Last Saturday, around 50 people gathered beneath an elder oak tree in San Pedro Springs Park, part of the headwaters complex of the San Antonio River. They gathered to discuss the similarities between genocidal violence directed at Indigenous peoples in Texas and Palestine—violence that comes at greater and lesser “intensities,” as one panelist described it. The event was the second discussion hosted by a group operating as the People’s University for Palestine. It has been convened by area academics and organizers who have found forces within higher ed and the media suppressing the reality of Israel’s eliminationist violence directed at Palestinian peoples. It is estimated that the Palestinian death toll could reach nearly 200,000—approaching 10 percent of the pre-war population—as a result of Israel’s war on Gaza, according to the Lancet medical journal. Deceleration has created a resource page for the People’s University for Palestine and recorded the first hour of Saturday’s discussion, which featured panelist comments and two poems. A few comments from the event are highlighted below. — Greg Harman
Danielle Lopez
We were not an easily conquered or easily subdued savage race. … We had 72 plus tribes and nations who traded peacefully, who had commerce and education and medicine. All of this area was known as simply the medicine gardens. Before it got foraged and desecrated by all the colonizers of all the flags that have been over this land, but this was our medicine gardens, and it still is our medicine gardens. That’s why we welcome and we see our relations in Palestine as our own relations. And that’s why we can identify [because] here we are in the ongoing occupation here on this territory and this space and what they do to our Mother [Earth].
Anayanse Garza
I am reminded that genocide has various frequencies and various intensities. And that here [in Texas] the genocide … is a low intensity genocide. And it’s very prolonged. And it’s very subtle. But it’s still erasure and it’s still genocide. And it also reminds me of what my ancestors went through during one of the most violent times in history for themselves. We’re here, because we have survived it. Because we have survived it in spite of all the the genocidal tactics and in spite of being completely surrounded by it every day.
Judith Norman
I’m speaking about from my own background, which is from, Eastern European Jews, who were the targets of genocidal violence of the holocaust. My family in Europe was completely destroyed. And my grandparents and great grandparents came here as dispossessed and traumatized refugees from that genocidal violence and developed and cultivated and eagerly grasped an identity of whiteness that brought them into a settler identity here. I mean, the European ideology of colonialism, which is responsible for so much violence, I mean, it operated first of all, internally. The groups that internally were displaced in Europe, the Irish and the Jews, through the ideology of who makes the land productive. This is a sort of way of racializing people. What groups are cultivating the land properly, making it productive, and what groups weren’t.
Haithem El-Zabri
My uncles are all resistance fighters. One of them has been assassinated by the Israeli army using a US-supplied Apache helicopter that flew into the town of Ramallah and fired a missile right into his office. So this has shaped me a lot. My background, my family, being Palestinian, like, as a child, I was always hearing about Palestine. … [But] what I really wanted to share is my experience at Standing Rock. … It was the most impactful experience to me because I felt that this is the world we could have if we wanted to. That it is possible. It’s not just a dream. I witnessed it. … There were over a 1,000 people at any one time, and everybody there just contributed from their heart whatever they’re able to give the community. And in return, whatever they needed was there.
The next People’s University for Palestine is planned for October 10, 2024. See: ‘Deadly Exchanges: Capitalism, Militarism, and Incarceration from Texas to Palestine‘ to RSVP.
