Slavery and Occupation are a Violence Machine
The Palestinian struggle is in a lineage of over 200 years of slave revolts, political violence, and resistance to occupation from the United States and Europe
He captured Harper's Ferry with his nineteen men so true
He frightened old Virginia till she trembled through and through
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew
But his soul goes marching on
John Brown’s Body (American Civil War Folk Song)
“Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity” - Noel Ignatiev
This October marked the 164th anniversary of John Brown’s abolitionist raid of the Virginian Harper’s Ferry military base in hopes of igniting an armed slave uprising across the American South. A militia of Freed and Fugitive Black slaves, and Whites fueled by the notion of being “soldiers in the army of the lord” sent to abolish slavery, took on the US Marine Corps occupying a military base, stealing arms in hopes to hand out during a plantation liberation campaign, before ultimately being crushed and killed by the US State.
28 years before that in Virginia, the slave preacher Nat Turner led a revolt of fellow slaves after an alleged religious vision to “kill all Whites.” Turner’s revolt resulted in the killing of an estimated 55 white people, before the subsequent backlash of the execution of 65 alleged rebel slaves by the US State plus around 120 more Black slaves killed indiscriminately by local White mobs.
40 years before that on the island of Haiti former slave Toussaint Louverture began the world’s largest slave revolt against French Colonial rule. An uprising that saw former enslaved peoples killing their masters but also French Colonists women and children in one of the bloodiest successful revolutions in world history, abolishing slavery and declaring an end to French occupation of the island.
Fast forward to 1971 at the Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York, a group of mostly Black but also Puerto Rican and White prisoners rose up and occupied the prison, taking 42 corrections officers (COs) hostage and demanding changes to horrific, overcrowded, and racist conditions in the prison as well as the removal of the prison’s superintendent. In the end New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered heavily armed State Troops and COs to retake the prison from the insurgent prisoners resulting in 33 prisoner deaths and 10 hostage CO deaths, only all but one of the hostages killed were done so by the State Troopers.
In 1992 thousands of mostly Black people in Los Angeles took to the streets to riot after the not-guilty verdict of the police officers that brutalized Rodney King on tape. Charlie Rose asked American-novelist Toni Morrison about this and she said:
What struck me most about the people that were burning down shops and stealing was how long they waited. The restraint. Not the spontaneity. The restraint. You realize the moment to be anarchic was when we saw those tapes, when we first saw those tapes … They waited for justice, almost a year.
On October 7 this past month Hamas militias broke through the walls surrounding Gaza with bulldozers, construction equipment, and hang gliders. Walls where Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can shoot on sight those that approach. Walls further backed by the United States multi-billion dollar Iron Dome Air Defense System that Israel boasted as a state of the art protection system against “primitive” Hamas rockets. Walls entirely regulated by the Israeli government which the Human Rights Watch constitutes as an “open air prison,” an almost euphemistic phrase really. A prison implies incarceration of people for a crime with some liberal notion of due process. Palestinians are held in Gaza based on their ethnicity, denied nearly all basic civil rights, over 50% are unemployed and face food and water insecurity, and are collectively punished for alleged crimes of others based on their race. Much more akin to the Warsaw Ghetto of Nazi occupied Poland.
After bursting through these walls Hamas’ offensive resulted in the killing of over 1400 people, including IDF soldiers and Israeli settlers, the seizure of weapons from Israeli military bases, and the taking of 230 hostages. As of October 30 Israel has killed over 8500 Palestinians in Gaza between air strikes and a ground invasion, forced the entire Northern half of Gaza to evacuate to the South with less than 24 hours notice, bombed hospitals, schools, ambulances, and refugee camps, not allowing any Palestinian refugees entry into Israel, denied aid, and turned off the power, water, and internet within Gaza’s border walls.
For the past month it feels like every single mainstream Western news coverage has begun with the interviewer leading with the question of, “Do you condemn Hamas?” Nearly every US Politician from President Biden, conservatives, to even progressive darlings like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has called Hamas instigators of a terrorist attack and positioned Israel as a defensive state. This is completely devoid of Israel’s 75 years of occupation of Palestine, forced removal of Palestinians from their land, genocide, and killing Palestinians peacefully protesting like in the 2018 Great March of Return. Last week, the Jewish Middle-East scholar and activist Norman Finkelstein contextualized the Hamas offensive in his essay, comparing it to Nat Turner’s slave revolt:
The 2,000 young men who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7, 2023, had been born into a concentration camp. For fully two decades they had been immured in a 25-mile long by 5-mile wide sliver of land that was among the most densely populated places in the world. The vast majority of them could never hope to leave but only to pace each day the camp’s suffocating perimeter; never aspire to gainful employment or eat a full meal; never expect to marry or raise a family. Abandoned by everyone, they were “remaindered” to languish and die. To expedite this process, Israel periodically launched “operations” visiting death and destruction on Gaza: thousands methodically mowed down; homes and critical infrastructure systematically pulverized. It might sound like the script of a bad B-movie, but on the night of October 6 each of those 2,000 men probably kissed his mother, then his father, goodbye. Forever. And then each silently vowed to vindicate the remorseless torture of a twilight existence, and to avenge the murder of a grandparent, sister, brother, niece, nephew by that Satanic power that cursed their lives.
“The owl of Minerva spreads it wings,” Hegel famously said, “only with the falling of the dusk.” That is, one only acquires wisdom into an epoch with the ripeness of time. It’s still high noon and thus too soon to resolve what verdict History will cast on the slave revolt in Gaza on October 7, 2023.
There is no point for any reasonable proponent of justice, liberation, and advocate for humanity to get bogged down in the wholly disingenuous calls to condemn Hamas. This question is not in good faith, aims to equivocate the violence that happened on October 7 with the 75 years of occupation and subjugation of Palestine, and act as if this revolt came without any historical context. It aims to erase years of nonviolent resistance by Palestinians that was met with slaughter from the IDF. Calls for international aid and support that did not result in any productive changes on the ground in Gaza. Promises from Israel to stop further settlements of Palestine that they immediately go back on as they kick more and more families from their homes. As the editorial board of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it, you can have empathy with non-combatants killed and taken hostage but “Netanyahu bears responsibility for attacks” for the increasingly far-right violence done by the Israeli State against the Palestinian people.
Resistance to slavery, colonialism, imprisonment are depicted most often within the old saying history is written by the victors. John Brown and Nat Turner, despite what was described as heinous violence by the press of their days, are heroes in the American context because the union defeated the confederacy and abolished chattel slavery in the United States. Attica and the LA Riots largely in response to the ongoing White Supremacist violence in the United States face a more complicated historic memory. There is a plaque outside Attica Correctional Facility only commemorating the fallen prison employees.
Marxist-historian CLR James described the violent struggle the slaves took up in the Haitian Revolution in his book Black Jacobins, "cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased."
It is important to remember that a system that inputs violence, apartheid, and genocide of Palestinian lives is going to output a violent response. That violence is sad, yes. But it is letting the oppressors define the playing field when we blame the response to 75 years of occupation as the cause.
What happens next feels self-defeating. Israel is allowed to keep doing this because the United States says “ok.” In the form of weapons, bottomless funding, and strategic support. And while there are mass protests in the streets in every American city, many also can see the resemblance of the Iraq War and how despite mass civil unrest the US military state will just do what it wants anyways. All the Democrats and Republicans come together behind Biden’s bold lies in support of Israel as the country continues to flatten entire neighborhoods while medics are too afraid to go out because the IDF keep targeting them.
Remember, Israel is allowed to keep doing this because the United States says “ok.” Across the Arab world people are taking action, literally millions in the streets leaving the US State Department wondering if this can be a tipping point for diplomacy in the Middle-East. Domestically, a few years ago in Portland the Democratic Socialists of America campaigned to end Portland Trail Blazers partnership with sniper scope manufacturers that sell to the IDF. After a year of action, including veterans co-opting their event in the Moda Center to send a message to “end the partnership” with war crimes, they won. These weapons manufacturers have addresses. They are a part of communities many of us live in. Their bosses walk around in the world wearing suits and to them selling a missile drone is the same as selling Big Macs no matter what the war machine is used for. Insurgency is possible.
The Israeli military thought their army, border fence, and Iron Dome were god’s gift—it was broken through. So when we think our actions are helpless in the short term to stop their genocide, know that Biden and Netanyahu have started a multi-front war. Just like with chattel slavery and with prisons, the ownership class only gives the illusion of the word of god. Solidarity means ignoring the bad faith battle over words and making their real world harder and harder to handle. When history is written by the victors we ought to keep fighting, and we ought to win.
Actions:
Local
Portland Rally Outside Sen. Ron Wyden’s office demanding a “ceasefire” - November 2 @ 3pm (911 NE 11th Avenue)
Palestine Actionists shut down Elbit Systems in Boston (Israeli drone manufacturer)
March on Washington for a Free Palestine - November 4
International Day of Solidarity in San Francisco - November 4 @ 1pm Civic Center SF
Other Protests and Locations this week: https://uscpr.org/oct-2023-protests/