The reactionary class of white settlers in the United States has responded to Black Lives Matter with the same defensiveness that Israeli settlers have responded to the Palestinian liberation movement. They've demonized Black Lives Matter as a hateful cult, they've supported the efforts from their country's police and military to suppress the movement, they've characterized the efforts from the colonized group to gain more power as an attack on white people (like how right-wing Zionists characterize all opposition to their ideology as anti-Semitism). It's part of the effort to justify the ongoing genocide and oppression that both of these settler-colonial states are built upon.
"Even the blind can see these people did wrong," the Native rapper Ant Loc says in a song about what the settlers have done to the continent's colonized peoples. Through deliberately spreading disease and slaughtering indigenous communities, European colonizers killed around 90% of the indigenous population, or 56 million Natives. The forced relocation, enslavement, and persecution of the people of Africa also consisted of genocide, as the 1951 petition We Charge Genocide explained:
It is sometimes incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and definitive destruction of a race or people. The Genocide Convention, however, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, defines genocide as any killings on the basis of race, or, in it specific words, as "killing members of the group"-- We maintain, therefore, that the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.
Settlers in both America and Israel prefer not to think that the term "genocide" applies to what's been done by the system they benefit from. A cultural myth surrounds the processes with which the indigenous First Nations and Palestine were colonized; the colonization of the First Nations is portrayed as a necessary part of "manifest destiny" and the creation of the "greatest country on earth," while the colonization of Palestine is portrayed as necessary for letting "God's chosen people" return to their rightful homeland. To preserve this mythology of settler-colonialism, they try to erase the colonial atrocities that continue to be committed every day.
What's being done to the Palestinians is equivalent to the genocide against the Africans and the First Nations people. After being forcibly transferred from the lands Israel has gained in the last century, the Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing deliberate deprivations of resources and discriminatory violence from the Israeli military, all while Israel enforces dozens of apartheid laws for Palestinians within its borders. Israel's government covers up this reality by systematically lying about abuses from its armed forces, by falsely painting killed Palestinians as "human shields" for Hamas (or more broadly by painting the resisting Palestinians as tools for Islamic extremism), and by propagating the narrative that Israel is the "only democracy in the Middle East."
When Zionism has established this narrative about terrorists trying to destroy a crucial haven for the Jews, it's easy for the settlers to ignore or rationalize any evidence that Israel is doing wrong to the Palestinians. It's the colonizer's fear of the colonized that motivates everyday Israelis to intuitively advocate for genocide against Palestinians, as demonstrated by Abby Martin's interviews that show Israeli settlers expressing desire for mass slaughter against the people on the other side of the Gaza barrier. Ethnic cleansing is seen as the solution to the indigenous backlash.
In this moment of crisis, the American settler is gaining the same intensely warlike mentality that the Israeli settler has long had. Encouraged by the endorsements of violence against protesters from Fox News and President Trump, white supremacist groups are shooting at Black Lives Matter protesters and infiltrating protests to act as agent provocateurs. The U.S. police and the army, which have largely been infiltrated by far-groups, are killing and maiming people at the protests often indiscriminately. All future violence against the movement will be tacitly endorsed by the country's reactionary figures, because they don't see George Floyd's murder as an injustice. They see it as just another instance of the police doing their job.
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