Why should people in the U.S. care about Palestine?

 

Our money is funding Israel’s war on Palestine.

Over the last decade, Israel has received $38 billion in aid from the United States. That’s $10.5 million every single day; a full fourth of the Israeli military budget comes from U.S. aid.  

 

Israel would like the world to believe that this conflict is a religious war, but make no mistake: it’s all about land and who controls it.  Israel has a long-standing goal of displacing Palestinians from their homeland. The continued occupation stands in the way of any peace in Palestine. Without justice, peace is an empty promise. These are not two equal sides. Israel is heavily armed and systematically oppressive while Palestine is fighting simply to exist. We in the United States must do everything we can to put an end to this injustice by supporting our Palestinian sisters and brothers through boycotts and solidarity actions, and by demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.   

 

Our money is funding Israel’s apartheid state.

 

The popular claim is that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” and is held up as a bastion of Western culture and human rights.  This belies its true status as one of the most unjust, unequal, and worst violators of civil liberties and freedoms. Israel, in fact, is a profoundly undemocratic country, premised on the denial of Palestinian self-determination. In particular, the U.S. and Israel like to tout the latter’s relatively progressive legislation around gay rights in order to shield Israel from criticism around other policies, in a process known as “pinkwashing.” This gay rights legislation, of course, is only enjoyed by the settler population and not the Arab and Palestinian population.

 

Israeli human rights organization Adalah has compiled a Discriminatory Laws Database of over 65 Israeli laws that form the legal backbone of anti-Palestinian apartheid. Millions of Palestinians live as second class citizens at best. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews also face racism within Israeli culture, which privileges white or light-skinned Ashkenazi Jews.  Additionally, the liberties Israel affords to its citizens are denied in Gaza and the West Bank, where residents–male, female or non-binary; queer or straight–only enjoy the right to be equally bombed, gunned down, or expelled from their homes. 

 

BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, an international campaign started by Palestinian workers, scholars, and activists to nonviolently resist illegal Israeli occupation and draw attention to the apartheid conditions under which Israel forces them to live. The movement takes its inspiration from the international campaign that helped end South African apartheid. 

Our money is funding Israel’s child prisoners and other political prisoners.

 

Children are not spared Israeli brutality. The Zionist entity of Israel regularly targets and kidnaps Palestinian children in order to curb Palestinian resistance. Their tactics include dragging youths and children from their beds in the middle of the night, then beating and torturing them into confessions while they’re in detention. A prominent Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, horrifically said that when Palestinian girls who protest are detained, “We should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras.”

 

Ahed Tamimi is one of hundreds of Palestinian youths who has been held hostage by the illegitimate Israeli forces.  She became famous for her arrest in 2017 at age 16 after slapping an armored soldier who shot her cousin.  From as early as age 11 she had struggled with the Israeli occupiers when they first arrested her mother, then later her older brother, and later still her younger brother.  By the time she was arrested herself, she was already known for speaking about the effect of the Israeli occupation on children.  She managed to obtain her high school degree while in an Israeli prison.

 

Ahed is not the first child prisoner of the Israeli government, nor the last. In fact, minors are routinely imprisoned and arrested merely on suspicion, without arrest warrants, in order to terrorize them and their families. Israel is the only country in the world that prosecutes children in military courts. It is estimated that over 12,000 Palestinian children and youths have been arrested and prosecuted in since 2000. The treatment of children by Israel runs counter to international human rights law and international humanitarian law, but that hasn’t stopped Israel from blindfolding and restraining children with shackles and handcuffs, placing them in solitary confinement, beating them, and refusing them food and water. Children as young as 10 have been imprisoned, and a three-year-old child was briefly detained for allegedly throwing stones. When a toddler is treated as a threat, something is grossly wrong with the system.

 

Our money is funding Israeli’s land grabs and displacement.

 

The Israel-Palestine conflict and the oppression Palestinians face began with Al Nakba when over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948 to make room for Israeli settlers. Nakba Day is celebrated each year worldwide on May 15.

 

On March 30, 1976, Palestinians organized a protest in response to the Israeli government confiscating more land to expand Zionist settlements. That day, the Israel Defense Force killed six young Palestinians. March 30 is now celebrated every year as Land Day, to commemorate their memory and to continue to protest the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian land. People across the world join with Palestinians to protest for the right to return and for freedom for their homeland.

 

Unfortunately, the land grab continues as every year more Palestinian land is “settled” by right-wing Israelis who intentionally move gated secured communities on to Palestinian land in order to push against the borders and make it harder for that land to be reclaimed by those who have lived there for generations.  These communities are then served by Israeli-only roads, water, and electricity.

 

The U.S. imports repression from Israel

 

American police departments that are responsible for the murders of many unarmed youth of color — including Minnesota’s own Isak Aden — send their officers to training programs in Israel. 

 

The U.S. does not keep all that violence training for use against our own people but shares it with desperate refugees seeking a better life.  The Trump administration contracted with Israeli company Elbit Systems to help build the southern border wall specifically because Elbit’s technology was already “field-tested” against border-crossings in desert conditions, i.e., against Palestinians trying to navigate their homeland.

 

Ironically, this technology in service of keeping out immigrants is also being used against the people who have lived here long before most of us “immigrated.”  In March 2019, the U.S. Border Patrol used the threat of Trump’s border wall to force the indigenous Tohono O’odham Nation to agree to massive, military-style “integrated fixed towers,” to be built by Elbit Systems on the tribal nation’s sovereign lands. The Tohono O’odham people live on both sides of the US-Mexico border, crossing between what are now Arizona and Sonora states for thousands of years. Combined with the growing presence of armed Border Patrol squads, the surveillance towers will make the Tohono O’odham reservation “the most militarized community in the United States of America,” according to the International Indian Treaty Council. Immigrant rights advocates have linked increased border militarization with thousands of deaths in recent decades.

 

The Minnesota State Board of Investments (SBI), chaired by Governor Tim Walz, owns, as of December 2019 an estimated $2.2 million worth of shares in Elbit Systems. Elbit also manufactures white phosphorus, cluster bombs, and armed drones used in Israeli killings of Palestinians. Investment funds in countries like Denmark and Norway have already divested from Elbit. Despite years of local Palestinian, Jewish, and solidarity activists demanding divestment–including thousands of petitions we delivered at the SBI’s meeting in August–Governor Walz continues to ignore concerns. 

 

U.S. imperialism uses Israel to control the Middle East. 

 

Israel occupies strategic land at the nexus of three continents, serving as a foothold for the US to dominate trade routes and project power over Middle Eastern oil while thwarting unity among Arab nations. The U.S. uses Israel as a staging ground for wars in the middle east, notably against Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya. Israel functions as a strategic outpost for US imperialism in the entire Middle East.

 

We can’t afford to NOT care about Palestine

 

With every criticism of Israel — from its militarism to its anti-Black racism to its blatant settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians -= we must emphasize that it is the United States which ultimately greenlights these injustices. Too many American anti-Zionists speak of Israel as though it is a rogue actor, controlling the U.S. on puppet strings. This idea is contradicted by the so-called “deal of the century” that Trump and Netanyahu want to impose on Palestine under threat of sanctions and future violence.  The proposal would annex even more of the West Bank and completely remove Palestinians’ capacity for self-defense by fully demilitarizing the “new” state of Palestine, even requiring Palestinians to pay “protection fees” to their Israeli occupiers. This land grab would not be possible without the U.S. government imposing these “accords” and would not be proposed without the potential benefit it would provide the U.S. in oil and military contracts. We resolutely document that Israel is a component part of U.S. foreign policy – and not the other way around.