In May, Israel’s vaccine apartheid, land theft, and indiscriminate killings left no doubt that we witnessed a new escalation in an ongoing genocide. The world witnessed the brutality of military occupation as Israeli soldiers bombed civilians, apartment buildings, medical facilities, international media offices, and children. The 257 murdered and 72,000 displaced Palestinians alert us to the suffering that fascist militarized states can inflict. Israel declared a formal ceasefire on May 21, but airstrikes on Gaza resumed on June 16. Though the $3.8 billion the U.S. gives to Israel each year could be used for food and housing, many Americans do not know or care about the atrocities that it funds. A common narrative is that the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is an age-old dispute too complicated and intractable to understand. This narrative, however, is being challenged as more people confront the reality and as unions, commentators, and movements recognize Israel’s actions as genocide, which is neither symmetric nor ambiguous.
A new generation of youth in the United States is becoming conscious of the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli State. The growing consciousness of the life and death consequences of inequality — and the role of government in maintaining it — is apparent in the mass movement against police terror that arose after the police killing of George Floyd. This growing consciousness occurred in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately killed poor people, resulting in the highest death rates among Indigenous, Black, and Latinx Americans.
More and more American workers understand a war being waged on our communities by the ruling class and the government it controls. The call to defund and abolish the police and invest in communities shows the consciousness of the State’s role in enforcing both brutality and organized abandonment against the most impoverished communities, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth. This consciousness has led to calls for solidarity with the Palestinians, as they witness Palestinians murdered by police and military and violently displaced from their homes.
Many organizations and leaders in the U.S. have come out in support of the Palestinians, including Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and others in the movement against police violence and systemic racism. A new generation of elected officials who ran for Congress to represent their American working-class communities is speaking out within the Democratic Party. Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, tweeted at U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “When will the U.S. condemn racist violence against Palestinians? Is it your policy to support settlers stealing Palestinian homes & burning their lands?” And Congresswoman Cori Bush, who felt called to run to represent her community after getting involved in the Ferguson, Missouri protests of the police murder of Mike Brown, also expressed her support on Twitter and elsewhere. A rally in New York City connected the defunding of the NYPD to the demand to end the billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Israel.
New York State Senator Jabari Brisport from Brooklyn said to the crowd, “Whether it’s in Astoria, whether it’s in Brooklyn, whether it’s in Ferguson, whether it’s in the West Bank, we say: ‘Hell, no.’ [when] The choice is made to spend money not on schools, not on housing, not on healthcare, not on transportation, not on childcare, but on oppressing marginalized people.”
On the other hand, New York Mayoral Candidate Andrew Yang faced strong criticism for tweeting his support for Israel with no mention of the violence against Palestinians. The old rhetoric is failing as the nature of the occupation is exposed.
The Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine was, like the colonization of America, from its outset antagonistic to the people who already lived there, as it implied their erasure. Indeed, since the Nakba in 1948, in the time between the massacres, Israel has been gradually stealing Palestinian land, erasing their culture, and driving them into occupied territories which the U.N. has called “unlivable.”
The majority of Gazans, for instance, are food insecure, and 90 percent of their water is undrinkable. The water crisis is by no means natural. There is no water crisis in the green line territories occupied by Israeli settlers since 1948. Their water is supplied by the Israeli (inter)national corporation Mekorot, which steals water from the Palestinian West Bank Mountain Aquifer. This water is then distributed based on apartheid.
Palestinians living in the West Bank receive 70 liters per person each day, while the illegal Israeli settlers attempting to take over the West Bank receive 300 liters per person each day. In addition to the apartheid system of water distribution, Palestinians face inequitable access to vaccines, travel restrictions, housing, and land.
The land Israeli settlers live on is, in fact, Palestinian land. Palestinian homes and olive groves are constantly being demolished. Escalations preceded the May attacks in settler attempts to take over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. A video went viral of Sheikh Jarrah resident Muna el-Kurd, confronting the settler who moved into her home. “You are stealing my house!” she says. The settler responds, “If I don’t steal it, someone else will.” “No!” says el-Kurd, “no one is allowed to steal it.” Israeli police terrorized the Palestinian residents by invading and tear-gassing the Al Aqsa Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan. On June 15, far-right settlers, Israel’s fascist mass-base, rallied in Sheikh Jarrah chanting “death to Arabs” and “may your village burn.” None of them were arrested, but Muna el-Kurd was.
The confinement of Palestinians is mirrored by the transnational dimensions of our globalizing economy. The American corporation Hewlett Packard provides technology for the Israeli army and police to confine and surveil Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli corporation Elbit Systems manufactures military jets in the United States and is contracted to surveil the US-Mexico border. The U.S. government funds the Israeli government with $3.8 billion every year, providing massive armaments to ensure that Israel can continue to function as its proxy for military dominance of the region as the U.S. maneuvers to secure the Middle East as a base of operations. Meanwhile, United States police officers from Baltimore and many other cities with rampant police brutality have traveled to Israel to learn coercive tactics from the Israeli Defense Force. Transnational corporations and state institutions restrict the freedom and movement of poor and indigenous people in Palestine, the U.S., and worldwide because the new forms of global fascism they are developing transcend these borders.
As revolutionaries within the U.S., we must understand and oppose Israel’s fascist rule because it is a humanitarian catastrophe. We also oppose it because U.S. corporations and politicians are preparing the American people to accept and support permanent war and fascist political repression wherever they need it, even within our borders. Palestinian workers are at the forefront of the growing class of people who cannot obtain the food, housing, and dignity they need in a global economy. Their fight for clean water, to keep their homes, for freedom of movement, to return as refugees, for sovereignty in their communities, control over their resources, dignity, and life is the fight against fascism and for a democratic future in Palestine and around the world. RC
July/August 2021. vol.31. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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