by achrilock
israel
Israel’s most crucial occupied territories are the US and Europe, and it is these that must be liberated from their control before we can think about really helping Gaza, the West Bank, or occupied Jerusalem. It’s not rabbit hole conspiracy stuff. It is history and, social, geopolitical reality. Israel has spent decades positioning itself as kingmaker, and spreading tendrils of soft power, throughout the western world, making itself both arbiter of and participant in that empire.
And this would be fine were it not for the fact that it was and is all in service to a project of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and carceral imperial rule. And the establishment West is complicit in it, in fact, even eager for it, because Israel’s history and project is their history and project. All of these polities had similar brutal, exploitative births. And their intertwined systems operate in the same ways. Exclusion, fortification, exploitation, extraction, policing, and military shock.
It’s no different than Russia’s project in Eastern Europe and in Africa. Israel’s just more suave in how they operate. More pretty talk and establishing abstract boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, less flamboyant exhibitionism. Israel and the West reserve their overt militarism for the ‘other,’ for marginalized people, usually people of color. White supremacy and colonialism and imperialism never died. They live on, in Israel, in Europe, and in the US. This is the shape of the problem.
It was (very) orderly, up until a few days ago, and for the most part lawful. The students were going out of their way to run a ‘clean’ protest movement, and many of the so-called “outside agitators” (myself included) were supporting their decision, precisely to avoid a situation like 2020, because the students didn’t need that. They had much to lose. But it was making the Israeli government look bad, and they didn’t like it, so their American proxies allowed the police to riot.
Because the Israeli government thinks that the tactics used in Gaza or the West Bank, or even increasingly at home in Israel, are the way to deal with even the slightest, most polite dissent. And now it’s a shitshow, because this ain’t Gaza, but it sure as hell can be if you keep brutalizing people. We won’t put up with it, here. It will be like 2020 again, all summer long. And I’ll say it again, they will hate you forever, now, their whole lives. And you ain’t winning this election.