Israel has seen a massive amount of organic flak from progressive and pro-human rights organizations since their genocidal response to the October 7 attacks. However, this is nothing new for a nation founded in the living memory of the mass expulsion and killing of a native population.
You would expect Western countries, with their advocacy for liberty and freedom from authoritarian states, to champion those who protest against such a regime, even if they are not morally perfect in all their actions.
Yet, these so-called freedom-loving institutions have failed to muster any support for any branch of the anti-Israeli movement.
This breakdown of stated theory never showing itself in praxis is at the core of Western chauvinism or jingoism, which has made itself much louder and apparent over the past decade.
The Western core of power can never truly support these liberatory movements, domestic or abroad, because they directly oppose the very thing that gives these colonial institutions power.
This has been the modus operandi of these nations for centuries; we even live on land that was stolen through the same methods as Israeli settlements steal theirs.
The entirety of the Americas was conquered and controlled by foreign forces, even up to this year when countries in South and Central America stand up and say “Give me liberty or give me death” the European and United States response is the latter, killing democratically elected leaders or quelling revolutionary action to ensure control of the area.
This is not a new phenomenon, it was articulated verbatim by civil rights activist and writer James Baldwin in 1969 when he said, “If any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing – word for word – he is judged a criminal and treated like one…” He finishes by stating how the powers that be will do whatever they can to make an example of those who step out of line.
This is often the response to those who are asked to condemn the violence of liberatory action, often while ignoring the violence that forces such action or even, in many cases, praising it.
It is no secret that the Israeli people support human rights violations against the Palestinian population.
Mass protests were organized on July 29, 2024, in response to it being revealed that IDF reservists were using systemic rape as a tactic on Hamas prisoners. This led to government leaders condemning the storming of a military base, while one outright defended and justified the actions of the IDF reservists.
A report published on March 13 by the UN found that “Israel has systematically used sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023. The Commission concludes that there has been a large increase in sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated against Palestinians by members of the [Israeli Security Forces] since 7 October 2023, intended to retaliate and punish them collectively for the attacks carried out by the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in southern Israel on 7 October.”
A similar report from March 4 found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred at several locations across the Gaza periphery” and that hostages have also “been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence,” but the term systemic was never used to describe the sexual violence.
It should be stated clearly that Humber Et Cetera condemns all forms of sexual violence, systemic or not, and is only bringing up this point to the specific systemic nature of Israel’s sexual violence as compared to the conflict-based sexual violence perpetuated by Hamas.
No one should be surprised by this systemic nature, as our settler colonial nation of Canada was founded on the same principles.
In American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, historian David Stannard writes extensively about the systemic rape and assault justified under the ideals of colonialism across the Americas having found that native women were “gambled away in card games and traded for other objects of small value, while stables of them were rented out to sailors who desired sexual accompaniment during their travels up and down the coast.”
Within Canada, sexual assault was used as a base tool of colonization.
Brock University Vice Provost Robyn Bourgeois concluded clearly in her work Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of Settler Colonial Canada, “in a settler colonial nation-state like Canada, the 'source of the attitudes' that make this permissible is the dominant ideologies of racism and hetero-patriarchy.”
Yet now, many say a simple land acknowledgement and congratulate themselves for being “anti-colonial” while turning their back on the same systems being perpetuated to Palestinians, not to mention the fact that these forms of violence still have not been eradicated from Canada.
How long until Israel does a land acknowledgement in Gaza? And will that bring true justice and reconciliation towards the people undergoing genocide on this very day?
No, it will not. This is a system perpetuated within the West that can not be allowed to continue, and those who wish to stand with Indigenous groups against the forms of violence must see this on a global level and fight against it, be it through direct action or solidarity.
