Comments by "Bugsy" (@bugsy9007) on "Israeli Strike On ANOTHER Gaza School Kills Almost 100 Palestinians" video.
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Israel—a state that is built on top of Occupied Palestine, as it attempts to cleanse and colonize the rest of the land—has also never had a shortage of trees. Why? Because Palestine and Palestinians have had trees for thousands of years. Plenty of them. In fact, for the past 76 years, the Zionist militias have uprooted, bulldozed, felled, and burned the trees of Palestine.
And this is where the sinister nature of Harris’ story is revealed.
This settler-colonial language is standard among Zionists. Just weeks before the genocide began, German politician and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen filmed an English-language video for the Israeli regime’s “independence day,” in which she praised the settlers for having “literally made the desert bloom.” The implication is that Israelis came to an unpopulated, desolate land and miraculously made the soil fertile.
This negation of the civilization that American- and Soviet-backed Jewish supremacist settlers occupied and partially destroyed is central to the narrative of erasure that has long been employed by the Zionist project. “A land without a people for a people without a land” is a myth that has been pushed since the late-19th century by those who had their sights set on Palestine.
The vice president is fond of this myth. Perhaps because of her personal ties. Harris’ husband Douglas Emhoff is a powerful corporate lawyer and fundraiser, as well as a staunch Zionist who has traveled with his wife to occupied Jerusalem. Or perhaps it’s merely political expediency. But Harris has repeated this story about planting trees in Israel for at least seven years, including during an appearance at an AIPAC national conference when she gushed about her love for the ethnostate.
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Following her most recent meeting with the war criminal Netanyahu, Harris spoke about her trees. Soon afterward, near the end of her statement, she used her gentle tone to vaguely allude to Palestine. The tone that, as her advisers have explained, doesn’t imply a difference in substance from the last 10 months.
“I ask my fellow Americans to help encourage efforts to acknowledge the complexity, the nuance, and the history of the region,” Harris said.
Sadly, Americans couldn’t ask for a candidate who is less complex, less nuanced, and more ignorant of history. Any ally of the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation—any person who thinks that the carpet-bombing of schools, hospitals, and tent camps in Gaza is a moral aberration—should be wary of those who dare ask for nuance when, across the ocean, they are helping to destroy an entire world.
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Recent polls reveal how, among registered Democrats, 56% acknowledge that Israel is committing a genocide, though an astounding 88% still say they are enthusiastic about Harris replacing Biden. This is why it’s so important to break down the genocidal language that the Democratic presidential nominee now employs, though much of it is in line with her long career in service of Zionism.
The notion of raising funds in the U.S. to “plant trees in Israel” is baffling, on many levels. Since the 1948 Nakba, the U.S. government and prominent American Zionist families—along with governments and families in Germany, England, Canada, France, Italy, Britain, and other countries—have flooded the apartheid state with hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons, subsidies, and loan guarantees. If Harris really isn’t making up her story to curry favor with her donors, it would appear unnecessary for the female child of immigrants, raised between California’s Bay Area and Montreal, Canada, to have to raise pennies for a militarized state.
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One could make the argument that Harris, 59, is, simply, an ignorant woman, who tried very hard to assimilate into American life while being raised by a single Indian mother. Assimilation, oftentimes, tends to mean a kind of annihilation of the worlds that could be associated with you: the Global South, refugeehood, oppressed societies. But Harris clearly was able to do sufficient research and summon enough empathy to be appalled at the apartheid regime in South Africa, which she actively protested against when she was a student at Howard University. Today, a liberated South Africa is charging Israel with genocide, and Harris finds herself on the side of the defendant. This is doubly ironic, not only because of the deep racism in Israel and the material support that the Israeli regime provided to apartheid South Africa, but also because Harris—as she often emphasizes—used to be a prosecutor.
Her hypocrisy goes beyond her unconditional support for the Gaza genocide. Well before she was elected to the Senate, Harris worked as a district attorney and was helped along by powerful friends in San Francisco politics. During her tenure, she was a notorious facilitator of mass incarceration, predominantly targeting young men of color. But upon moving to politics at the national level, she suddenly went from prosecuting some of the most vulnerable members of California’s brown and Black communities—securing heavy-handed sentences for possession of small quantities of marijuana—to claiming to defend them from Republican policies.
Whether we examine the war on the poor at home or the expansion of America’s empire abroad, Harris has been firmly on the side of a violent establishment that ceaselessly produces weapons, builds jails, and dehumanizes people of color. With a rush to election day, legacy media outlets are racing to craft a new narrative in which Harris, who was plagued by low approval ratings throughout the entirety of the Biden administration, is suddenly a voice for her people.
But Harris doesn’t have any people. Except perhaps her donors, pro-Israel allies, and the leaders of the Democratic Party, who have anointed her without a primary. She is speaking only for herself, the rich, the powerful, and the colonizers. The color of her skin and her family story are not shields that can offer protection to Palestinians abroad or minorities at home; they are masks for those who will actually govern should she be elected.
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