May 15 2021 was Nakba Day, the Day of Catastrophe, when Palestinians mark the anniversary of their violent expulsion from the lands currently occupied by the Apartheid-state of Israel. Thousands were massacred, while hundreds of thousands more were forced to flee for their lives. Even though this genocidal action took place 73 years ago in 1948, the genocide against the Palestinian people never stopped. This was the point driven home at the rally I attended in front of Guelph City Hall on the 15th, in which three hundred people showed up (masks on of course) to show their solidarity with Palestine. There were marches all around the world that day, 100,000 people in the streets of London, 10,000 in Washington D.C., thousands in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, all in support of an oppressed people fighting for their lives against a brutal occupation that keeps on killing.
Today we’re seeing Israeli bombs raining down on Gaza, with upwards of fifty airstrikes taking place within the space of fifteen minutes. Today we’re seeing Palestinian citizens of Israel hunted down by Zionist settler mobs with the full backing of the police and military. We’re seeing Palestinian neighborhoods attacked and vandalized, the forcible expulsion of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque placed under siege by far-right Israeli settlers chanting “death to Arabs” and other racist slogans. As of Sunday May 16, 174 Palestinians have been killed in this latest round of violence by an Apartheid system that has oppressed them for more than seven decades. Over thirty of those deaths have been children.
This is what settler-colonial violence looks like. The kind of racist lynch-mob violence on stolen land that gripped Apartheid South Africa in the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre or Jim Crow Apartheid USA during the “Red Summer” of 1919. The kind of institutional violence that is always under the surface in settler-colonial societies like Canada and is always ready to erupt into open brutality, blatant massacres and killing sprees. The type of violence exhibited by the Israeli settlers currently attempting to expel Palestinian families in East Jerusalem, forcibly taking over their homes with the full backing of the police and military, is more than familiar to indigenous peoples in North America.
The following is a good summary of the Nakba that People’s Dispatch put out recently:
And just like the Hollywood movies that Parenti describes in his talk, in which outnumbered colonizers are portrayed as the good guys holding out against hordes of barbarous natives, this media narrative turns reality on its head. The Palestinians don’t have an army, they don’t have fighter jets, they don’t even have a state. Meanwhile Israel, a classic Western-style settler-colonial state built on stolen Palestinian land, has one of the most powerful armies in the world and receives billions of dollars in military aid every year from the United States, Canada, the UK and other Western countries. Out of a population of only 7 million people, more than 600,000 Israelis are active-duty soldiers at any given time. And yet the media tries to portray the violent repression directed against Palestinians as a “conflict” between two roughly equal camps. It’s ridiculous and bears no relation to reality. All this false balancing does is provide propaganda cover for an Israeli Apartheid system and the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land.
Perhaps the most blatant example of this happened in 2018 with the Great March of Return. The Great of March of Return saw thousands of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza marching peacefully to the border wall with Israel to protest against the brutal siege and blockade being inflicted on their communities. The Israeli Army responded with lethal force, hundreds were killed, including medical personnel, and yet the media still tried to portray this horrific massacre of civilians as a “clash” between militant rivals because some Palestinian youths set some kites on fire and floated them into Israeli airspace. Some of you might remember the shows I did back then when I would read the names of those Palestinians who were killed during those protests, many of them deliberately murdered by Israeli soldiers using 50 caliber sniper rifles equipped with thermal vision scopes for precision targeting. It was the same thing on May 15 2021 when the Israeli Air Force dropped a precision laser-guided bomb on a residential high rise in the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza, killing eight children along with their mothers.
This is especially true because Canada is among Israel’s greatest supporters. Apart from some tepid statements by Jagmeet Singh of the NDP, largely cancelled out by his party’s appalling record in supporting Israeli Apartheid, no one in the Canadian political class has said a word about the mass murder being carried out against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Even as multiple American congresspeople are issuing statements that are surprisingly critical of Israel and the Biden Administration’s continued political and military support for Israel. The U.S. has once again blocked a UN resolution condemning Israeli aggression, while Canada has attempted to do the same in the context of multiple UN agencies, providing diplomatic cover for settler-colonial violence in a fellow settler-colonial state. Even though upwards of 80% of Canadians in poll after poll have expressed support for the Palestinian cause, Canadian foreign policy has not budged an inch. This is going to have to change, and it’s only going to change if the mass mobilizations that we saw on May 15th are sustained and can influence the upcoming federal election. The present consensus in Canadian politics with regard to Israel, from the Conservatives to the Greens, is absolutely disgusting. Solidarity with Palestine is there in the streets, it’s growing stronger all the time, and it needs to extend to Parliament as well.
Lowkey – Long Live Palestine
I’m going try to be more consistent with putting out new episodes from now on. Next week I plan to focus on a country sometimes called the “Israel of the Americas” and the popular struggles being waged there against another US-supported terror state backed by death squads. Colombia is a country where oppressed people are rising against a neo-colonial ruling class that murders indigenous leaders, trade unionists and human rights defenders on a regular basis. Colombia is a country armed to the teeth with American weapons, is home to multiple U.S. military bases, and its right-wing government allows Canadian mining companies to plunder the land with impunity. But the people have had enough and the current national strike movement is gaining momentum every single day as popular mobilizations continue against rampant and lethal police violence, paramilitary killings of popular leaders, and anti-people neo-liberal economic policies.
So, stay tuned to Back in the USSR for that. For now, I want to play a clip from the Gray Zone’s May 14th livestream in which Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada outlines the current situation in Palestine and explains, much better than I can, the details of what is going on.
Gaza Under Attack: Israeli Apartheid with AliAbunimah, Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal
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