Sylvia Wynter's Dream

by Blaire Santos | 16th October, 2023 | Challenging Beliefs Prompt

DISCLAIMER: This post contains distressing images and information.

I remember not having to take my shoes off to get on a plane, but now I expect to be selected, supposedly at random, for a body search every time I travel through the US. TSA has always fulfilled my expectations because being 1/8 South Asian is too close to being Middle Eastern; therefore, I must be a discernable threat to their national security, as anyone from the Middle East could be a terrorist. 

However, my little brother was born in 2006, in the post-9/11 era in which islamophobia has proliferated Western consciousness. Thus, many years ago, when I was helping him with his primary school English homework, he was not alarmed that the exercise, where he was supposed to put commas in the right places, mentioned that “Muslims are terrorists.” The exercise had many points of alarm, including a sentence about “Heathenous Mayans living in the jungles of South America” rather than the Maya civilisation that lived in the cities of Central America. I took it upon myself to call the principal and raise my concerns about the text’s insidious narratives, wondering what other conspiracies infiltrated the Abeka books Christian schools are using in Belize.

With my younger brother now in college, I had long since forgotten this incident about ‘Muslim terrorists’ and ‘Mayan heathens.’ However, this memory returned to me in full force during the past week as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated, especially after calls for a Palestinian genocide intensified after Nicole Zedeck, a correspondent of i24NEWS, reported that Hamas beheaded babies.¹ Bel Trew, The Independent‘s Chief International Correspondent, reported the same.² 

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A post shared by i24NEWS English (@i24news)

On October 7, 2023, Hamas conducted the single deadliest attack on Israeli civilians at a techno music festival. NPR‘s international correspondent in Jerusalem, Daniel Estrin, reported in the podcast, All Things Considered, that Hamas militants killed at least 260 young Israelis. “Many more are missing.” 

This attack was just the beginning, as the Israeli Defense Force spokesperson, Daniel Hagar, reported that Hamas has killed at least 1,400 people in Israel. 

In retaliation, the Israeli army has launched a series of brutal airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, including on mosques and apartment buildings, which, they claim, are aimed only at Hamas agents. They have warned civilians to flee, but in some cases, they gave these warnings mere minutes in advance, resulting in many civilian casualties and injuries.

When interviewed by Channel 4 News, Mark Regev, the Israeli Prime Minister’s advisor, stated that Hamas has to “pay a price.” 

The interviewer responded, “Right, but why should children pay a price? Why should pregnant mothers pay a price? I mean, the danger here is that you’re just going to continue the cycle of violence that has defined politics in this part of the world for so long.” 

Furthermore, although Israeli officials publicly lament civilian casualties, where do they expect Palestinians to flee in the open-air prison of Gaza? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict originated with the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948) and the influx of Jewish immigrants seeking to establish a homeland. The 1947 UN Partition Plan, accepted by Jewish leaders but rejected by Arab leaders, led to violence. Eventually, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who fled or were expelled from their homes. Subsequent conflicts, including the Six-Day War in 1967, caused further Palestinian displacement. Palestinian refugees, ripped from their indigenous lands, sought asylum in neighbouring nations, where many now reside in refugee camps, making it a longstanding, unresolved issue.

Since October 7, the killings on both sides have been disturbing and haunting. Hopefully, a cease-fire will happen soon to prevent civilian deaths. And maybe one day, Israel and Palestine can reach a peaceful solution.

Although Hamas acted against what the UN has deemed illegal occupation by Israeli settlers³, their actions against civilians constitute war crimes.⁴ Nevertheless, as images of Gaza in ruins surfaced, I remembered the scorched earth policies of the mass ethnic cleansing of Mayas in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996, led by the Guatemalan military, which, at the time, received US and Israeli support.⁵ Some of my family members had to flee to Belize, abandoning their homeland forever.

“Highland Maya civilians were the victims of a 36-year civil war in which 900,000 of them were displaced from their lands, many of them becoming refugees in Mexico, Belize, and the United States, and another 166,000 were killed or ‘disappeared’. By the time a cease-fire was declared in 1996, the Maya constituted 83% of the war dead.”

Foster, Lynn V. Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World (PDF). p. 84. 

Under Article 8 2,b.,iv of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the following is a war crime:

“Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.”

RS-Eng.pdf (icc-cpi.int)

Clearly, these Israeli airstrikes also constitute war crimes, and look suspiciously like a genocidal assault given that Israel is preventing Palestinian civilians from crossing the Northern and Southern borders to seek refuge from the onslaught.  

According to the UN, Francesca Albanese, a “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967,” warned that a Palestinian genocide is imminent.

“Since October 7, 2023, more than 1,900 Palestinians have been killed, including at least 600 children, more than 7,600 injured, and over 423,000 people have been displaced as a result of the Israeli strikes. This fate befell a population which has already experienced five major wars since 2008 in the context of an unlawful blockade imposed by Israel since 2007, which Albanese said has been widely condemned by the international community as collective punishment.”

_{^{GENEVA. “UN expert warns of new instance of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, calls for immediate ceasefire.” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 14 Oct. 2023,https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-warns-new-instance-mass-ethnic-cleansing-palestinians-calls#:~:text=Since%207%20October%202023%2C%20more,result%20of%20the%20Israeli%20strikes.}}

I reeled in horror watching this video of Pro-Israel demonstrators in New York City calling for the annihilation of all Palestinians. It was originally posted to YouTube, but has gained traction on X where it has amassed 25.5M views. How could the victims of the Holocaust consider committing the same kind of ethnic cleansing that the Nazis had viciously meted out from 1933-1945? Did they forget what it felt like to be on the receiving end of genocide? As the countdown to catastrophe began with hospitals running out of fuel and people being forced to drink sea water,⁶ I wondered, ‘why are the Israeli’s going to such extremes?’ However, I realised the answer was in the conspiracy theory of beheaded babies, originating from an extremist to justify the eradication of Palestinians.  

Conspiracies feed off fear and injustice, inciting extreme responses. In an article on Mondoweiss, Dave Reed notes that Israeli forces are using the unverified assertations of beheaded babies to justify the massacre of Palestinians.⁷ He traced the source to Major David Ben Zion of the Israeli army, who “has a history of calls for genocidal violence against Palestinians”, which was supported by Betzalel Smotrich, a far-right Israeli politician. 

Although Bel Trew later clarified that The Independent did not see evidence of decapitated children and the Israeli military also denied having such evidence, this story has spread like COVID-19 across social media. US President Joe Biden even repeated it, and subsequently the White House had to release a statement that such reports had not been confirmed. 

Clarifications and retractions have received far less notice, and similar cases of fake news are surfacing on both sides of the Hamas-Israeli conflict.⁸ Below are some screen shots I’ve taken over the past week of misinformation, which are arguably feeding the conspiracy theory of ‘inhumane’ and ‘barbaric’ Palestinians.

While the pattern of conflicts and cease-fires reflect historical continuities in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has devastated both sides, as someone from a colonial space, I recognise that the conflict is rooted in the denial of indigenous rights to people who have lived in this area for thousands of years, who have been colonised over and over again. Whether by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians, or the British, the historical evidence shows that the Jahalin, al-Kaabneh, al-Azazmeh, al-Ramadin and al-Rshaida Bedouins people of modern-day Palestine descend from the same peoples that inhabited this gulf of the Mediterranean since the time of King David’s conquest. Since the settlement of the Jews, who also experienced displacement (from Europe), seeking to return to their ancestral homeland, new generations have been born into the midst of the ever-evolving conflicts over this stretch of land. Although efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute continue, conspiracy theories derail such efforts and encourage recurring patterns of violence, antisemitism and islamophobia, which are difficult to address comprehensively. Ultimately, the conspiracy theories are part the same Western playbook of revenge and policy—lies to foment war. 

1. ‘It Smells Of Death Here’: Surveying The Scenes Of Atrocities In Kfar Aza – I24NEWS (archive.org) ↩︎
2. Kfar Aza: Inside the Israeli border village where ‘babies were slaughtered’ in Hamas attack | The Independent ↩︎
3. Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory illegal: UN rights commission | UN News ↩︎
4. United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect ↩︎
5. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20151005-israels-role-in-the-guatemalan-genocide/ ↩︎
6. Israel Hamas war live updates: Gaza is 24 hours from ‘catastrophe’, warns WHO | The Independent ↩︎
7. There is no proof Palestinian fighters ‘beheaded’ babies. The only source is a radical settler. – Mondoweiss ↩︎
8. The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation | WIRED ↩︎