The reactionary class of white settlers in the United States has responded to Black Lives Matter with the same defensiveness that Israeli settlers have responded to the Palestinian liberation movement. They’ve demonized Black Lives Matter as a hateful cult, they’ve supported the efforts from their country’s police and military to suppress the movement, they’ve characterized the efforts from the colonized group to gain more power as an attack on white people (like how right-wing Zionists characterize all opposition to their ideology as anti-Semitism). It’s part of the effort to justify the ongoing genocide and oppression that both of these settler-colonial states are built upon.
“Even the blind can see these people did wrong,” the Native rapper Ant Loc says in a song about what the settlers have done to the continent’s colonized peoples. Through deliberately spreading disease and slaughtering indigenous communities, European colonizers killed around 90% of the indigenous population, or 56 million Natives. The forced relocation, enslavement, and persecution of the people of Africa also consisted of genocide, as the 1951 petition We Charge Genocide explained:
It is sometimes incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and definitive destruction of a race or people. The Genocide Convention, however, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, defines genocide as any killings on the basis of race, or, in it specific words, as “killing members of the group”…We maintain, therefore, that the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.
Settlers in both America and Israel prefer not to think that the term “genocide” applies to what’s been done by the system they benefit from. A cultural myth surrounds the processes with which the indigenous First Nations and Palestine were colonized; the colonization of the First Nations is portrayed as a necessary part of “manifest destiny” and the creation of the “greatest country on earth,” while the colonization of Palestine is portrayed as necessary for letting “God’s chosen people” return to their rightful homeland. To preserve this mythology of settler-colonialism, they try to erase the colonial atrocities that continue to be committed every day.
What’s being done to the Palestinians is equivalent to the genocide against the Africans and the First Nations people. After being forcibly transferred from the lands Israel has gained in the last century, the Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing deliberate deprivations of resources and discriminatory violence from the Israeli military, all while Israel enforces dozens of apartheid laws for Palestinians within its borders. Israel’s government covers up this reality by systematically lying about abuses from its armed forces, by falsely painting killed Palestinians as “human shields” for Hamas (or more broadly by painting the resisting Palestinians as tools for Islamic extremism), and by propagating the narrative that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East.”
When Zionism has established this narrative about terrorists trying to destroy a crucial haven for the Jews, it’s easy for the settlers to ignore or rationalize any evidence that Israel is doing wrong to the Palestinians. It’s the colonizer’s fear of the colonized that motivates everyday Israelis to intuitively advocate for genocide against Palestinians, as demonstrated by Abby Martin’s interviews that show Israeli settlers expressing desire for mass slaughter against the people on the other side of the Gaza barrier. Ethnic cleansing is seen as the solution to the indigenous backlash.
In this moment of crisis, the American settler is gaining the same intensely warlike mentality that the Israeli settler has long had. Encouraged by the endorsements of violence against protesters from Fox News and President Trump, white supremacist groups are shooting at Black Lives Matter protesters and infiltrating protests to act as agent provocateurs. The U.S. police and the army, which have largely been infiltrated by far-groups, are killing and maiming people at the protests often indiscriminately. All future violence against the movement will be tacitly endorsed by the country’s reactionary figures, because they don’t see George Floyd’s murder as an injustice. They see it as just another instance of the police doing their job.
Like the job of an Israeli Defense Force soldier, this job innately consists of enacting violence against the colonized. The police act as modern slave patrols, keeping in check the elements of society that the settler capitalist class perpetually sees as a threat. Because of this background to why the system of American policing was created, it makes sense that Natives are killed by U.S. police more than any other racial or ethnic group. Natives have experienced, and continue to experience, the deadliest effects of the continent’s colonization. Black people, whose historic roles as slaves has continued through the process of racist mass incarceration and for-profit prisons, are naturally the police’s second biggest targets.
The settlers will do anything to keep the colonized groups in this position, including attempts to wholly or partly kill them off. This is the role that Covid-19 is playing in the settler-colonial stories of both America and Israel. Due to socoeconomic disparities and discrimination in the medical system, blacks in America have so far died from Covid-19 at a rate three times higher than is the case for whites. The death numbers for Natives, who incidentally are also one of the poorest demographics, are in some areas nineteen times higher than the rates for all other populations combined.
“In many ways the Coronavirus could be called a colonial virus,” assesses African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela. “Every cop on the street corner in every African community, certainly in the U.S., is a coronavirus, a colonial virus that threatens us all the time. This is our reality.”
Israeli settlers are going a step further in weaponizing this virus. Israel has been destroying Palestinian property to the consequence of undermining the Palestinian efforts to fight the virus, and Israel’s blockade against Gaza has created a looming catastrophe for its residents-a catastrophe that may already be in its early stages, given how the virus has often been spreading among Palestinians largely undetected. Everyday violence against Palestinians from Israeli settlers has been increasing during the pandemic, showing the instinct from the settler to turn against the colonized at every available opportunity.
It makes perfect sense that the Israeli armed forces have been trainingU.S. police in recent years. The Israeli Zionist project represents a series of recent innovations in colonialism, wherein high-tech weaponry, economic warfare, and state violence have been utilized with the purpose of destroying a nation. What the U.S. has gotten out of this is a crucial military ally in the Middle East, and a colonial power that can help the U.S. perfect its methods for repressing colonized peoples.
Despite these advancements in how settler-colonial violence can be applied, colonialism in both Palestine and the First Nations is being met with a historically familiar obstacle: the will from the colonized to wage war for their liberation. Israel’s decades-long efforts to erase Palestine have failed to negate Palestinian cultural resiliency, and the Palestinian resistance movement continues. In America, indigenous radicals like Ant Loc are still fighting for the destruction of “America” and the return of stolen lands to the Native peoples, while the colonized Africans have just triggered a mass protest movement.
When the opportunity comes, those who’ve been beaten down by colonialism in America, Israel, and elsewhere will rise up to take back what’s theirs. It will be a war in the military sense, where the two opposing sides take the actions that reflect their interests. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon explains the unavoidable violence of this confrontation:
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon…Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together — that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler — was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system.
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