Here’s why white people who aren’t Jewish should care about Gaza
If you're either ignoring what’s happening or watching in horror and feeling powerless to stop it, this is for you.
Two things... First, this post is meant for white folks who aren’t Jewish, particularly white Americans. I’m going to talk about the specific experience of being of European descent, which might be emotionally activating for those who come from places that have been colonized by Europeans.
Second, I won’t be making any direct connections to the experience of being a man—though I think there are similarities to how whiteness and “traditional masculinity” harm the very people who cling to them for protection, white people and men, respectively. I take occasional detours like this in this newsletter, and I hope you benefit or at least are okay with it.
The first time I wrote about what’s happening in Gaza, I fumbled through grief, horror, anger, and hopelessness. I grappled with my reaction to the videos and images of what happened on October 7th and the resulting genocidal violence, which at once broke my heart and seemed thousands of miles away from my daily experience. I struggled to understand why Jewish people, Arab-Americans, and others were reacting in the ways they were. I was feeling a lot but was mostly confused.
I had a sense then that being white had something to do with my confusion. Ever since becoming involved with the organization White Awake nearly a decade ago, I’ve been learning how our white supremacist society harms me as a white person (on top of harming Black, Indigenous, and other people of color even more).
But when I wrote that first post I hadn’t yet learned about the concept of “settler colonialism.” I’d heard of it but hadn’t realized it was relevant to my life. Then I read
’s post “The ‘Set-Up’ of Settler Colonialism: From the U.S. to Ireland to Palestine” in his newsletter. (Disclaimer: David is a friend, and we’re collaborating on an anti-racist support group for white people.)This post is for non-Jewish white Americans either ignoring what’s happening or watching in horror and feeling powerless to stop it. What David wrote, which I’m about to summarize, helped me see what’s at stake for me and why I need to get more involved in helping stop what Israel is doing. I hope you end up feeling the same.
Settler colonialism is what it sounds like.
It’s when settlers, backed by an empire, displace existing inhabitants of a territory using violence, economic means, and political power. That’s what’s happening in Palestine. Zionists (the movement to establish and maintain a Jewish state) are leveraging the understandable fear and outrage of Israelis and Jewish people worldwide to further a settler colonialist plan that began 150 years ago.
David described the history of that plan and how it connects to similar efforts that the British empire successfully completed in Ireland and the U.S. I highly recommend spending 15-20 minutes reading his post (there’s also an audio version at the top).
Here’s the gist of his argument as I see it: White Americans are settlers. Some of our ancestors came here explicitly to take this land from Indigenous people. But many were poor European workers and indentured servants who were coerced, manipulated, or outright forced to leave their homelands by war, poverty, and the economic destruction caused by capitalism. These ancestors were then coerced, manipulated, or outright forced to give up customs, traditions, and ways of living that had served them and their ancestors for millennia. In return, they were given the newly invented identity of “white,” which protected them from being enslaved (like Africans) or killed (like Indigenous people). But whiteness also hurt them (and hurts white Americans today) by making them less safe, less economically secure, and less connected with themselves and others.
David tells the story of his Scots-Irish ancestors who arrived in the colony of South Carolina in 1767. “Their arrival was made possible by legislation,” he writes, “explicitly designed by colonial elites to fund the travel of poor European Protestants to settle in the western portion of the colony on the condition that they would act as an armed human buffer to protect the plantations of the rich from Native nations seeking to reclaim stolen land.”
I have ancestors with a similar story.
As I wrote in my first post, some of my German ancestors came to the colony of New York in 1708. They were refugees who had escaped poverty and war in their homeland. They had been shipped there by the British, because the empire needed a “frontier against the French and their Indians” (literally that’s what Queen Anne’s order said). Once they worked off their debts, they were given a plot of land. They eventually relocated to Pennsylvania and then West Virginia, likely following economic opportunities as the empire expanded westward.
David quotes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz:
“For nearly three hundred years, the English Crown and then the U.S. offered free or cheap land to British and Ulster-Scot settlers, then to Germans and Scandinavians, then to Polish and Czech peasants. If a farming family fell on hard times or wanted greater opportunity, they picked up and moved on, homesteading newly ‘opened’ territory. By 1880 all the arable land on the continent was owned—much of it by large operators—and millions were landless. While many of those pushed off the land poured into the cities to work, most stayed in rural areas as tenants, sharecroppers, migrant farm workers, cowpunchers and miners, and later as roughnecks and roustabouts in the oil fields.”
This is the story of many if not most of white Americans’ ancestors. They were forced to let go of their Germanness or Irishness or Polishness and adopt colonizer culture. Some of them clung to whiteness for protection, becoming hateful and violent toward people of color. Others joined movements for justice alongside people of color. Many tried to play it safe, ignore racism, and adopt white, American, capitalist culture.
But there is no true safety in whiteness. Our people were—and we are—settlers, which comes with a price. That price isn’t as costly as the one paid by those who are being colonized, but it’s still a price. David writes about the “unfilled promises” that empires make to settlers: “The ruling class of the imperial core along with elite leaders of settler movements themselves promise their settler populations safety, economic security, and a noble, meaning-filled, even ‘holy’ purpose in exchange for their participation in the settler-colonial venture.” He summarizes the violence and economic instability many settlers experienced early in the creation of the U.S. He explains the “profound loss and self-dehumanization” they suffered being forced to let go of their traditions in service of the empire.
How else to make sense of the problems many white Americans face today?
We have relative privilege compared to people of color, yes. But we live in the world’s richest country, yet the U.S. has worse health care outcomes, more children living in poverty, the highest incarceration rate, and the highest rate of gun violence among high-income nations. Life expectancy for white Americans is at the lowest it’s been for 25 years. There’s a profound sense of emptiness in the lives of many white people I know, including myself. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong? White supremacists think they have an answer, one that I strongly disagree with. But I know nothing of my German heritage, besides what I’ve learned from researching my genealogy. I recently met a German college student visiting the U.S. and felt like we had nothing in common beyond our basic humanity.
How does this connect to what’s happening in Gaza? David explains how being settlers harms Israelis:
“The killing of Israelis that took place on October 7th of this year is the most severe example of the danger that many Israelis have lived under since the founding of the country. While nowhere close to the danger experienced by Palestinians, it is not insignificant ... In Israel, nearly a quarter of the population is below the poverty line (a percentage twice that of the very unequal U.S.) ... [and first the British Empire and now the U.S. government along with right-wing Israeli leaders have distorted and manipulated] Jewish identity such that it would be in service of empire.”
It may seem to complicate things that Jewish people have been oppressed and displaced for a long time. How could they be the perpetrators and someone else the victims? Didn’t Palestinian land originally belong to Jewish people?
David continues:
“Often, settlers are selected from groups of people who themselves have been victims of centuries of mass violence. Trauma, scholars tell us, is a physiological energy that needs to move, whether toward healing or toward replication. Thus, part of the heartbreaking power of settler colonialism is that it gives these settler populations a target—the Indigenous—upon whom they are given state-sanctioned authorization to unleash this traumatic energy.”
Israelis, like white Americans, are settlers—or, as David writes, “foot soldiers of a growing global capitalist empire.” They come from traumatized people. That trauma is now being passed on to Palestinians. As they say, hurt people hurt people.
David begins his post explaining how settler-colonialism was (and still is) a “set-up” that the rich and powerful used to manipulate poor and working people into spreading empire. He writes:
“Settler colonialism didn’t happen because some large-scale homogenous group of aspiring European settlers collectively decided, as one big united team, to leave home and dominate Indigenous peoples around the world ... Like racism more broadly, settler colonialism functions as a tool of [the] capitalist class to divide and rule over the global 99 percent—in this case, by using some of us to displace, supplant, police, and genocide others. Settlers are certainly given some skin in this imperial game and significant advantage as compared to the colonized, yet their ultimate safety and material well-being, as well as their humanity itself, are not served by this system.”
White Americans should care about what’s happening in Gaza because our struggle is connected with the struggle of poor and working Israelis and Palestinians.
We all, to different degrees, are victims of the same perpetrator: a global capitalist system that uses racism, sexism, settler-colonialism, and other forms of oppression to divide and rule over us. That system is keeping us from addressing the many crises we face today, from economic inequality to climate change.
We should morally object to what Israel is doing to Palestinians, and what the U.S. government is doing to support Israel’s government. But we also have much to gain for ourselves by joining the fight to stop the violence.
Here are some ways to get involved today (and please share others in the comments):
Vote “uncommitted” in your state’s Democratic presidential primary
Get involved with Palestine Action to shut down Israel’s weapons trade
Now, a question for the comments below: Do you feel connected to your ancestors?
(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll get the warm feeling of supporting my writing and this little project of mine.)
Thanks for the post and the resources. I agree that "we should morally object to what Israel is doing to Palestinians".
❤️🔥🙌🏻🙏🏻