(ThyBlackMan.com) As a black, native Washingtonian, who’s family has lived in DC for several decades, I can relate to the most basic plight of displaced Palestinians. I have seen gentrification transform the once Chocolate City, with a thriving black middle class majority, to a predominately white, yuppy urban oasis, as blacks were systematically squeezed out into neighboring suburbs like PG County, as affluent whites came back to reclaim the Nation’s Capital, after fleeing during post desecration white flight. The high cost of housing, property taxes and economic incentives given to predominately white affluent gentrifiers all converged to push innumerable blacks out of Washington, DC, who had lived in the Nation’s Capital for generations. And then many native Washingtonian blacks, like their Palestinian counterparts in Gaza, experienced disproportionate poverty and high incarceration rates, compounding issues of the city’s inequality.
So, as a black woman, in an city where so many who look like me have been impoverished, incarcerated and displaced—cleansed from the Nation’a Capital—I can relate to the pain of the Palestinian displacement and Nakba issue, as should other African Americans, given
our shared history of enslavement, segregation and injustice. For the Palestinian people, the Nakba, meaning catastrophe, occurred in 1948 when the Palestinian people experienced violent ethnic cleansing and the dispossession and loss of their homeland, when the state of Israel came into being. Israel’s birth for the Palestinian people was very violent and brutal, as Palestinians were murdered by Israeli settlers and millions of Palestinians became refugees without a home going forward. Many consider the Nakba occurring well before 1948, in preceding decades when Zionists began killing and persecuting indigenous Palestinians for Palestinian land, as the Zionist’s, who wanted ans erhnically and religious pure Jewish state on Palestinian aim land fled anti-semitism in Eastern Europe and Russia.
I see a groundswell of empathy and support for Palestinians on social media given the brutality of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, where many IDF soldiers and some Israeli settlers were killed, given that now over an estimated 10,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed, including at least 4,000 Palestinian children, by Israeli bombing in response to Oct. 7.
I also see a few black social media users say, that this isn’t their, our issue and it doesn’t cross over to what impacts blacks economically and politically. I think having such a narrow, myopic perspective is short-sited. I’d this expands beyond a regional dispute and becomes World War III, it effects us all of course. Then there’s also the issue that it’s our US tax dollars that’s funding Benjamin Netanyahu’s, Israel’s prim minister’s inhumane war and collective punishment against the besieged Palestinian people. War crimes are being committed and we as African Americans should care that our tax dollars are being used to help facilitate. Israel could not accomplish it’s displacement of and atrocities against the Palestinian people without US aid and complicity.
Given the staggering numbers of Palestinian civilian deaths, purportedly over 200 Palestinian children a day being annihilated by mussels and weapons made in the USA, many around the globe are calling for a humanitarian cease fire and have protested for the U.S. to push Israel for a cease fire. The only Palestinian Congress person, Rashida Tlaib was recently censured by Congress for pleading for a cease fire and the human rights of her people.
For any blacks to minimize this geo political event and tragedy in the Middle East against the Palestinians, who are being further displaced and ethnically cleansed, is to be forgetful and tone death of our history of enslavement and genocide that intersects with theirs, as all of this collective punishment and pain is a result of the very same colonialism and imperialism that’s still negatively impacting and taking the lives of black and brown people around the globe.
Staff Writer; Joy L. Freeman