Israel and the US vs. Palestine: Latinos, call it for what it is
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Referring to the most recent Israeli invasion of Palestinian territory,Hispanic US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned against Israel using its current campaign against Arabic militant group HAMAS to justify "Ethnic cleansing" of regular Palestinian citizens from the Gaza strip. Colombian president Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrega stated that even if Colombia has to breakoff diplomacy with Israel, he cannot "endorse genocide". And other Latin American countries have also expressed solidarity with the
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besieged Palestinians. See a pattern here? Latin American countries have long suffered the results of numerous, ruthless attempts at colonialism (by the US, a piece of history not taught in American schools.) Now Israel is attempting to speed up its own colonization of the Palestinian State by bombing the hell out of the Gaza Strip, a section of Palestine that Israel has walled off and turned into an Arabic ghetto. And the US is backing them up.
Latin American solidarity with Palestine may well be rooted in the sad Latino trajectory of colonialism by the US. But I believe it is more than that: it's a response to US institutional racim. After all, what do Latin Americans and Palestinians have in common? That they (we) are not white, as "white" is understood in the United States. They (we) are Brown. Arabs may speak a different language but they LOOK like us. Moreover, they have a tradition of living among us, settling in Latin countries, forming communities, marrying natives and having Latin American children. So to us they are familiar, not the "other" that supposedly performs atrocities in the name of Islam. (In fact, when they land in Latin America, they convert to Christianity. That's not a stretch because they include Jesus Christ in their pantheon of Islamic prophets, so they venerate JC,like we do). Finally, Arabs are related to many of us through ancient bloodlines. They were in Spain from 711 to 1492, before royals Ferdinand and Isabella booted them for political and religious reasons.Palestinians are Arabs, they have brown skin. Today's Israelis are mostly descendants of European Jews, their country an artificial construct of European Whiteness forced on an Arabic region.Israelis are largely WHITE,or considered so by the rest of the world. That is why, in the US,Israelis are favored by the official media and political apparatus, a solid bastion of entitled whiteness. And that is why Arabs are maligned--it's all an expression of American institutional racism. Even some alleged spokesmen for people of color are being coerced into spouting the racist party line of Palestinians as culprits in their own victimization. Don't listen to these sellouts. Don't listen to Joe Biden's sanctimonious mumblings and false equivalencies of Ukraine and Israel both being prey to foreign aggression--he's really siding with the killers. This is the same man who's building walls in the American Southwest to keep brown people out.
Don't believe any of the lies you're being fed by him, and others who speak for the interests of American whiteness. Don't believe that victims and freedom fighters are really "terrorists". Resist all fascist attempts to muzzle your progressive voice. Try to pierce through the veil of misinformation that surrounds us in the US. Get your news from different sources and you'll see that it's really about racism against brown people. Let's call it for what it is.
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