Sarah Schulman, 10/8/23
It seems that Israel is planning a ground invasion of Gaza and the US is accompanying this with an aircraft carrier with 5,000 sailors into the area. These are both significant escalations. If these events indeed occur, Israel will kill as many people as they can and the presence of the US military escalates the entire region.
The other option is to end the siege of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. Make every person who lives in the area an equal citizen with equal rights, passports, access to roads, universities etc. Two rights of return for two equal peoples.
Media coverage humanizes Israeli suffering and ignores Palestinians. They don’t interview Palestinian individuals or leaders of any faction. The media insists that Israelis are people and Palestinians are not. That Israeli feeling and experience are the only ones that matter, and continue to ignore what brought us to this moment.
Palestine is – like every society in the world- a multi-diminsional society. Like Jews and Americans, Palestinians contain multiple factions, multiple religious approaches (Palestinians are wide spectrums of Muslim, Christian, and Druse), and a wide variety of political visions. They would never act like a united block and all vote in the same way, for example. To fear that is to misunderstand Palestine and to imagine that they are different from every one on earth.
Which way? Military escalation by two immense powerful militarized societies: Israel and the US? Or end the brutal structures of occupation, apartheid and siege and give people a chance to live, and to live their lives with equal rights and freedoms?
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