Black Poet-Scholar El Jones Reads Her Poetry of Resisters’ Solidarity at the Ramallah Cultural Palace, The West Bank

For a program-packed full-week after the New Year, Sabeel, the Jerusalem-based Liberation Theology Centre run by a very capable team of Palestinian theologians and community activists, recently hosted us, members of an international delegation of scholars and activists from six different countries from N. America and Asia – S. Korea, Japan, Myanmar, UK, USA and Canada.

Each of us in our own ways – as poets, activists, scholars – we have unequivocally supported the liberation struggle of Palestinian people, now in its 108th year, if we treat the year 1917 when British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour gave away a piece of land which was inhabited by native Palestinian people of different faiths and racial backgrounds, as the origin of the conflict in Palestine.

Our arrival in Ramallah coincided with the community play produced by Sabeel and its community activists, at Ramallah Cultural Palace. The play was designed as a way for the Palestinians in their largest and administrative capital to process communally their 15-months-long experience of grieve, rage and helplessness to stop Israel’s genocide against their fellow Palestinians in Gaza.

One of our fellow delegates – Dr El Jones, who is the 5th poet laureate of Halifax, Nova Scotia, an academic, Black feminist resister and community organizer – offered to read her poetry as an act of solidarity, the solidarity that dates back to the times of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, and in the N. American black revolutionary tradition of Malcom X and Angela Davis. On 14 November 2024 FORSEA has posted El Jones’s address at the Palestinian solidarity protest in Halifax, Novia Scotia.

A backgrounder to this poetic act of global solidarity with Palestinian people

The question of Palestine is not at all as complicated as Western apologists of the criminal state of Israel – the Zionist state is in the dock at the International Court of Justice in the Hague and its two top leaders including the Prime Minister Bibi Netanyuahu are wanted by the International Criminal Court – have sought to make it out to be. There is nothing complex or complicated – or morally grey – about the conflict between the Eastern Europe’s – and later American Zionist Jews – who, under the patronage of the Anglo-American imperialist patrons, thieving a vast piece of Palestine and the natives on it. This expansionist theft is ongoing now, spearheaded by Israel’s mainstreamed Messianic Fascist movement under the banner of “settlements”, led by the Jewish Power party of Itamar Ben-Gvir.

These ancestrally White European Zionist Jews, only several generations ago, emigrated from their dark antisemitic world of largely Eastern Europe (Poland, present-day Belarus, Ukraine, all under Tsarist Russia’s control) and “settled” in the grabbed land, the land that has never been empty, but inhabited by the native peoples.

They accomplished their broad-day light land grab and loot on one big deceitful narrative: land without people, for people without land.

In Eastern Europe, their ancestors were periodically chased out as “Christ killers” – for pogroms and permanently ghettoised by the Christian Europe where such practice began right under the nose of the Church in Rome. All this was recounted in her 460-page autobiography by the late Golda Meir (My Life: Golda Meir, Israel’s Only Female Prime Minister, 2023), that Kyiv-born Zionist, who was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 1920’s, and settled in Palestine during the British Mandate, called herself “a Palestinian”, only to subsequently dismiss Palestinian identity of the native Arabs. In her capacity as the Prime Minister of the fictitious state of Israel, Meir was on the record saying, “there is no such thing as Palestinians!”.

Instead of having the strength to revolt against the Christian Europe or the national vision of liberation on the very “savage continent” of imperialist and Fascist Europe, the persecuted Zionists came up with their “final solution”, that is, institutionalized genocide via a vast, sadistic and creative ecosystem of depopulating Palestine and dismembering native communities by erecting the Wall – 520 K in total length.

Outside Europe, and on the land of multi-faith Arabs of Palestine, the early Zionists sought what the Arch anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler, termed “lebensraum” or living space, and found a justificatory narrative in the Hebrew Bible. They use their holy book as if it were a land deed for Palestine they lusted after.

There are many other faith communities with similarly holy books such as Buddhists’ Dhammapada, Hindus’ The Bhagawad Gita, Muslims’ Holy Quran, and so on. If any of them waived their religious bestsellers and seek to take over land in foreign places the natives would laugh their asses off. (See Noam Chomsky on the insanity of Zionists’ uses of the Hebrew Bible to claim land.)

But the likes of Theodor Herzl from Austria and David Ben-Gurion from Russian Poland were smart enough to know how to hatch their parasitical vision for their “national homeland”. The lifelong and sole goal of Ben-Gurion (born David Gruen) was “the creation of a Zionist state with a large Jewish majority and as few Arabs as possible,” a mission all Israeli regimes, irrespective of their outward ideological orientations, since the establishment of the Zionist State in 1948, have pursued, through multiple methods of cleansing Palestine of its Arab natives. Gaza is only the latest episode of the colonizer’s terrorism.

All colonial narratives are inherently Orwellian: the colonizing thieves and looters are “civilizers” and the natives that resist are “terrorists”, whether it was the late 19th century British invaders who took my old feudal home city of Mandalay, then the seat of our sovereignty, on 28 November 1885, and gave the conquered piece of real estate away to the English Queen Victoria as a “new year gift”.

Zionists took a leaf off the British imperialist playbook for land acquisition – by sword.

Part of the New York Times reportage (dated 20 June 1899) of the Zionist Congress held in USA reads, “CONFERENCE OF ZIONISTS; Elect Delegates at Their Meeting in Baltimore. WILL COLONIZE PALESTINE Rabbis Gottheil and Wise Were Chosen Members of the International Executive Committee.”

They knew they needed the Western imperialist patronage. They ran around among different existing imperial powers, from the Ottomans in Istanbul to the German Kaiser in Berlin to the British colonial officials in London. This Zionist strategy – parasitical in essence – too was clearly spelled out as integral to the Zionist Project in Meir’s autobiography.

Finally, the Zionists succeeded in securing the coveted imperialist patronage from what Jefferey Sachs called “the biggest gangster empire” – the British – of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the custodianship of Palestine fell from the hands of the Ottomans into those of imperialist Britain.

During the so-called British Mandate of Palestine, Britain’s senior colonial official and Christian Zionist Lord Balfour gave the chief Zionist lobbyist Lord Rothschild his nod. Balfour did so, without the slightest concern for how native Palestinians, the rightful owners of the land, might feel about the anticipated massive influx of White European immigrants in their Arab homeland.

With a typical mindset of Kipling’s White Man, Lord Balfour evidently did not view the colonized or “subject peoples” as full and equal human beings who were entitled to such principles as commonsensical fairness or justice. But that’s par for the course for all European colonizers who arrogated to themselves the right to manage the future of “the Orientals” and the latter’s lands as the colonizers deemed fit.

To this day this Cancer of the White Supremacy of the West continues to pervade in elite circles. It has resulted in the global movement with a hashtag #BlackLivesMatter after the American police’s coldblooded murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota several years ago, and after 8 October 2023, #PalestinianLivesMatter.

Watch the Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu roast the British TV News Anchor Anna Botting LIVE on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News con 19 January 2025.

“Our lives don’t matter, neither to you nor him, because we are Arab Muslims.”

There is then no wonder that not a single Palestinian intellectual, activist and theologian, we met in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, attaches any credence to any Western discourse of “human rights” or “international law”. A black Palestinian community leader whom we met in the Old City of Jerusalem said pointedly, “there is no human rights in the world”, before proceeding to tell us a story of international conference on human rights held in Jerusalem where several hundreds western academics and NGO-types came to discuss and debate the virtues of human rights.

Today’s Western world of power and cultural elite have chosen to be oblivious to one of colonial Britain’s most consequential policy errors – the other bloody mistake was Mountbatten’s partitioning of the Indian sub-continent in 1947. Consequently, this racially venomous White Supremacist world of Europeans (and N. Americans) insist, with no shame nor moral clarity nor historical intellect, that we start the Palestine-Israel conflict only on “7 October 2023” as their preferred Year Zero. This is an attempt to shift the blame and responsibility for the colonial Britain’s mess in Palestine and for the West’s latest collective genocide in Gaza on Hamas and other armed Palestinian resistance movements.

A visit to the Walled Off Hotel, Art and History Museum, 10-ft away from the wall of Aida Camp set up immediately after Palestinian’s 1st Holocaust or the Nakba of 1948, will make any international visitors realize Palestinians have an astute sense of history. They set the origin of today’s conflict – and the on-going Nakba for their community – to the days of the British Mandate during which British colonial masters sowed the seeds of today’s Zionist genocide.

Maung Zarni