Palestinian children were martyred today.
On Oct. 7, members of the Hamas organization coordinated assaults on select venues within occupied Palestine (the state of Israel), that resulted in the deaths of Israeli armed forces members and civilians, to break the eighteen-year Israeli siege of Gaza. The response of the Israeli government has been the indiscriminate carpet-bombing of seventeen square miles of Palestinian territory that is functionally a concentration camp.
When a police precinct in Minnesota had been set ablaze, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza shared in the joys of Afro-America, while Israeli forces continued to militarize American domestic forces. This is an indictment against the state of Israel, which like the United States, operates as a settler-colonial project dedicated to consumption. American Manifest Destiny propelled the genocide of several First Nations peoples, under the guise of a divine sanction. What divinity is there in raining death upon the orphaned?
Devoid of compassion the United States expects its citizens to tolerate more senseless massacres. Having been made numb from a history of human sacrifice for profit, the United States demands that its citizens not only fund the Israeli pogrom but also viciously support it. To question the state of Israel, or to recognize the human existence of Palestinians, is to align with terrorism, barbarism, and fear.
Yet is it civilized to conscript civilians to become snipers aimed at the legs of children? What is noble in bulldozing a mother’s home in front of her, while her children struggle to console her? Is there honor in forbidding a people from visiting the fields of their youth?
The United States has utilized Israel as an investment to maintain order within the “Middle East,” but this investment has proven difficult to manage. The Oct. 7 assault has ignited a genocidal fury within Israel that has revealed to the world what Washington has ignorantly accepted. The masses of the world are demanding that the State of Israel be brought to justice through mass protests in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
As of now, Yemen, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran have assisted militarily in an explicit form. The war escalates each day, with neighboring nations being disgusted by Israel’s brutality. The United States has mobilized several forces within the wider region as an act of deterrence, while its military bases are struck with resulting casualties.
This is not World War III. It is the continued anti-colonial struggle that has always rebuked insatiable greed. The Palestinian liberation struggle is of the same spirit as Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army. The strikes against U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria are excursions in the same history as raids on colonial outposts.
There is a protracted struggle for liberation. For those oppressed within the United States, We must remember the traditions that reared us and those we’ve struggled against, if we seek to be free. If Palestinians are under the heel of Israel, then the world is under the boot of oppression.
Jy’Mir Starks is a student of the Kwame Ture Society, a member of Groove Phi Groove and 1L Law Student at Howard University Law School
Copy edited by Alana Matthew
