On a campus that claims to prize the free exchange of ideas, some ideas are barred from entering. But for those of us actually interested in freedom, challenging the existence of capitalism, the United States, or Israel should not be considered heresy. We have every right to question the existence of states that discriminate by design.
Black subjugation in the United States is no accident – this country’s founding document bears the design of white supremacy. Since ratifying the U.S. Constitution required the Three-Fifths Compromise, Black people live under a political contract that counts us as subhuman. Though our subjugation has since changed form – with slavery evolving into convict leasing, Jim Crow into mass incarceration, and lynchings into extrajudicial murders – we are no closer to our freedom.
Dangling the bait of progress, the United States has kept us playing an endless game of chase. To paraphrase Malcolm X, when the U.S. sticks a knife in our back nine inches and then pulls it out six inches, it might look like progress, but it’s still murder.
Real progress is impossible when Black freedom is a national security threat. It is impossible when the United States spends hundreds of millions in counter-intelligence programs to destabilize our communities. It is impossible when so many of our leaders have been imprisoned, exiled, or killed – when even a non-violent reformist like MLK cannot survive. It is impossible when a free children’s breakfast program run by the Black Panthers led FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to call them “the greatest threat to internal security of the country” at a time when the KKK was bombing Black churches. Progress is impossible because the U.S. is more threatened by Black survival than white terrorism.
For Palestinians a knife is still stuck nine inches deep, with progress impossible because Israeli state terrorism is considered a national security measure. Just as homemade rockets face more censure than weapons-grade white phosphorus, Palestinian children throwing stones face harsher sentences than Israeli settlers committing murder.
It is no surprise that Israel’s apologists often compare it to the U.S. As settler colonial states they share founding values – doctrines not of “democracy” or “equality,” but of Manifest Destiny and Zionism, which justify and require their ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations. For Israel to celebrate its independence last week, Palestinians had to remember their Nakba – when 750,000 of their people were expelled from their homes. For Israel to hold onto its Jewish majority, Palestinians have been held under military occupation. And for Israel to exist as a preferential Jewish state, Palestinians in Israel must exist as second-class citizens.
Palestinian subjugation is no accident. Paying lip-service to equality, both states maintain discriminatory laws to sequester their surplus populations into impoverished ghettos, and then profit from their surveillance and incarceration. Citing national security concerns, both seek to eliminate leadership among the oppressed; three years after the FBI coordinated the assassination of 21-year old Fred Hampton in his bed, Israeli security forces assassinated intellectual Ghassan Kanafani and his 17-year old niece in his car.
Like its U.S. patron, Israel has no intention of permitting freedom for those it subjugates. Since invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli policy has been designed to prevent a two-state solution. Dangling the bait of peace, the formal peace process acts as cover for its ongoing colonization of the land it considers ‘Greater Israel’. Defying the Oslo Accords, Israel relentlessly constructs new settlements and demolishes Palestinian homes in an ongoing effort to fragment the West Bank, change ‘facts on the ground’, and prevent the viability of a contiguous Palestinian state.
There is no need to infer Israel’s intentions from its actions. Just this year, its re-elected Prime Minister plainly announced plans to continue denying self-determination to the millions of Palestinians under his control.
The Israeli state knows it cannot allow freedom for Palestinians on either side of the Green Line; if Israel were to grant equal rights to all people – including the right for Palestinians to return to their homes, just as it grants any Jewish person the right to immediate citizenship – it would mean the end of Israel as a preferential Jewish state. This end would arrive not through violent means, nor even the loss of a demographic majority, but rather because the end of Israel’s preferential treatment entails the end of Zionism as a political practice.
Both the U.S. and Israel are diametrically opposed to liberation, for a free and equal Black and Palestinian population within their borders would require the complete transformation of their governing principles and institutions. Just as a United States with liberated Black people is no longer the same country, equality for all people under the control of Israel would mean its dissolution. If we are working towards a world in which Black and Palestinian people are finally free, then by definition we are working towards a world in which both these states no longer exist.
And for all who find this conclusion too extreme: remember that every July, when this country celebrates revolution, it endorses a Declaration calling for its own abolition, for “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
Turns out even the founding racists had some good ideas.
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