From Palestine to Canada the Voices Are Clear
End The Occupations of This Generation
Palestine has been at war, since before my mother was alive. Palestine has been at war for 25 years short of a century.
It’s been 75 years since the people of Palestine started to pack up everything they owned before traveling to the north, where it would be safe from the south, where the invaders, Zionists, were taking over.
Meanwhile, Hitler was all the way over in Europe doing the same thing to the Jewish people.
The first thing you have to understand is that Zionism is not Judaism, just like Christianity is not Catholicism.
They are not the same, and you can tell because Jewish people don’t want to murder en masse, and blame Hitler. Zionists blame all their behavior on other people.
The other thing that makes them different is that while many people convert to Judaism every day, most people are born to the faith and they have deep centuries-long rooted connections to the practice.
Zionists convert every day, move to Israel, steal the land of others, and then turn around and say “We did so because we were afraid.” Zionists do not take credit for their actions, and they certainly do not feel accountable for their behavior.
So to say “You’re anti-Semitic” is mostly just a scare tactic that they use to prevent people from saying that their behavior is wrong, they do so because they know everyone in the world is afraid to offend the Jewish people, given all they’ve been through.
Ironically, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people — such as the Indigenous Palestinians in Gaza, Sudan, the DRC, or Canada, — are never afforded that kind of respect.
I remember just last year in 2022 I was attending an “All Children Matter” Rally, that was being put on by the local Indigenous community. An Elder offered a young Asian girl a bottle of water, and the girl and her two friends started laughing at her, while on stage the male Elders were singing and dancing for their lost children.
So I yelled at her and told her she was being rude, the Elder thanked me, but there was no reason to thank me, when someone offers you water you take it or you say “No thank you,” you don’t laugh. It was only later someone said “Maybe she was nervous,” if so then she shouldn’t have been pointing and laughing at the ritual wear.
People have absolutely zero respect for things they don’t understand. Culturally speaking we are not integrated at all, which is why we were calling for more diversity, which is why we were calling for more integration not less.
But y’all, meaning white people, decided that we were “Going to War” over shit that didn’t matter to you and so you fought with everything you had, even raising up your Nazi flags across North America.
“I am in mourning,” my friend Nada Chehade tells me, “It is the new Nakba, it’s the Holocaust, it is slavery, it’s everything to me, can you understand?” No Nada, I cannot.
I can’t fathom what the people of Palestine are going through and I won’t try but what I will say is that to say nothing is to be complicit with the genocide and ethnic cleansing that is happening around the globe.
We are talking about the erasure of an entire race of people, on the basis that Israel has a right to exist because instead of staying to fight they got scared and ran away, and decided to impose their will on whatever place would have them, and when nowhere would have them, they decided to kill to make their voices heard.
That is Zionism.
It’s evil, it’s abhorrent of anything, and anyone who decides it doesn’t have a place in their lives, and it’s unwelcome in our world.
I’ve been around people of all different kinds of faiths. I’ve met Sikhs, Christians, Catholics, Satanists, Buddhists, and all kinds of people, and none of the ones I know are okay with what is happening in Gaza, but unlike me, many of the people who want to say something often don’t because they are at risk of losing employment for speaking out.
A lot of the people I know who are going to rallies are doing so because they are in privileged positions, but they are masking up and hiding their faces to protect that privileged place in case they end up losing it for speaking out.
Doesn’t this sound fucking familiar? Isn’t this shit what the Nazis did to the Jewish people? Isn’t this what the White folks did to the Black people they enslaved?
They policed our language, our joy, our institutions, everything about us until there was nothing left.
People are using words like “Ethnic Cleansing,” and that’s because these are the only words that fit.
What happened is that those who “Moved to Israel,” during the Hitler years, decided, without asking, without cooperation from other governments, that “this” land in what we now know as {Palestine} would be safe for them to live and flourish.
But because they essentially moved in without saying “Can we do this?” the people of Palestine fought back and Hamas was born.
Now the American government, even the Canadian and English governments will have you believe that Hamas is made up of terrorists, but the truth is that these are everyday citizens fighting for their land, their home, that was stolen from them.
It’s no different than what happened between English soldiers and the Kanadian Indigenous, when they were fighting before the English won, and colonized what we now know as Canada.
Now that you understand all of that, let’s talk about what Israel has been up to.
Since 1948 the people of Israel have been saying that if you don’t support the state of Israel, then you don’t support Jewish people, but Israel doesn’t even support the victims of the Holocaust, so what are they even talking about?
Now that we understand that Israel is one big lie after another, that as a state doesn’t really care about the people of Palestine, what can you do, from your chair to help?
Learn. Educate yourself, and grow in the knowledge that more people today are picking up the Quran than ever before, because they want to understand the Arab religions that are helping people find peace, in the middle of war zones.
It’s difficult to find music from Arab countries that is political because Google is the world’s leader in content diversification, so in short, you really need to look for what you want to find.
Which is to say that finding artists from Palestine is difficult in the Western world, but not even close, to being impossible, so I want to share a few videos of life in Palestine, by Palestinian artists, who are telling their stories through the majick of the internet.
This is the story of a young man named Hamada, he is a singer in a folk band called Soul. The Israeli army stole his guitar and then made a video laughing about it as they ruined it with their fat fingers.
And this MC Abdul talking about bombs in his dreams.
Karter Zaher x Jae Deen x Shadi Akhi — WE WON’T FORGET (Music Video)
We won’t forget. Ever. That which happened before cannot happen again, and we have the power to stop it. If we raise our voices loud enough, if we vote properly, if we boycott big business and support local, if we support each other with our money as much as our words, we can change the world.
We can BE the change, we want in the world, it’s fucking possible, but you, as an individual have to decide what that looks like for you. I can’t tell you, all I can keep doing is saying over and over again that the Occupation of Gaza is wrong and inhumane, it’s nothing short of evil and it needs to end immediately.
Sending all my love, from Canada to Palestine,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
