Last Saturday, another protest in support of the people of Palestine was held in Civic Garden in the West End of Downtown Dallas. The demonstration was held to show public support for not only a ceasefire in Gaza, but a return of all political prisoners and the end to all funding and support from the United States as well.
“The ethnic cleansing and displacement of Palestinians is a genocide,” a representative from the Dallas Anti-War Committee said to a crowd of over 2,000 standing in drizzling rain in Civic Garden. “But who is funding this genocide? The United States of America [is] who enables Israel, who sends 3.6 billion dollars to Israel in money and bombs and missiles and guns, who protects Israel from seeing any consequences from the UN for decades of war crimes, who is soaked in the blood of this genocide.”
As outlined in the last article in this series covering the Siege on Gaza, Israel is a Zionist colonial project that developed from the British Mandate of Palestine in 1917, formally adopted in 1922. Palestine remained under British control until 1948 when the State of Israel was officially established. Since then, Israel has progressively claimed more territory and Palestine now largely only consists of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Over decades, Israel has been accused of countless war crimes by both the UN and humanitarian groups worldwide. The Siege is no exception, as the UN has condemned Israel’s consistent attacks on civilian zones. In response, the young nation’s government claims that it has provided sufficient warnings with evacuation instructions. Bombing a hospital or a school is one of six grave violations that are identified and condemned by the UN Security Council.
While Palestinian resistance group Hamas has committed violations under the Geneva Convention – as Hamas has taken hostages during the conflict – reports referring to the group as terrorists are misleading and present a skewed narrative regarding indigenous populations retaliating against armed occupation. Likewise, the United Nations General Assembly has explicitly affirmed the people of Palestine’s right to resist.
Both the hostages and their families have called for a ceasefire and the exchange of all Palestinian prisoners for the hostages’ release.
“Here we are in Downtown Dallas,” chapter leader of the AFL-CIO labor union said at the demonstration. “And there’s Lamar Street right there. Lamar is named for Mirabelle C. Lamar, who was a president of the Republic of Texas. He ran against Sam Houston. His campaign was supported by the Galveston News, which is the parent organization of the Dallas Morning News. And Mirabelle Lamar said, ‘We gotta get rid of Sam Houston, because he’s too soft on the Native Americans.’ Mirabelle Lamar’s program was to kill or remove every Native American in the Republic of Texas. We are standing on Caddo land.”
The Caddo Tribe was eventually overtaken by the Comanche Tribe, after which both tribes were exterminated the US government and its settlers.
In regard to the plight of the Palestinians, the Weekly has previously pointed out similarities present in both the civil rights movement and the colonization of the Americas. As the right to resist is guaranteed by the Magna Carta – which was created in 1215 and is considered to be the basis of the Declaration of Independence – armed retaliation in conflicts during our land’s colonization could also be described as justifiable with a strong legal argument to support the claim.
The Darfur genocide, which has been ongoing for the last twenty years, has resulted in up to 400,000 deaths of people from the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups. Resistance groups like the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement have taken the opposition against the Sudanese government and associated forces. Despite only exerting control over a small portion of the country, the SLM continues its fight to end the genocide as the UN has offered support in the deployment of the United Nations-African Union (UNAU) mission. However, the UNAU began exiting the region in 2018 after 11 years of conducting peacekeeping efforts.
While the genocide in Darfur has received ample support from the UN, the United States has abstained from voting in support of the deployment of peacekeeping operations. This was presumably done to minimize tensions with the Sudanese government at the time, while allowing the UN to proceed with their operations. Variably, the United States voted against a humanitarian truce in Gaza, along with Austria, Croatia, Fiji, Guatemala, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Paraguay, Tonga, and of course Israel.
As the US is one of the few countries holding veto power in the UN, it is likely to continue to block humanitarian aid as the Siege on Gaza continues.
While Gazans recently broke into UN warehouses to retrieve necessary supplies, the people of Palestine utilized their right to self-determination with the move. Even as Gaza’s Ministry of Health has released the names of all Palestinians killed in the wake of President Biden publicly doubting the death toll, press questioning the seriousness of the conflict continues to find wide circulation. Genocide denialism runs rampant and hate crimes have seen a huge uptick in recent weeks.
Despite Hamas’ classification by US and European governments as a terrorist organization, press entities such as the BBC have stopped using the term ‘terrorist’ to refer to Hamas. The word further communicates a false moral dichotomy to readers, erasing nuance and even major contextual truths. Supported by the UN charter, the existence of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and subjugation is fully legal and justified.