Party's Over

Free Palestine

Americans woke up yesterday to the footage of Palestinian fighters parachuting in on an Israeli music festival, killing and kidnapping many of the IDF soldiers who were throwing a drug-fueled rave party. This rave was directly outside the walls of the open air concentration camp that the revelers are there to patrol. The footage of the attack was combined with lockstep propaganda claiming the attack was “unprovoked.”

Breaking out of a concentration camp to attack your guards is the very opposite of “unprovoked.” And while I disavow the slaughter of innocents, when you corner, cage, and kettle people, their retaliation is unlikely to be surgical. It can’t be. Fixating on such concerns is as absurd as scolding a victim of assault for violating MMA rules against gouging and groin kicks.

There’s plenty of footage of the Palestinian fighters guiding frightened settler civilians to safety and humanely accounting for their IDF hostages. There’s also plenty of footage of the Palestinian fighters massacring civilians and mistreating hostages. It’s war, actual war, which never follows the thoughtful rules and regulations we would wish to impose on it.

Israel, despite enjoying the logistical and technological advantages to achieve relatively less “collateral damage,” is responsible for an order of magnitude more death and destruction in this conflict — a conflict that did not begin yesterday.

The conflict began before you were born.

As the map shows, Jews have been aggressively, persistently, wiping Palestine off the map and depriving Palestinians of the basic conditions for their survival as a nation and even as a people. As we speak, Netanyahu is shutting off all utility services to its Gaza concentration camp, ensuring that the civilians there will have no food, water, electricity, or basic goods.

A common theme in the American Right is to compare Israeli settlers with American settlers, framing them as the bearers of civilization replacing the primitive, barbarous natives. First of all, times change and White Americans are no longer the settler colonialists but the targets of the settler-colonial process. Israelis are doing the same thing to us right now that they’re doing to the Palestinians; they’re just quite a bit farther along in the process over there.

Hating us and seeking our destruction is an Ancient Jewish Custom, you see:

And while it’s absurd to even dredge up pioneer-era America in defense of Israel’s colonial project, it’s important to bear in mind that Native Americans have always enjoyed better treaties with the American government than their numbers and political power imply. Native Americans enjoy spacious reservations that are an order of magnitude larger than what would be allotted to them under a “fair” arrangement, in contrast to the Palestinians who are half the population of Israel but kettled in ever-shrinking containment zones.

This difference is not a matter of degree but of intention. America’s settlers arrived in America to share the land with the inhabitants, and did so. This conquest was not “fair” to the indigenous peoples and I’m not suggesting it was. But it cannot be analogized to the Israeli project of deliberate and systematic genocidal displacement, replacement, and mass murder of the indigenous peoples.

Another common theme is inviting us to hate Muslims. First of all, I don’t hate groups of people for their immutable racial characteristics or integral religious identities. Zionist propagandists are eager to pivot from pretending to oppose white supremacist bigotry and religious hatred to promoting bigotry and hatred when they think they can exploit those attitudes to alienate the Western world from the Palestinian targets of their own bigotry and hatred.

If you don’t care for Muslim refugees (I don’t, either), shut down the refugee factory of Zionist warmongering.

In the coming weeks, horrors are going to be visited upon Palestinian civilians in retaliation for Hamas’s attack on their guards. This will be cheered by Western media in general and conservative social media in particular with all the fanfare of a soccer match. Unless and until Israel promises and begins delivering on an equatable outcome (for instance, retreat to the Green Line), and they won’t, every military act by the Palestinian forces is an act of freedom fighters against outright genocide.

I stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. It’s one struggle. Jews are welcome to join it too, on the precondition that they cease and desist their genocidal campaigns.

Free Palestine.