Everywhere is Palestine
Defeated
My last writing here had to do with the building of an Amazon Fulfillment Center in Oxnard and the negative impacts it would have on our community. Much has happened since then. Of course, much of the article laid out the enumeration of labor violations Amazon commits on a daily basis, and the complete war they waged on employees trying to unionize in Bessemer Alabama. Since then the vote in Bessemer failed, although the employees are rightfully taking Amazon to court for Voter suppression and other violations, Amazon still continues to amass unforeseen amounts of wealth at the expense of its average worker. Initially I planned on writing about the vote failing and` how we take that going forward. Before setting out to write it I already knew what I wanted to say, that being that this vote dying was not the end of unionization in Amazon and it isn’t the end of a organized labor resurgence in America either. If anything it is both the sign of more of both of these to come and a sign that we still have much work to do. Despite knowing what to say I didn’t want to say it though. I didn’t want to write it because although it was an acknowledgement that the conversation of labor rights and democracy in the workplace was increasing and expanding it still has a really long way to go, a much larger cultural shift must come, before anything real could happen. That was until the recent Israeli genocide on the Palestinian People and the relentless 11 days of bombing the Gaza strip, also called “the worlds largest concentration camp” by Norman Finkelstein. You may think that the recent ethnic cleansing efforts from the Israeli Military State against the Palestinian People has nothing to do with organized labor and human rights here in America and here in Oxnard even. See for yourself why it is.
The Times They Are A-Changin
For me, personally, the 2014 assault on Gaza was a political awakening that I carry with me until today. Of course the subjugation of the Palestinian people and their land by the Israeli settler project did not begin in 2014. However for me as a young teen it was the first time I had gotten the true story of Israel’s settler domination that had been happening at least since the removal of Palestinians from their homes and lands in 1948 or what the Palestinian people refer to as the “Nakba” or “the catastrophe”. In 2014, as it had done in the past, Israel “defense” forces bombed the Gaza strip without discrimination, killing over 2,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, also things not new to these bombings/terrorist attacks by the state of Israel. The 2014 “Gaza War” (the name that is given to the massacre of women and children by a much superior armed force while living in an open air prison) was a revealing moment for a few reasons. In 2014 Barack Obama was the president of the United States, and like both his predecessors and soon to be successor in Donald Trump, not only did he excuse Israel’s blatant war crimes as “the right to defend itself”, but in his administration just as the ones before and after as I mentioned, gave billions in weapons, intelligence, training, and diplomatic support to the Israeli government so that it could carry out it’s genocide. I’m sure many of you reading this have now seen through the Obama administration for what it was, a neoliberal glib gesture that sought to re-legitimize the status quo that brought about all the problems that it promised to not repeat. Whether that be more financial crashes, more military interventions, or more social safety net austerity. But at the time, 2014, the neoliberal Obama administration still had a sizeable portion of the country on snooze since it had a black face to cover up it’s imperialist and empire expanding motives. This was especially true with the “Gaza War” that year. The event was almost entirely blacklisted from mainstream media and when it did get mention it was to reaffirm Israel’s “right to defend itself” or to reaffirm that Hamas was a terrorist organization that does not represent the will of the average Palestinian. Street activism was much the same. Sure small groups of anti war protesters & pro Palestinian groups amassed, but a larger movement and a larger conversation was never on the table. Palestine was not on most Americans minds, and if it was, your average American had to get past a lifetime of indoctrination to find out what truly happened.
So four years passed. That isn’t four years of nothing mind you. Just like every day since the Nakba, Palestinians especially in Gaza are under constant siege and denied their fundamental human rights. Whether it’s the fact that essentially no citizens of the Gaza strip are allowed to leave and almost no press is allowed in. Or the fact that the Israeli government has calculated the exact amount of food aid to give each Palestinian so that they are fed enough to not die but always in a state of constant fatigue and hunger. Or the daily expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral homes. Or the brutal police repression that works in tandem with far right Israeli groups to brutalize and kill Palestinians. Or the fact that nearly half of the 2 million people living in the 25 mile long and 6 mile wide strip that is Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, are children. Or that 70% of these children are unemployed. Or that nearly all of them have some form of traumatic stress disorder from the conditions that have been imposed on them. All these things constantly persist. Nevertheless 4 years passes and in 2018 Israel carries out another mass killing of protestors, this time under the Trump administration. It was called “The Great March of Return”. The march was an organized coordinated effort mainly led by the youth in Gaza where they were to march toward the no man’s land established barrier between Gaza and the State of Israel and setup tents in homage to the tents Palestinians resided in after the Nakba/removal from their ancestral lands. Nonviolent, highly organized, and seeking to make a global outcry was the purpose of this march. To bring light to the Palestinian struggle, the conditions in Gaza and the other occupied territories, and to call for international solidarity towards their cause. Over a hundred peaceful Palestinians, armed at worst with rocks for which they couldn’t even throw over the border fence which kept them from the brigades of soldiers and tanks aimed at them, were killed during the protest which lasted from March 30 to May 15. Among those killed were children, the disabled, journalists, and even medics with internationally recognized field medic gear on. Many of these murders were no accident. Behind the safety of a border wall and a massive no man’s land chasm between Gaza and Israel, IDF soldiers fired bullets while looking down ultra magnified lenses hundreds and hundreds of yards away, shooting children, women, and the elderly like fish in a barrel. The Israeli government backed by the Trump administration made the same excuses as it did under Obama’s. That it had a right to defend itself, that Hamas were terrorists, and that civilians killed were either “human shields” of Hamas or necessary deaths in order to once again “defend themselves”.
Operation Guardian of the Walls
That’s what the Israeli government is calling it’s latest wave of terror attacks and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. As I’m writing this over 243 Palestinians have been killed. 66 of them children. Preceding the last 11 days of bombing Gaza, Israeli settlers and the Israeli courts were removing Palestinians from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Obviously this is an outrage as it is considering the Palestinians that live there have lived there for generations are being told that they must give up their homes and effectively leave the country or die. But to add on to it the Israeli courts have been extra aggressive in these removals and during the holy month of Ramadan no less. This persecution and hate percolated days later when IDF soldiers fired tear gas, flash grenades, and “non lethal” rounds at people peacefully praying within the Al-Aqsa mosque. Further still Israeli citizens took to the streets, destroying Palestinian businesses while celebrating and even publicly beating a Palestinian to within inches of his life on live tv. All of this stoked and protected by Israeli security forces and police. Then the 11 days of bombing I mentioned followed. The UN, who as we’ll get into in a second failed to protect the Palestinians in any meaningful way, estimates that at least 58,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes from these bombings. Plastered across social media were photos and videos of Israeli and U.S missiles and bombs destroying residential neighborhoods, vehicles, bookstores, and even the bombing of a media tower owned by major outlets such as AP and Al Jazeera (which the IDF claims was being used as a hideout/base for Hamas). The main roads to the main hospital were bombed. Journalists were killed in their homes. White phosphorus, drones, bunker busting bombs, and plenty of other weapons of war were used against civilians in Gaza. Countries like China rightfully called for a ceasefire amongst the UN Security Council and condemned Israel for it’s crimes against humanity. Further, countries such as Iran gave direct financial and military support to the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the democratically elected Hamas, so that they could mount a resistance to the Israeli aggression. Meanwhile though, much like the last two Administrations and the many that came before them, Joe Biden and his administration continued to cover for the Israeli Apartheid Regime. Using the exact same words, saying that Israel “has a right to defend itself”. They also blocked every resolution working toward punishing Israel for it’s crimes against humanity and left the UN security council a complete wash. This only extended the deaths and destruction as the days went on without a call of condemnation on Israel. Not to mention at the height of this massacre, his administration passed a potential $735 million more dollars for precision-guided weapons to Israel. It looked as though this massacre was going to just become another in a slew of massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people since 1948. But something is different. Surprisingly, instead of continuing the slaughter like they normally would, the IDF and the Israeli Apartheid State backed off. It called for a ceasefire. That same day Palestinians took to the streets of Gaza and elsewhere in Israel in celebration. They had won. They had been pushed down, stepped on, subjugated, brutalized, and murdered like this before, but in those times past their survival against annihilation was not met by worldwide solidarity. This time is different.
Everywhere is Palestine
The 2020 protests nationwide and worldwide against police brutality in reaction to the murder of George Floyd is what I suspect, as others do, the catalyst for the upsurge in both attention and activism around the Palestinian cause this time. 10's of thousands and even in some cases 100's of thousands took to the streets in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Chicago, Gaza and the occupied territories, Toronto, New York City, and all over the world. Most of them made up of 20 something years old’s of every different race, religion, and gender. The same people who were at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter Protests in the spring/summer of 2020. Not only did people come out in force like they never have before around this issue, but they came correct too. The protests have been unequivocal in calling for the end to the Israeli Apartheid Regime and calling out the U.S role in maintaining the state of Israel as yet another outpost for its imperial interests at the expense of an entire people’s. Seeing this is a sure sign that something is changing, but we also can’t let it slip. I brought up the Amazon Bessemer unionization vote and it’s failure not just because I wrote about it before, but because it directly relates to the struggle for a free Palestine. The current mechanisms for change, for institutional piecemeal reform to the working class, are completely broken in this country. The political and socioeconomic system serves a ruling class that is growing ever the more rich and powerful as the average worker becomes ever more isolated and alienated. The successful coordinated assassination of unionization attempts by Amazon shows that reality. A free Palestine is how we transcend that reality
The protests of last spring/summer against police brutality proved to be the engine for radical awakening for millions of Americans. Even more, the movement found itself intersecting with various other movements and creating a coalition around issues from police brutality, to workers rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and more. The fight to end Israeli Apartheid and Free Palestine from it’s colonial domination is now and must be part of that coalition. The powers that be are vehemently against that, and that is why by embracing it and using it as a catalyst for a larger global movement we will prevail over them. In dominating and subjugating the Palestinian people the Israeli Settler State, and the American Empire that helped create and now maintains it for, in Joe Biden’s words “to protect her [The U.S] interests in the region”, has sowed its own seeds of demise. We the working class people of the world must be the demise of this racist, imperialist, colonialist, capitalist system. Here in Oxnard we have not only experienced a corporation like Amazon moving into our community bent on suppressing worker rights and preying on our people, but we also were in the streets calling for the end to police brutality and the dismantling of the current policing regime in the United States and abroad during 2020. Our community MUST stand with the Palestinian people in solidarity and take to the streets of Oxnard to say that we and the Palestinian people are one and the same. That our struggle against state violence is intertwined with theirs. In August of 2014, protestors took to the streets of Ferguson Missouri after the police killing of Michael Brown. In the following days the police shot protestors with rubber bullets, assaulted journalists, and quite literally helped murder activists and protestors. Amidst all this, still dealing with their own struggle in the 2014 “Gaza War” that as I described was more of a mass execution of innocent Palestinians, Palestinians reached out to Ferguson protestors on social media offering them advice on how to get the tear gas being deployed by police, out of their eyes. Palestinians helped Ferguson protestors correctly identify the tear gas and other munitions used by the police because they recognized it as being made by the same company that made the tear gas they were subjected to at the hands of the IDF. It’s our time to do the same. To call out the forces of imperial and colonial domination that is the State of Israel against the Palestinian people and tell them we are with them. That they are not alone in their domination and oppression and that we are there to stand with them in the streets to fight!
GO TO WHATEVER ACTION YOU CAN OR BUILD YOUR OWN ACTION!
