The Israeli war machine is amok. I would say run amok, but perhaps the proper term is fly amok, given their air power. Like the Americans after 9/11, Israel is engulfed in a war-fever sparked by the Hamas attacks. But America, with perhaps the most fearsome war machine on Earth, left the lands of Iraq and Afghanistan after spending trillions of dollars, losing thousands of U.S. casualties, tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives lost and spent.
Did the U.S. empire emerge triumphant? Nope. The only winner were weapons manufacturers. What we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are limits to military power, even an imperial power. We see that Israel is indeed a garrison state waging war against an occupied people for whom every interaction is a martial one; one of military power and repression, when Palestinians, yes, even Palestinian juveniles, children are processed.
They are tried in military courts, before military judges. That’s because Israel is a garrison state. But it’s also an apartheid state. And guess what? It’s also a terror state. What do I mean by calling Israel a terror state? When we think of the word terror, or even terrorist, we are accustomed to thinking of certain ethnic groups, preferably Arabs, aren’t we? But terror is just a tactic, an asymmetrical military tactic. Think about how the British empire thought of the Americans running around in rags, fighting men wearing scarlet uniforms. They thought of them as poor colonial terrorists. Terror is a technique.
When President George Bush attacked Iraq, he promised awe and shock, shock and awe. What does that mean, except terror? When we think of the military, you can’t do so without recognizing that it needs an enemy to function. Imagine a Palestinian child being brought before a military court, being brought before a military judge. That interaction is a military one, and that child is brought precisely because he or she is Palestinian.
What’s wrong with this picture? That’s because in a garrison state, apartheid state, a terror state, being indigenous is a crime. For indigenousness is a living refutation of settler colonialism. Here in the U.S., the military used massacres to depopulate what the people we call Indians, the indigenous people. Whole indigenous communities were erased, and while they failed, they did untold damage and destruction, like Israel.
Behind it all was nothing but land hunger. That’s it. That’s behind all of it. That’s how it is. Everything else is pretext. Being indigenous is not a crime, but being a settler colonialist certainly should be. And what of land theft? Abolish military courts. Abolish the occupation. With love, not fear. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
