Over
the last few weeks, as the stories of rocket launches, bombings, screams
and pictures of babies with their heads blown off have filtered out of
Gaza, I have tried to limit my exposure to such horrors. Those are the
privileges of living in the West, the ability to turn off the world by
turning off one’s TV and bypassing articles in ones news feed.
I
commenced this turning off of horrors after being bombarded this summer
with story after story of police brutality in the U.S. – of a California
Highway Patrolman pummeling 51-year-old Marlene Pinnock in the face for
walking on the shoulder of a Los Angeles freeway; of the NYPD choking
Eric Garner to death; of Brooklyn police officers putting another
pregnant woman in a chokehold, and dragging a naked grandmother out of
her home; of Renisha McBride’s character being placed on trial beside
that of her killer, Theodore Wafer.
It sometimes feels too much to
bear. To be black in America, even when you are rich, is to live in
constant awareness that you have little protection against violence,
either from desperate people in your own neighborhoods or from police
who see you as a body to protect themselves from rather than a citizen
worthy of protection.
What does any of this have to do with the struggles of Palestinians in Gaza?
Everything.
First, we have a black president, who is commander in chief of a
pro-Israel state. And black people are generally not into publicly and
vocally criticizing Barack Obama, despite plenty of privately whispered
reservations around kitchen tables and in barber shops and beauty shops.
Second, African-Americans are disproportionately evangelical
Christians, and evangelical Christianity, with its love of the story of
Moses leading the Israelites (almost) to the Promised Land, is rooted in
a kind of conservative theology that justifies a pro-Israel position.
When President Obama was elected to office, many considered him to be
the progenitor of the new “Joshua Generation,” who having thrown off the
Mosaic tropes of older models of black leadership, which characterized
everyone from Harriet Tubman to MLK, was now poised to actually lead the
nation into the “promised land.”
Israel’s
origin story has had deep and profound meaning for African-Americans
and our ongoing freedom struggle. And conservative evangelical preachers
generally don’t invite their congregants to consider how the
Israelites’ ethnic cleansing of the Canaanites squares with our moral
outrage against the murder of innocent people. That’s not especially
surprising in white evangelical churches, given how bound up white
evangelicalism is with the Western colonial project. But it always gives
me pause in black churches, when preachers (my own pastor being an
exception, thankfully) take this text as the subject of a sermon, with
no sense of irony.
As a black person attuned to the processes of
colonization, slavery and apartheid that built the West on the backs of
black and indigenous people, I cannot help seeing these acts of war and
terror as interconnected. There is no way to morally justify the Israeli
occupation of the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. Therefore, I must
redirect my outrage from organized resistance groups or “terrorists”
toward the powerful nations that make people vulnerable to these
militant extremist groups.
I place the term “terrorist” in scare
quotes not because the violence and terror that Palestinians and some
Israelis are enduring isn’t real but rather because the social
construction of the “terrorist” performs important political work in
justifying our political interests. In prior centuries, European powers
constructed ideas of a savage Indigenous other and a benighted
animalistic African other to justify the plunder and enslavement of the
places where these people lived. Indigenous people and West Africans
were not a threat, except if their land was what you wanted.
Sept.
11, 2001, became a significant touch point in a much longer U.S.
project of constructing the “terrorist” as an identity that justifies
escalating levels of state-based violence that kills far more civilians
than armed militants. Given this long history of creating enemies that
justify our political aims, while claiming that the enemies themselves
necessitated the political aims, we should be suspicious of these
constructions.
We can be suspicious of the construction of the
terrorist as a political figure and still condemn the violence committed
by militant extremist groups like Hamas. We can be suspicious of the
myth of the black male criminal, which drives so much of social policy
in the U.S., and still decry and disavow violent criminal activity that
devastates communities. We can be suspicious of the practices of
surveillance and policing that constrict the lives of African-Americans,
Latinos and Arab Americans in the U.S. and still call the police when
we are in danger.
What I am advocating is for us not to do as I
did when the first pictures of this latest round of violence filtered
out of Palestine. We cannot close our eyes and make the devastation and
injustice go away. We have to look clearly. We have to begin to think
about the processes that breed militancy and resistance.
Coming
from a people who have had religious texts used to justify the slaughter
and oppression of my people, I cannot abide the use of religiously
grounded identities to justify the mistreatment of another group of
people. Like the members of
Jewish Voice for Peace, I believe that I can retain my religious identifications and reject some of the politics that go along with them.
So
though I am Christian, I choose to approach my engagements with the
Bible with what liberation and womanist theologians call a “hermeneutic
of suspicion.” I invite others with similar histories and
identifications to do the same.
Having come from people who have
risen up, rioted and rebelled against oppressive state forces that
confined us to land, restricted our movement and denied our humanity, I
resist the urge to characterize all forms of resistance as terror.
Especially, if we will not first be honest about the colonization and
apartheid that fomented these acts of rebellion.
I recognize that
what begins as resistance can devolve into terror, particularly the
terrorizing of women and children, and this is especially true of
nationalist movements. In this regard, Hamas deserves our strict and
sure scrutiny.
On this score, I agree with Morehouse professor Marc Lamont Hill,
who said that
we must begin “not from the place of Palestinian resistance, but from
the place of Israeli occupation.” Like him, I’m not pro-Hamas, but
rather anti-occupation. Moreover, I know that our advocacy for Palestine
will not necessarily improve the
conditions of black Palestinians who live there under the shadow of racism.
Still,
black people know what it means to live under the shadow of limited
resources, constant surveillance, random acts of state-based violence
that go unpunished, and fear of violence from people who look like you,
because those people have become the most severe victims of systematic
privation and the desperation and nihilism and, yes, violence, it
breeds.
The same kind of nuance, the same hermeneutic of
suspicion, the same ethic of care, that frames our understanding of
black suffering and violence – unchecked policing, nonexistent economic
opportunity, mass incarceration — in this political moment in the U.S.
should frame our understanding of Gaza’s relationship to Israel.
America’s sordid history of settler colonialism, slavery, mass
incarceration and other racially driven social ills teaches us a lot
about why our country identifies with Israel and it teaches us
everything we need to know about why we shouldn’t.
