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.