Hello,
In light of recent events, global communication and language about the genocide in Gaza I would like to relay some thoughts that may be helpful in understanding my motivations to speak out on the matter.
I was born in the 80’s and remember the Rwandan genocide, specifically the news coverage clearly identifying the ethnic cleansing of the Tutsi by their Hutu neighbors. Public discourse at the time was not interested in defining whether or not it was a genocide, but whether the global West should have been able to predict, prevent, or otherwise slow down / freeze the barbarism being reported. When we use a de-colonized lens that examines the history of the region we understand that the precursors to the Rwandan genocide are the result of economic and political inequality established and left-over by their colonizers: Germany & Belgium who favored the Tutsis. The colonizers reshaped and mythologized the ethnic identities of the Hutu and Tutsi which allowed for a clear “us versus them” language to develop in a land and people who were otherwise not so categorically divided according to the phenotypes of their ethnicity. The history of how the 1994 genocide developed has multiple factors and precursors / steps, but first and foremost it is a consequence of colonization and division of peoples to manipulate and control a population.
Currently we are seeing active public discourse about the genocide in Gaza which in the past 3 years has claimed the lives of 70-100,000 people, 80% of which are civilians, 29% children. More than 21,000 children have died in Gaza since 10/2023 when Hamas launched a terrorist attack against Israelis killing 1,200 people. The scale and systemic destruction of Gaza since 2023 is precedented in the history of the region by the 6-Day War (1967) & the 1948 Nakba which are themselves surpassed by the atrocities of the Holocaust (1945) and for which that atrocity is surpassed by the ethnic cleansing of the North American continent by the colonizers who eventually established the United States and Canada.
When discussing the Holocaust, it is important to note that Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews and another 6 million Roma, Slavs (Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Ukainians and Serbs), LGBT people, people with disabilities, Roman Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, & other political and ethnic groups not aligned with German Christianity or those who fit the Aryan race phenotype. I grew up within the folds of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and know first hand what propaganda films about a peoples demise can do to one’s own sense of reality and justice as part of the message I grew up with is validation that the Witnesses were the one, true religion, in part because our brothers and sisters in the Holocaust chose to die for their faith than disavow their allegiance to Jehovah (JW’s were treated more as a religious/political nuisance that needed to be converted rather than an ethnic group needing to be eradicated). I am also of Roma descent.
But why is the discourse about Gaza and the plight of the Palestinian people often being dismissed or ignored by people who identify as Jewish and who have historically said to the atrocities of the Holocaust: NEVER AGAIN ?
Because many people have yet to learn that criticism of Israel and holding anti-Zionist views is not the same as endorsing hatred of Jewish folks or supporting anti-Semitism.
I believe that all peoples and minorities have a right to pursue life with health and happiness in mind. I believe that Jews and Christians and Muslims should be able to live in any territory with fair / equitable representation in their governments and access to equal rights of citizenship, mobility, and freedom.
Israel has been unable to provide such equality to people who are outside the Jewish faith/ethnicity since the 1948 Nakba, and the expansion of the state in the 1967 six-day war; both historical events that most US citizens have no knowledge about and I encourage you to read about to better understand the oppression that Palestinians have faced for more than 75 years. Currently, Israel maintains occupations in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golam Heights that are illegal under international law, but due to the US/Israel alliance, Israel has been able to defy such law. These occupations have created clear apartheid divisions of territory and access to land based on ethnicity for decades. These occupations have been maintained and reinforced through horrific means of ethnic cleansing, sexual abuse / exploitation, and outright slaughter of unarmed children well-documented by the Israeli military. In many interviews, it has been clearly recorded and known that the goal and intention of the Israeli military is to destroy non-Jewish territories, infrastructure, people and hope. This is due to a rationale and perspective that deems all Arab-Palestinians as potential terror threats to Israel and its Jewish citizens, allowing for imprisonment with no due process for years with arrest reasons even less couth than the racial profiling of NYC 1990’s “Stop and Frisk” & “Law & Order” policies. Israel is not bringing democracy to the land, it brings colonization, oppression, and ethnic replacement aligned to repeat the mistakes of the United States and Canada which grew out of the most atrocious and silent genocide of the human race: that of the Indigenous Americans for which 80-95% of the population was destroyed and replaced by European Colonizers, killing uncounted millions. This is the goal in Israel – it is clear, it has been stated, and it is being practiced with weapons nearly as deadly as Smallpox to push out and replace the Arab / Palestinian / Muslim / Christian and other non-Jewish populations.
To be neutral in times such as these is to provide support to the oppressors and I question whether or not I have been loud enough.
US taxpayers are funding the bombs that Israel uses, and we should be fighting this in whatever way we can. Consider boycotting any brand that does business with Israel and spend time connecting with Jews, Muslims, Christians, Arabs & non-Arabs alike to listen and better understand what the systemic oppression of Palestinians has done to the global Jewish population that is intentionally put in the crossfire of hate speech to protect Israel’s propaganda that falsely asserts it is protecting Jews everywhere when it is only protecting the interest of wealthy billionaires and letting Jews around the world live with the designation of potential martyr to Israel’s ethnostate colonization of the Levant.
NEVER AGAIN means NEVER AGAIN FOR EVERYONE!!!
STOP GENOCIDE – FREE PALESTINE!
