Who needs protection from whom in Palestine?
Yesterday someone, who I think was in good faith, coming into my comments to learn, asked the question: "okay, Israel is an apartheid state. What do we do? Like how do we make it right?"
And I said, "Well, first, give all Palestinians full citizenship, full voting rights, and restore their freedom of movement across the entire country, and restore the land that was taken from them over the last 75 years. Give it back."
And then they replied, "Okay, but if we do that, how do we ensure we keep Israelis safe from Palestinians?"
I think that's the exact wrong question to ask, and let me tell you a story from U.S. history to explain why.
So contrary to many people's popular beliefs, before and during the Civil War, abolition was not a popular point of view, even in the north.
The centrist Liberal position in the north was that slavery was wrong and abhorrent, sure, but it was absolutely necessary. Because if you suddenly just, like, freed all the black people, oh my God, what would happen? It would be so scary, right?
These people who've been treated so violently as slaves — if you even saw them as people — um, would just be let loose on the country. Like, what would keep from just killing all the white people and causing total mayhem?
Lincoln himself was not an abolitionist. He only passed them Emancipation Proclamation because he saw it as strategically necessary. He had to bring the southern economy to a grinding halt, and by freeing the slaves in the same time, he could recruit many of those slaves to serve in the northern army.
This was considered so extreme — the idea of arming black people, freed slaves — was totally terrifying to many in the north. And, uh, some of the border states even had political movements to try to leave the union over it.
And they believed their fears were totally justified, because there was a ton of violence from slaves towards slave owners. This is a very suppressed history, but there were over 250 slave uprisings involving 10 or more slaves attacking slave owners during the antebellum period. And there were countless more cases of individual slaves, you know, killing a slave and then running off into the night.
Like, I don't think we have good numbers on how many there were, but there was definitely like a lot of precedents of slave on slave owner violence. [text only: obviously completely overshadowed by slave owner on slave violence.]
And this was part of the justification for why we can't free slaves: they're just so violent.
But Lincoln took his gamble. He passed this outrageous Emancipation Proclamation law, and it was, in fact, essential for winning the war.
But after the war was over, the fear in white people's imagination of black violence did not go away.
But it was not black people who formed a paramilitary army to terrorize another race. That was the Ku Klux Klan.
It was not black people forming lynch mobs killing people by the thousands in a spectator sport.
So when you say, "If we free Palestinians, if we free Palestine, who's gonna keep Israelis safe — do you see that you're using the same logic as liberals in the Civil War era saying 'If we free slaves, who's gonna keep white people safe?'"
It's the wrong question to ask.
History teaches us we should be much more concerned: if we free Palestinians, who's gonna keep them safe from stochactic terrorism from Israelis?
Who's gonna keep Palestinians safe from Israeli police forces, that have been brutalizing them for generations?
And we know from looking at South Africa that you can end legal apartheid and not make a dent in economic apartheid. And so just restoring the land that was taken over the last 75 years will not be enough to upend this economic apartheid.
Especially knowing that many of these Palestinian families made their living through agriculture before Israel came and kicked them off their land. And Israel has, unfortunately, irreparably destroyed much of this land.
[Background shows an old Palestinian woman hugging the dead stump of a chopped down tree.] The major crop out of Palestine was olives. Olive trees can live for hundreds of years, and Israel regularly bulldozes or cuts down hundreds of years old groves of olive trees, to try to break Palestinian spirit so they'll have no reason to return to the land, and no way of making a living if they do.
Through land and water mismanagement, Israel has desertified much of the country over the 75 years: polluted water sources, overused water drying up aquafirs.
[Holding up book]: For a really good look at how devastating Israel has been to the ecology of Palestine, check out Raja Shahada's "Palestinian Walks".
So another question asked is, "if Palestine is free — if all Palestinians are given full, equal civil rights, and their land is restored to them — how are we going to keep them safe from Israeli hatred and violence, and how are we going to ensure that they have economic security?
If we look at the history of apartheid in South Africa, and the freeing of slaves in the United States, we realize these are much more pertinent questions to ask then how are we going to protect the colonizers from the colonized people once they are freed.
