Land Back & Free Palestine
“When you hear the words decolonization, white supremacy, patriarchy or even racism, do you feel something? Do you get a chill down your back, randomly start crossing your arms, get tense all over your body, or even just feel an urge to resist? Well good! When your body is cold it shivers, when it’s hungry it growls, when it’s in fear it shakes and when it’s sad it cries. Your body is meant to respond, whether that be physical or emotional, and it’s the same when deconstructing what you’ve been taught. It tells you that something is there and that you must go through it and find ways to process it.”
– Kris Archie, Executive Director of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples, 4rsyouth.ca
Today, while going through a particularly uncomfortable spate of nicotine-withdrawals, I started to think about what a post-Occupation Palestine would look like in the future State that must come next. How would a coalition-government comprised of both Israeli and Palestinian representatives seek to mend eight-decades of terror and deliberate hardship?
If, like me, you are of a Progressive persuasion, the solution is probably obvious: relinquishment of occupied lands to the governance, administration, and general oversight of the original, local population; break nationalistic delineations through integration campaigns which rehouse families who wish to return to their ancestral lands while remaining cognizant of the fact that there must be some right to remain for innocent Israeli civilians; and, most importantly, a complete ICJ/ICC investigation and trials in-line with the standards set for the court following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Specifically, the justice must not be only meted out in the international courts, turned into some spectacle like what followed the horrors in the Balkans after post-war colonization efforts by European superpowers, but must instead be reconciliatory and focused deep within the homes of the occupied peoples and their de-hegemonized Israeli neighbors—utilizing the expansive capabilities exemplified by Rwanda’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission to dismantle the institutions of hate and traditions of dominance maintaining apartheid and “cutting the grass” necessitates.
In the United States, we are taught, first-and-foremost, that if it is human, it is equal. The greatest documents of the “White race,” written after experiences under colonial occupation which they themselves saw the injustice of, demand that ALL are equal, that we have inherent rights which exist outside of any State—or monarchy especially—and are in-born, found within the base-sociality that all humans share. And yet, we spend the rest of our lives having to justify that idea, the obvious fallacy, to ourselves, making excuses for the infinite contradictions we see in the State which is allegedly founded on those documents; Gods forbid one ever scratches more than a millimeter into any history textbook provided by our education system.
Typically, free of bothersome books that introduce us to La Frontera, we can be deluded into believing that a contradiction isn’t what it is, not really. That whatever seems to not make sense only does so because we are ignorant: we live in the core. Well, ignorance is bliss; and it is very easy to compartmentalize something as complicated to instead enjoy the very tangible lack of chill-down-your-spine that Archie mentions above. For me, precocious and hardheaded, I took the idea of “America” to heart, the formative experiences of civics in the post-Cold War nineties followed by patriotic fervor of the War of Terror in the Middle East turning the Constitution into some sort of creed in my soul. And perhaps growing up where I did—on land originally “given” to the Mescalero Apache in the 1840s—once I managed to stumble my way into “higher” education, that was all done for, the universal truths of imperialism and colonial occupation no longer able to be dismissed or ignored.
Ultimately, in this whole new world we suddenly find ourselves in, I must look to the occupied Peoples of my own country and it becomes impossible to ignore the obvious: Palestine is precedent for all occupied peoples including, and especially, those who are still occupied within and by the United States both in the Americas and abroad.
How can Western leaders, all of which are some variant of “lawyer,” not see the writing on the wall for their own projects? Perhaps, this is the overarching reason for Biden and the DNC’s, frankly, klannish adherence to Zionism and the Western colonialism for which it stands; a gross form of executive malpractice that we will forever hold the lot of them responsible and for which ourselves will make many sacrifices in the end.
For is that not what the world is saying as all eyes turn to Occupied Palestine for what will be the final time before their self-liberation? Are we all not seeing it for the condemnation of centuries of global extraction, subjugation, imprisonment, and deprivation?
It can be no other way, for that is what Israel is: a Western colonial project. And that is what the United States is, all the Americas; as with Australia, New Zealand, the entirety of the continent of Africa and massive portions of the Arabian Peninsula and the Asian continent. All the world is under the weakening thumb of the Imperial age of Europe and, in every settlement, they remember what they were before, planning for the day they can be themselves once more.
And, while my heart still marches to the cadence of those founding documents that so enraptured the imagination as a kid, the old patriotism quick to flare from time to time when the right song plays, I have added a sticky-note to remind what this all is:
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day… fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Frederick Douglass; What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July (1852)
Photo: Hanini, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
