culture fix

i wore my "tear down the israeli apartheid wall" shirt today. it's a nice shirt; i get compliments. and yet, the shirt led me into a rather sinister conversation with myself.

i thought to myself, "we are against the wall. we are ok with seeing it torn down. we might even help tear it down. but then, what do the palestinians think of the wall?" thinking back to my time in palestine (summer 2002) - when there was no wall being built - i remembered that, wall or no wall, the palestinian people are fighting a war for *survival*. at the end of the day, they must devise a plan to kill israelis.

this is a simple realization. a people being invaded by an occupying army of momentous proportions and vicious determination *must* find a way to murder their occupiers. how else to get the bastards to leave?

but then, can we white folks in the US really grasp this simple little thought? i mean honestly, that i am able to live on this continent has a great deal to do with the fact that indigenous people's resistance on this continent was not sufficient to drive us into the sea. european settlers gained footholds here and then expanded those footholds until they could shove their whole fucking boot down the throats of native peoples. but what if the natives had poisoned our drinking water? slit the throats of our babies? buried us to the neck in anthills? in short, what if indigenous people had the tenacity and viciousness that has characterized european civilization in every incarnation? plainly speaking, there would be no "united states."

and so now the palestinian people face the latest and most vicious onslought of european colonialism. what else can they do but fight to kill and pray to god (allah ackba! god is great!) that their warfare will lead to victory over the colonizers?

and if the best a desperate people have to hope for is murder, how do we - as inheritors of settler colonialism - show "solidarity" with murder of our settler-brethren?

the israelis share a profound psychic bond with white america (and afrikaaners and ulster protestants) that makes us brethren in perhaps the sickest concoction humanity has ever devised.

so how genuine is our support for palestine? how deeply do we value self-determination? can we - in our hearts and minds - go beyond calling for the destruction of a wall? can we allow ourselves to cheer on the tearing down of the very fabric of israeli (and thus our own) civilization?

allah ackba!