Today in Gaza the U.S. and Israeli governments stole the life out of yet another generation of Palestinians, adding to the banks of lives they’ve taken in their bid to control the fate of yet another terrain through sheer violence, one funded by billions of U.S. tax dollars in military aid to Israel each year, implicating every American alongside their government.
This, on the very anniversary of the forceful taking of Palestinian land for the formation of the Israeli state in 1948, or the same year in which racial covenants in the U.S.–which played a huge role in shaping the neighborhoods of Los Angeles now mired in gentrification–were outlawed by the Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer. It’s anyone’s guess whether the irony was lost on the Supreme court then, but it’s certainly lost amid the nation’s highest office now.
No space on the planet forced into being for the sake of capital or the reign of bigotry, and at the expense of life, will ever be legitimate and actually free. Indeed, in stratified Los Angeles and throughout cities in the U.S. and all over the world, capitalism has been undergirded by the backs of millions of history’s ‘otherized’ people since time immemorial. But we do not forget.
We are the land, and from Los Angeles to Gaza we resist occupation by hostile states, their elitist benefactors, and those who would be their imitators. Our only demand is to be free. Until that day arrives, all of our bodies remain on the line.
J.T.