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Weekend Edition August 15-17, 2014<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/15/the-shortest-distance-between-palestine-and-ferguson/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/15/the-shortest-distance-between-palestine-and-ferguson/</a></small></small></b><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><big><big><b><big>Under Occupation</big></b></big></big></div>
<h1 class="article-title">The Shortest Distance Between Palestine
and Ferguson</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by JAIME OMAR YASSIN</div>
<div>The superficially coincidental images coming from both Gaza and
Ferguson this month have created some surprising and sudden
currents of solidarity. Many have looked on with amazement, for
example, as <a
href="https://twitter.com/stopbeingfamous/status/499792750179778560"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://twitter.com']);">Gazans
offer tips via twitter</a> to those who have been involved in
the uprising and faced the absurd and excessively militarized
response to it by Ferguson police. And participants in “peaceful”
vigils and more militant confrontations in Ferguson have <a
href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/12/michael-brown-s-hometown-is-under-occupation.html"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.thedailybeast.com']);">invoked
Gaza</a> by now a dozens times.</div>
<p>Few have looked at images coming out of Ferguson and not been
tempted to draw the same allusions between the 2/3 Black suburb
policed by a nearly all-white police force, and Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories. It would be difficult not to draw that
comparison at the moment given the spectacle of the massive armory
gifted to the FPD by the federal government in the name of
stopping “terror”–which has so often been given a Palestinian face
in the US–and the revelation that the former police chief of
Ferguson <a
href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3ABF1s_dc8pVsJ%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fww5.stlouisco.com%2Fscripts%2FPD%2Fpress%2Fview.cfm%3FViewMe%3D16635&client=safari&hl=en&gl=us&strip=0"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://webcache.googleusercontent.com']);">studied
“counter-terror” measures in Israel in 2011</a>. Ironically, it
seems Black Americans are now the target of anti-terror funding
and training, which was ostensibly meant to target those from the
Muslim and Arab world.</p>
<p>While there is nothing happening within the US anything like the
now-cyclical Israeli slaughter of thousands of Gazans, the reality
is that life for Black Americans in places like Ferguson does not
vary in much from blockaded Gaza, and West Bank Bantustans
in off-attack times . The similarities are not just coincidental
in terms of the timing of the events–they are in fact, concurrent
and historical.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/12/racial-disparities-ferguson-missouri_n_5671891.html"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.huffingtonpost.com']);">Ferguson
is a majority Black, segregated community, run almost entirely
by white people. </a>Almost all of its political
representatives, and all but 3 of it’s 53 person police force, are
white. Such areas, populated by the disenfranchised, are growing
throughout the US, as the white and associated enfranchised
classes move back to the cities and to ex-urbs or new white
suburbs, leaving geographically isolated and service-poor
communities behind. The result has been, as is on display in
Ferguson, an easy to lock-down community full of people the
mainstream has forgotten–policed by an authority trained from
birth to distrust and marginalize Black people with the full
backing of the Federal government. Unbelievably, the <a
href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/faa-no-fly-zone-ferguson-michael-brown-109964.html"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.politico.com']);">FAA
declared a no-fly zone over Ferguson</a> and FPD mounted
roadblocks at its city limits as it began its peace-keeping
operation of its own citizens–chillingly reminiscent of the
media-blockade conducted during Cast Lead and during other Israeli
operations.</p>
<p>While the struggle in Palestine is often painted in ideological,
ethnic and religious terms, it too is becoming not so different
than those in the US, wedded as much to economic concerns as white
supremacist structures. As Haaretz recently reported, the larger
settlements of the West Bank—which have grown astronomically since
the signing of the Oslo Agreement with the Palestinian
Authority—are <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/business/real-estate/.premium-1.607090?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.haaretz.com']);">now
in the midst of a housing bubble</a> that is outstripping prices
in Tel Aviv and its suburbs. Young urban professionals, with no
interest in ideology or perhaps even in Zionism, flock to these
well-financed and subsidized cities,
where the attendant express highways spirit them quickly back and
forth from Tel Aviv. Israel’s military industrial complex gives
them security from the tenants of the land they’ve stolen.</p>
<p>As these suburbs, grow, perhaps, and as the twisted “peace
process” between the compliant Palestinian Authority and Israel
evolves, we may in decades to come see a Palestine—or what is left
of it—not unlike the US’s black underclass cities and towns.
Perhaps it may yet become a broken and discontiguous
economic-ethnic series of hamlets—segregated underemployed
communities of service workers kept under lock and key by a less
visible series of cages and walls, no less violent than military
occupation. Given the current state of negotiations, with Israel <a
href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/the-gaza-war-was-pointless-heres-how-to-make-sure-it-never-happens-again-109778.html#.U-0UQeNdW7w"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.politico.com']);">shaping
a Palestinian Authority take-over of the rubble of Gaza</a>,
perhaps one tiny wall separating these two territories will be
lifted, and Gaza allowed to enjoy the slightly less onerous
open-air prison system of the West Bank.</p>
<p>Perhaps then people will also wonder what the Palestinian’s
problem is. Why they can’t keep out of trouble with the
authorities. Why their men line the halls of the entity’s prisons.
Why they cannot simply learn to stop being racists and love their
oppressor. Why they are rioting. This is, in fact, <a
href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/israel-provoked-this-war-109229_Page2.html#ixzz38Sds6WM1"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.politico.com']);">the
reality that Israel is striving for in the West Bank</a>,
institutional apartheid that becomes so well-camouflaged and
accepted over time that it begins to look like the US’s honed
version of it—an “unfortunate” remnant of the past that is always
explainable, always the victim’s fault, and is always in the midst
of being fixed, with, not surprisingly, little success. Between
the decimation of Gaza and the continued madcap pace of
colonization in the West Bank and Jerusalem, they are closer than
ever to this goal.</p>
<p>Which brings us to a final, and perhaps most alarming, similarity
between Ferguson and Palestine. Both places nominally have a
president who superficially represents them, from a similar ethnic
and economic background, the product of a historic and
unprecedented process. It was an event that overturned years of
conventional wisdom that claimed the disenfranchised would never
know representative state leaders.</p>
<p>The last dispiriting likeness is the betrayal of that hope–that
leader who works for the very structure oppressing the people he
seems to most represent, who is revealed to be only the latest
trick for a white supremacist system of violence and dispossession
that can superficially change, but will not budge. The leader that
arms the enemy, kills for them, lies for them, and prevents racial
and economic justice for his own ostensible people. For the people
of Palestine, it is Abbas. For the people of Ferguson, Sanford,
Oakland and other cities, this is Obama–whose <a
href="http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/08/12/president-barack-obama-michael-brown-case/13966527/"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.ksdk.com']);">bloodless and
offensive commentary on the murder of Mike Brown</a> shocked a
nation of angry people perhaps as much as the FPD response
did. They couldn’t seem any more different superficially, of
course, but more and more, we see they have the same white
supremacist, capitalist boss.</p>
<p><em><strong>Jaime Omar Yassin</strong> is a writer in Oakland,
California</em></p>
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