On Palestine: Follow The Money
It's not Anti-Semitism, it's not Islamophobia, it's Imperial Capitalism
One of the consequences of coming up in academia is the impulse to read every single thing possible before expressing a single opinion for fear of having an incomplete understanding of affairs. Sunday came and went, and I could only wring my hands and ponder the legitimacy of my voice and positionality in lending my thoughts to those interested in hearing them. Though I continue to read, listen, and learn everywhere I can, I must honor my own intelligence and integrity to claim outright, and not just on social media, that the United States and Israel are enacting an unjust and grotesque genocide against Palestine in which those of us who live and pay taxes on American soil are implicated and complicit. Hear me clearly: While the flames being fueled are Islamophobic and anti-Semitic, the heart of the conflict has nothing to do with either faith, neither of which preaches genocide as a matter of collective solidarity or self-perpetuation. At the heart of the conflict is white supremacist, capitalist, and imperialist greed enacted by the very same powers who have been raping the Global South since the 18th century.
I say this with confidence as a scholar of imperialism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and anti-racist practice. For my fellow millennials, we barely need to turn to the history books to feel and hear the resonance with our lived experience, wherever we might be in the world. This is a repetition, a historical and contemporary rhyme that has established the rhythm of all American foreign policy in waking memory. The U.S. government, the world’s greatest purveyor and collector of weapons of mass destruction, claimed that Iraq was home to such weapons and without verification, leveled a nation and their ancient culture, only to abandon them to new aggressors a decade later and quietly admitting their mistake (*cough* falsification *cough* outright deceit). The war on Iraq, materially, had little relationship with the actors who carried out the attacks on the towers. Their demands had to do with releasing the imperial stranglehold the U.S. enjoys on the Middle East through war, political manipulation, coups, and land-grabbing. No amount of state negotiations seemed to bear fruit, so jihadis took issues into their own hands and committed unspeakable atrocity, traumatizing an entire nation to this day. The message the West was fed is that “they” (who, exactly?) “hate Americans and their freedom.” I struggle to understand how this wasn’t pressed for a more nuanced political and economic interpretation, but this is no time for a rant on the state of American public education.
The subsequent illegal war on Iraq was one of the most lucrative endeavors in modern American history. We did that shit for oil. Similarly, the U.S. was the first to recognize the Israeli state, and Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid for 75 years. (Not Somalia, not Yemen, not Bangladesh, not Albania, not Myanmar, not Ukraine. Israel, and often on humanitarian grounds.) While the U.S. continues to frame itself as the world’s moral policeman in the name of democracy, it does little to ensure free and fair elections on its own land or recognize its colonial history of genocidal eradication of indigenous peoples, enslavement of Africans, and poisoning of all political and economic stability in much of Central America, wounds from which this country continues to suffer continuous and ever-increasing spiritual and political toxicity. The U.S. needs apartheid to continue for the money to keep flowing in our direction at the expense of the lives and freedoms of more than half the world. It’s entirely by design.
Current beneficiaries of apartheid and genocide in Palestine include Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, HP, IBM, and many other smaller players in Silicon Valley. As a historical materialist, I cannot help but repeat this: When the pitch of the hatred is murderous and senseless, follow. the fucking. money. Israel takes great pride in the massive success of their largest industries, which include the invention, testing, development, manufacture, and export of weapons and surveillance technologies now used around the world, with the biggest customers being the U.S., the U.K, Germany, and France. This should come as no surprise, nor is it accidental that these are also countries whose Islamophobic policies have oppressed their immigrant and Muslim populations despite the hand of colonialism in placing them there in the first place. To cover up and justify reckless, sadistic, craven capitalism, they fuck with culture.
The Israeli settler colonialist apartheid state has a huge military and surveillance infrastructure and has been controlling Palestinian access to electricity and clean water for at least many months. This recent attack on al-Ahli Hospital (a hospital generations older than the state of Israel) threatens to reduce the already vulnerable medical infrastructure to a(nother) mass grave. Misinformation is at an all-time high, together with shadow-banning of social media accounts expressing solidarity with Palestine. Organizations that fact-check mainstream news agencies taking cues from U.S. neoliberal capitalist investments in the Israeli propaganda machine have been effectively silenced by algorithmic repression (fuck you too, Mark Zuckerberg).
Israel has a very well-documented history of accusing Palestinians of attacks on their own people and of attacks that cannot be substantiated. False allegations of rapes and beheadings did substantial harm to the Palestinian cause and fueled already rampant Islamophobia worldwide. We have to be increasingly vigilant about who we believe and ensure the verification of the information that comes our way because the garbage we integrate from bad faith actors on TikTok cost other people elsewhere their lives. Biden, who has already proven himself incapable of demanding verification of any information, said he sees that the attack on al-Ahli Hospital was carried out by “the other team.” The framing of this conflict as a game on a playing field where there are rules of engagement followed by both parties rather than a blood-and-money-thirsty land-grab fueled by American interests is astonishing. Team? The other team? Palestine objectively does not have the weaponry or infrastructure to carry out that attack and has no motivation to do so. Palestinians don’t have to attack themselves to have something to blame on Israel. Israel has bombed Palestine more than 6,000 times in the last eleven days.
From the 18th century through the early 20th (or, it could be argued, today), Europeans painted a portrait of Africans and peoples of the Global South as subhuman monsters in need of a moral and spiritual education to justify fleecing them of raw materials, land, and labor. Arabs and Muslims have been painted similarly for Western access to land and oil. As Fariha Roísin so beautifully spells out in her post on October 15, Jews and Muslims have always been sibling peoples of The Book who historically enjoyed mostly peaceful and pluralistic communities across shared lands until the creation of the Israeli state and its alignment with American interests. The force playing our peoples against one another using horrifying, hateful narratives and justifications for ethnic cleansing are the same white supremacist capitalist assholes who have been raping the Global South since since the 18th century. Our tax dollars, rather than going toward our healthcare, education, infrastructure, housing, or economic relief, are supporting a genocide far from our shores in the interest of imperial control, access to oil, and propping up lucrative weapons and surveillance technology manufacturing. While doing so, the media circus has eschewed all responsibility to secure authentic information verified by multiple credible sources before feeding them to world leaders like the U.S. President Biden, who claimed to have seen photos and videos of beheaded babies and raped women, only to have to recant when The Washington Post’s insistence on clarification revealed that no news or watchdog agency could produce evidence that either atrocity occurred. As Roísin explains, Hamas knows a thing or two about optics. Terrorism functions on the spectacle, and those who practice it in the name of freedom and self-determination–however horrifyingly murderous–are razor-sharp in their understanding of the messages they’re trying to send. See: Terror in the Mind of God by Mark Juergensmeyer
I do not justify mass murder of civilians or anyone else anywhere for any reason, nor do I believe any reasonable person does. Therefore, I must believe that reasonable people can understand, without condoning or supporting murderous violence, that radical violent means for self-determination and emancipation come as a result of the failure and suppression of all non-violent and diplomatic measures. As a Bangladeshi, I see the Palestinian fight for political self-determination as aligned with ours, and the genocide against my people also enjoyed copious funding and support from the United States, Henry Kissinger in particular. While the U.S. declares their solidarity with Israel at every turn, almost all other powerful nations around the world responded to ongoing apartheid and routine bombing of Palestine with silence and apathy. All of them had the power to call for ceasefires, insist on meaningful negotiations for a two-state solution, or enact embargos to force Israeli and American hands. The BDS Movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) is dismissed as anti-Semitic rather than about enacting a non-violent push in solidarity with an occupied people. If, as we must, recognize the inhumanity suffered by Jews around the world in their survival of genocidal atrocity, it follows that we must recognize and fight against the same everywhere. That’s what it means when we say: NEVER AGAIN.
I call on my community to make space for Jewish and Israeli folks who are rightfully horrified and grief-stricken by Hamas’ attack, but who also call for a ceasefire on the understanding that asymmetrical violence is inherently unjust, that genocide is not Jewish value and does not represent the interests, politics, or spiritual quality of all Israeli citizens and Jews around the globe. There are Jews calling for ceasefires in America and worldwide who will not see a repetition of the horrors enacted on their ancestors carried out once more in their name. Supporting Palestine is not anti-Semitic; it is anti-colonial. No people who have suffered the multi-generational oppressions the way Jews have could possibly wish ethnic cleansing without generations of state brainwashing into hateful Islamophobia. I will say it again: the core motivations for genocide are not religious or ethnic. They are, as usual, capitalistic and material, and those who reap the benefits are white men sitting in the topmost suites of American skyscrapers sucking on their proverbial cigars while pitting us against one another.
I have more to say and likely will in the coming weeks, but for now, I will limit myself to stating my unequivocal solidarity with the people of Palestine in their fight for self-determination and emancipation in the face of asymmetrical genocidal violence in Israel’s campaign for a second Nakba. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Here are some resources I have found accessible and helpful:
Decolonize Palestine: Palestine 101: This website has an enormous archive of information, reading lists, and visual breakdowns of history that are essential fare for teachers looking to clarify the situation in Palestine to their students at high school or undergraduate levels
Hasan Piker’s breakdown of “How We Got Here”
Hasan Piker’s explanation of the Hamas attack in tactical terms
Amnesty International, Israel: 50 Years of Dispossession: Here we find detailed data on the nature and consequences of the restriction of resources on Palestinian people and how those deprivations amount to crimes against humanity
Palestine Legal: Resources for Activist Advocating for Palestine Across the U.S.
Extraordinary poet and friend Israeli-American Shira Erlichman detailing her experience with talking to her family about Palestine on Instagram
Jewish Voice for Peace: For Jews looking for a political home in anti-colonial practice