Sunday, March 24, 2024
The 1903 Japanese Mexican Labor Association Strike: A Reflection 121-Years Later
Monday, March 11, 2024
Palestine: A Chicano’s Education Or How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 3: The Lions Expose the Hunters
Palestine:
A Chicano’s Education
Or
How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 3:
The Lions Expose the Hunters
When People Are Colonized Resistance Is Justified
Free, Free Palestine! Free, Free Palestine!
¡Viva! ¡Viva! ¡Palestina! ¡Viva! ¡Viva! ¡Palestina!
Aaron Bushnell, You Are Not Alone!
Biden, Biden, You’re A Liar—We Demand a Cease Fire!
Biden, Biden, You’re A Liar—We Demand a Cease Fire!
We Are All Palestinians. We Are All Palestinians.
(Peoples’ slogans at Chiques demonstration as part of a worldwide day of action, Sunday, March 2, 2024)
On Sunday, March 2, 2024, a worldwide day of action, thousands, if not millions, of people from all walks of life took to the streets across the land, again, to protest the United States government-backed Israeli Defense Forces’ inexorably merciless massacre, starvation, oppression, and overall genocide of the people of Palestine.
Before marching through the streets of Third, C, Second, Oxnard Boulevard, Seventh, and A, a multiracial mass of one thousand gente assembled at the city hall of Chiques (aka, Oxnard) to condemn President Joe Biden, Senator Alex Padilla, Congresswoman Julia Brownley, and Oxnard Councilwoman Gabriela Basua, and Oxnard Mayor John Zaragoza by name for their complicity and support for the Zionist murder of the people of Palestine for not demanding that the state of Israel agree to a permanent cease-fire on Gaza. The people inveighed the US government’s enablement of Israel’s acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip as charged in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa.
According to REUTERS, on January 26, 2024, the ICJ found that "At least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the (Genocide) Convention."
Democratic functionaries of empire yet continue to asininely recite
“Israel has the right to defend itself.”
¡Sin vergüenza!
Sunday, February 25, 2024, in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC Airman Aaron Bushnell protested by self-immolation the US government’s sponsorship of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.
Before Aaron Bushnell live streamed his suicide by fire, he stated "I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
Like former Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning who witnessed with horror a US military Apache helicopter killing innocent Iraqi civilians and other atrocities that our censored media does not allow the public to see, I imagine Aaron Bushnell viewed or knew of similar atrocities by the US government.
Over the years, I have both directly and indirectly known people with US security clearance allude to witnessing our government commit inhuman acts of violence against civilians in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ask a veteran.
****
For decades the state of Israel dominated the narrative on the question of Palestine; complemented by US State Department and corporate media propaganda, of course. As the Middle East hegemon, the state of Israel assiduously defines, with US assistance, the present and past to chart the future. In 1958, the great Nigerian storyteller Chinua Achebe published the exquisite novel Things Fall Apart which critiqued not only the British empire’s brutal colonization—if there were any other kind—of his homeland but also all of Africa by other European imperialists. As I studied Things Fall Apart after I listened to an obituary of Achebe’s life on public radio in 2013, I was reminded of what my mentor-teacher professed when I was a Fresno State undergrad: Christian missionaries are the advanced guard of any imperial invasion; after which, well, things fall apart.
Achebe also understood that the violently mighty, conqueror-oppressors and alike define the past in which the present is comprehended. To counter the myths, half-truths, and the downright mentiras of settler colonial empires around the globe like the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Israel, Achebe encouraged counter-hegemonic storytelling in writing:
There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.
Via history, art, music, poetry, dance, novels, film: We Must Dare To Be Lions.
As the governments of the Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Israel, are historical hunters, I view Vine Deloria as one lion, among many, that narrated the story of the US government’s hunt in North America in his germinal, must-read book to appreciate the essence of American history, Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969). With US congressional documentation, Deloria researched a chilling history detailing the hunt of the US Army that methodically murdered, ethnically cleansed, and drove out Native Americans from their homeland for the Ingalls family to settle as Zionists do in Palestine. So, Zionists are using the US’s playbook of settler colonial occupation and conquest. In the February 26, 2024 online edition of The New Yorker, Shane Bauer, in an article titled “The Israeli Settlers Attacking Their Palestinian Neighbors, quotes Ory Shimon, a twenty-year old Westbank Israeli settler, expressing that “he felt that Israel was being unfairly scrutinized: ‘America came with ships and killed all the Indians and made them slaves. It’s terrible, but now America doesn’t’ say ‘We’re sorry, take the land back.” Furthermore, Bauer wrote the following regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich:
In 2017, he [Smotrich] published his “Decisive Plan” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first step, he wrote, was to make the “ambition for a Jewish State from the river to the sea . . . an accomplished fact” by “establishing new cities and settlements deep inside the territory and bringing hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to live there.” Once “victory by settlement” was accomplished, Smotrich continued, Palestinians would have two options: stay in Israel, without the right to vote in national elections, or emigrate. “Zionism,” he wrote, “was built based on population exchange e.g. the mass Aliyah of Jews from Arab countries and Europe to the Land of Israel, willingly or not, and the exit of masses of Arabs who lived here, willingly or not, to the surrounding Arab areas. This historic pattern seems to require culmination.”
Hence, according to Zionist, all of Palestine belongs to Israel. Drive out Palestinians to Syria, Jordan, and Egypt; conquer as much as land possible to keep forever. This permits us to comprehend cunning Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) atrocities that target journalists, doctors and nurses, refugees, and civilians in Gaza today.
The violent, steady, theft of land from the people of Palestine was not so linear after World War I as British hunters gained control of the region from the Ottomans with the League of Nations Mandate of 1918. As scrupulously accounted for by Daniel Yergin in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power (1991), capitalist geo-strategic points of Standard Oil and British Petroleum encouraged the European partition of the Middle East. Subsequently, to solidify its regional control, the British permitted Ashkenazi Zionist hunters access to Palestinian lands. But as Palestinian national liberationist leader Ghassan Kanafani details a good number of Palestinian elites rented and sold their real estate to Zionists and served as quislings for capo capitalists. Before this Jews, Muslims, and Christians of Palestine lived in peaceful harmony. This is according to Richard Becker, Jimmy Carter, Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé, and other eminent writers. For a succinct summary of this history read Eric Mann’s February 22, 2024 essay in the LA Progressive.
Weaponizing the Holocaust, however, Zionists insist that Muslim leaders of the Middle East have forever been antagonistic to the existence of Jews and the state of Israel. As early as the late 1940s, nascent Arab states—essentially puppet governments created by imperialist Britain, France, and the US—in and out of the region of Palestine accepted the state of Israel’s existence as this is what the Western powers dictated. In 2017, even Hamas declared Israel’s existence based on 1967 borders. The myth of annihilation, however, benefits the state of Israel in terms of international sympathy and support, especially that of the US, as well as its ruthless illegal settlement and occupation in all of Palestine. Resistance and Palestinian counterattacks are then used as pretexts, to the max, by Zionists to go on the offensive to conquer the little remaining territory that Palestinians control ever so tenuously. Some call this cycle mowing the lawn. Ultimately, the hunters, the US and Israel, are mouthing a false history and gaslighting the public.
From my study of books and articles on the question of Palestine, Zionist leaders since the late nineteenth century have systematically worked to conquer all the land of Palestine to advance a purely Jewish state. Many people ignorant of this history, blame Palestinians for not agreeing to a two-state solution when it is Israel that has blocked this idea as it contravenes the Zionist mission to dominate all of Palestine. Furthermore, in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), President Jimmy Carter eloquently details how Israel has sophisticated control over diplomatic affairs and public relations systems, especially with US surrogates such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This is how Zionists of the state of Israel steadily violates with impunity United Nations:
- Resolution 181 of 1947 that partitioned Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. But as Britain planned its exit in 1947, Zionist terrorists, advised by the State of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and his Consultancy, accelerated the seizure of Palestinian lands in both territories. Thus, as resolutely described by Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007), Hagana, Qiryati, the Harel Brigade, Brigade Etzioni, Alexdroni Brigade, and other Zionist terrorist militias, before the formal creation of the IDF, executed Palestinian villagers in both the territories of Palestine and Israel, dynamited occupied homes, ethnically cleansed communities usually at the dead of night, and stole all their possessions.
- Resolution 194 of 1948 resolved that refugees of Nakba, the catastrophe of the Zionist killing and mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their lands, had the right to return to their homes, be compensated, and live in peace with their neighbors of all backgrounds—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. The state of Israel contravenes UN Resolution 194 as it refuses to return occupied and stolen lands to Palestinians. In fact, before and since 1948, the state of Israel has driven Palestinians from lands partitioned to them under UN Resolution 181. Zionist utilizes scripture and the recent history of the Holocaust to shield them from any criticism. For Zionists such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is “No such thing” as Palestinian people. All of Palestine is biblical deeded to Jews, according to Zionnists.
- Resolution 242 was adopted after the Six-Day War of 1967 and called for Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied during this conflict. Although it withdrew from the Sinai, Israelis continue to expand into, occupy, and settle upon Palestinian lands in the Golan Heights and the West Bank.
Despite the deceit of the US government and Israel, the lions of the world are roaring loud for a liberated Palestine. I am that historian, of many. Be a lion, too. Write, demonstrate, and demand from your government representatives (local, state, and federal) a Palestine where Arabs and Jews can coexist in harmony and peace as they did before the embarkation of Zionism.
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Palestine: A Chicano’s Education Or How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 2: Settler Colonialism as Zionism, And Vice Versa.
Jews comprised 5% of the population at the start of the Zionist settler colonial project. While 75% were Muslims and 20% were Christians living in well-nigh harmony in what is now Israeli-occupied Palestine.
30,000 Palestinians (mostly civilian babies, children, women, and men) have died at the hands of Israeli settlers and the United States-backed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in vengeance for the Hamas resistance of October 7th killing 1,200 people, and the taking of hostages.
The people of Palestine resist Israeli incursion, occupation, and oppression with rocks hurled by children, inaccurate and marginally effective rockets, and guerilla-style tactics against a vastly superior, regular IDF military equipped with state-of-the-art tanks, bulldozers, bombs, and jet fighters, many manufactured by US companies and subsidized by the United States.
IDF wantonly bomb to rubble Palestinian hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, and camps in Gaza resulting in 1.4 million Palestinian refugees (67% of the total population) dying from exposure, starvation, wounds, and disease.
The state of Israel commands and blockades roads, airspace, and waterways leading to the Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan Heights. Hence, Palestinians are at the complete mercy of their occupiers for food, fuel, medicine, and potable water to survive. Meanwhile, uniformed people continue to wonder why Palestinians, from the young and old, resist the oppression of the United States-backed IDF.
Again, Israel has the right to defend itself.
As written by President Jimmy Carter in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), Palestinians live in an apartheid state in their territories and the state of Israel.
Saturday, January 20, 2024
Palestine: A Chicano’s Education Or How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 1
Palestine:
A Chicano’s Education
Or
How I Decided to Educate Myself on Zionism, part 1
As a Chicano who lives in the historically conquered territory of the Southwest after the US attack on Mexico in 1846 and who lives in the state of California that systematically dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land and relegated them to lives in concentration camps known as reservations, I identify with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. Hence, I refuse to abet via silence the continued catastrophe, Nakba, of ethnic cleansing against the people of Palestine perpetuated since 1948 by the United States-backed state of Israel.[i] This moral stand arose from witnessing the brazenly decontextualized propaganda of commercial network news streamed to my television since October 7, 2023. Indeed, I have yet to view corporate news functionaries addressing the fundamental causes of Zionist invasion, racial apartheid, and theft of Palestinian territories even before the mid-twentieth century that induced Hamas’ recent attack on Israelis and the taking of hostages.
Furthermore, US news anchors, posing as objective journalists, fail to provide their audiences with primary statements of Hamas or Palestinian Authority officials; virtually all accounts related to the October 7th attack originate from biased Israeli government officials and spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces. Then US officials from President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to Democratic party operative, Senator Alex Padilla, and others pathetically parrot the perspective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The unverified accounts of Hamas beheading Israeli babies echoed by President Biden being one example.
To paraphrase the late eminent scholar Edward W. Said, everyone speaks for Palestinians except Palestinians.[ii]
When US propaganda television news presents the perspective of Palestinians it is restricted to the severe suffering of Gaza civilian women, children, and men of all ages having been mercilessly and collectively punished by IDF with US bombs and tanks that level entire urban districts, hospitals, refugee camps, and schools. I have yet to view the commercial media report on Palestinian resistance presenting them as valiant human agents not solely powerless victims of IDF domination.
Thus far, IDF attacks have killed 24,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Of them, over 11,000 children, 7,000 women, and 1,000 senior citizens; or 75% of the total number of Palestinian casualties. This number steadily increases, not counting deaths in other territories under Israeli military siege and occupation (such as the Golan Heights and West Bank) in violation of United Nations resolutions 194, 242, 338, and 465. According to a December 15, 2023, report by France 24, October 7th Israeli deaths “is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.”[iii] Therefore, Palestinian lives lost caused by IDF are greatly disproportionate to the estimated lives lost of Israelis and other people by Hamas on October 7, by a ratio of over 20:1.
To lessen my ignorance on the question of Palestine and fathom the reasons why Hamas would dare challenge the Israeli government that enjoys an extraordinarily superior military largely supplied with state-of-the-art US weaponry and financing in the billions of dollars annually, I lately studied, in the consequent order, books authored by Richard Becker, Jimmy Carter, Rashid Khalidi, respectively titled Palestine: Israel and the U.S. Empire (2009), Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020). I currently started Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). Moreover, I seek out and read the latest articles in the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker focused on the experience of Palestinians and Jews before and since the United Nations partition of Palestine in 1947 that led to the violent creation of the state of Israel the next year that, in the words of Pappe, “led to one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Around a million people were expelled from their homes at gunpoint, civilians were massacred, and hundreds of Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed.” I also learned that Palestine’s partition after WWII was sponsored by Britain, the archetype colonial power in rapid decline, and subsequently advanced by the number one global empire, the United States. I augmented this self-study with enlightening social media video clips that feature the informed views of people in opposition to Zionism such as Angela Davis, Norman Finkelstein, Nelson Mandela, and Gabriel Mate.
This initial investigation also encompassed conversations with colleagues and people in my social network, as well as attending community forums and demonstrations. Over time I came to understand the effective ways in which a highly tuned Israeli public relations campaign—with the support of influential allies such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—has defined the dominant narrative imbibed by the US public, particularly those of the Great Depression and Baby Boom generations. Myths, misinformation, and outright lies portray Palestinians as fanatical terrorists who irrationally attack Israelis, and Zionists, on the other hand, essentially, as neutral, and innocent defenders of Israel’s security. People who do not have the luxury to devote time to independently learn the historical realities of the Palestinian experience are left to rely upon pro-Israel propaganda proliferated by US television “news,” with no recognition of causation.
In this regard, US stories on events in the Middle East are a modern-day production of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But people of all generations, internationally, and from all walks of life, are learning alternative perspectives via social media.
[i] Other Western nations with ruthless imperial histories, as if there were any other kind, that back Israel are Britain, France, and Germany to name a few.
[ii] Said’s more popularly well-known books are Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979).
[iii] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths