On Sunday, a demonstration organized with the combined efforts of Dallas Palestine Coalition, Dallas Peace and Justice Center, Palestinian Youth Movement, and many others took Dallas City Hall to demand that political leadership at every level – including the City Council who recently signed a resolution to support Israel – condemn the actions taking place in Gaza supported by the United States.
The US allotts $3.8 billion annually to support Israel, with the average taxpayer contributing $25.25. Over $337 million of these funds come from Texas.
Guest speakers including Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Jews United Against Zionism, Imam Muhammad of Masjid Al-Islam, Next Generation Action Network’s Dominique Alexander, Akheel Mohammed of the Indian American Muslim Council, and more spoke in support of Palestine. The protest of thousands of Dallasites called for an end to the violence, further clarifying false narratives presented by mainstream media and politicians from both sides of the aisle.
While loss of life in the conflict overall has been significant, the proportion of deaths from Israelis to Palestinians shows parallels with respective casualties in other colonial projects throughout history.
Prior to this conflict, data collected from the last 15 years shows that loss of life has been widely disproportionate. For example, Palestinian deaths in 2014 made up over 95% of all casualties suffered on both sides. Additionally, numbers factored from the last month still place the ratio of casualties as 3:20 between Israelis to Palestinians. Likewise, the ratio of soldier and civilian deaths to American Indigenous death during the Indian American Wars from 1850-90 was 3:10, according to the Encyclopedia of Indian Wars by Gregory F. Michno.
As the colonization of Palestine has been more accelerated in the last 15 years than 40 of the most contentious years of our own land’s colonization, the ongoing genocide occurring in Gaza represents a frightening stage in the ethnic cleansing of the region. While exact figures are hard to find, as most registries showing casualties are kept in context with specific conflicts or wars, journalist Garry Leech compiled data in 2014 to estimate that Israeli forces have exterminated over 5.1 million Palestinian lives since 1948.
In the last week, over 47 families made up of over 500 Palestinians have been erased from the civil registry due to relentless bombings. Among those who have survived, over 1.1 million Palestinian civilians are now homeless as their houses have been destroyed by Israeli bombs and are desperate for humanitarian aid as just two days ago the borders were open to allow Egypt to send limited supplies.
Outside of conflicts, both basic rights and resources afforded to Palestine are severely limited. Since the British Mandate for Palestine was first established 1918, regulations set on Palestinians have shown stark similarities with mandatory conditions associated with the restriction of Indigenous tribes to reservations in 1850 and laws limiting freedom for newly freed slaves. Limitations on fishing in Gaza mirror hunting restrictions on Indigenous folk of the 1800s and the inaccessibility to basic rights shares commonalities with the Black Codes of 1865-66. These similarities further identify Israel as a colonial project and Zionism as a nationalist movement that is distinctly ethnic and non-religious.
“Zionism is a nationalist movement, a political movement that was created a little over a hundred years ago. It’s a transformation from subservience to God,” Rabbi Dovid Weiss says. “Because our subservience to God that clearly dictates to us that we shalt not kill, we shalt not steal […] that was 3,000 years ago we made this covenant with God.”
“Two thousand years ago, King Solomon’s Temple was destroyed, and we were put under oath to God to not attempt to recreate Jewish Sovereignty until the coming of the messiah. Making Jewish sovereignty in any shape or form in any part of the world is forbidden. We are not to return en masse since we were sent into exile by God 2,000 years ago. Jews who respect the teachings of the Torah know that sovereignty is expressly forbidden. Zionism is not Jewish sovereignty. It’s a nationalist movement.”
As more discrepancies have been found in Israel’s claims that Hamas was responsible for the hospital bombing at Al-Alhi Baptist both substantiated facts and history consistently conveys Israel’s willingness to target hospitals and schools to kill a large number of civilians. Despite this, media platforms spread potentially false information shared by the Israeli government.
“This is why, as Americans, we should be furious,” a member of Palestinian Youth Movement said last Thursday at a demonstration at the Dallas Morning News building, calling for an end to media complicity in Palestine’s genocide. “It’s not only an attack on Palestinians in Palestine, but those here in the USA too. Six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume of Plainfield Township, Illinois was murdered by a man who believed everything the western media was feeding into his brain. Understand that this boy was killed because of the lies in western media.”
Aside from complicity in its media, the United States has offered a total of $243.9 billion in aid to Israel from 1946-2022, adjusting for inflation. As then-Senator Biden said in 1986 and recently reiterated: if Israel did not exist, the US would establish another nation in its stead in order to protect American interests in the Middle East.
“I want everybody to remember: what we have going on now is a rapid genocide. What we had going on last month was a slow genocide. And a slow genocide is still unacceptable,” Dan, a member of the Dallas Anti-War Committee said prior to the march on Sunday. “Our struggle cannot end with a ceasefire, our struggle cannot end until the siege of Gaza is lifted. Our struggle cannot end until Palestine is free. […] It is a colonial project, every single prime minister that Israel has ever had either was born in Europe or had at least one parent that was born in Europe. That is a fact, and you can verify it. Meanwhile, millions of Palestinians, many here in this crowd, can never return to a land where they were born or their parents were born and their families have lived for nobody-knows-how-many-generations.”
“Colonial projects seem out-of-place in the 21st century. As out of place, you might say, as an Israeli bomb in a Palestinian hospital.”
Many bombs currently being sent to Palestine are coming directly from Grand Prairie, paid for by our taxes. As of this morning, nearly two-thirds of Gaza’s medical centers have ceased functioning.