Reject Israeli and United States Colonial Violence

We are a group of Fremont County and Wind River Indian Reservation community members who believe that violence against Palestinian people is legally unjustified and morally shameful. As a coalition of citizens with identities ranging from Jewish, Indigenous, Christian, LGBTQ2S+, folks who have experienced the systemic abuses of the US prisons/immigration systems, and white allies, we understand that Zionism is a colonial project that co-opts a carefully-fabricated Indigenous Jewish identity to justify the mass killings and displacement of Indigenous Palestinians. This justification also perpetuates and thrives upon the blatant racism and Islamophobia against Palestinian people. To condemn Zionist violence is not anti-semetic; conversely, we believe it is anti-semitic to conflate the two– as Judaism has always existed far beyond, and often well outside the scope and intention of Zionist ideals, especially when manifested in the form of ethnic cleansing and systematic disenfranchisement.

The United States has been funding violence against Palestinians for decades, endorsing Israeli war crimes and targeted discrimination across a dozen different presidential administrations, from Truman to Biden [1]. The violence against Palestinian people did not start this past October, therefore. Our call to end the violence in Palestine is not about condemning Hamas, but instead, condemning the violent colonial forces that created the organization in the first place. The current violence goes back to the early 1900s (as opposed to thousands of years ago), when British settler-colonial powers initiated a land grab that pitted western nations, especially those that would eventually unify under NATO, against Indigenous Palestinians [2]. The United States, a direct beneficiary of this land grab, enables and reaps the benefits of this violence, in the form of Israel’s industrial-scale development and distribution of weaponry [3], border security technologies [4a] [4b], and training of US police and military personnel from the Israeli military and Israeli policing organizations [5] [6].

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We cannot be complicit in the genocide of Palestinian people, just as we cannot be complacent in the racist and colonial war against Black, Indigenous, and migrant populations occurring right here on North American lands– violence that is fueled by the intermixing of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. The continued violence [7] (as seen in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Crisis), over-policing and disenfranchisement [8], and the dishonoring of sovereignty (as seen in the historical and ongoing stealing of lands and water [9]) that occurs against Native community members right here in Fremont County are all direct consequences of these systems of industrialized prejudice.

While the sacredness of human life and death cannot be quantified nor compared, it is crucial to understand the disparities in deaths between Israelis and Palestinians– and why we are calling Israeli violence “genocidal”. Almost 19,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since 2008 (with more than 11,100 of those deaths happening in Gaza since October 7th of this year alone [10]), as compared with 1,500 Isrealis during the same period [11]. Statistics demonstrating the imbalance in violence goes deeper when we look at those who have been wounded: since 2008, around 183,500 Palestinians have been injured and conversely, around 11,700 Israelis [12]. Naming these statistics is not about valuing certain lives over the other. Instead, it is about critically naming that a colonial, war based society breeds this violence for everyone; and Israel embodies this colonial violence in mentality and practice.

We understand that the Israeli and United States governments and media outlets have worked to create and widely disseminate a narrative (based on racist depictions of Palestinians [13] [14]), just like the one we saw play out after the September 11th terror attacks, that justifies continued war crimes against the Palestinian people. This is happening because both the United States and Israel hunger for and subsist on industrialized warfare as a furtherance of each nation’s geopolitical aspirations. In the United States in particular, the national defense budget this fiscal year, as authorized by President Biden, is $816.7 billion [15], with $3.4 billion going to Israel every year [16]. This is our tax money. This keeps defense contractors and politicians who push these genocidal policies wealthy and protected, while the rest of us are subjected to, or at least faced with the grim reality of living in a violence-based society. This war society will also harm us all in the long run.

A common reaction to the invitation to condemn the Israeli led genocide against Indigenous Palestinians is that “it’s too complicated” or “it’s not my place to comment.” We argue, however, that in addition to our moral obligations to support the sacredness of life, we all have an obligation to fight against the large and unnecessary aggression towards our world’s climate and environment. Right now, as the 40 Days for Life (a purportedly “pro-life” demonstration led in part by Wyoming Catholic College and other influential local religious organizations) just ended in Lander, we are asking where all those folks who so tirelessly advocate for the welfare of children, born and unborn, have been in resisting the slaughter of almost five-thousand Palestinian children since the beginning of this recent surge in Israeli violence [17]? The costs of war and colonial violence in the United States have already been clearly documented and made real for many: aside from the real lives that have been taken directly, the industry of warfare is one of the greatest single contributors to climate change. A low estimate of the greenhouse gas emissions of the world’s militaries is 6% of total world emissions [18]. It’s important to note as well that the United States Military uses the most fossil fuels of any world institution [19]. As Fremont County has been working to reduce its own carbon footprint and in Lander specifically (where there are about 10 conservation organizations, many of whom are trying to center Indigenous leadership), we are asking why we haven’t seen any public calls to end the genocidal violence against Palestinians, if only for the environment’s sake?

We are asking why our local and state governments have not taken a stance? We are asking why expressing solidarity with Palestine in public is seen as taboo, and similarly has been outright criminalized in certain NATO-aligned Western nations [20].

We are asking these questions… but really, we already know the reasons. We have long been spoon-fed information (from politicians and on all major American and western-colonial news broadcasting sources) that supports this genocide and conflates the violence as a justified war between Israel and Hamas (and also Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon, and Israel and Iran) when in reality the Palestinian people do not have a centralized military, as Israel does [21].  Additionally, prevailing rhetoric frequently conflates being Palestinian (that is, to be non-ethno-European, non-Jewish, or non-white) with being an active combatant, which itself is a reflection of tactics we have seen used by American military personnel to justify their war crimes across history, perhaps most notably from President Barack Obama as justification for thousands of illegal drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia [22].  This spoon-fed information also tells us that speaking up and expressing sympathy with the plight of displaced, targeted and slaughtered Indigenous Palestinians is wrong (or anti-semitic).

However, we refuse to be silent on this crisis. We will not be made complicit in the ongoing colonial genocide against Palestinian people, just as we will not allow the violence we see daily against Indigneous and LGBTQ2S+ people in Fremont County. We demand that our local and state governments publicly resist this genocide. Although our hope that this demand will be met is dwindling, especially since an actual openly anti-semitic, anti-queer, white supremacy group called the Patriot Front showed up to a local Wind River Pride gathering this past June and the city of Lander/Fremont County did nothing, and in doing so endorsed their expressions of violence against our own neighbors [23]. Further, our hope that elected state officials will do something is also dwindling after At-Large Representative, Harriet Hageman, just voted to censure the only Palestinian person in the US House after openly speaking out against the violence [24]. Despite this, we still have hope and confidence in the power of our collective action and voices. We know that we, as a people, have power… despite the history of trying to be silenced. We demand a ceasefire– pausing violence for four hours a day does not stop violence [25].  We demand an end to the Israeli occupation of Indigenous Lands. We demand that those complicit and silent in this violence take responsibility, and strive to do better in securing a better, more dignified and equitable existence for all.

We will continue to make our voices heard in calls to our local and state representatives, our social media platforms, and in regular conversations with our community. Will you join us?

FCCN is Fremont County and Wind River Indian Reservation citizens and community members who agree that current actions being taken against Palestinian people are wrong.

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