Strangers for Ancestors #12: Zionism IS Racism
Heart Shaped Rocks, Chris Gazaleh, Clarion Alley Mural Project, part of the project Manifest Differently, San Francisco, 2023
Strangers for Ancestors is back! However, it’s been challenging to stay focused as much of the world, myself included, is reeling from the events that have unfolded in Palestine/Israel since Hamas launched its most vicious attack on Israel, to date. It’s almost too horrific to process the outright ethnic cleansing massacre that Israel is currently waging against civilians in Gaza in response. Alongside that horror is the horror that the world is actively watching this take place and the one force that could stop it - the United States is not willing to do so. Instead the global audience is losing faith in humanity as we learn about hospitals being bombed and water being cut off to Gaza. We are literally watching Israel committing a monstrous and ungodly genocide against the Palestinian people solely for their existence and for defending the homeland that was stolen from them to create the settler-colonizer Zionist state.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it very much lines up with the holocausts of the Americas. Powerful, wealthy people wanting what they don’t have, identifying it or “discovering” it somewhere else under the stewardship of someone else, and creating whatever justification and frameworks, religious or otherwise, they need to destroy whatever is standing in their way of getting what they want. They believe wholeheartedly they are entitled and they will make up whatever story is necessary because they and theirs are the “chosen ones” of their god. It doesn’t get much more heinous than that. Yet here we are.
Without real intervention, this current tragedy was always going to be the logical and inevitable conclusion to the 75 years of pain and suffering that Palestinians have been experiencing since they were made refugees by British and Zionist forces in 1947 - 1949. I am not justifying Hamas’ attack against civilians; I am acknowledging that what has happened is the logical and inevitable conclusion to Zionism. Without intervention, this was always going to happen. Apartheid is not sustainable. Settler-colonization is not sustainable. And now we get to watch in realtime just how unsustainable the aftermath of this holocaust will be; one inflicted on a people whose only supposed crime was to be born, and carried out by a nation that was created following the horrific holocaust that was committed against its people for being born, by an entirely different people thousands of miles away.
It doesn’t get much more heinous than that. Yet here we are.
I am not justifying Hamas’ attack against civilians; I am acknowledging that what has happened is the logical and inevitable conclusion to Zionism. This was always going to happen. Apartheid is not sustainable. Settler-colonization is not sustainable.
We need only look to the United States and Manifest Destiny to see how that tactic has worked. The answer is suffering, a lot of suffering; that is how the tactic to cover up genocide, apartheid, slavery, and the slow deaths of millions through legislation plays and plays out. What is happening now will never end unless the root of this 75 year Nakba is addressed and the families of the over 750,000 Palestinians are provided the right to return to their homeland and to be full and equal citizens with self determination.
I highly recommend that people visit this link to Al Jazeera’s feature The Nakba did not start or end in 1948: Key facts and figures on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to learn more about the history behind the current holocaust.
I also highly recommend watching the following:
I hope to continue next week with the story of my settler-colonizer family and its crimes against humanity. It’s a cautionary tale I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.