Over the previous two months, protest marches in solidarity with the Palestinian individuals have taken place all throughout the United States and Canada. They have attracted a various crowd of individuals, together with many Indigenous nations and communities.
Participants have denounced “US imperialism” for enabling Israeli aggression, ethnic cleaning and genocide whereas others have charged Israel itself with “settler colonialism”.
However, many attendees – particularly pro-Palestinian immigrants – have failed to understand their very own relationship to settler colonialism. Many of us see the US and Canada as secular democracies that present good financial alternatives and never as settler-colonial societies, serving because the blueprint for Israel. We have ignored our personal complicity as settlers.
Muslims and South Asian, North African and Arab immigrant settlers should interrogate the legitimacy of America’s and Canada’s proper to exist and the expensive trade-off they make in taking up nationwide identities in these nations that come on the expense of Indigenous peoples at “home” and imperialist adventurism overseas.
Settler-colonial historical past ignored
A major variety of migrant Muslims don’t appear to understand that American societies are animated by white supremacist non secular doctrines corresponding to manifest future and doctrines of discovery and terra nullius, Protestant ethics, widespread regulation property rights, and Victorian notions of gender and sexuality.
Rather, Muslim “arrivants” to the US ought to think about the historical past of settler colonialism within the Americas – a historical past that sees Islamophobia and anti-Indigenous narratives in addition to anti-Blackness and anti-Jewishness inextricably certain.
In the late fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus’s conquistador invasion of the Americas commenced because the European Crusading eviction, homicide and compelled conversion of Muslims and Jews in Andalusia was coming to an finish.
There, Muslims and Jews have been racially and religiously solid as “enemies”, “savages” and “heathens”, an othering that tinted the lens by means of which Columbus and his successors noticed Indigenous peoples within the Americas, describing them as “blood drinkers”, “cannibals” and “devils”.
As Alan Mikhel writes in his ebook God’s Shadow, Columbus described the weapons utilized by the Indigenous Taíno individuals of the Caribbean as “alfanjes, the Spanish name for the scimitars used by Muslim soldiers”, whereas Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés recognized 400 Aztec temples in Mexico as “mosques”, described “Aztec women” as “Moorish women” and referred to Montezuma, the Aztec chief, as a “sultan”.
Later, within the sixteenth century, because the transatlantic slave commerce received beneath manner, Africans – 20 to 30 p.c of whom have been Muslims – would change into the brand new “infidels” and “savages”.
These weren’t mere insults however Euro-American Christian non secular and racial narratives of dehumanisation that ultimately discovered their manner into US non secular doctrine, regulation and settler attitudes.
They have been used to justify the expropriation of Indigenous land and assets in addition to the enslavement and continued “after-life of slavery” initiatives concentrating on Black peoples. They additionally drove the Islamophobia that in recent times has resulted in Muslim bans, unmitigated US authorities help for Zionist settler colonialism in addition to the demise and destruction wrought as a part of the “war on terror”.
Rather than query the US settler-colonial venture root and department, Muslim immigrants have taken it as a right and tried to entrench themselves as “good liberal settlers”, eliding their very own settler-colonial complicities, even once they have come from nations ravaged by the results of imperialist US international coverage.
American nightmare
This love for the delusional promise of the “American dream” runs counter to what the selectively quoted anti-American Muslim Malcolm X, known as an “American nightmare” and exists regardless of a surge in recent times of Indigenous activism in addition to an unlimited physique of scholarship in Indigenous, Palestinian and comparative settler-colonial research.
This activism and work assist us perceive that the US’s imperial commitments overseas are knowledgeable by the violence it has wreaked towards Black peoples and Indigenous peoples in North America – or what the latter seek advice from as Turtle Island.
As Eve Tuck, professor of vital race and Indigenous research on the University of Toronto, and Okay Wayne Yang, professor of ethnic research on the University of California, San Diego, wrote in a paper titled Decolonization shouldn’t be a Metaphor: “Oil is the motor and motive for war and so was salt, so will be water. Settler sovereignty over the very pieces of earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms. … ‘Indian Country’ was/is the term used in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S. military for ‘enemy territory’.”
A working example is the Iraq conflict. Critics and a few US officers have been adamant that the conflict – spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of oil big Halliburton – was supposed to profit huge oil. However, it was missed that US fighter jets, cruise missiles and armoured automobiles couldn’t have descended on Iraq in 2003 with out the gasoline derived from ample oil provides tapped from Indigenous lands, which at the moment makes the US the world’s largest oil producer and, by far, the biggest polluter.
Indigenous-led NoDAPL protests in 2016 towards the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was set to run near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation have been a missed alternative for Muslim and pro-Palestinian activists to centre and draw deeper connections between settler colonialism at residence and overseas.
Another blatant occasion of the connection between settler colonialism at residence and overseas is at Cornell University, the Ivy League establishment the place I used to be a visiting scholar final yr and which has additionally been a hub of pro-Palestinian activism in current weeks.
Set among the many bucolic countryside of upstate New York and flush with waterfalls, gorges and evergreens, Cornell is considered the biggest college land seize in US historical past and the only largest beneficiary of the 1862 Morrill Act, which noticed 10.7 million acres (4.3 million hectares) stolen from 250 completely different Indigenous peoples in 15 states and handed over to universities.
In this, Cornell accrues advantages from the principal income and capital of the land in addition to floor extraction rights involving minerals, assets, mining and water. Cornell University can also be partnered with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, based in 1912, whose navy analysis and improvement labs have pioneered the applied sciences of Palestinian dispossession.
Muslims’ particular duty
Understanding our funding in settler colonialism ought to push us to oppose it in full. This goes additional than pickets, teach-ins, Boycott-Divestment-Sanction (BDS) campaigns, blockading arms producers premised on short-term disaster administration, or the performative land acknowledgments which have change into customary at land-grab universities like Cornell.
It means transformational solidarity, a long-term course of grounded in shared religious, moral and political commitments that demand a metamorphosis of all our relationships, together with to the native, historic and materials geographies of the land we’re located on.
As Palestinian scholar Dana Olwan wrote in an article titled On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms, incidents through which “Indigenous activists are invited to provide opening ceremonies for pro-Palestinian events” are many and are sometimes animated by the dearth of a deeper interrogation and difficult of the “Canadian and United States settler coloniality and thus normalize the violence of such states”.
This sort of transformational solidarity shouldn’t be new. For instance, it has been customary in Chile, a rustic with the biggest Palestinian inhabitants outdoors the Middle East, for Palestinians to march in solidarity with the Indigenous Mapuche individuals on the annual Indigenous People’s Day parade and work on the land with them.
While these solidarity traces do happen within the US on the degree of mobilisation, they’re inconsistent on the degree of organisation. Land acknowledgments are about intent, objective and above all – motion.
As Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), the religious pan-African revolutionary, put it: “What mobilisation does is, it mobilises people around issues. [But] those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues. We are concerned with the system. … Mobilisation usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action.”
As I write in my ebook Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances, Muslim immigrant settlers bear a selected duty to behave not solely due to the geopolitical context of Islamophobia and Islam as a quintessential different relative to a Euro-American Christianity but additionally arguably due to Islam’s founding upon, and relationship to, social justice.
Aligned appropriately and as a quintessential signifier in whose world Orientalist shadow others are solid – as with NoDAPL Indigenous water protectors, who have been in contrast by US mercenary companies like TigerSwan to “jihadi movements”, and Black Lives Matter activists, who have been designated by the FBI as “Black identity extremists” – Islam and Muslims are ideally positioned to geopolitically demystify the intimate intersections between imperialism and “settler colonialism” in Palestine and Turtle Island.
By reneging on this duty, significantly these of us who establish as immigrant South Asian and North African Muslims, we change into Zionists on stolen land whereas we concurrently expose our hypocritical fantasies of releasing Palestine – and ourselves.
That is why we immigrants within the US and Canada should critically re-examine our ethical-political commitments with regards to supporting Palestine, founding an abolitionist and decolonial Islam and forming alliances with Indigenous and Black peoples of their calls for for Indigenous land rematriation in addition to Black reparations. We want to maneuver past reactionary paradigms of “survival” and “resistance” in direction of pro-active strategic motion aims that centre our collective livingness, thriving and liberation. Palestine’s releasing is concurrently entwined with the releasing of Indigenous and Black individuals in Turtle Island. To finish Palestinian occupation, the bewitched American/Canadian false dream should fall and get replaced by a genuinely decolonial enchanting else.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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