Israeli is a microcosm of the USA. It’s like a little miniature version of the settler-colonial state that took over the entirety of turtle island from “sea to shining sea” between the 1600s and the 1800s, and which continues its viral, foul spread through today.
We vaporized the coal mines – turned all that dust and soot – the pit where generations of coughing miners lived and died underground, into our atmosphere – creating a massive hole in our ozone layer, a layer of protection made of O3 molecules that keeps the sun warm but not too hot, keeps us all warm and cozy inside. Without it, we have extreme weather patterns, like those we have started to see across the globe – higher oceans, bigger, wilder storms. Droughts last for years and form deserts, dustbowls, in what had a generation ago been fields and fertile land.
And still we drive these cars around, in circles and circles and circles, hunted and hunter, again and again and again until we hit a Wall, and realize we are the ones trapped inside it. The Wall was meant to keep “The Other” out – but walls can never do that – be they highway loops around the gilded city, or Walls to keep the jewel of Jerusalem from the dreaded “Arabs” who, in fact, have been living there continuously for thousands of years.
The timeframe is just sped up in Israel and Palestine, and the land mass is much more compact. You can go from the wealthy elite’s Mediterranean beaches (like San Diego or Miami in the US) to the Wall along the Rio Grande in Texas on the Mexico border in a drive of less than an hour. But the Wall in this case is not between the US and Mexico, but between Israel and Gaza, and Gaza is imprisoned inside the Wall. Gaza has been fully imprisoned there since 2006 – since the Palestinian people had the nerve to vote for resistance instead of compliance, and the Israeli military has been punishing them ever since. How dare the Palestinians build their own airport, their own universities, their own sidewalk cafes on the beach – and how dare they do it in spite of the Israeli blockade since 2006 that has blocked building materials, medicines, many ingredients for cooking (“putting the Palestinians on a diet” as the Israeli cabinet member put it in 2006), and how dare they do it when Israeli forces have them walled in as inmates of the world’s largest open-air prison as punishment for Israel’s decision to pull their colonizers out of Gaza in 2005 and move them to settlement colonies in the West Bank instead.
But the right and the far right politicians in each (the US and and Israel) are not that different. Joe Biden, like Naftali Bennett, nervously calling for “restraint” while continuing to funnel billions upon billions of dollars and weapons to bomb children in what seems like a far-away place because “it’s necessary to preserve our way of life” – well, that quote was George W. Bush justifying the bombing of kids in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 – but it’s the same rhetoric, the same war, the same poor misguided people sending more sons and daughters into military uniforms, military academies, military schools, never really escaping the draft because a hundred years of warfare have us all caught in the draft of regressive lies and propaganda and pain.
And the only option we are given as ‘voters’ in this ‘democracy’ is an ever more far-right extremist. Trump and Netanyahu are both cut from the same cloth. Both born in privilege, given free rein to become bullies in their elite boarding schools and universities, both miserable students but aspiring sadists, failing upward in their respective ‘democracies’ due to the pull and power of their parents’ wealth and influence. Parents who neglected them, sent them to boarding school rather than give them love and affection and care. And now these spoiled man-babies who have grown to eighty years old without ever having the experience of not getting their way after throwing a tantrum, now both these man-babies have power beyond their wildest dreams, and are using it to fulfill their fascist fantasies of ruling the world and crushing all their ‘enemies’ into dirt.
And we, the people of these ‘democracies’, act like we are powerless to stop them. Act like the only power we have is to go to a voting booth in November, hold our noses and choose between a douchebag and a turd sandwich, and claim that “we had to do what we had to do in order to ‘save democracy'”.
Well, I call bullshit on that. Settler-colonial America, the gig is up – take off the mask you put on in order to show you still have it together on your Zoom calls. Fall the fuck apart. Feel the rage of being mis-led and mis-taken and mis-understood for so long. This nation, like that of Israel, is a house of cards built on a web of lies. All the patriotism, the myths, we get stuck in the rhetoric – but remember, this generation’s hero was the last generation’s pariah. Martin Luther King was called a communist, a terrorist, a ni— and worse during his lifetime, and he was assassinated in cold blood for daring to question the colonial war in Vietnam, and linking it to the struggles of Black people all across the USA.
Who will be the next generation’s ‘hero’ – will it be Mumia Abu Jamal, locked inside a dungeon for close onto 40 years for daring to be part of a resistance movement in Philadelphia that thumbed their nose at the USA establishment and were bombed – men, women and children alike – by the Philadelphia police department in 1985? Will he be the USA’s Nelson Mandela? Released from prison, blinking in the bright sunlight and declaring an end to apartheid, and a future of many national languages and stories? Or will he die in prison.
Palestine has their own Nelson Mandela: locked away in prison since 2004 – Marwan Barghouthi, the one man who crossed all political parties and factions and called for a unified Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, a man who was leading in the polls in 2006 for the Palestinian Presidency (the last election, by the way, that Israel allowed the Palestinian Authority to hold). But he was in prison while running for President, and Israel could not allow that to happen. So they pressured him – tortured him, no doubt, maybe threatened his family – the techniques used are widely known and have been for decades. And he dropped out of the presidential race, and Ismail Haniyeh and the Hamas party won. And Marwan has been hidden away in the dungeon for the nearly twenty years since then.
Can South Africa show us the path out of this? I don’t think F.W. DeKlerk was one iota less racist than Trump or Netanyahu, or Joe Biden for that matter. But international political pressure caused the apartheid state to fall, and forced F.W. DeKlerk out of the Presidency, and Nelson Mandela in, in 1994.
Time speeds up – there is an end to time. And maybe 2024 is the year to end it. To end this obsession with clocks and bells and standing at attention and waking to bugle calls and responding to notifications that has been dogging Europeans into settler-colonial mentalities and conquests since the 1400s. Maybe the Sikorsky helicopter plants in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey will go on strike, maybe the factory workers in Iowa will wake up from their stupor and stop making parts for the F35 jets that are dropping bombs on kids in Gaza. And in the 2030s the kids will look back and see the simultaneous demise of the US and Israeli settler-colonial conquests of dominion and power over the indigenous people and land they had invaded and settled, and the words of David Rovics’ 2003 song will ring true: “Before apartheid was ended, they were building a Wall”.
