A Postmortem on Bernie Sanders and Palestine

Now that the Sanders campaign has ended, Palestinian Americans should reflect on why our organizations so readily abandoned anti-imperialism.

Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary.  Now, I’m no operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or electability.  It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make it visible. 

Sometime ago, I was added to an online group of Palestinian Americans organizing for Bernie Sanders’ campaign.  The specific identity of the group is immaterial.  Many such groups existed and as far as I can see the outcome of their work fit a standard template:  we’re Palestinian (and thus purport to speak for all Palestinians from within the United States); Bernie’s not perfect (but he really is kinda perfect); Bernie’s by far the best on Palestine (trust us); this isn’t merely about Palestine (Palestine is merely the pretext); we’ll be sure to hold him accountable (even though we just finished giving him unqualified support).  I don’t want to put Palestinians on the spot; all statements supporting presidential candidates look more or less the same.  Let’s call it a limitation of the genre and leave it at that. 

So, members of this group were working on a statement explaining why Palestinians should support Sanders.  Somebody put up a shared document with various points exaggerating Sanders’ record as an advocate for Palestinian rights and some fantasizing about Palestine’s future under a Sanders presidency.  Again, pretty typical stuff, which is to say a whole lot of bullshit. 

In the margin of the document, a user asked, “Is Sanders a Zionist?,” to which another person replied, “Yes he is.”  No discussion ensued.  The question and answer hung in silence until the document went public, at which point any consideration of Sanders’ Zionism had been scrubbed. 

I’m less interested in the question of Sanders’ Zionism than I am in the reasons for scrubbing Zionism from the conversation about Sanders.  Sanders doesn’t call himself a Zionist, and the label can flatten a pretty wide range of thought, but if we examine Sanders’ positions against what the Palestine solidarity movement understands to be Zionism, then Sanders unambiguously fits the description.  He constantly affirms Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.  He opposes right of return.  He treats Netanyahu as the aberration from a humanistic norm.  Yeah, he’s a Zionist.  This fact wasn’t lost on his Palestinian American champions.  It just didn’t seem to bother them very much. 

But let’s leave the question of Sanders’ Zionism to the side, for it has proved effective at putting colleagues at loggerheads.  Whatever Sanders or any other politician thinks about Palestine should have no influence on how Palestinians think about Palestine.  In fact, according to the mythography of electoralism, it’s the community’s duty to educate the politician.  In order to accomplish that goal, the community needs to convey principles it considers nonnegotiable.  For Palestinians, those principles would include right of return and full equality in all of historic Palestine. 

That’s not what happened in the various statements of support.  Instead, their authors instrumentalized Palestine as an abstract commitment—an idea mobilized through performances of ethnic verisimilitude—in order to boost a campaign extraneous to the actual work of decolonization.  Rather than pressuring the politician, they made demands of the audience and assured people opposed to Zionism that voting for someone pledging to uphold Israel’s “Jewish character” wasn’t a pragmatic concession, but an act of virtue, a feat of devotion to Palestine. 

What does it mean that groups visibly and proudly identifying as Palestinian felt it necessary to scrub Zionism in order to boost a politician jockeying to supervise US Empire?  By what moral calculus did those groups take vital demands off the table?  Did they have the consent of refugees for whom right of return is sacrosanct?  Of rank-and-file Palestinians in the United States?  Or was it an exercise in unilateral leadership by the diasporic professional class? 

I know what the response is:  we didn’t mythologize anyone; we regularly pointed out his weaknesses.  Well, not really.  (I didn’t see you pointing out that Sanders is a Zionist, for example.)  Exerting tremendous energy to conceptualize Sanders as a benevolent uncle figure and then occasionally saying “he needs more work on this issue” or “we need to keep pushing him” was a cardinal feature of mythologization, as was running interference with points of view more palatable to the mainstream when fellow anti-Zionists dissented from the consensus.  Saying “he’s the best on Palestine even though he’s not perfect” was the rankest kind of mythmaking.  It confused “being better than a terrible field” with “being good.” 

I saw in these statements a yearning to matter, a desire to at long last be taken seriously after decades of abuse and disregard.  It’s a normal response to subordination, to the pain of continuous betrayal, but no amount of high-minded talk about an electoral revolution will compel sites of power to care about Palestinian Americans.  They shouldn’t be our audience, anyway.  Palestinians are admired by people around the world who value justice and resilience and dignity.  Let’s not forgot our place, which isn’t among consultants and technocrats, but with the ignominious, the surplus, the unbeloved. 

During the primary, and during the 2016 election cycle, whenever I expressed skepticism about deploying Palestine in service of a presidential campaign, other Palestinian Americans quickly intervened:  “Well, I mean Steve’s making an, ahem, important point, but, here, let me butt in and do it, you know, more responsibly.”  I found it to be a pathetic move.  The idea was to keep radicalism in check, or to snuff it out.  Decolonization, however, is inherently radical in the metropole.  The interventions were thus a form of ostracism:  we don’t want disreputable elements of our community running a bus over this good foot we’re trying to put forward.  The limits of US electoralism came to define the parameters of Palestinian liberation. 

Electioneering requires compromise, but compromise isn’t a neutral practice.  The people are made to sacrifice for the affluent.  That’s how compromise works under capitalism.  Every time, every single time, it’s some aspect of Palestinian freedom that must be compromised.  Never the candidate’s position.  Never the system’s inherent conservatism.  Never the ongoing march of settler colonization.  We’re volunteering to be captured by the settler’s notion of common sense. 

And what would have happened if your guy won?  You already gave up right of return.  A one-state solution.  Anti-imperialism. Nobody was talking about general strikes until the pandemic. And nobody ever talks about armed struggle.  How did you plan to get these things back on the table after having surrendered them to a person whose first, second, and third priority is appeasing power?  You gave up something Palestinians have struggled and died for over the course of decades, and for what?  Just to make the apocryphal and frankly useless point that this politician is a more tolerable Zionist than the other ones? 

And when your guy loses?  This is the question of the moment, isn’t it?  You gave up all that leverage for nothing (except for individual benefits).  What happens next?  God knows I can’t answer that question.  I’m not saying don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t be interested in a candidate.  That’s not the point.  I dislike coercive forms of persuasion.   I’m simply trying to convince you not to give up the idea of freedom as it’s articulated by the downtrodden.  Not for any reason.  Certainly not for a goddamn politician. 

There’s a question you ought to ask as necessary (which is to say constantly):  what happens to Palestine?  When we humor a system calibrated to exclude us, when we pretend that liberation is possible on the margins of a hostile polity, when we imagine liberal Zionism as a prelude to freedom, then what happens to Palestine? 

Raising this kind of skepticism is a good way to get branded a hater.  (Treating the recalcitrant as irrational is a central feature of electoral discipline.)  I hate this sensibility precisely because I’m not a hater, because I recognize that defiance is a priceless asset in conditions of loss and dispossession.  Let’s please abandon this smug idea that skepticism ruins the party for sensible people.  It’s an ugly form of internal colonization.  Recalcitrance can be a deep, abiding act of love, in this case a devotion to life realized in the form of a simple question:  what happens to Palestine? 

The system you deign to reform ranks nothing above ruling class accumulation—the system, in other words, is designed to betray, and performs its mandate with brutal efficiency.  And so the answer to that timeless question never changes:  Palestine goes away.  Any group that doesn’t facilitate a flow of capital into the imperial core is fit for disappearance.  Our mandate, in turn, isn’t to seek the approval of our oppressor, but to earn his contempt.  

Instrumentalizing the persecuted is a critical feature of electoralism.  Promoting a Zionist presidential candidate and remaining faithful to the core tenets of anti-Zionism?  Forget it.  It’s not happening.  It can’t happen.  Electoralism is salted against insurgency.  It’s not a space for ideas, for creativity, for the simple decency of not asking the least powerful among us to defer their freedom; it’s hostile to anything that impedes the reproduction of orthodoxy.  Liberation has always required tremendous imagination.  That’s not on offer when David Sirota is authoring the narrative. 

You have no cause to be angry with Sanders.  Not now.  He hasn’t broken a single pledge.  He never hid his intentions.  There was plenty of reason for concern when he kept repeating liberal Zionist platitudes.  It was you, not Sanders, who folded Palestine into a campaign that always promised to maintain the status quo.  The outcome was easy to predict because it has many decades of precedent.  Palestinians, victim of a million betrayals, should know this better than anyone.  We also know that struggle has no easy trajectory.  Mass movements predicated on voting make for attractive sources of relief.  Then they go up in smoke and you’re left to find the next shiny figure to exploit, the next fount of excitement and pageantry and social capital.  This isn’t a serious politics.  It’s terminal naivete, or industrial self-promotion. 

And now what?  You disposed of the most radical members of our community, systematically excluding so many brethren from the life-sustaining pleasure of shared resistance, in order to assuage a bunch of faceless assholes waiting for the first opportunity to dispose of you, all that love sacrificed for no reward beyond some retweets and an evanescent sense of importance, your moment of being accepted by the polity now replaced by angry regret for having again succumbed to the gravitational pull of authority, of the state and its functionaries, of the very institutions that maintain our dispossession.  But our nation, Palestine, is neither temporary nor ephemeral.  Our politics should match the condition. 

40 thoughts on “A Postmortem on Bernie Sanders and Palestine”

  1. “In order to accomplish that goal, the community needs to convey principles it considers nonnegotiable. For Palestinians, those principles would include right of return and full equality in all of historic Palestine.”

    Non-negotiable? Must another two generations pass before the Arabs of the Palestinian region understand that demanding Israel allow itself to be flooded with a people opposed to the existence of a Jewish state, is a demand that Israel be forced to commit suicide? That is what is non-negotiable for the Israelis.

    Of course, if “it’s the community’s duty to educate the politician,” then the American politician’s need to be taught the truth, that the “historic” Palestinian region includes the east bank of the Jordan River.

    1. don’t be disingenuous. the east bank of the Jordan river was ‘historically’ Palestine but is now Jordan. as such, the people from there are now referred to as Jordanian, not Palestinian.
      and Jordan was and is flooded with Palestinians who can’t return to their part of ‘historic’ Palestine.

      how nice is it to be the only entity in the world allowed, even encouraged, to be xenophobic. imagine America saying they can’t let any more Mexicans in because they’ll be committing demographic suicide. what makes it worse is that Palestinians are not foreigners in Israel.

      1. I do not see your issue with the first. You agree with the true “historic” boundaries of the Palestinian region but say it is also a disingenuous remark? Perhaps you are using an obscure definition.

        Mexicans are not foreigners in the US. But the US was not founded as a refuge of white Europeans. It was a land controlled by both England and the colonists. The colonist leadership decided that England was becoming oppressive so they severed ties. The US becomes a Latin state does not change that.

        Israel was founded as a Jewish state, as identified by the UN in res 181, as a refuge for Jews. Forcing the Israelis to allow the state to become a majority Arab Islamist state defeats the purpose of its foundation. Considering the type of violence committed against Israelis by the Arabs who demand entry, along with them voting for an Islamist party whose end goal, according to their charter, is genocide of the Jews. So you are still wondering why the fictitious RoR will never be allowed by Israel?

        1. HAHA! Find me a ’48 Palestinian who identifies as “Israeli, not Palestinian” and I’ll give you a BJ.

          You’re a racist.

          1. Tell it to Joy. It was a reply to her, in your terms Racist post: “the people from there are now referred to as Jordanian, not Palestinian.”

        2. the israelis living in palestine are yiddish from somewhere in eastern hell.
          jordan and palestine and lebanon and syria and much of iraq were part of a single unit – greater syria.
          many arab, iranian jews refuse to become israelis.

  2. the fear engendered worship of the murderous state-entity that hides itself behind the ancient holy name, israel..

    1. It does not appear that the Israeli government, famous for the defense of its citizens against the murderous radical Islamist groups that seek it annihilation, to the point that it sacrifices its children for the hopes of generating publicity, hides behind anything. But it is nice that you acknowledge your fears.

  3. Thanks, Steve,
    Your analysis is crystal clear: Why sacrifice your precious time and integrity to please “a bunch of faceless assholes waiting for the first opportunity to dispose of you”?

    The solution is to break that self-suffocating habit with a nice clear demand. Pick a demand that you like: BDS comes to mind here. The faceless assholes won’t love you any less for it, because they never could love you. They will always see you the way a rat sees cheese.

    It’s pretty simple to walk into your City Council, where the news media sits, and demand a resolution against military aid to Israel, or a resolution to boycott Israel. That demand will travel. Even now during the pandemic, you can still speak at those meetings, on your computer or your phone.

    You can even campaign for office on that kind of BDS demand. That’s being done right now by Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani in the Ann Arbor City Council election campaign. She’s on the ballot and all over the local news media.

    Anyone who thinks that BDS is an impossible demand should look at Dr. Savabieasfahani’s campaign video : https://youtu.be/4kYdnvS6aQI

    You can also see her campaign website here:
    https://voteforthedoctor.com/

    Or type her name into Google News and find this news article:

    “Anti-Israel activist and environmentalist running for Ann Arbor council”, at:
    https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2019/12/anti-israel-activist-and-environmentalist-running-for-ann-arbor-council.html

    As Frederick Douglass said, power concedes nothing without a demand. Malcolm, Stokely, the Panthers, and Kanafani said the same thing in more modern ways. Without them, without the millions who they inspired, any demand for Palestinian liberation, let alone BDS, would have taken much longer to reach this place. So just speak that demand as best you can. You’ll feel better, and so will Palestine.

    Palestine is only made of flesh and bone. It can’t withstand perpetual destruction without voices from the diaspora demanding BDS or something like it.

    1. Demanding peace would be nice. Demanding what passes for leadership within the Palestinian Authority hold elections would be nice. Demanding reasonable peace parameters would be nice.

      Demanding antisemitic measures will get you attention. Mosquitoes buzzing about get attention.

  4. Steve Salaita, You’ve accurately pegged Bernie as not ‘aware’ of his own imperialism. With such intellectual weakness, Bernie has & will quickly succumbs to the deep-state Finance-Media-Religion-Education-Military-Industrial-Legislative-Judicial-Complex which really runs the USA. Little can do justice today except for finally a both-sided, equal-time, recorded & published series of TRUTH & RECONCILIATION SESSIONS AMONG ISRAELI & PALESTINIANS. Israelis as aggressors who continually project their own violence onto others have religiously avoided such truth.
    https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/structure/both-sides-now-equal-time-recorded-dialogues
    Jack Sigman RE: ‘murderous radical Islamist groups that seek it annihilation’.
    The greatest murder factor in Jewish society is from within. There is as much intolerance to Gay marriage, women’s control over their bodies, divorce & other aspects of neo-liberal living among Jews (eg. Orthodox, Zionist etc), as there is in Arab Christian, Jew or Muslim heritage in Palestine or anywhere worldwide. Israel is a recently invaded colonial state under the control of a foreign oligarchy. Abuse of power & the gun has become the norm in Israeli-Jewish relations. Most Israeli Jews don’t own their homes nor have any hope of ever given financial disparities. A tremendous number of homes are empty being used only seasonally by those Jews from abroad as a ‘get-away’. The Jewish population of Israel falsely included many who would never live there. Hence a large number of Jews living in poverty & without homes, imposed as a deficient economic policy by Zionist oligarchs from abroad.

    I come from a mixed Christian, Jewish & Animist family, so I’m familiar with the perpetual stance of ‘Jewish victimhood’, even when standing upon the necks of others. For 67 years I’m on the inside of mixed family ‘religious’ discussions on foreign European Ashkenazi (my family) Israel’s violent takeover of Palestine. Palestine is the land-bridge between the mega-continents of Eurasia & Africa. According to ‘Out-of-Africa’’ genetic studies billions of people have ancestry which has passed through or lived in the Palestinian land-bridge, probably least of all the Ashkenazi. So Palestine is really just one valuable place on the Risk-board of world conquest.
    APARTHEID
    For some in the Jewish world, with an ‘outsider’ view of society & history, its easy or somehow convenient to consider oneself apart from the communities in which we live, but mostly tragic. Considering oneself apart or aloof from one’s neighbours livelihood strengths & needs, engenders a lack of sharing & caring solidarity.
    Palestine is meant to be the place of ‘economic’ (Greek ‘oikos’ = ‘home’ + ‘namein’ = ‘care-&-nurture’) welcome & inclusion for all those in distress. Palestinians as they have done for 1000s of years, welcomed & assisted the Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Arab-Jew & others coming through, helping all to feed their families. Miko Peled (Son of an Israeli General) is a good source on this welcoming history. But with the Ashkenazi bringing murder, poisoning, burning, land-theft & other atrocities, the Palestinians responded to bring back civil order, even under the illegal imperialist British occupation. It had become apparent that the Ashkenazi have & had another ‘agenda’ for Palestines, which is & was to continue making Palestinians refugees removed from their homes & livelihoods.
    When I witness the constant cow-towing to the interests of a privileged, self-declaring to the world as ‘victim’, few & lack of solidarity for those like the Palestinians who are under our boots, I cry for the day when humanity might have its priorities & hearts back in order from this oligarch directed ‘theatre’. From a religious perspective, this is a 7000 year old ‘exogenous’ (Latin ‘other-generated’) imperial colonial tragedy. Its time to get back to ‘indigenous’ (L ‘self-generating’) Eden, where we can be full ‘indigenous’ (L ‘self-generating’) people again. http://www.indigenecommunity.info

    1. Using Peled as a source is rather awkward as he lies so many times in his presentation. As for colonialism, it is the Arabs who colonized the region through conquest.

      While it is reasonable to accuse the ultra-orthodox Jews of being intolerant, Israel is mostly secular and inviting to all peace-loving people. Unfortunately, the “Palestinian” Arabs do not appear to seek any peace but that of the grave.

      1. Jack F. Sigman, RE: “Using Peled as a source”. Trying to trash Miko Peled, Son of Israeli general Matti Peled as ‘lying’ simply because he tells truths, you have not been allowed to hear or too cowardly to engage in is disingenuous to say the least. Your oligarch owned mainstream media & tribe purposely keep you ignorant & afraid. Miko Peled is the example we should all be trying to emulate, reaching out beyond the limited worldview ‘box’ of our own insular self-justifying groups towards our perceived ‘enemies’ in order to find our what their experiences, perceptions & what they have to say.
        Over 67 years I live with my Jewish family, friends or acquaintances, including enough Israel serving Zionists & citizens of Israel to know that; Zios don’t ‘get’ the very basic principle of ‘don’t invade another people, under any circumstances’. Most regular citizens are kept in the fog of perpetual war. The principle of non-aggression includes, don’t support or finance those committing this genocide or justify oneself using these aggressive self-serving logics.
        For those of us raised by Walt Disney & Annette Funicello its mentally a challenge to disown colonialism & to own the facts of our ‘genocide’ (systematically removing people from their means of livelihood as well as state or settler sanctioned murder) involved. Whether we live in the Americas, Australia, Africa etc, these false murderous justifications misinform us & lead to our own egregious crimes against our brothers & sisters. Israel is not alone in its crime. We in the Americas, have an equal responsibility to respond to the genocide our settler ancestors committed here because when we ignore this blight upon the false economic relationships which we live by, we continue to commit those crimes now here & worldwide.
        In order to sort this out we have to apply ourselves as Miko Peled has done to engage the other side in TRUTH & RECONCILIATION or both-sided, equal-time, recorded & published dialogues to bring us to a place where we can act together. Dialogue is where those Ashkenazi immigrating to Israel should have started with instead of taking the brutal attitude of invaders.
        Part of the confusion of Israelis, Russians & ourselves is the false notion of ‘co-operatives’ (originally ‘co’ = ‘together’ + ‘operatives’ = ‘stakeholders’). Co-ops became the ‘exogenous’ (Latin ‘other-generated’) opposite of their original pre-colonial ‘indigenous’ (L ‘self-generating’) design. Israeli Kibbutz misinform Jews over 110 years since Deganya. One-member / one-vote does not recognize the diverse experiences & knowledge of those contributing.
        A dear Jewish friend, having been a Stockbroker in Montreal, Toronto & with dealings in New York adopted participatory criteria for investment, only investing in companies which engage their multistakeholder: worker, managers, suppliers, consumers, founders & regional folk by providing opportunities for investing each stakeholder capacity into capital ownership & representation. This Indigenous Economic Democracy enables ‘companies’ (L ‘com’ = ‘together’ + ‘pan’ = ‘bread’) & ‘communities’ (L ‘com’ + ‘munus’ = ‘gift-or-service’) to economically include, welcome & celebrate diverse contributors as ‘we or us together’. ‘InLakesh’ (Mayan ‘I am another you. You are another me’). Together hearing all sides & including all, we can achieve the Great-Spirit’s dream for peace & prosperity on that land-bridge between the mega-continents, called ‘Palestine’ & let go of our perpetually paranoid aggression. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/relational-economy/8-economic-democracy

  5. The Palestinian question doesn’t require a discussion between oppressors and oppressed. Zionists robbed Palestinians from their land with the tell tale “A Landless people for a people-less land”; which was a terrible lie. The same lie as saying that the “Current Israelis are the children of the Israelis that are named in the Book, so that they have to return to their land, and the Palestinians are the real usurpers”. I am not against giving the persecuted and oppressed a home.
    I do not deny the Holocaust and consider it a monstrous, surely the worst, offspring of capitalism and imperialism -the same as the not so massive but equally monstrous genocides inflicted (and some are still ongoing) to Aboriginals in Australia, Native Americans all across the Americas, Armenians, countryside Ukrainians (the Holodomor), and other in the late USSR, Chinese in Nanjing, Congolese in times of Belgian King Gustav Adolph, etc. Very large etc.
    The actual persecuted and oppressed Jews before and during 2WW could have gone to some place, even to Palestine and be received as brethren as they were in many places in South America (where they had been welcome time before during the czar’s pogroms) and weren’t in the USA for the abovementioned times (only the rich were well received there). But the Zionists wanted to maintain the sense of martyrdom and also to serve the interests of their patrons, first the English, later on the Americans. The sense of martyrdom and of being surrounded by enemies is very convenient for the sake of turning the fake State of Israel a tool in the hands of the imperialists in order to control the Middle Eastern masses, be sure that the Arab dictators and kings (the latter made kings by the then dominant British Empire, the former supported by the Americans, some for being their friends, others so to have convenient enemies, some other to play both roles) are very happy to have you in the neighborhood. You are the sandy man to keep their people hooked to them, because they are not loved but hated, as the so called Arab Spring showed some years ago…
    Well, to sum up, Zionists have achieved a terrible, horrible deed. Jews all over the world, instead of working to integrate into the countries they are living in, some of them from a lot of Generations ago, and conquering their due rights united with the rest of the oppressed and discriminated layers there, abandon their countries an come here to cultivate and prolong the paranoia, exerting over other people’s the same “right of life an death” that was time ago applied against them, and are now big haters, oppressors and discriminating people themselves. And you want not to be hated or despised!
    Stop talking hollow grand speeches, Mr. Zionist. Nobody with a pure heart is going to believe you, after your permanent ethnical cleansing, hate speech, bigotry against Arabs, coloreds, etc. You Zionists are (second to the Nazi, of course) the worst that could have happened to the Jews.

    1. Rosario, RE: “Palestinian question doesn’t require a discussion between oppressors and oppressed.” The issue being that the voice of the oppressed is sublimated, so we don’t hear ourselves, nor get our perspective, issues & solutions known by the mainstream. Given the prejudice, when one group has perverted & taken control of a Finance-Media-Religion-Education-Military-Industrial-Legislative-Judicial-Complex & the ‘other-side’ has not been publicized, then the “discussion” is absolutely required. The audience must hear both-sides in an equal tete-a-tete. Having heard from both-sides, contrasting & comparing logics, facts, discernment, emotion etc, the listener may thus restructure their minds.
      What Norman Finkelstein calls the ‘HOLOCAUST-INDUSTRY’ is a Jewish justification for every atrocity one commits & still retains the status of a victim. Following circumcision at a young age, our minds are kept in terror through the one-sided indoctrination of the world against us. For the past 500 years 6 million Jews in each of various episodes have died in self-declared ‘Holocausts’. Upon closer examination we find presently the official Jewish claim against NAZIs is 4.5 million still uncorrected in the public record. 50 million people died during the 2nd World War financed by certain oligarch interests. There never was a true hearing with both-sided, equal-time, recorded & published results about what really happened. Nuremberg was a one sided Show-Trial by vicious victors. Western victors, justifying their huge atrocities. Financed & captured by certain oligarch interests, Allies had in the meantime (1920-1945) undeniably murdered & genocided way over 8 million 1st Nation people in the continuing & same: land-grabbing, refugee creation, biosphere destroying process of ‘settling’, extracting/exploiting self-justification in the Americas. Our human challenge in these times as before is the nature of our Relational-Economy as one planetary people. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/e-history/9-spaceship-earth

      1. It appears you are now dabbling in the antisemitic industry of “Holocaust denialism.” It is inappropriate and certainly unattractive.

        Nuremberg was not a show trial. No one was tortured to confess. The Nazis supplied the very evidence that led to many convictions. And when the evidence was insufficient, a judgement of “not guilty” was rendered.

        Exactly how did you invent your tale that “Allies had in the meantime (1920-1945) undeniably murdered & genocided way over 8 million 1st Nation people/”

        1. Jack F. Sigman, Ah with one hand on the axe & the other despondently saying “Never-again”, again & again. Hmm!!
          RE: “How did . . . Allies . . . genocide 8 million 1st Nation people” Its simply a matter of referring to population estimates by such ethnohistorian anthropologists as Henry F. Dobyns in ‘Their Number Become Thinned” with 105 million 1st Nations genocided & murdered over the period of oligarch led colonization since Columbus’ oligarch financed ‘slave voyages’ of 1492. Then we map-out incursions into sovereign 1st Nation territory during this 1920 – 45 period. We search financial records for who was financing the settler invasion & corporate mining, deforestation (destruction of indigenous Polyculture Orchards) railroad, roads, wars, residential school child-abductions, intentional spreading of small-pox through infected blankets to 1st Nation refugees (similar to prison confinement, restrictions on healing food, shelter clothing & denying Gazans/Palestinians access to medicine during COVID-19).
          Its true that in our schizophrenic western Judeo-Christian society that; the ‘hand’ we see doesn’t know what the corporate ‘hand’ of the Finance-Media-Religion-Education-Military-Industrial-Legislative-Judicial-Complex is doing. Still we are the ones feeding this beast. Grow-up my friend!
          You will be surprised to learn how all humanity’s worldwide ‘indigenous’ ‘sylvalization’ (Latin ‘sylva’ = ‘tree’) 3-dimensional Polyculture-Orchards were 100 times more productive (10,000% more) for food, materials, energy & water-cycle per area of land than 2-D ‘agriculture’ (L ‘ager’ = ‘field’) spread by oligarch financed ‘civilization’. Hence the basic resource poverty & perpetual hunger & war of the oligarch-led system we live in. Indigenous Welcome & Orchard Food Production Efficiencies documented. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/design/1-indigenous-welcome-orchard-food-production-efficiencies

          1. Citing your figure of 105 million murdered over 500 years, a figure that is not substantiated, it comes to 0.2 million (200,000) per year. over a 25 year period of time, that would be 5 million. However, it is highly unlikely, and there is no substantiation, that the number of deaths are anywhere close to that figure. Additionally, who killed them? Specifically. Saying the government did so, or settlers did so, is no answer.

            Yes, I would be surprised to learn, as would the rest of the botanists in the world, regarding your unsupported productivity claim.

  6. Can you please cite where you read this inaccurate quote (“A Landless people for a people-less land”)? The truthful quote is “a land without A people for a people without a land.’ No t land without people as the Ottoman Palestinian region had people but they had tribal, not national, affiliation. No grand speech required.

    Regardless, the Jews who immigrated to the region paid for everything. No pure heart required. But those with a heart cannot support the genocidal agenda of the “Palestinian” Arabs.

    1. “Regardless, the Jews who immigrated to the region paid for everything.”

      And the JNF had a policy of never reselling nor leasing the land to non-Jews. You have to wonder what the endgame would be when they bought enough land to call it a “state”.

  7. The principle must be clearly stated by leadership that cannot compromise itself in any way. That is really the only struggle. It means education, effort and organisation with the absolute goal in mind. That aim is to support the freedom and inherent rights of all the Palestinians resisting occupation and brutal oppression.

    The article was well written and makes a very important point about such groups assigning to themselves positions which totally betray any real prospect of ‘change you can believe in’. The entire western political class particularly in western society have been forging manufactured consent of a historical narrative that is full of lies and distortions. Zionist ideology is perverted and evil.

    It has often been pointed out that no political figure in the USA which is the center of extreme and radical Zionist ideologies can expect success unless they are pro-Israeli. The job is the USA is to prove that this is not true. To do that the appeal must be integrity on the principle that all human beings are deserving of full dignity. The question then becomes one of optimism that every person we come across has a conscience and that when rightly informed will react on behalf of the oppressed populations of non-Judaic persuasions in Palestine. A figure must be found to emerge to lead a campaign on the principle involved. That must be the aim and it would then open up pandora’s box in a way never previously attempted or achieved. Should that gain momentum through organized education, absolute demands on principle can be fought for. I believe that fight can succeed and that now is the best time to attempt initiating of such a movement. The unconscionable manipulation of behind the scenes control must be brought into light in US political discourse. The ongoing occupation of Palestine simply put is a black and white issue.

  8. Jack F. Sigman, Ah with one hand on the axe & the other despondently saying “Never-again”, again & again. Hmm!!
    RE: “How did . . . Allies . . . genocide 8 million 1st Nation people” Its simply a matter of referring to population estimates by such ethnohistorian anthropologists as Henry F. Dobyns in ‘Their Number Become Thinned” with 105 million 1st Nations genocided & murdered over the period of oligarch led colonization since Columbus’ oligarch financed ‘slave voyages’ of 1492. Then we map-out incursions into sovereign 1st Nation territory during this 1920 – 45 period. We search financial records for who was financing the settler invasion & corporate mining, deforestation (destruction of indigenous Polyculture Orchards) railroad, roads, wars, residential school child-abductions, intentional spreading of small-pox through infected blankets to 1st Nation refugees (similar to prison confinement, restrictions on healing food, shelter clothing & denying Gazans/Palestinians access to medicine during COVID-19).
    Its true that in our schizophrenic western Judeo-Christian society that; the ‘hand’ we see doesn’t know what the corporate ‘hand’ of the Finance-Media-Religion-Education-Military-Industrial-Legislative-Judicial-Complex is doing. Still we are the ones feeding this beast. Grow-up my friend!
    You will be surprised to learn how all humanity’s worldwide ‘indigenous’ ‘sylvalization’ (Latin ‘sylva’ = ‘tree’) 3-dimensional Polyculture-Orchards were 100 times more productive (10,000% more) for food, materials, energy & water-cycle per area of land than 2-D ‘agriculture’ (L ‘ager’ = ‘field’) spread by oligarch financed ‘civilization’. Hence the basic resource poverty & perpetual hunger & war of the oligarch-led system we live in. Indigenous Welcome & Orchard Food Production Efficiencies documented. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/design/1-indigenous-welcome-orchard-food-production-efficiencies

    1. There is absolutely no truth that Gazans, or any other Arabs, have been denied medicine, except by other Arabs.

      1. Jack F. Sigman
        RE: GAZA Your two comments “There is absolutely no truth that Gazans, or any other Arabs have been denied medicine, . . . ” & “Who killed them?”
        To quote you again Genocidal “‘denialism.’ It is inappropriate and certainly unattractive.”
        In order to understand how Zionist genocide occurs through capture of foreign governments like the USA for targeted Oded-Yinon-Plan destabilization, supplying guns to foreign mercenaries removing people from their structured biosphere infrastructure & means of livelihood as well as associated settler & state murders, you must read:
        Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11
        By Dr Gideon Polya 22Nov’15 https://countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm
        Dr. Polya is an Australian Jew, who has specific research articles on Palestine & Gazan murder.
        RE: COLONIAL GENOCIDE IN THE AMERICAS
        I provide you in my previous statements with the name of Ethnohistorian Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns & his major 1983 work called ‘Their Number Become Thinned’ mentioned by 100s of authors as a touch-stone for understanding pre-Columbian 1st Nation populations. Dobyns breaks with colonial anthropology, by studying the enormous Polyculture orchard food productivity & comparing this with 1st Nation ethnohistory. https://www.amazon.ca/Their-Number-Become-Thinned-Population/dp/0870494007 I’ve supplied links above for you to ‘Indigenous Welcome & Orchard Food Production Efficiencies’ web-link, which references many studies as well as my own 50 years of Polyculture experiments & observations of leaders in the field of Polyculture efficiencies itemized, qualified & quantified, Permaculture & the like. I’ve had the privilege of learning from UNESCO researchers who helped clue me into this Polyculture Orchard benefits 47 years ago. Take a walk on the ‘wild’ (derived from ‘having will’ side. Here’s a brief summary about Polyculture Orchards. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/design/1-polyculture-orchards
        When you comment definitively before reading referenced documentation, its facetious for you to say “unsupported”, but is this typical of your reaction?
        I participate in ‘indigenous solidarity over the past 56 years, working & living with 1st Nations & indigenous peoples from around the world on many successful & less than successful projects.
        Israel is having its longest drought in recorded history because of its ignorance about Polyculture. The Palestinian village culture of many olive & other food trees which Ashkenazi destroyed held the long established seeds of re-implanting polyculture & plenty back into the mega-continent land-bridge. The Ashkenazi false claim of ‘Regreening the desert’ through monoculture planting of inappropriate tree species, which are prone to lightning strikes & drought death is but the ignorance generated by chauvinistic violence.

      2. Jack F. Sigman, Here are the specific death figures from both Israeli starvation & denying the necessities of life, including essential medical supplies policy against Gazan people up to 2018. Gaza Massacre Update: Calculations of deaths in Gaze & Palestine over various periods of time. “Decent Humanity” Will Boycott Apartheid Israel & All Its Supporters By Gideon Polya 1Jun’18 https://www.globalresearch.ca/gaza-massacre-update-decent-humanity-will-boycott-apartheid-israel-and-all-its-supporters/5642583

        1. Global research is a disreputable organization who routinely posts antisemitic material. Polya has been cited as a racist. Therefore, your information is unsubstantiated and actually false.

          In fact, there is no truth that Israel has ever starved a people nor withheld real medical supplies.

  9. Steve,
    if it’s any consolation, the Palestinians aren’t the only nation, who, robbed, oppressed, betrayed, and then villified by the zionists, have been mis-led by the self-serving, west-educated “elites” to nowhere closer to real liberation. of course, this phenomenon is the feature, not a bug, of the imperialist system. we should never forget that the real struggle is not between the nation-country-states, or between religions, or between races or genders. it’s always between the globally-networked haves and the global havenots.

    1. i didn’t mean to minimize the unspeakable sufferings the Palestinians have been subject to on the zionists’ hand when i said the Palestinians aren’t the only nation. i only meant to express my deepest empathy toward your people, as my native country of South Korea has also been an occupied territory that was ravaged by the most violent war in human history.

  10. Steve,

    You might want to consider writing for RT rather than allow the deep state front CounterPunch to post your writing for free.

    As a controlled opposition venue, CP will oust you whenever you become too threatening. You know the story.

    Besides, that would make for a better example to academia regarding consequences for their excesses than driving a bus.

  11. Dear Jack F. Sigman,
    Its cute how many in Hasbara close their eyes (as their bosses tell them to) to those internationally renowned research organizations & individuals who are trying to help Israeli & Palestinians find productive peace, love & harmony.
    If you care about:
    1) the people of Israel & Palestine, going through the greatest drought in recorded history. A people & nations can’t exist without water. Water comes from aligning with human diversity & biosphere.
    2) Isolation of Jewish Israels who feel trapped in an artificial nation with a self-imposed paranoid inability to reach out to neighbours. Loneliness is a public health issue.
    3) perpetual human conflict arising from Ashkenazi racist ethno-suicide Apartheid,
    4) dominance of an oligarch directed Jeffrey Epstein child abuse clan representing Israel’s self-cannibalism,
    This raises the questions of: why are you here? what your predetermined historical ‘agenda’, philosophy or master is? Isn’t our ultimate human goal ‘mutual-aid’? https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/home/2-mutual-aid

    1. You are now dealing in direct propaganda rather than relying on antisemitic sources, which is good that you are no longer just parroting. regardless, your pontification has no basis in reality.

      Israel is not going through the “greatest drought in recorded history.”
      Palestine does not exist as anything but a region.
      All states are “artificial.” The Arab genocidal threats prevents normal relations.
      From there you descend into a murky place where none can follow you. Have fun down there.
      You do not prom0te “mutual aid.” You promote antisemitism.

      1. Jack, We can be our own worst enemies. The Jerusalem Post, Israeli Crime Statistics https://www.jpost.com/tags/israel-crime-statistics
        Jewish children assaulted at home twice as much as Arab children – survey The yearly report on personal assaults in the country additionally claimed that 95% of the people who experienced sexual assault did not report it to the police. Central Bureau of Statistics. CBS found that approximately 649,000 people out of approximately 5.6 million aged 20 or older were harmed in assaults of various types: By Tamar Beeri
        28Jun’19 https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Jewish-children-experience-assault-at-home-twice-as-much-as-Arab-children-survey-593909

  12. Jack F. Sigman, Did anyone ever tell you that Palestinians are the true Semites. European Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites. Arab Jews are Semite, Sephardic jews are a mixture. We all exist as individuals, but as well as part of ‘corporate’ (Latin ‘corp’ = ‘body’) collective entities. We all have a collective responsibility. If you want to know what your corporate entity is up to beyond the false beliefs, which keep you ignorant, then read your Jewish brother epidemiologist Gideon Polya’s excellent UN based research & analysis on death & injury rates arising from Israeli state murder & apartheid. That desert of Ashkenazi (my family) imposed human alienation & its associated biosphere parsing is only getting dryer. From one Jack to another. http://www.indigenecommunity.info

  13. Steve, take the trash, like sigman, out of your beautiful blog site. they are trying to bury your inspiring posts under their trash, as usual. you are a gifted writer, which is exactly why the zionist trash had to somehow silence you.

  14. Douglas jack. Only those with antisemitic intent make those statements. Gideon Polya is considered a non-academic with no research skills worth noting outside his field of . Much of his material is invented.

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