian neighborhood.

This hypocrisy proclaims the importance of the press while massacring scores of Palestinian journalists; extolls sovereignty in Ukraine while arming settlers in Israel; opportunistically “defends” women's rights in Afghanistan while bombing schools and hospitals in Gaza; cynically vetoes ceasefire resolutions supported by the vast majority of the world while supporting those who openly proclaim their desire to erase the Palestinian people from history.

The same self-righteous liberals who dutifully cheer on wars of aggression, from Iraq to Grenada, under the pretense of ”defending democratic values” — the same Americans who celebrate the slavers and perpetrators of a genocide who fought the British in a “Revolutionary War” — these hypocrites chastise the Palestinian people for resisting extermination with a revolutionary counter-violence of their own.

In their surrealist calculus, mass theft of land, concentration camp conditions, kidnapping and torture of political dissidents — these are valid, state-sanctioned violences.

But to throw a rock at a tank, to kill a settler, to dare protect your own dignity and humanity with violence of your own — that is terrorism.

A Yemeni blockade in support of a people on the brink of extermination is an unacceptable violation of international law, a terroristic campaign — yet the decades-long, murderously cruel blockades imposed on Cuba and Gaza, against the will of nearly all nations on earth, are barely worth a mention.

In these moments of heightened political consciousness, the empire stands naked, cowed, on trial before the world’s watchful masses. The stubbornness of the resistance brings an anxious sweat to their brow, the weight of a thousand genocidal lies forces their head to bow, and once again the mask slips.

In June of 2020, the empire and its domestic foot soldiers, the police, were similarly unable to hide behind their usual pretenses. In the face of a mass uprising which threatened their very existence, the police could only respond by brutalizing, kidnapping and denigrating the very people they claim to “protect and serve.” For a brief moment, it was eminently clear to all pragmatic observers that the police were not acting out — they were fulfilling their function, as they always have, of protecting capitalist property and disciplining the poor and racialized populations who resist the quotidian (and spectacular) horrors of racial capitalism.

But while it burned bright, this moment of radical possibility was crushed, co-opted and liberalized almost immediately. Five months after George Floyd was lynched by the state, millions of the same people who flooded the streets in June took to the polls to vote for one of the chief architects of mass incarceration and the war on drugs. The revolutionary horizon of abolition, initially propelled by the justified rage of the Black masses, was sanitized and co-opted by liberal politicians, artists and opportunists. Corporate diversity seminars and police “reform” bills took center stage. In most places, police budgets increased after the uprising.

Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI and local police departments mobilized in a previously unheard of manner to infiltrate and sabotage Black and brown revolutionary organizations — and to kidnap, torture, harass, stalk and assassinate their leaders. It’s always telling which movements face the most severe state repression, for those are the movements which threaten the very foundations of empire. 

These organizations posed an existential threat — as Hoover famously wrote, “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country” — not only because of their commitment to domestic revolutionary practice, but because they viewed their work as deeply interconnected with the global third world struggle against imperialism. They understood that the capitalist and colonial imperatives which cripple the dreams and life chances of poor, racialized communities in the United States are the same forces which maintain apartheid states like Israel. The violent techniques of repression and eviction we’ve witnessed in Sheikh Jarrah and in the West Bank settlements are the same forces (police and property) viciously gentrifying our cities. Palestinians and Black Americans are victims of the same fascist techniques of police brutality, torture and incarceration. It’s no accident that revolutionaries like George Jackson found inspiration and common cause with the Palestinian struggle.

To make these connections and to organize on their basis is to strike at the very foundations of empire. When the leaders of the Black power movement aligned themselves with the leaders of socialist anti-colonial struggles across the Americas, Africa and Asia, they marked themselves for destruction. Faced with this existential threat, the US police state did not hesitate to reveal its fascistic character.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

In both of these moments, the mask slipped. The state could not hide its true function as the violent organizing institution of racial capitalism.

But, due to a combination of factors, chiefly state repression and careful ideological maneuvering, the mask was re-made — often incorporating crass representation of the groups it sought to repress and shallow nods to the symbolism of the movements it had just ruthlessly crushed — and donned once more. Black power came to be more closely associated with Black capitalism than revolutionary political practice. Nixon invoked the specter of Black nationalism and communism to rally southern whites around his revanchist political project. As Fred Hampton’s blood stiffened in his mattress, the long arc of neoliberalism, white power and mass incarceration took its vengeance. 

Armed with this history, we confirm that the death cult of empire is irreconcilable with our dreams of a just world. Its lofty ideals are no more than a charade, its claims to world leadership as fragile as Henry Kissinger’s rotting skeleton. 

With every stone, bullet and improvised bomb that the Palestinians hurl back at the occupying forces, with every market in Gaza that defiantly opens in the brief moments of quiet, with every doctor that works in the dark, against impossible odds, bandaging and stitching and mending while the occupation closes in, with every child that draws breath, in defiance of the wishes of the most powerful armies on earth —

With their humanity, their naked, honest humanity, the Palestinian people confirm that they — not the blood-soaked bureaucrats in Washington, nor the shameless journalists at the oh-so-revered New York Times, nor the murderous foot soldiers of global capitalism at NATO — are the true humanists, the real “leaders of the free world.” 

In Gaza, the empire faces its gravediggers.

And in each act of the resistance, a new world is born, kicking and screaming, fragile yet determined, beyond doubt, to survive. We don’t know what shape this world will take, or when it will mature, but we know that it will not emerge from Washington, London or Tel Aviv. Our new world will be nursed at a thousand sites of resistance, fed with the fruits of our labor which once swoll the bellies of our blood-sucking bosses, raised by freedom fighters in every corner of the world.

We owe it to the struggling masses of Palestine, of the Congo, of those in a thousand sites of resistance to the long tentacles of the US empire — and we owe it ourselves, to our domestic struggles for liberation — to never let those hyenas and jackals hide behind their false humanism again.

Before the forces of liberalism capture this moment, we must concretize our ideology, and hammer home that there is no reforming this beast which we are uniquely positioned to destroy. There is no humanistic mission to the US empire. There are no “mistakes” as we so often call our genocidal ventures into Vietnam or Iraq. 

To paraphrase the great Du Bois: This is not the United States gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is the United States; this is the real soul of empire — naked, drenched in blood, built by blood money; honest, for once.

The empire’s actions in Gaza are not tragedies or missteps but rather the predictable and historically consistent behavior of empire, from Wounded Knee to Jakarta, from My Lai to Attica — and with a Democratic president and “socialist” legislators in virtual lockstep with Israel’s genocide, we would be remarkably naive to pretend that the institutions of empire possess any capacity for reform. 

As just one example: we cannot return to a world in which The New York Times is regarded as the unbiased paper of record. The zionist mythology is nurtured and legitimized in their pages: the colonizer morphed into the victim, the colonized morphed into, at best, a historyless people, and at worst, a nation of terrorists. The ongoing Nakba — that ethnic cleansing by the Zionists, that cataclysm for the Palestinian people — erased from history, replaced with a collective amnesia about the violent foundations and maintenance of the Israeli state. And it doesn’t stop there:

From Korea and Guatemala in the 1950s, to Vietnam and Indonesia in the 60s, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile and Grenada in the 70s and 80s, Iraq, Afghanistan and the former USSR in the 90s and 2000s, Libya and Yemen in the 2010s — that deified rag has consistently ginned up support for US aggression and justified the tremendous violence we inflict on the rest of the world — crusade-like, in the name of anti-communism, democracy, human rights, “American interests” or whatever smoke screen our leaders and their loyal accomplices in the press concoct to distract us from the violence’s true function: the disciplining arm of global imperialism, the massacres, rivers of blood, tortures, loyally installed fascist dictators, carefully trained death squads, psychological warfare and sexual violence which puts anti-colonial, anti-capitalist movements to the sword for daring to challenge the profits and hegemony of Western multinational corporations.

These understandings have serious tactical implications. Our tactics must not, cannot stop with politicking and marches. As we have learned — including through the example of the Yemeni blockade — the cold heart of capitalist empire responds only to organized, frontal attacks on its economic organs and central nervous system. 

We cannot shame empire into a humanism it has never and will never possess. We cannot appeal to the conscience of a state which has none.

But we are uniquely positioned to strike at the soft underbelly of the beast. Israeli bombs, guns and tanks are designed by American engineers, who are trained in our schools and universities. These weapons are built by American workers, with American tax dollars, shipped through American ports and accrue huge profits to American capitalists. America’s vampiric financial institutions — Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, namely — provide the blood money which fuels the US-Israeli war machine. It goes without saying that the Israeli Occupation Forces maintain bone-deep ties to both local American police forces and national intelligence agencies.. If we aren’t positioned to resist the American transnational war machine, who is? Our capacity to resist is a question of will, not opportunity.

And if we are to resist, if we are to truly call ourselves anti-imperialists, freedom fighters, workers and tenants and students in solidarity with the peoples of the third world — whatever our lofty aspirations may be — that must mean, we must accept, that we are not working to reform empire — we are at war with it.

The United States, as we know it, must die for the world to live.

Muddled Interventions: Haiti, the UN, and Resolution 2699

By Binoy Kampmark

A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian state. Haiti’s political existence is the stuff and stuffing of pornographic violence, the crutch upon which moralists can always point to as the end — doom and despair that needs change. Every conundrum needs its intrusive deliverer, even though that deliverer is bound to make things worse.

Lately, those stale themes have now percolated through the corridors of the United Nations to renewed interest. The staleness is evident in the menu: servings of failed state canapes; vicious, murderous, raping, pillaging gangs as the mains; collapse of civic institutions as the dessert. It’s the sort of menu to rile and aggravate any mission or charity. 

Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the constant theme in reporting from Haiti is that of rampant, freely operating gangs. Sophie Hills, a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, offered this description last October:

“Armed gangs have immobilized the capital, Port-au-Prince, shutting down the already troubled economy and creating fear among citizens to even walk the streets.”

October 23rd, 2023, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, reported to the Security Council that the situation had continued “to deteriorate as growing gang violence plunge[s] the lives of the people of Haiti into disarray and major crimes are rising sharply to new record highs.” These included killings and sexual violence — the latter marked by instances of rape and mutilation.  

To further complexify the situation, vigilante groups such as the “Bwa Kale” movement have responded with lynchings (395 alleged gang members are said to have perished in that gruesome way between April 24th and September 30th).  

Moïse’s opportunistic replacement, Ariel Henry, has served as acting prime minister, persistently calling for foreign intervention to right the worn vessel he is steering into a sunset oblivion. The last presidential election was in 2016, but Henry has opted not to schedule another, preferring the bureaucratic formula of a High Transition Council (HTC) tasked with eventually achieving that goal. When the announcement establishing the body was made in February, Henry loftily claimed that this was “the beginning of the end of dysfunction in our democratic institutions.” 

That rhetoric has not translated into credible change on the ground. The contempt for the HTC was when gang members posing as cops kidnapped its Secretary General.

In September, Henry addressed the United Nations hoping to add some mettle to the Haitian National Police, urging the Security Council to adopt measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to “authorize the deployment of a multinational support mission to underpin the security of Haiti.”

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

The measure can be read as a stalling measure to keep Henry and his Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK) ensconced by using an external intervention to shore up a shaky regime. This is certainly the view of the National Haitian-American Elected Officials Network (NHAEON) and the Family Action Network Movement (FANM). In their September letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the organizations warned that “[a]ny military intervention supporting Haiti’s corrupt, repressive, unelected regime will likely exacerbate the current political crisis to a catastrophic one.” The move would “further entrench the regime, deepening Haiti’s political crisis while generating significant civilian casualties and migration pressure.” 

In its eternal wisdom, the United Nations Security Council felt that an intervention force consisting of Kenyan police, supplemented by assistance from other states, would be required for this mission. Resolution 2699, establishing a Multinational Security Support Mission led by Kenya, received a vote of 13 in favor, with Russia and China abstaining, citing traditional concerns about Chapter VII’s scope in permitting the use of force. “In previous practices,” remarked Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, “there have been precedents of abusing Chapter VII authorization.”

Resolution 2699 would entail a co-deployment with Haitian personnel who have melted before the marauding gangs. Thus, in the words of Mark Twain, history continues to rhyme (the US occupation, 1915–1934 and the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti [MINUSTAH] from 2004–2017).  

Armed gangs feature as a demonic presence in United Nations deliberations, regularly paired with such opaque terms as “a multidimensional crisis.” It is telling that the cliché reasons for that crisis never focus on how the gang phenomenon took root — not least those mouldering state institutions that have failed to protect the populace. Little wonder then that the Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia felt sending in armed elements was “an extreme measure” that unnecessarily invoked the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations.

Undeterred by such views, the United States representative Jeffrey Delaurentis noted that the mission would require the “inclusion of dedicated expertise in anti-gang operations, community-oriented policing, and children and women’s protection.” That Washington approved the measure can be put down to endorsing a policy which might discourage — if only in the short term — the arrival of Haitian asylum seekers which have been turned away en masse.  

Despite claiming a different tack from his predecessor in approaching the troubled Caribbean state, President Biden has sought to restrict the influx of Haitian applications using, for instance, Title 42 — a Trump policy put in place to deport individuals who pose a COVID risk, despite any asylum credentials they might have. Within 12 months, the Biden administration expelled more than 20,000 Haitians — or as many as the past three presidents combined.

Resolution 2699 also suffers from another glaring flaw. Kenya’s dominant contribution to the exercise has raised searching questions back home. Opposition politician Ekuru Aukot, himself a lawyer who had aided in drafting Kenya’s revised 2010 constitution, saw no legal basis for the government to authorize the Haitian deployment. In his view, the deployment was unconstitutional, lacking any legal backbone.  

In granting Aukot an interim injunction, this point was considered by the Nairobi High Court worthy of resolution. Judge Enock Mwita was “satisfied that the application and petition raise[d] substantial issues of national importance and public interest and require[d] urgent consideration.” The judge accordingly issued a conservatory order “restraining the respondents from deploying police officers to Haiti or any other country until 24th October 2023.”  

On October 24th, Judge Mwita extended the duration of the interim order until November 9th, when an open session is scheduled for the petition to be argued. “This court became seized of this matter earlier than everyone else and it would not make sense for it to set aside or allow the interim orders to lapse.” The whole operation risks being scuttled even before it sets sail.  

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. You can email him at bkampmark@gmail.com.

The History Behind the So-called "Israel-Hamas War"

(Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

By Dylan Jones

Where we start a narrative makes a big difference. If we start the narrative on October 7th, when Palestinian resistance launched rockets into Israel, then it’s easier to justify a military response from Israel. However, is this an honest place to start telling the story from? What different conclusions would we draw if we started the story from 75 years ago? Or thousands of years ago? Starting the narrative in a different place by adding historical context allows us to understand the obstacles to everyone's liberation in this situation.

First, I would like to acknowledge that there is no doubt important Jewish cultural and spiritual ties to Palestine. And indeed, before Israel was founded there were many Jews living peacefully alongside Muslims and Christians in Palestine. Palestinians have lived there since time immemorial, with genetic ties going back to the Canaanites[1]; they have social, cultural, and spiritual ties to the land. In this way, Palestinians are indigenous to the land. This is not to say that non-Palestinian Jews are not also Indigenous to Palestine, a question which I will show has absolutely no bearing on the current situation. An Indigenous person from a given area can also act as a colonizer/settler under the conditions of a settler colonial nation state such as Israel. This becomes clear when we analyze the last 75 years— since Israel’s founding.

The modern state of Israel has its roots in Western colonialism. Theodore Herzl in the 1800s defined the goal of today’s zionism, to create a home for white Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. He decided it could be in Argentina, Uganda, or Palestine. At this time, Britain controlled Palestine as a colony and, under the Balfour Declaration (1917), it promised an area of Palestine to the zionists in order to quell anti-semitism in Europe. Palestinians had no say in this decision. As tensions heightened due to Israeli settlers converging in Palestine and inevitably seizing property from its inhabitants, the U.N. announced a partition plan in 1947 which would designate over half of Palestine to establish the nation state of Israel. When Palestinians rejected the plan, Israel committed genocide to take it by force. In what is called the Nakba, Israeli military forces and vigilante settlers murdered 15,000 Palestinians overnight, displaced 850,000 people, and destroyed 550 villages. After this initial genocidal campaign, Israel took even more land than it was promised in the UN partition plan. To this day, Israel actively prevents those it displaced from returning. Israel meets protests asserting the right to return with violence.

Since the Nakba, over the course of decades, Israel has consistently evicted more Palestinians from their land, forcefully displacing families and entire communities. It arbitrarily imprisons Palestinians, including children. It has developed an apartheid system that denies basic human rights to Palestinians. There are policies of environmental racism such as not allowing Palestinians to drill for well water and spraying herbicide on Palestinian farms to destroy their sources of food and economic livelihood. This is state terrorism. This is a settler colonial state in operation. Israel is displacing, invading, ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and occupying more and more of Palestine in order to replace the existing society with its own.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Israel regularly bombs Palestine, hardly warranting a few articles in mainstream news. But when the rockets launched on October 7th, mainstream news immediately stated condemnation. When a white Israeli citizen dies, it is news. When an Israeli bomb severs a Palestinian child’s head from their body, it is normal; we can immediately jump to justifications. Similar to its response to other Palestinian resistance, Israel is using October 7th to justify a second genocide, a second Nakba. Since October 7th, Israel has murdered more than 15,000 Palestinians, over 6,000 children, and over 4,000 women. They have blocked water and food. They have bombed schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Israel has hundreds of child hostages but has the power to define them as prisoners. There are around 10,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel. Every hour, Israel drops 42 bombs and half of the population of Gaza is children.

According to Israeli officials themselves, the goal is not to hunt down Hamas but rather to seize this opportunity to murder and displace Palestinians living on the land Israel would like for its own. Netanyahu himself says “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy bible, we do remember,” referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites in scripture. This references a call to exterminate the entire population of Amalekites—every man, woman, child, and piece of property.[2] A former Israeli intelligence chief, Rami Igra on CNN said, “the non-combatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term. All of Gaza voted for Hamas and as we have seen on the 7th of October most of the population in Gaza strip are Hamas”.[3] Imagine if the same outrageous claim were made about Israelis having voted for Netanyahu. The Israeli Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter announces, “we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” “Gaza Nakba 2023”.[4] In this way, Israeli officials are clear that the intention is not to hunt down Hamas, it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Despite how clearly Israeli officials admit genocide and ethnic cleansing, western media still focuses on the “hunt for Hamas” narrative. We must reject this narrative and when we are asked to condemn Hamas, we should say instead…

Israel—as a terrorist, settler colonial nation state—is dependent on violence against Palestinians and it thereby jeopardizes the health and safety of its own inhabitants, rather than protecting them. It supposes that one people’s self-determination, rights, and lives have to come at the expense of others. Among Zionists goals are creating a safe space for Jewish people and creating a relationship with an important spiritual place to Jewish people living around the world. There are peaceful ways to do this that respect the existing Palestinian society. Establishing the theocratic settler colonial ethnostate of Israel erases Palestinian society. Therefore, the dismantling of zionism is the only truly just and safe path for Palestinians and Jews. If the Palestinian resistance stops its resistance, Israel will only continue its occupation, annexing more land, extra-judicially imprisoning Palestinians—including children (read: taking as hostages), and bombing Gaza. This characterizes life under the boot of Israel since it was founded. This does not advocate violent resistance as the only option, but points out that the root of all the violence rests clearly with the settler colonial state of Israel. Free Palestine is not a cry for retribution. It does not advocate violence against Israelis. Free Palestine means dismantling the social and political project of zionism and moving toward liberation for everyone.

I believe most people have wondered what they would have done during the holocaust when Nazi Germany slaughtered millions of Jews, Romanis, Sintis, people with disabilities, and others. I say emphatically you do not have to wonder what you would have done. What you would have done is what you’re doing right now for Palestinians living in Israel’s death camps. Attend and/or uplift: rallies for a permanent ceasefire, vigils, assembly meetings, sit-ins, and shutdowns. Call legislators and demand a ceasefire. Advocate for Palestine among your friends and family. Whether we would like to be activists or not, our tax dollars are funding the bombs eviscerating Palestinian people. At a moral bare minimum, we are called to be activists now. I do not believe I would have come to support Palestine if it were not for the values for love and kindness that my family and friends taught me. Now I call on all my friends and family to live out these values. Long live Palestine! Long live Gaza! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Notes

[1] https://www.brown.uk.com/teaching/HEST5001/Palestinians.pdf

[2]https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics

[3]https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/anderson-cooper-360/episodes/d61ee373-605b-4ec4-82dd-b0a9001d97a9

[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-right-palestinian-fears-hamas-war-rcna123909