July 4, 2026
This week:
America 250 years, built on the back of slaves and the murder of its indigenous inhabitants.
1000 days of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
Which one we will remember this week will say a lot about us. But it also will say something about the power of myth, the power of the stories we tell ourselves.
America, we’ve been taught, its origins in the search for religious freedom from a tyrannical ruler, hardscrabble pioneers settling an untamed wilderness, defending themselves against savages who had the temerity to protect their land and their way of life, rewarding the industriousness of those willing to work hard and risk, and a religion whose message was one of divine chosenness, a mirror image of the biblical story now in this new land.
And Israel, trying to convince itself – and its Zionist friends – that it was a “people without a land in a land without a people, that their eternal victimhood somehow grants them moral superiority and even more, political, economic, and otherwise impunity.
While America’s foundational origin story – chosenness, divine mission, vanquishing an enemy, taking the Promised Land, a new covenant – is partially based on the Hebrew Bible, modern-day Israel learned its settler-colonial lessons from the model (and mistakes) of white European settlers genocide of the native populations in America. A circular story of divinely-sanctioned violence against an indigenous population.
I revisited this week the performance of Voices of the People’s History of the United States (2016) on the 35th anniversary of the publication of Howard Zinn’s seminal book (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkJ_WHoBLzY&t=1146s). I thought of America’s racist history at home including a colonial adventurism abroad and a predatory capitalism that creates trillionaires while millions go hungry. Voices of the People’s History was healthy reminder of those marginalized, oppressed, and repressed voices this week amid the 250th anniversary hoopla, fireworks, and self-congratulatory nationalistic bullshit.
And I’m also still reeling emotionally from our 19th “solidarity tour” in Palestine, just returned two weeks ago, where the signs of emotional fatigue, trauma, murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are written on every Palestinian face, even as they maintain an extraordinary resilience, strength, and faith. 18,457 young Palestinians massacred by Israel during its genocide of Gaza (https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BSmMqdRB5/)
Our foundational mythologies. The stories we tell ourselves matter. The language we use, the stories we tell are the food we feed our children, the walls we build in the house of understanding we inhabit.
While progressives in the United States rightly protest a MAGA theocracy, a racist American exceptionalism, a white Christian Nationalism with hundreds of thousands turning out for No Kings Rallies, where are their protests, where are their demonstrations against an exclusionary white racist Israeli exceptionalism, a racist Christian and Jewish Zionism?
Every Israeli bullet, every missile, every act of brutality, every middle-of-the-night kidnapping, every Gaza hospital, church, mosque, school destroyed, every Palestinian murdered by Israel has the US footprint, has OUR name on it. Enough liberal hypocrisy. And most recently, Israel’s tail wagging the US dog in its chosen war against Iran (or is Israel the dog wagging the US tail – hard to tell).
Two sides of the same racist coin. Theirs is not simply an innocent misreading of history, a disagreement of interpretation, a harmless, unintentional mistake, no! No! Theirs is a purposeful, intentional choice of an ideology based in a desire to dominate, a will to power, a demeaning and dehumanization of the other.
This week:
America 250 years, built on the back of slaves and the murder of its indigenous inhabitants.
I’m not celebrating; on the contrary, I’m wondering if American can even be saved or if it’s been fatally flawed from the start.
1000 days of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
I know which one I’ll be thinking about, and the people I’ll be re-committing myself to, with even further words and acts of friendship and solidarity this weekend.
Free, free Palestine.
Michael