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Now
is the time for President Joe Biden
to speak out against apartheid in Israel, and for the U.S. to no
longer support state-sanctioned violence and repression against
Palestinians.
Violence
and civil unrest have broken out in Israel and the occupied
Palestinian territories, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) waging
airstrikes with U.S.-supplied bombs and flattening Palestinian
high-rise
apartment buildings
in Gaza, and the Palestinian militant group Hamas launching rocket
attacks.
Dozens
have been killed, mostly Palestinians, including children. This, as
violence escalates in the streets, with Jewish supremacist lynch
mobs
in Proud
Boys gear
calling for “death
to Arabs,”
attacking
Palestinians
and their businesses with material
support and incitement
from the Israeli government.
Two
flashpoints ignited the most recent violence. One was the forced mass
eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh
Jarrah
neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and handing over the property to
Jewish settlers. Such a forced removal of people because they are
Palestinian amounts to ethnic
cleansing,
and part of a greater effort to socially engineer the city of
Jerusalem to make it more Jewish and displace
and overpower the Palestinian population.
Secondly,
Israeli police stormed the Al-Aqsa
mosque—one
of the holiest sites in Islam–with teargas and stun grenades
during the holy month of Ramadan.
Responding
in the typical white American narrative of the Mideast “conflict,”
President Biden said Israel has “a
right to defend itself”
from Hamas rockets while speaking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu,
not mentioning the many Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks this
past week.
Biden
also said he did not think the Israeli military airstrikes in Gaza
were a “significant
overreaction.”
While the President would later say upon the upcoming White
House Eid celebration
that Palestinians and Israelis “deserve to live in dignity,
safety and security,” we do not see a U.S. foreign policy
reflecting this empty sentiment.
Biden’s
statement won’t cut it, considering he is the leader of the
country that gives Israel $4 billion in aid annually and is in a
position to make the Mideast nation do better, be better and stop
colonizing another people.
In
response to Biden stating Israel has a right to defend itself, Rep.
Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez
asked a question: “But do Palestinians have a right to survive?
Do we believe that? And if so, we have a responsibility to that.”
The squad member added “the United States must acknowledge its
role in the injustice and human rights violations of Palestinians.
This is not about both sides. This is about an imbalance of power.”
Other
members of Congress are speaking up for Palestinian rights and
questioning America’s funding of the Israeli occupation. “For
decades, we have paid lip service to a Palestinian state, while land
seizures, settlement expansion, and forced displacement continue,
making a future home for Palestinians more and more out of reach,”
said Reps.
Ilhan Omar
(D-Minn.), Andre
Carson
(D-Ind.) and Rashida
Tlaib
(D-Mich.) said in a statement.
“We
are anti-war, we are anti-occupation, and we are anti-apartheid,”
said Rep.
Cori
Bush
(D-Mo.), noting Palestinians face state violence, militarized
policing and occupation of their communities, as they are forced to
walk through checkpoints and try to live their lives.
Calling
a budget “a reflection of our values,” Rep.
Ayanna
Pressley
(D-Mass.) said, "We cannot remain silent when our government
sends $3.8 billion of military aid to Israel that is used to demolish
Palestinian homes, imprison Palestinian children, and displace
Palestinian families."
The
violence in Israel-Palestine has escalated of late, but the violence
was always there. That violence stems from Israel’s military
occupation of Palestinian land since 1967, with no end in sight, no
chance for Palestinians to get free with equal rights,
self-determination or statehood.
Two
leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem
(The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories) and Human Rights Watch agree that Israel is an apartheid
state committing crimes against humanity.
According
to the Human Rights Watch report,
Israeli
policy
“is to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over
Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territory. It is coupled
in the occupied territory with systematic oppression and inhumane
acts against Palestinians living there.”
Meanwhile,
B’Tselem,
based in Israel, referred to the nation as a “regime of Jewish
supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” The
organization says it rejects the claim that Israel is a democracy
behind Green Line (its pre-1967 borders), with a temporary military
occupation.
Instead,
the organization argues that the government has entrenched its
control over the Palestinians through land allocation to benefit the
Jewish population; denial of citizenship rights for Palestinians; no
freedom of movement, and second-class political participation for
Palestinian citizens of Israel, and no political rights for
Palestinians living in the territories.
Why
should Black people care? There’s such a thing as solidarity.
Because oppressed people must stick together as a unified front.
Nobody is free if somebody isn’t free, and we must live in a
world free from war and police violence.
Know
there are George
Floyd
murals
in the Palestinian territories. During the uprising in Ferguson,
Palestinian activists instructed Black Livers Matter protesters on
how to deal with police tear gas—which was manufactured
in Pennsylvania
and used on BLM and Palestinian protesters.
As
much as they love him today, Martin
Luther King Jr.
lost support from liberal allies and the civil rights establishment
when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam. Dr. King connected the
dots and viewed “war
as an enemy of the poor.”
He understood the connection between American support for war and
colonization abroad and continued poverty and denial of civil rights
at home.
“We
stand with the Palestinian people, and support their right as an
oppressed, colonized people to resist how they see necessary,”
the Walter Rodney Foundation said.
“As Kwame
Nkrumah,
Kwame
Ture,
Malcolm
X,
and many more often reminded us: the Palestinian struggle is a
Pan-African struggle.”
Halsey
tweeted
to her 14.1 million followers: “It is not ‘too
complicated to understand’ that brown children are being
murdered + people are being displaced under the occupation of one of
the most powerful armies in the world. It is willful ignorance to
conflate these simple horrors with religion + geopolitics.
#FreePalestine.”
Displaying
a photo of an Israeli soldier pointing a rifle at a rock-throwing
Palestinian child as an example of the “both
sides”
argument, Anthony
V. Clark
said what is happening in Palestine is
not complicated:
"oppression is oppression/ colonization is colonization
/open-air prisons are open air prisons/ & those oppressed &
colonized living in open-air prisons fighting back is self-defense!”
Further,
just as Palestinians have created murals for George Floyd,
Palestinians–including Black Palestinians–are losing
their lives to state-sponsored violence. Black-Jewish filmmaker and
writer Rebecca
Pierce
tweeted about Mohammad,
an Afro-Palestinian man in Jericho known for his kebab sandwich cart,
who was just killed by the IDF. “This is the human cost
Palestinians bear daily,” she said of the occupation.
Meanwhile,
U.S. policy in Israel and Palestine is steeped in white
supremacy.
When New York City mayoral candidate Andrew
Yang
supported the Israeli bombing of Gaza, he received kudos from Trump
advisor and white supremacist Stephen
Miller.
Former
Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Ron
Dermer
said Israel should focus its attention on courting white evangelical
Christians rather than American Jews because they provide the
“backbone of Israel’s support” in the states, and
their support is “passionate and unequivocal.”
“What
you’re seeing in Israel is Trumpism on steroids. What you’re
seeing in the streets of Israel is when you, like the PM Netanyahu,
weaponize ethno-nationalism and belligerent racism and unleash it in
the street,” said Palestinian author and journalist Rula
Jebreal
on
MSNBC.
In
the midst of this despair, Israel, which has a universal health
system, is touted for its successful COVID-19 vaccination program.
However, Israel has left
Palestinians out
of the vaccinations. Now that’s apartheid.
Biden
can stop this and become a part of the solution. But the people,
those who love freedom and justice, and don’t want to see more
babies die must demand change. As America confronts its own
reckoning, how can it overcome its problems of systemic racism and
police violence at home as it gives billions of dollars to Israel to
maintain an oppressive apartheid system and brutal occupation?
This
commentary was originally published by The
Grio
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