For the past 20 months, people in Los Angeles have shut down freeways, walked out of schools, marched peacefully, interrupted politicians, closed major streets, and organized educational events to try to stop the genocide in Gaza.
For the past 77 years, since the ‘Nakba’ on May 15th, 1948, the powerful Western countries have helped to empower Israel to occupy Palestine. This 77-year colonial occupation is now aiming for its “Final Solution,” which is to “level all of Gaza” as they did with Rafah, according to Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, back in May.
Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, using religion as a land deed, resembles the early days of U.S. expansion using Manifest Destiny to remove the indigenous population of North America and replace it with European white settlers to build a “new world.” This is the blueprint of the colonial project of Zionism outlined at their founding conference in 1897, as the New York Times has reported multiple times.
In 1948, hundreds of Arab Villages were depopulated by the barrel of a gun across historic Palestine during the Nakba. Eighty percent of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed out of their homeland and into refugee camps, many of them into the Gaza Strip. British forces killed those who didn’t leave.
For decades, the Palestinian people have fought a relentless struggle for their existence and for the world to hear their calls for justice and sovereignty, only to be met with silence from most world leaders. Still, they have received solidarity from working-class people around the world.