[85] All Over the Map.
“…those who persevere in the face of injustice and rise above it with unwavering faith and a commitment to the highest ethical principles will inevitably lead humanity out of darkness.” – Dr. Farah Al-Sharif A couple days after Christmas, a few dozen folks from the Detroit chapter of Christians for a Free Palestine and our allies belted out subversive Christmas carols in front of the entrance to Eastern Market. This was my favorite chorus – sung to the tune of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas": We wish for the liberation Of the Palestinian nation, An end to the occupation, And a Happy New Year! A white man in his sixties walked by and yelled, “Have you ever been to Gaza?” I said, “Actually, no. Have you?” He yelled back, “It is a shithole!” This boomer white dude dialed up his displaced anger. He did not take issue with what’s actually been done to Palestinians. He was mad because we had the audacity to show up and take the side of the oppressed in a horrifically one-sided situation. A week later, Lindsay and I met leaders from the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) at the office of Moratorium Now, a legendary Detroit grassroots organization that was allowing PYM to store two huge 3D maps of Gaza they made for the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit over Labor Day weekend.
These Palestinian-Americans – most of them thirty or forty years younger than the raging white man at Eastern Market – created these before and after 3D maps in painstaking detail to teach the world how the state of Israel, with the full support of Western governments like the US, has turned Gaza into a shithole.
They compared and contrasted these maps during a session at the People’s Conference to document the deliberate targeting and destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure since October 7, 2023. They laid out the case, quite compellingly, that all this bombing and killing had nothing to do with protecting Jewish people. It was all part of a calculated campaign of genocide.
On New Year’s Day, we moved these heavy, awkward maps into a U-Haul so PYM could store them safely somewhere out in Washtenaw County. As we shuffled through the snow and ice, I looked down at neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, markets, desalination plants and refugee camps that have been reduced to rubble all over Gaza.
Rafah.
Deir al-belah.
Nuseirat.
North Gaza.
Beit Lahiya.
Jabaliya camp.
Khan Younis.
The Gaza strip is the exact same size as Detroit. But it has three times the population. 70% of the people of Gaza come from families who were removed at gunpoint from their homes in 1948. Those families lived on that land (now called “Israel”) for generations. They were herded into eight different refugee camps in Gaza.
Israeli historian Benny Morris says that Israel was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers and daily intimidation, humiliation and manipulation. He says that Palestinian nonviolent civil disobedience has always been crushed – so eventually, the only real option became armed struggle.
Before October 7, 2023, Gaza was already in bad shape. Because Israel had sustained a decades-long blockade. Israel controlled everything that entered and exited the strip. Many leaders and scholars referred to it as an open-air prison, or concentration camp.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel and the US have done everything they possibly could to finish the job in Gaza. All thirty-six hospitals have been bombed and only thirteen of them are still open. According to Israeli sources, 83% of Palestinians murdered in Gaza have zero ties to Hamas.
It cannot actually be called a “war” if only 17% of those murdered are “combatants.”
Can it?
This is why many human rights organizations and scholars have been calling this a genocide for a long time now.
At the People’s Conference in Detroit, young leaders from PYM explained that genocide is built into the logic of Zionism, a settler colonial expansionist project devoted to the elimination of Palestinians - all under the guise of protecting Jewish people.
Zionism is the foot soldier of imperialism in the Middle East. Zionism secures Western dominance and corporate profit through wars and violence.
Gaza is not just the collateral damage of Zionism. Gaza is the blueprint of Zionism.
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Two weeks after we moved the maps into that U-Haul truck, professional football player Azeez Al-Shaair was being interviewed after his team’s playoff victory, and he had a simple message written on the black tape he was wearing over his nose:
Stop The Genocide.
The NFL fined Azeez Al-Shaair $11,593 for violating the league’s uniform and equipment policy, which prohibits players from using their game day platforms to display personal messages.
The next week, Azeez Al-Shaair’s team lost in the playoffs to the New England Patriots. The owner of the Patriots is Robert Kraft. He has donated more than two million dollars to AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israeli propaganda institutions in America.
In 2019, the same year that Robert Kraft was charged for soliciting sex at a day spa in Florida from young Chinese women who were forced to live there and never leave (ie, sex trafficking), he received a Genesis Prize of one million dollars from Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.
[Note: According to one of the documents released this week by the Department of Justice, Jeffrey Epstein advised Kraft to hire his lawyer - and Kraft did - and the charges were eventually dropped.]
By 2019, Robert Kraft had been to Israel more than one hundred times, including his “Touchdown in Israel” trips where he gives NFL players free tours of the holy land.
Kraft used his Genesis Prize award money to start the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, which he recently rebranded as the Blue Square Alliance, an organization which claims to fight hate of all forms.
When I was watching the Kansas Jayhawk basketball game last week, a Blue Square Alliance commercial came on. It said that one out of every three Jewish Americans has experienced an act of hate this year. When I clicked on the website, it said that Jewish Americans experience 69% of all religious hate crimes in the US.
Anti-Jewish hate is real. But these statistics are hyperbolic and highly problematic.
I could not find anything on the website that clarifies what constitutes an act of hate. This is critical because Zionists have been aggressively pushing definitions of “antisemitism” that include critiques of the state of Israel. This is what Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law for California public schools last year.
When young Palestinian women use 3D maps and scholarly research to chronicle the calculated campaign of genocide of their families in Gaza, wealthy and powerful people like Robert Kraft count that as an act of Jewish hate.
These Zionist propaganda campaigns – and there are many – mute and minimize all the ways that Zionist entities dox, demonize, incarcerate and kill Palestinians and Muslims – and other ethnic, racial and religious minorities, particularly those who do not pass as “white” in America.
Today, if you watch the Super Bowl, remember all this when you see Robert Kraft rooting on his team - and when you see one of Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance commercials, which cost $8 million each.
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On the same weekend that Azeez Al-Shaair got fined for his truth-telling facial message, Lindsay and I attended a talk after a worship service at a liberal church in the suburbs. The guest speaker, who was Jewish, got his graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. He teaches college courses and serves on boards of non-profits.
At the beginning of his remarks, he told the audience that he is a “liberal Zionist.” He said that he came to church that Sunday to teach Christians how important Israel is to the safety, security and identity of Jewish Americans.
Multiple times, he made creepy analogies to the Black freedom struggle to justify the existence of Israel, a Jewish ethnostate that resembles the Jim Crow South.
He was reluctant to use the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s government, despite the fact that several well-respected human rights groups call it that.
He made references to “Palestinian suffering,” but it was always an abstracted sidenote.
He claimed that calling Zionism “racism” started with Soviet propaganda in the 1960s.
He was dismissive of “fringe” organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace because they are not part of the Jewish American establishment.
He turned the genocide of Palestinians into a complicated and nuanced issue.
The Arab woman sitting next to us said that his talk was “unnecessarily convoluted.”
Not too long after we walked out of his lecture, I was wondering which of these genocide-denying white men is most dangerous: the Boomer dude at Eastern Market, the billionaire sports-team owner at the massage parlor, or the scholarly Zionist at the church?
Displaced rage and bank-rolled propaganda do a lot of dirty work for US empire and Israel. But for me, the “both-sides-are-bad” liberal lack of clarity is the most insidious. Because its measured tone and hyper-nuanced neutrality normalize genocide.
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In the wake of continuous Israeli bombing in Gaza (despite a “ceasefire”) and another heavily redacted release of millions of Epstein-related documents, many of them curiously connected to Israel, Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti proclaimed that Western civilization itself is one big rape culture:
We’re literally witnessing a world run by pedophiles and rapists and it’s reflected in global policy. They just keep forcing themselves on people and finding ways to distort it, justify it, get away with it by sheer force and war mongering.
The Yemeni-American lawyer and activist Fatima Mohammed called the Epstein files “a microcosm of the American project.” What’s been released in the past couple of months is a continuation of what white men have done to native children in boarding schools, African children on plantations and Arab children in torture black sites.
The only way forward is to break rank with every aspect of rape culture and breathe with Something Else.
We need to stop listening to the ragers, the rapists and the unnecessarily convoluted.
We need to take cues from those who persevere in the face of injustice and rise above it with unwavering faith.
A few days ago, Palestinian journalist Asem Alnabih put it like this:
As social media fills with the names of those entangled in the Epstein scandal, I’m reminded of how many honorable and principled people Gaza has lost, people Israel assassinated, who lived and died with integrity, dignity, humanity, and moral courage. They upheld honor and decency at a time when much of the world, and many states, seemed to surrender to the darkest impulses of humanity.
Unfortunately, 99.9% of the North American population does not know the names of truth-tellers like Miriam Barghouti, Fatima Mohammed and Asem Alnabih. Because Western society platforms pedophiles and rapists - and the influencers and politicians who protect them with distortions, distractions and redactions.
Our personal healing and collective liberation are hinged to flipping our sick society’s human hierarchy of value on its head.
There are literally billions of people, all over the map, living with integrity, dignity, humanity and moral courage. None of them are famous. We must find them and follow their lead.
