Séamus Malekafzali – Israel's Exports of Violence

These remarks have been adapted from a talk with the Palestine Working Group at Columbia University on April 15.

I don’t mean to speak as if I am ancient, but when I was in college, there was a perception that left-wingers, socialists, and communists, were mixing together all these different causes, foreign and domestic, economic and social, that ultimately meant nothing to each other. At worst, they were spouting off incoherent nonsense about an “omnicause”, if that phrase was in common parlance then.

How can it be that this issue of tuition is in any way related to Native Americans in the student body, how can you seriously argue that such-and-such donation box shows the administration’s blindness to Western interventions abroad, and so on and so on and so on? Newspaper opinion pages love this sort of thing, college presidents enjoy using it as a cudgel against student protestors, and when strategy is being discussed on campus, it may be difficult and thorny to navigate these debates and to decide where priorities should lie.

When it comes to the issue of something as present and severe as what is happening to the Gaza Strip, the lines that are being drawn by those in the streets between Palestine and other nations suffering under the heel of oppression and conflict are not far apart at all, not in the slightest. Students are not just demanding these issues be brought to the forefront, they are being forced to by governments and their own university administrations who seek to make an example of them.

The Israelis who are pushing for these crackdowns and celebrating as students here are arrested, imprisoned, and deported despite their legal status and their rights, are not solely seeking control over the narrative in the United States, or the temperature of the rhetoric in the United Kingdom. Israel is seeking to place its thumbs on the scale of governments, societies, and most critically conflicts, all around the world, to make its influence undeniable, and to make avoiding interaction with it, as many Arab states tried to do in decades past, impossible. The bombs that rain down in Shuja’iyya, and the ethnic cleansing that is occurring right now in Rafah, have consequences that stretch beyond its borders, both to the benefit and the chagrin of the Israeli politicians and arms dealers who are responsible.

Inevitably, whenever we discuss Gaza and the war being waged against it, we are confronted with the argument: “What does this have to do with me? It’s on the other side of the world, two countries duking it out. It’s none of my business.”

To begin with, on a basic level, how could this not be your business? We, as Americans, pay our taxes to a state that then uses that money to send arms to the country that is enacting this catastrophe. It is by definition something you are related to.

Your dollars went to funding this venture, one way or another. You have the ability to pressure your representatives to speak up about it because they retain the power to halt that funding. You have the ability to vote in other leaders because they hold the executive authority to tell Israel to stop its ventures. The United States holds powers that very few, if any, countries in the world have, which is that Israel listens to the White House and almost always the White House alone. When even the late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, says that it is a myth that Israel controls America, that in fact America controls Israel, you understand how accepted this notion is among those who are intimately involved.

If you are aware of what is happening, and you know that America is supporting it, and you still consider it to be none of your business, or even none of the business of those who oppose it, then you are abandoning the very idea of cause and effect. In discussing most Israeli actions during this war, that abandonment seems to be increasingly invoked by its defenders.

If we manage to break past that argument of having nothing to do with it, then the appeals to sanity start to come in. “Okay, I acknowledge we have something to do with Israel, but why are you putting Mexico and Palestine in the same category? What does ICE and the border wall have to do with Gaza, why are you calling for walls to be torn down everywhere?”

Are there not similarities between how the threat of illegal immigration is expressed by American conservatives and how the threat of Palestinians is expressed in Israel? How migrants in so many countries around the world are fear mongered about? That all they want to do is to rape, is to pillage, that they take over communities, that the sight of their laborers is to be feared, that the sight of their families means they’re about to subsume you as a race? Technology from Israel’s Elbit Systems, the defense contractor, is building surveillance towers on the border with Mexico, just as mortars from that same contractor are being used by Israeli soldiers to bombard Palestinian towns in Gaza. CECOT, the Salvadoran mega-prison where innocents are being deported to right now, was constructed under the guise of holding “terrorists” indefinitely, borrowing language from the War on Terror, with President Bukele publicly making the comparison that Hamas was just like MS-13.

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