When will the Zionist announce Gaza is no more
Childhood Notes on Palestine
Preface
In a few days I shall celebrate my 77th birthday, but as the poem below reveals, I have been conscious of events in Palestine since I was four years old, 1948. It was not enough that I was born, May 29, 1944, into the atomic bomb age. I am so thankful I was born of conscious parents who attended the 1945 San Francisco Peace Conference that established the United Nations. But I have never forgotten the 1948 news reels during intermission at the drive-in theatre I attended with my brother and parents. When I saw masses of Palestinian refugees fleeing across that bridge into Jordan, I recall sitting so horrified and traumatized that I didn't think to ask my parents what was going on. I just knew in my four year old mind something was very very wrong. I suspect the newsreel was giving the Western point of view as it is giving us at this very hour as I write, i.e., Israel has the right of self defense to slaughter Palestinians who dare exercise their human right to self defense by any means necessary. Yet, as I suspect the fake media did in 1948 (then beyond my comprehension as a four year old), at this hour it is proclaiming Palestinians the villains and Israel the victims, though happily, especially through social media, the world is seeing who the true victims are as a result of American taxpayers and bipartisan support from the American political sycophants.
I am neither Democrat nor Republican, I am a revolutionary Black nationalist. In 1980, when I addressed the Oakland, California National Conference of Black Men at the Oakland Auditorium, I said, "We Black men (and women) support Yasser Arafat's call for Palestinian state. We want the same national independence Yasser Arafat demands for Palestinians." I repeat my notes to the Black Men's Conference in 1980. Since the present uprising in occupied Palestine, we have viewed video documentaries of conditions in the occupied areas, not to mention the Zionist version Nazi concentration camps as in Gaza. But the settler invasion, occupation displacement of Palestinians reminded us of gentrification in the ghettoes of America, with the concomitant removal of North American Africans, especially when the whites settlers arrive, alas, often joined by their Negropean sycophants who are in unity with displacing the long term residents who have been removed from their neighborhood by hook or crook, mostly by the latter, and the new settlers often find those remaining uncivilized when they sing too loudly in the church they have been saved and sanctified in for decades. And after the neo-liberal settlers have replaced the ghetto inhabitants, the settlers first project is placing Black Lives Matter signs in their windows as the former inhabitants make their way to homeless encampments nearby or where-ever. Of course, in occupied Palestine, settler occupation is more sinister, alas, the settlers often take up residence before the occupants are removed. Can we not imagine why events in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are approaching the level of violence in the Gaza concentration camp?
Not only are Americans deaf dumb and blind to events in occupied Palestine, they suffer the same myopia as per gentrification and displacement in American ghettoes, i.e., concentration camps. As per the homeless, America is spending billions for transitional housing when the simple solution is granting the "unhoused" a life estate to housing, thus, ending homelessness overnight. But the myopia is so severe, the City of Oakland is planning to build housing for the unhoused near the Lake Merritt area, yes, the site where Black vendors have been removed and relocated, if only a slight distance, from the lake residents and businesses that have found their presence a nuisance. And the City is planning housing for the homeless adjacent to the lake?
Just know this: those who champion equity don't mean it, just as those who talk about Black Lives Matter don't mean it. When the institutions and corporations who have oppressed us suddenly donate to our liberation, we must be suspicious for it may be in the best manner of the Trojan horse, except when we count the dollar amount of reparations and the memoranda of understanding that clearly state we follow our own agenda and take orders from no one, especially our former oppressors, no matter their new-found recovery from the addiction to white supremacy. We think long term recovery is due.
photo Alicia Mayo
