Dear Editor,

As the attention of the world is focused on the bloodletting that has recommenced in Gaza, armed Jewish settlers in the West Bank have stepped up their provocations against Palestinians under the watchful and helpful eye of the Israeli Defence Force.

Palestinian homes in the West Bank are being demolished or occupied as the security forces take fresh batches of West Bank Palestinians into administrative detention. The efficacy of the prisoner exchange between Hamas and the Israelis has been totally eradicated by this new wave of arrests.

The people of the global South understand only too well the narrative the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are trying to share with the rest of the world. We understand because we have also been fed into the same inhumane meat grinder of racist, white supremacist settler colonialism. The Israeli/Palestinian disaster is but the latest manifestation of the same diabolic and Machiavellian enterprise that led Europeans to sail the ocean blue, discover new lands and people, dispossess the people of their land, and kill as many of them as was possible.

It is estimated that the European settler colony project was responsible for the death of over 50 million indigenous people in the Caribbean as well as South, Central, and North America. This New World indigenous holocaust was accomplished in just over 100 years. Entire ethnic groups of indigenous people were wiped out.

Perhaps one of the most inexplicable ironies of settler colonisation is the almost fanatical insistence that the new settlers are constantly facing an existential threat from the barbarous hordes of the indigenous. New genocidal ethnic cleansing purges were, therefore, reframed as self-defence or as noble, courageous acts designed to protect and advance the glorious civilisation of the West. The victimisers covered themselves in the bloody garments of their victims and then cried to the world, “See what these savage brutes have done to us!”

Now that the US House of Representatives has passed a resolution affirming Israel’s right to existence, and this also affirms that the denial of Israel’s right to exist is a form of anti-Semitism, it is left to be seen how the pro-Palestinian supporters in America will respond to this new challenge to free speech.

The settler colony project has always been shrewd enough to evolve laws that help to protect the institution of colonialism. The charge of anti-Semitism is being weaponised and used as a cudgel by Israel and the US to help provide cover for impenitent Zionists as the Israelis mount the last stand for white supremacist settler colonialism in the modern world.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

rodeneynimrod2@gmail.com