Rep AOC/Bowman: STOP demonizing the anti-imperialist movement to liberate Palestine!

“Bigotry and callousness” and “promoting bigotry” were words used by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to describe a demonstration of solidarity with Palestine last Sunday. And Rep. Jamaal Bowman declared “it is disgusting” that “groups of extremists could show support for terrorism.” In fact, the Palestinians themselves are resisting terrorism, waged against them by both Israel and the United States government.

At other times, these politicians have supposedly been for free speech and even solidarity. Apparently, the torrent of anti-Palestine hatred in Washington and the mainstream media has affected their judgment.

The protesters’ message is that Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. They have to resist, in the same way the Jews resisted the Nazis during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. For every Palestinian man, woman, and child, this is a matter of life or death. Would these allegedly “progressive” representatives call the Warsaw Ghetto Rebels “terrorists,” too?

Rep. Bowman accused the solidarity activists of “celebrating death or attacks on civilians and showing swastikas.” A photo appeared in London’s Daily Mail tabloid depicting a protester showing a swastika photo on his cell phone. The mainstream media's hyper-focus on this one individual is designed to distract from the root causes of the conflict, U.S.-financed Israeli settler colonialism and terrorism against the native Palestinians defending their land and liberating themselves from occupation. The media also wants to distract from the mass, popular movement of people taking to the streets to support Palestinian self-determination. Rep. Bowman is just another imperialist Democrat fulfilling his duty to confuse and distract the public in defense of U.S. and Israeli white supremacist domination in the region.

Alice Walker, Desmond Tutu, and many others have declared that Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people. Archbishop Tutu added that “the parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark.”

It is far from “antisemitic” to denounce Zionist Israel’s genocidal assaults on the people of Gaza, which are happening now as they have repeatedly in recent years – which is well documented by Jewish Voice for Peace. We also note that True Torah Jews are “dedicated to informing the world and the American public and politicians that not all Jews support the ideology of the Zionist state called “Israel.” Such Jewish groups prove that Judaism and Israel are NOT synonymous. To claim they are is ignoring the antiracist and progressive history of non-Zionist Judaism.

Those of us who express solidarity with Palestine against Israeli apartheid and its U.S. supporters are confident we share the view of the majority of the world’s people – especially across the Global South, but also all who oppose racism and bigotry everywhere, including right here in the Bronx. The NYPD and Israeli Occupation Forces are both tools of white supremacists. The IOF are a permanent, occupying militarized force in Palestine, in the same way that the NYPD are a permanent, occupying militarized force in Black/Brown/migrant communities like the South Bronx. Racial profiling and “crowd control” tactics utilized by the NYPD against people of the South Bronx are learned from IOF suppression tactics in occupied Palestine.

U.S./European/Israeli imperialists want to displace and colonize Indigenous Palestinians just like they want to displace and colonize our neighbors in the South Bronx. Settler-colonialism is a zero-sum game, and the end goal of the settler is to completely exterminate the Indigenous population and replace it with a European-dominated society.

We formally call on Reps Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman to publicly retract their slander, and recognize these vital points which we made in this rally and will continue to broadcast, for as long as the human rights abuses of Israel against the Palestinian people continue.

The Bronx stands in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance because our common enemies are capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Our loyalty should always be with oppressed peoples struggling against the U.S. empire and their puppet states like Israel. 

Strength and victory to the resistance! Palestine will be free from the river to the sea!

Signed by the Bronx Anti-War Coalition