For eleven days last year, ending with the ceasefire of May 21, hope conquered fear, love triumphed over hate, liberty defied tyranny, and solidarity was victorious over division and ideological fracture as the people of Palestine united in revolutionary struggle against the state terror of the Israeli carceral regime of imperial conquest and dominion.
Peace and freedom will come at last to this land of conflicted identities when the peoples of Israel and Palestine unite together in solidarity against the tyranny and terror of divisions of faith, ethnicity, history, and identitarian politics to liberate each other from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in a new secular nation wherein there are no tribes but the human, no state language nor religion, no authorized narratives of victimization as fear weaponized in service to power but the limitless possibilities of becoming human in a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.
Until the dawn of a United Humankind, reigns the darkness. Only by awakening to our mutual interdependence and the universality of our humanity can we banish the long night of our history which has us in its jaws, and emerge into the light of a new humankind.
As I wrote in my post of May 19 2021, Day Ten of the Third Intifada: What Is At Stake In the Question of Palestine and Israel?; The Third Intifada has served an instrumental purpose in exposing the crimes against humanity and brutal police state of Israel’s fascist kleptocracy before the court of the world, and focusing international attention on an injustice ongoing now for over seventy years. It has become part of the question of the Restoration of democracy in America and of who we wish to become as a global humankind; what does this mean for America and for the world? What is at stake in the question of Palestine and Israel? What is our duty of care for others?
To such questions I speak as a witness of history, as an American and antifascist who believes in our founding principles of democracy; liberty, equality, truth, and justice, even when we do not always live up to our ideals, as a scholar of the alam al mythal and a member of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufism, and of human being, meaning, and value and the origins of evil in the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity.
I was present at the Defense of al Aqsa and the rescue of the innocents trapped when the Israeli military attacked a nonviolent protest and families at prayer with deadly force and then hunted fleeing and defenseless women and children through the streets of the Old City and Sheikh Jarrah; Israel then launched a general campaign of genocide and terror in Gaza and the West Bank including East Jerusalem.
Weeks of attacks, provocations, and mob violence by Israeli deniable assets preceded this; if it sounds familiar its because it is the same tactic used by Trump to disrupt and discredit the Black Lives Matter protests; armed racist militias unleashed in a campaign of state terror, arson, violence, and looting followed by troops to “restore order”. Trump and Netanyahu learned this from the same master, Adolf Hitler.
Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and Palestine and Israel must be liberated together from subjugation by America’s colony and proxy state.
This is simple, America, and it’s always the same damned thing; the people next door are different, look or pray or speak differently, and so must be evil and the cause of all our problems, plus there is always someone who claims one of his uncles dreamed the outsiders put a curse on his goat, so let’s murder them all in their sleep. This equation of fear and force works the same no matter what ethnicities are involved, and the politics of the situation are irrelevant to the human cost.
No matter where you begin with othering people, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
To the objection that America has no colonies I replied; Do we bear no responsibility for how our enormous military and financial support of Israel is used? What would you imagine its true purpose to be, if not to secure the strategic resource of oil by which America enforces its hegemony of global wealth, power, and privilege?
There are calls for solidarity with Israel, and to this I say; I stand with the people of Israel and Palestine united in universal human rights, as one flesh and one humankind, against the tyranny and terror of the state of Israel’s fascist and sectarian apartheid regime.
Attempts have been made to defame Palestinians and Muslims with inflammatory and disingenuous claims of moral transgression, both to claim moral equivalence of abuser and victim and to isolate them from the support of the international community, and to this I say; Wedge issues can be used by authority to serve power. Issues of the sovereignty and independence of peoples from colonialism and state terror, in this case determined by sectarian division and narratives of historical victimization which confer virtue and legitimize regimes, are not controlled by other factors but are primary to national identity. If you think about it, this is something both conservatives and revolutionaries can agree on. Being a victim means a nation is more likely, not less, to also be an abuser; this is how power, fear, and force work, how the Ring of Power hollows out and replaces meaning and value when trust is betrayed. The term for this is internalized oppression, and in nations it is a consequence of colonialism.
To the claim that Palestinians or any Islamic peoples do not care about America, so why should America care about them, I reply; Only with American support and Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction from the international community can we hope to win liberty and a free society of equals for the people of Palestine and Israel. We care deeply for the beacon of Liberty and guarantor of universal human rights and democracy which America represents; our survival depends on it.
If we are demonized, silenced, and erased by the tyranny and state terror of Israel’s fascist regime, we become nothing, and so does America; for an America which abandons humankind to the dehumanization of predator regimes also abandons its ideals and values. We must unite in solidarity as fellow human beings, or become a world in which some of us are not legally as human as others. Divisions of exclusionary otherness are weaponized by authority in service to power and hierarchies of belonging; coupled with force and control this is fascist tyranny.
America, you do not need to judge who gets the white hat, Muslim or Jew; nor who is to be pronounced good on the basis of historical injustices and inequalities; no one wins a contest of victimhood. You need only choose this; do you hold that all human beings are created equal, or are some of us better than others by reason of birth? We fought two wars against the British Empire, over forty years, to win the principle of equality under the law; the people of Palestine and all humankind ask only the same.
We Americans have a historic role as guarantors of democracy and universal human rights; I say only that it must be applied equally, as all human souls are equal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/17/us/israel-palestinian-conflict-us-protests-trnd/index.html
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/boycott-divestment-sanctions-bds-israel-occupation-palestine
https://jacobinmag.com/2014/07/the-palestinian-resistance-and-its-enemies
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/hundred-years-war-on-palestine-review-khalidi
Torch of Liberty 
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