{"id":1579731,"date":"2024-03-29T05:56:39","date_gmt":"2024-03-29T05:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=317370"},"modified":"2024-03-29T05:56:39","modified_gmt":"2024-03-29T05:56:39","slug":"reflections-on-gaza-empire-and-who-and-what-is-breaking-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/03\/29\/reflections-on-gaza-empire-and-who-and-what-is-breaking-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Gaza, \u201cEmpire,\u201d and Who and What is Breaking the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Image by Nat<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently attended a moving presentation of Palestinian poetry at the public library in the University of Iowa campus town of Iowa City. The presenters and audience were largely (though not exclusively) university-based and included a number of folks from the university\u2019s renowned Iowa Writers Workshop. There was an invitation for audience members to speak after the presentation. Here below is a write-up based on some notes I took during the talk.<\/em>\u00a0I should have spoken but didn\u2019t. I didn\u2019t feel on my game to bring across what needed to be said on such short notice. Next time I\u2019ll try to do better.<\/em><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s possible that me not being employed in \u201chigher ed\u201d anymore or anywhere else for that matter leaves me freer than others might feel to say things that could get you in trouble at a major public university in a dark red state like Iowa.\u00a0 There\u2019s a new Zionist version of McCarthyism haunting campuses right now and if its haunting them in bright blue places like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, you can be sure its haunting them in right-wing Iowa. This new McCarthyism smears honest discussion of what\u2019s happening now to the Palestinian people (and what\u2019s happened to those people in the past) as \u201canti-Semitism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poetry shared here just now was both beautiful and painful to hear.\u00a0 I am still having a hard time processing the depth and degree of the horror that has been inflicted on the people of Gaza over the last nearly half a year. I just saw a report suggesting that the real Gazan death count so far is 50,000 not 30,000 if you factor in \u201cmissing\u201d people, including whole families, still\u00a0buried in the rubble<\/a>\u00a0of America and Israel\u2019s bombs. We should also note that Israel has been stepping up its slaughter rate in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

What are we supposed to say about such terrifying and appalling mass murder? It\u2019s soul-chilling, mind-numbing, sadistic madness taking place in broad daylight, in full public view. It\u2019s almost beyond words but the poets we just heard remind us that words, like Palestinian and Black lives, still matter.<\/p>\n

I want to pick up on a couple things this event\u2019s eloquent moderator said. Early in his remarks he read from a poem whose author challenged us to \u201cname\u201d those who have \u201cbroken\u201d Palestine.\u00a0 Later on he indirectly took up the challenge by making a reference to \u201cempire,\u201d noting his sensitivity to \u201cempire\u201d as a native of Haiti.<\/p>\n

Empire indeed.<\/em>\u00a0Let me try to add a little historical specificity to that word. Without discounting or apologizing for the criminality of the Zionists and their occupation, the Zionists\u2019 guns have always been loaded and equipped by\u00a0empire, by Western Empire<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It was the British who for their own imperial reasons sponsored and oversaw the initial Zionist presence in Palestine and it was the British who trained and equipped the Zionist militias who savagely and genocidally drove out hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people to form the occupation, terror, and apartheid state of Israel in 1947-48.<\/p>\n

Since 1947 and especially since the Six Days War in the 1967, it has been Britain\u2019s global hegemonic successor the American Empire above all that has provided the critical funding, equipping, and political-diplomatic protection for Israel as Tel Aviv has steadily increased its bloody displacement of the Palestinian people.\u00a0Since 1948, Israel has received more than $200 billion dollars\u2019 worth of assistance from Washington. It gets $4\u00a0<\/em>billion in military aid annually, with Joe Biden pledging an additional $14 billion in the wake of the Hamas attack last October. United States bombs rain down on Palestinian hospitals and apartment complexes and children. The U.S. has shot down one ceasefire resolution after another at the United Nations since last October.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not really \u201cthe Israel-Hamas War\u201d: it\u2019s been the one-sided\u00a0US-Israeli Crucifixion of Gaza<\/em>, the latest and worst escalation of a 76-year Palestinian \u201cNakba\u201d (the Arab word for catastrophe) that the world\u2019s leading imperial superpower the US has backed from the start.<\/p>\n

And this isn\u2019t just about AIPAC, the Israel Lobby<\/a>.\u00a0 In pursuit of its own strategic imperial interests around the world, Washington has a long record of supporting repressive right wing around the planet, with disastrous consequences on every continent.<\/p>\n

Empire, and after WWII the US Empire has broken Palestine.\u00a0 Washington has also broken Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Chile, Honduras, El Salvado, Honduras, the Congo, Libya, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Paraguay, Iraq, Iran, and \u2026the list goes on.<\/p>\n

(Washington has for years been breaking Ukraine, about whose white victims of Russian aggression our ruling class has told us to show great concern while expecting us to tolerate Israel\u2019s US-funded\/-equipped\/-protected genocidal ethnic cleansing of brown-skinned Arabs.)<\/p>\n

And the American Empire has long enlisted Israel in the imperial breaking of people and nations all over the world, not just in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

If you attend any of the big Palestinian demonstrations in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles or any other big city, you will hear activists and thousands of people chanting something powerful: \u201cThere is only one solution, Intifada revolution<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contrary to what the new McCarthyites are saying,\u00a0there\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0nothing antisemitic or genocidal about the word intifada.\u00a0 Its Arabic for \u201cuprising against oppression.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Rising up against oppression\u2026 imagine that!<\/em>\u00a0Isn\u2019t that what US-Americans are told their nation\u2019s Founders did in 1776?<\/p>\n

Let me finish with something I get to say without fear of losing a job I don\u2019t have or a promotion or grant I\u2019ll never get, and without any of the doctrinal inhibitions that are so commonly internalized in the academic world: we need an\u00a0Intifada Revolution<\/em>\u00a0in the heart of \u201cempire,\u201d right here in the belly of the beast of the most dangerous and aggressive imperialist state on Earth. And we need to confront not just\u00a0who<\/em>\u00a0is breaking Gaza and the world but\u00a0what<\/em>\u00a0is breaking Gaza and the world. The\u00a0what<\/em>\u00a0is the underlying system of US capitalism-imperialism, which will always find new leaders \u2014 new\u00a0whos<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 to blame for its crimes until it is overthrown by an intifada revolution at home and abroad.<\/p>\n

This essay originally appeared on The Paul Street Report<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The post Reflections on Gaza, “Empire,” and Who and What is Breaking the World<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently attended a moving presentation of Palestinian poetry at the public library in the University of Iowa campus town of Iowa City. The presenters and audience were largely (though not exclusively) university-based and included a number of folks from the university\u2019s renowned Iowa Writers Workshop. There was an invitation for audience members to speak More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Reflections on Gaza, \u201cEmpire,\u201d and Who and What is Breaking the World<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,204],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1579731"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1583246,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579731\/revisions\/1583246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}