On Zionism
students encampments & why it should matter, dispatch 10
Note: Hello if you’ve received this newsletter a few times already, I apologize. For whatever reason, this newsletter is not being sent out to all my readers… so hopefully third time’s a charm. If you see this newsletter please engage with it (read it, share, comment, like it) so I know that folks are getting it. Newsletters specific to Palestine are free, but they take me weeks to write and I put a tonnnnne of research into them, your help in spreading this work is really appreciated. One way toward a liberated Palestine is political education, this is my intention with these dispatches. To inform, to educate and to help us collectively gather a shared, holistic understanding of what is going on… and what we need to do to work toward a liberated world and a Free Palestine. Thank you for your attention.
It’s been hard for me to write this newsletter.
Part of the reason I haven’t published anything in the last few weeks is that I have felt very overwhelmed and slow, almost like I’m moving through lead… the horrifying tenor of watching Israel invade Rafah last week on May 7th, right after a spirited first week of hundreds of encampments of thousands of students around the U.S calling for their universities to divest from Israel, has been hard to process and metabolize. I’ve been fighting inertia while organizing full-time. It’s been an uncomfortable and debilitating last few weeks.
We’ve all known, as Israel has been threatening to invade Rafah for months, that this would happen. Yet, despite now worldwide protests, Israel still invaded... and that shocked me, it broke my nervous system for a few days. How callous do you have to be not to heed the general public's concerns? Then with all this baby boomer liberalism trying to convince us of our stupidity while we slowly join all the dots… We don’t need Hillary Clinton to tell us that she doesn’t think young people are smart, we don’t think she’s smart either. She tells us we don’t know anything about the Middle East. Oh honey, if only that were true.
The students are showing more bravery than she could ever muster and probably ever has in her truly pathetic war criminal ass life. I am deeply depressed that the Democratic Party has proven to be as spineless as my father always warned me they were. To see the charade of the bipartisan political system shatter in front of our eyes is part of this deep revolutionary work… but my God is it sad to truly encounter and face. The fact that in a democracy such as the U.S., where protest is supposedly an enshrined right by the First Amendment (this is before the right to carry guns, just FYI), and with January 6th not too far in the distance, it’s quite interesting that protesting genocide would be such a highly contested act… this theatre of debating ethics and morality being dictated by warmongers is getting old.
I watched an interview recently with Suella Braverman (the former British Home Secretary, who is also married to a Zionist) who was walking around with a camera crew at Cambridge University trying to talk to students. All of them (including an older Holocaust survivor) stared at her blankly as she walked toward them, surreptitiously masquerading as wanting friendly banter, asking questions like “Why are you covering your faces?” “Can you tell us why you’re protesting?” When every single encampment has made very clear demands, asks and statements about why and what they’re protesting… I know because I’ve read several of these statements. So we know that most of these “conversations” happen in bad faith, they are conversations offered to confuse rather than clarify, which is a Zionist tactic.
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One of the reasons I have mentally survived these last few months is because (for the most part) I don’t engage with Zionists. This has come from years of thinking that I could rationally convince someone of not wanting to be involved in a genocidal ethnofascist state (#this didn’t start in October)…
Shared courtesy of WAWOG comrade, Bilal Khbeiz explains this perfectly in his essay “Gaza–Beirut–Tel Aviv: In Praise of Selfishness and Opportunism” from 2009:
“In Notre Musique, Jean-Luc Godard re-stages a real interview between the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and an Israeli journalist in which Darwish proclaims that the Palestinians have the fortune and the misfortune of having Israel as an enemy. The world’s attention is drawn to the Palestinians only because of the interest in Israel and its history. Nonetheless, Palestinians find it very hard to be recognized as victims precisely because their struggle is with Israel. The moral debates that ensued from the Holocaust made archetypal victims out of the Jews, and enabled them to persecute their enemies on the pretext of self-defense, not least because of the unique position they were granted in modern history (consider the irony of the most powerful army in the Middle East being called the Israeli Defense Forces).
However, citing the Holocaust in this context is not specifically related to what Israel chooses to name its army or the right of Israeli Jews there to defend themselves. It concerns first and foremost the right of the Jewish people not to bear the responsibility for the atrocities committed by their army on the pretext of self-defense. The same logic extends to those resisting Israel and its provocations: no one has the right to hold us responsible for terrorism by claiming that it is a form of self-defense or by considering it a logical consequence of globalization (a form of fate or compulsion, as Jean Baudrillard maintains).”
In an interview where Suella coerced a bright Black student into a “friendly discussion,” she told the student that she was worried about the anti-Semitism she’s witnessed at the protests (where?) she had gone to… (did she accidentally go to a white supremacists rally?) and that we should be taking Jewish students who are scared seriously… imagine telling a Black student anywhere fully deadpanned that you’re worried about anti Semitism and not even mention a society (and thus university campuses) that are rife with anti-Blackness. It’s astonishing what people will care about, while the rest of us scream about our basic human rights.
People have the gall to comment on my IG about anti-Semitism they heard at a protest... yet when I ask them where and when this happened they go silent… unable to give me any details. If it’s true, I believe it should always be reported, and documented because anti-Semitism has no space in the movement for the liberation of Palestine. Yet so often these things are said with no proof... imagine that!
I have been going to pro-Palestine protests since I was a teenager. From Sydney to Montreal to New York to Los Angeles, I’ve been to many different cities and protested where I can, boldly. In these many times over many decades, I’ve never once seen anti-Semitism at any pro-Palestine protest. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m saying that this continued suggestion that there is inherent anti-Semitism in the movement is deeply dangerous and it also feels like a bad-faith continuation of derailing a legitimate liberation movement by insisting that everything that is liberatory from the group that’s being occupied is an act of malice and vengeance…
…but then I remember that the ADL (the infamous anti-Defamation League, that again, strangely only targets supposed acts of anti Semitism… not the many other ways people are “defamed”) considers “From The River To The Sea” anti-Semitic, thereby, presumably, the very existence of Palestine is also so.
The ADL has reported the sky-rocketing rise of anti-Semitism since October… yet the majority of people who have been attacked or murdered since October are Muslims and Palestinians… and I’m just talking about the U.S. There was the fatal killing of Samantha Woll, a Rabbi in Detroit, but that wasn’t anti Semitism… it was a home invasion. If anti-Semitism is on the rise (which I know it is because I see white supremacists wield it regularly… it’s just not usually people protesting for Palestine) and we care about the violence of all human life… why aren’t we also speaking about the very real and blatant Islamophobia that is also (and has been) rising?
(Is it because deep down you think Muslims deserve the violence they face? Be honest)
Since October, a six-year-old Palestinian boy, Wadea Al Fayoume, was stabbed to death (by his landlord) 26 times. Dr Talat Jahan Khan, a beloved Texan doctor, and a friend’s family friend, was stabbed to death at a picnic table. Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Ali Ahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid were shot at for wearing a keffiyeh, now Hisham is paralyzed from the neck down.
What do we call these acts?
Recently I was talking to my friend Tasbeeh about how Muslims are expected to accept Islamophobia and ignore the decades-long systematic destruction of Muslim lands, Muslims and the Muslim faith… yet these acts of violence are not seen as relevant, why? Why is Islamophobia not considered but anti-Semitism is? It’s the same negotiation I see of Zionists being obsessive with the figures of all the Israelis that were supposedly killed on October 7th (people keep saying 1400… after an internal investigation, that number has gone down to 1160… and we know that many of these Israelis were murdered by the IOF not Hamas, through literal evidence) yet the growing number of 35,000 dead and murdered Palestinians, what about them? When you tell a Zionist that number what do they say? They either ignore it completely, overriding it as “defense” or they blatantly wish there were more dead Palestinians. There are so many videos of this that it’s disturbing they feel so righteous to be so hateful… against people who never did anything to them.
Most of us have been raised to believe Islamophobia is a fact, so much so we don’t even question our own beliefs, we presume they are correct. All Muslims are violent savages, so we should be in expectation of the violence faced against us, right?
I was at USC and UCLA multiple times at the height of the escalation of the encampments a few weeks back and what I experienced and witnessed was the most virulent Islamophobia … and just hatred… I have ever personally experienced. And it happened entirely at the hands of Zionists.
Here’s what my WAWOG comrade Anahid Nersessian, who also teaches at UCLA, wrote in the London Review of Books, “On the weekend after the encampment was formed, a large group of counter-protesters, few to none of whom appeared to be UCLA students, arrived on campus. They screamed, hurled racial slurs and sexual threats (‘I hope you get raped’) at the students, and opened a backpack full of live mice – swollen, and seemingly injected with some substance – on the ground near the camp. When the counter-protesters dispersed, they left behind a Jumbotron, a massive flat-screen TV, about ten feet high, which had been set in the middle of campus facing the encampment and was surrounded by metal barriers. Paid security guards remained inside the barriers to protect the screen. For the next five days, the Jumbotron played footage of the 7 October attacks on a loop, along with audio clips describing rape and sexual violence in explicit terms. Mixed in among the clips were speeches by Joe Biden vowing unconditional support for Israel and renditions of ‘Meni Mamtera’, a maddeningly repetitive children’s song that went viral earlier this year when IDF soldiers posted a video of themselves using it as a form of noise torture on captive Palestinians.”
I really hope you read the whole piece entitled, “At the UCLA Encampment,” especially if you’re generally interested in learning about what happened at these encampments… and who did what. But the fact that the NYPD, LAPD, and security forces joined together to protect Zionists shouldn’t surprise anybody. This is what they’ve been planning on, with the help of Israel and the IOF for years. This is the current and the future for the U.S. If you want to learn more, google Cop City.
Middle East Eye reported on May 2nd that “while Los Angeles police were cracking down on a Gaza solidarity encampment set up by students at UCLA, an Israeli special operations veteran was boasting online about running a “quiet infiltration operation” into the camp” with the help of the LAPD.
A few days earlier, according to Nersessian, “At 11 p.m. on 30 April, a large group of men, mostly middle-aged, many wearing Halloween masks, arrived at the encampment carrying knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace, which they used to attack the unarmed students. They shot fireworks into the camp and used the plywood barricades to crush students into the ground. Footage from ABC News shows half a dozen counter-protesters punching and kicking a student. Videos from independent journalists and people on the ground captured calls for a ‘second Nakba’.”
It was scary to see or hear about the anger, vitriol, and hatred of the Zionists at the UCLA encampments and not feel deep existential angst about the state of the world. How could this happen and students be vilified for protesting a genocide? What is this upside down world? I’m shocked by people’s basic lack of human compassion, empathy and morality… Since October, I have been deeply worried about us as a people. With all these debates about what you would do during a genocide… now it’s very clear who would do what. Just incase you’re wondering, what you’d do during a genocide is exactly what you’re doing now….
The same day Israel invaded Rafah was Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as the Met Gala. I’m not the first person to point out that many Holocaust survivors (like Gabor Maté) are pro-Palestinian, there’s also Marione Ingram and Stephon Kapas, that sweet grandpa you’ve probably seen at the London protests. So, it’s interesting to me that Israel keeps using their image, their pain and their trauma… but won’t actually listen to their demands. Same thing that’s happening with the students… they’re actually very articulate and they’re very clear. But, also like the students, Holocaust survivors weren’t protected by Israel before October, and I’m sure they won’t be protected after either.
To go back to Rafah, it’s wild to see how all of this is being so well documented yet people still contest Israel’s villainy. After the Super Bowl massacre a few weeks prior, it’s become clear that Israel also uses significant US pop culture dates to torture and bomb Palestinians.
The writer Frederick Joseph wrote on his Substack “In Retrospect” about the attack, “Rafah has become a reluctant sanctuary to over 1.5 million Palestinians, of whom more than 600,000 are children, has swelled under the Israeli directive for everyone in Gaza to seek shelter. The Palestinians there have been corralled into an area hardly sufficient for the breadth of their lives and dreams. The land is a mere 5 miles, and is more of a cramped holding cell than a refuge.”
What the international media won’t tell you is that Hamas actually agreed to a ceasefire with Israel, one that was also proposed by Egypt and Qatar. The assumption was that it was a plea to halt the inevitable slaughter that would happen (and is happening) in Rafah. The agreement also included the release of all Israeli hostages, war prisoners, and the bodies of deceased Israelis. “This demand has been the heartbeat of Israel's “Bring Them Home Now” campaign, a resonant call that wove through the fabric of Israeli society, mobilizing mass support for their actions under a banner of retrieval and return,” wrote Joseph.
Indeed, so it’s strange that Israel still rejected the deal. It’s almost like Israel doesn’t care about the hostages…
Jewish writer, Joseph Hill, in his Substack, "New Means" also wrote two weeks ago:
“Yesterday I saw snipers above the University of California San Diego, I saw armored cops with wooden batons beat students for protesting genocide, I saw students and journalists arrested at UCLA simply for being on their own campus. And I saw Israel commence an attack on over a million civilians living in tents. But it is, of course, the students who will again be called violent.”
It’s actually because I do take anti-Semitism seriously, that I thought why not speak about Zionism… so people can really understand what we’re talking about when we are talking about that. Most people assume only Jewish people can be Zionists, but the great majority of Zionists are actually Christian Zionists… I know… plot twist, and the plot does thicken.
Here’s an explainer I got from TRT World, an interview with Stephen Sizer, the former Vicar of the Church of England who has written three books on the Christian Zionist movement and its support for the state of Israel. He was recently also banned from licensed ministry in the Church of England until 2030 for his views on Zionism and Israel’s policies in the Middle East... so you know he’s a real one.
“Christian Zionism is the dominant form of Zionism. It has been since before the Zionist movement emerged in the 1870s, 1880s – Christians were calling for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine from the 1820s, 1830s and the Balfour Declaration with the demise of the Ottoman Empire that Britain's entry, if you like, into the Middle East having defeated the French was to colonise Palestine. And he saw the role of the Jews as serving the best interests of the British Empire. Christian Zionism predates Jewish Zionism by at least 50 years and today dominates the Zionist movement at least 10 to 1, probably nearer 20, 30 to 1.”
So, apparently, for every one Jewish Zionist, there are 20 or 30 Christian Zionists. No doubt, Netanyahu knows this, and knows he needs the Christian, particularly the Christian right in America, Canada and Europe to continue the expansion of the Zionist agenda in Palestine.
As former (and most likely future) President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner rejoiced in an interview for the Middle East Initiative, a program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in March, that there is “very valuable” potential of Gaza's “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip” … I am really wondering when the international media will flag something like this as genocidal… when will Western journalists actually do their due diligence here? What will it take for them to speak about Zionism honestly, and truthfully?
Theodor Herzl, the man known as the “father of Zionism,” cautioned against the racist image of Palestinians as “wild desert people.” According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, he also wrote: “We can be the vanguard of culture against barbarianism."
In his diary, Herzl wrote,
“The antisemites WILL BECOME our most loyal friends, the antisemites nations will become our allies.”
Does this not sound like a sick settler colonial fantasy? I guess this is why Zionists are banding together with white supremacists. It’s almost like these Zionists don’t care about anti-Semitism… they only care about weaponizing it.
On May 15th it was the 76th Nakba Day, or “the catastrophe” in Arabic, when 750,000-1,000,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to create Israel. We know this date was not a singular moment, either, but rather, the Nakba has never really ended, it has been ongoing. What we are seeing in Rafah and Gaza has been named “the second Nakba” by multiple Israeli politicians, and as WAWOG reported recently in our latest newsletter, “In November, Likud Minister Avi Dichter, like many other state officials, announced that “Israel” was rolling out a “second Nakba.”
As Nersessian also reported, “Videos from independent journalists and people on the ground captured calls for a ‘second Nakba’.”
In an extraordinary piece by Palestinian writer Kaleem Hawa for The White Review, last year, published in May, he writes about Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel ALTNEULAND where “the Viennese protagonists observe the transformation of Palestine from its ‘backward’ and desolate Arab roots into a thriving utopian society.”
Sound familiar?
When I was a child, growing up in Australia you were often faced with the idea that the land you lived was given the justification of terra nullius - a Latin phrase that means “nobody’s land” when in fact, it was somebody’s land, Australian Indigenous peoples are recorded to be some of the oldest (if not the oldest) peoples on Earth. Look how much we disrespect our elders… When you Google terra nullius in the U.S., the common definition shared is by Cornell University Law which describes the Latin phrase as a “territory without a master,” this feels particularly apt; the supreme white master. I don’t think I ever really comprehended how sick it was to conquer land when I was a child. You’re in school being taught about the savages that white men civilize and that becomes accepted history. As a colonized person myself, I gratefully knew better. Yet, I’ve also lived and migrated to four different continents, three of which I’ve been a settler to - so I, like many, am both; colonized and settler. This has primed me to always consider another perspective, or a lesser-known one, and it’s been in moments like this where I have truly been able to decolonize… because I’m faced with the urgency of unlearning land ownership and my own participation in the imagination of the settler colony. We are the sites of our own decolonization.
“In practice, the Zionist entity of today was built on Palestinian genocide and persists as a limping apartheid settler colony. Long before Herzl, Zionist works had adopted the narrative trappings of the frontier story – the stillness of the land, the menacing enemy, and thus, the pioneer hero. For the young city of Tel Aviv, this was Meir Dizengoff, its first leader. After purchasing 12.8 hectares north of Jaffa, the founding members of the Ahuzat Bayit ‘neighborhood association’ distributed the land across 60 lots that would become the outline of the planned city, whose name – which roughly translates to ‘hill of spring’ – brought them full circle, lifting the words from the Hebrew translation of ALTNEULAND.”
Over the last seven months, it’s been humbling to read and hear Palestinian narratives firsthand. I thought I knew a lot, but I actually don’t, I actually know so very little. The movement for Palestinian liberation is long and profound and rich and extensive. As a non-Palestinian, I learn from all the materials of abundance that Palestinians have generously been documenting of their genocide and thus resistance, survival and inevitable liberation for 76 years. Everyone from Leila Khaled to Ghassan Kanafani to Bassel Al-Araj, the writing is there for us to learn from and be motivated into action.
Hawa writes evocatively in a way I’ve never had the privilege of knowing or understanding Palestine, the land before. “The city’s Ben Gurion airport is built on the remains of the Palestinian city of al-Lydd (occupied July 11, 1948; population of 19,440) and was the site of a brutal Zionist ethnic cleansing operation during the Palestinian Nakba of 1947–49. “During an ill-fated summer 75 years ago, after two days of fighting the Arab resistance in order to occupy the area, Zionist forces massacred more than 100 men, women and children seeking refuge in the city’s Dahmash Mosque. Oral testimonies recall the corpses piled onto the streets, left to bake in the sun. That same day, it was decided that the people of al-Lydd and nearby al-Ramla (occupied July 12, 1948; population of 17,590) were to be expelled. Hours later, thousands were sent on a death march along the roads to Ramallah, on the orders of the then-prime minister David Ben Gurion.”
This is about one city but we know this has happened in hundreds of towns over the last few decades. We know this has been happening all across the West Bank for the last few months, while Gaza’s population is being decimated and starved. Just today I saw a video of three Israeli men who went into a Palestinian family’s home and have been taunting the family, apparently, they won’t leave. This has been a settler tactic since the beginning of Zionism in Israel - to go into Palestinians’ homes and declare it for themselves.
Is this fair to you? Does this feel honest and just? Is this what we’ve decided is what will repair the devastation of the Holocaust? I heard Jerry Seinfeld supports the “Shoot To Kill” fantasy tours, where targets are designed to look like Palestinians with simulated armed combat in faux Palestinian villages… this is to help Israelis get their rage out on Palestinians. The more I learn about this society… the more menacing it reveals itself to be. This seems to be the product of Zionist propaganda that gives Zionists an ardent belief in their ordained superiority. This is also what fascism is.
But it makes sense… it seems that Christian Zionists are also white supremacists. And so Herzl’s prophecy is complete, “The antisemites WILL BECOME our most loyal friends, the antisemites nations will become our allies.”
The former chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, Annelise Orleck, was arrested a few weeks ago and is now banned from being on campus for six months. Do we not consider this an act of anti-Semitism? All the Jewish comrades that are fighting and having to hear anti-Semitic tropes coming from the Zionist outside agitators. Earlier, when I said I’d never seen anti-Semitism at a pro-Palestinian protest, I left out that I had, but it was from the Jewish/Zionist counter protestors… who were goading us to chant along with them… almost as if we could be tricked into saying the wrong chant because we don’t actually know what we stand for…
They’re so desperate to catch us in some anti-Semitic act that they don’t realize they genuinely seem evil trying to manufacture these moments, like the Israeli Yale student, who was stabbed in the eye (I watched the video, you should too, it’s quite amusing how desperate many of these folks seem to be to frame someone) at a protest supposedly by a pro-Palestinian student… but then she went onto to do interviews… with Fox News and Piers Morgan and she was there with both eyes entirely intact… trying to express why what had happened to her was an act of anti Semitism.
Jeff Sharlet, a fellow Jewish faculty member at Dartmouth, told JTA that he spotted state riot police at the protest even though the college said it only called in local police. “They (the students) were not obstructing anything. There was no argument they were obstructing anything,” Sharlet said. “There wasn’t hate speech. If we get to the point where a few students chanting ‘From the river to the sea’ requires long guns on a college campus, that’s not good for us as Jews, as Americans, as educators of students.” Right, wait till you figure out it’s a protest chant for liberation, just because Zionists are murderous they seem to think everyone else are too.
If you’re wondering, believe it or not, it should not be normal for universities to be embroiled in the militarization and arms manufacturing of anyone, let alone another country, and as always, it’s the responsibility of academic institutions to be at the forefront of challenging and questioning our ethical dilemmas as a society. That’s actually the exact reason for the locational site of a university - sure it’s about education, but it’s also about sharing ideas, debating, protesting, and learning how to articulate your demands. I find that many universities these days are so ingratiated in the bureaucratic systems and frameworks of faulty nation-states that we are facing a quandary of ethics here. What has happened in this neoliberal age is that everything has flattened through the homogenization of capitalism, en masse people aren’t thinking about “values” or even morality because we live in an amoral society and you’re rewarded to not care, so why would anyone want to be good or principled?
Protesting is an effusive and effective right. Believe it or not, it’s also a cornerstone of democracy. How not to slide into authoritarianism? Well, you speak out when, uh, there’s a genocide… The bar is actually quite low and I’m shocked absolutely SHOCKED every day that seven months into this bullshit and the vast majority of people have not said a peep.
I think it’s important to take the consideration of any student on campus who feels unsafe but I really want to ask more people if they think Muslims and Palestinians feel safe knowing how much money and privilege is given to Israel and Zionists institutionally? I wonder if these Jewish students who are afraid are considering if Black students feel safe, or if trans students feel safe, or if disabled students are met with their basic needs… I mean… to just focus on anti-Semitism feels like a missed opportunity to speak about this racism and bias more broadly and how a lot of students face these things... Like, are we not even going to mention class here? Like… do people not think about class dynamics and how poor and working-class folks feel anywhere!?!?!?! I believe all people should be treated the same. I also believe if we think genocide is bad, it should be bad for anyone to do it.
A few days ago the first Jewish Biden appointee, Lily Greenberg Call, resigned after saying, “I think the president has to know that there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous,” adding in, “He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong.”
We are up against a lot of Zionists, but I have been moved by my Jewish comrades, as well as the white people standing up and putting themselves in positions where they protect the rest of us, the movement, where they are putting their bodies in the line of fire. I’m seeing white people educate themselves about Palestine and though there’s always more that we could all learn… I am still moved. I’m proud of everyone figuring out how to speak and enunciate however best they can. This is important, we are all in this together.
“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible,” Toni Cade Bambera once wrote. To me, a people’s revolution is a no-brainer. I think for the fate of the planet, there’s no choice. We must see Zionism for what it is, and we must speak honestly about it now, for the sake of our collective futures.
Hawa asks us, “In your vision of justice, does the siege end? Do the lands return? Do Palestinians return to those lands, does the forced starvation go away, do the water and trees come back, are our prisoners freed? With thousands of children in graves, and thousands more whose families are in graves, our demands today are no different from the demands we made in our text during the first week of the genocide: that you do not waiver and that you remain committed until total return.”
Liberation requires all of us to work. To get there, we must figure out our individual contribution to the revolution. This, I think, means naming what stands before you, or before us. Zionism is a cruel and unjust system and it must end, as must capitalism. These extractive colonizing systems have no space in the new world we are trying to create where we are all equal, where we are all free, where we are all safe, where all our deaths matter. They act like we don’t know what we’re saying or doing when we are simply saying: no more war and never again. We are no longer asking, now we are demanding that this endless military spending is put into making societies safer and better for everyone. The haunting voices of the cacophony of loud Zionist voices take up a lot of space. At UCLA they kept chanting “Take off your mask!” “You have nothing to say.” I wanted to shout that they clearly had nothing to say except racist or Islamophobic taunts, or lies and violence… the amount of people they told would get raped… Zionists are strange. They want us to believe that Hamas raped women on October 7th, with still no proof… but then all they do is make rape threats towards us. Every accusation is a confession.
But it comes to a point where you have to be honest about how “your truth” is just bypassing fact, and in a society that is working towards accountability, this is not an act of principled care or honesty. Zionists utilize victimhood to silence anyone who challenges them… but I think we will get to a time where they won’t be able to keep obfuscating facts. All genocides eventually come to an end.
At least our liberation stands for freedom and is robust, dynamic, multi-ethnic, and religious, how wonderful! For all the Jewish students who feel unsafe, what I’d encourage them to do is find their anti-Zionist Jewish comrades, of which there are many. We do work to keep our Jewish comrades safe. This has always been important for me, as a pro-Palestinian. But above all, I think it’s important to focus on the goal here. Palestine will be free, and in that utopic envisioning, we will all coexist and live peacefully and harmoniously.
This is my utopic envisioning, what’s yours? ᵕ̈
May we center liberation for all.
I pray our commitment remains firm.
Free Palestine
May 19th, 2024