Over the previous two months, protest marches in solidarity with the Palestinian folks have taken place all throughout the US and Canada. They’ve attracted a various crowd of individuals, together with many Indigenous nations and communities.
Members have denounced “US imperialism” for enabling Israeli aggression, ethnic cleaning and genocide whereas others have charged Israel itself with “settler colonialism”.
Nonetheless, many attendees – particularly pro-Palestinian immigrants – have failed to understand their very own relationship to settler colonialism. Many people 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’ve 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 pricey trade-off they make in taking over nationwide identities in these nations that come on the expense of Indigenous peoples at “residence” and imperialist adventurism overseas.
Settler-colonial historical past ignored
A big variety of migrant Muslims don’t appear to understand that American societies are animated by white supremacist spiritual doctrines similar to manifest destiny and doctrines of discovery and terra nullius, Protestant ethics, frequent legislation property rights, and Victorian notions of gender and sexuality.
Fairly, Muslim “arrivants” to the US ought to contemplate 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 sure.
Within 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 forged as “enemies”, “savages” and “heathens”, an othering that tinted the lens via 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 e-book God’s Shadow, Columbus described the weapons utilized by the Indigenous Taíno folks of the Caribbean as “alfanjes, the Spanish identify for the scimitars utilized by Muslim troopers”, whereas Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés recognized 400 Aztec temples in Mexico as “mosques”, described “Aztec ladies” as “Moorish ladies” and referred to Montezuma, the Aztec chief, as a “sultan”.
Later, within the sixteenth century, because the transatlantic slave commerce acquired below method, Africans – 20 to 30 % of whom have been Muslims – would change into the brand new “infidels” and “savages”.
These weren’t mere insults however Euro-American Christian spiritual and racial narratives of dehumanisation that finally discovered their method into US spiritual doctrine, legislation 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 focusing on Black peoples. In addition they drove the Islamophobia that lately has resulted in Muslim bans, unmitigated US authorities assist for Zionist settler colonialism in addition to the dying and destruction wrought as a part of the “struggle on terror”.
Fairly than query the US settler-colonial challenge 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 after 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, referred to as an “American nightmare” and exists regardless of a surge lately of Indigenous activism in addition to an enormous 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 essential race and Indigenous research on the College of Toronto, and Ok Wayne Yang, professor of ethnic research on the College of California, San Diego, wrote in a paper titled Decolonization is just not a Metaphor: “Oil is the motor and motive for struggle and so was salt, so shall be water. Settler sovereignty over the very items of earth, air, and water is what makes attainable these imperialisms. … ‘Indian Nation’ was/is the time period utilized in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S. navy for ‘enemy territory’.”
A working example is the Iraq struggle. Critics and a few US officials have been adamant that the struggle – spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of oil big Halliburton – was supposed to profit huge oil. Nonetheless, it was missed that US fighter jets, cruise missiles and armoured autos couldn’t have descended on Iraq in 2003 with out the gas derived from plentiful oil provides tapped from Indigenous lands, which at this time makes the US the world’s largest oil producer and, by far, the biggest polluter.
Indigenous-led NoDAPL protests in 2016 towards the Dakota Entry 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.
One other blatant occasion of the connection between settler colonialism at residence and overseas is at Cornell College, 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 grab in US historical past and the one largest beneficiary of the 1862 Morrill Act, which noticed 10.7 million acres (4.3 million hectares) stolen from 250 totally different Indigenous peoples in 15 states and handed over to universities.
On 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 College can also be partnered with Technion-Israel Institute of Expertise, based in 1912, whose navy analysis and growth labs have pioneered the applied sciences of Palestinian dispossession.
Muslims’ particular accountability
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 change 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 wherein “Indigenous activists are invited to offer opening ceremonies for pro-Palestinian occasions” 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 kind of transformational solidarity is just not new. For instance, it has been customary in Chile, a rustic with the biggest Palestinian inhabitants outdoors the Center East, for Palestinians to march in solidarity with the Indigenous Mapuche folks on the annual Indigenous Folks’s Day parade and work on the land with them.
Whereas these solidarity strains 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 folks round points. [But] these of us who’re revolutionary usually are not involved with points. We’re involved with the system. … Mobilisation normally results in reform motion, to not revolutionary motion.”
As I write in my e-book Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances, Muslim immigrant settlers bear a selected accountability 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 forged – as with NoDAPL Indigenous water protectors, who have been compared by US mercenary corporations like TigerSwan to “jihadi actions”, and Black Lives Matter activists, who have been designated by the FBI as “Black identification 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 accountability, notably these of us who determine 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’s the reason we immigrants within the US and Canada should significantly 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 have to transfer 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 folks 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 writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.