Tulsa massacre and antipathy toward Israel are linked by attempts at erasure
The week of May 26 marks 103 years since mobs of deputized white men destroyed Tulsa, Oklahoma’s thriving Greenwood neighborhood called “Black Wall Street.” Two days of looting, burning and killing left 300 African Americans dead, 9,000 homeless, and 1,405 homes and businesses destroyed.
At its core, the Tulsa-Greenwood Massacre underscores the mortal threat marginalized communities face when deprived of full and equal rights. It also suggests a framework for understanding long-standing conflicts in other parts of the world.
Take the Middle East, for instance.
Caged inside rigid systems of patriarchy, autocracy, and strict religious doctrine, marginalized peoples throughout the Middle East have suffered wholesale displacements, ethnic cleansings, and genocides by colonizers for millennia. The histories of indigenous Nubians, Druze, Yazidis, Copts, Assyrians, Amazigh, Mandaeans, Maronites and Jews, provide lessons in structural racism, as well as essential context regarding Israel’s uniqueness in the region.
History is replete with examples of oppression
Beginning in 622 AD imperialist armies marching north from Arabia offered conquered peoples three choices:
pay a “protection” tax or
face execution.
Quranic “dhimmi” practices – similar to Jim Crow Laws – reinforced structural inequality and religious discrimination resulting in ongoing attacks on dwindling Christian communities.
In Sudan, Janjaweed/RSF militias killed or ethnically cleansed millions of darker-skinned Africans in an ongoing civil war. Kurds have survived centuries of persecution and slaughter by ISIS, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
In 1948 through the 1960s, approximately 750,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab lands, forced to abandon homes, property and deeply-rooted cultures.
Oct. 7th, grotesquely mischaracterized by some as “resistance,” more closely resembles Tulsa.
Except for Jews, no other people indigenous to the Middle East has managed to completely break free of colonial oppression. Deploying an unyielding rejectionist strategy, Arab states continually deny Palestinians citizenship, cynically and tragically keeping refugees in limbo for diplomatic leverage after seven decades. Whom does this strategy serve?
Convenient "alternative facts” and conspiracy theories spread by regional leaders and Islamist educational institutions concretize fantasies that Israel will simply disappear. It’s a phenomenon mirroring delusions that the 2020 election was “stolen” and the Jan. 6th, 2021, insurrection was “peaceful.”
Radical extremists target minority groups they consider 'inferior'
So here’s the crux: Broadly and metaphorically, Israel resembles Greenwood: Two“island” minority communities – daring to succeed – enduring “attacks to erase” by demographically and geographically superior forces.
For white supremacists, any “Black Wall Streets'' shatters racist mantras that African Americans are “less than” and, therefore, must be destroyed.
Similarly, for radical jihadist leaders use scripture to dehumanize Jews, Zionists or not.
Furthermore, the idea of empowered women instills existential fear into patriarchal extremist regimes.
Public beatings, honor killings and stonings endorsed by extremist Sunni regimes contrast sharply with Israel’s democratic ethos of gender equality. White supremacists have similarly backward fears of female autonomy which also stokes extreme violence.
Religious militias enforce 7th century extremism
To guarantee a steady supply of anti-Israel fighters and martyrs, fundamentalist regimes indoctrinate kids into opposing the concept of Israel. No Jews allowed. Not on the map. But the idea of Kurdish independence – also intolerable. Berber nationhood – nope. Coptic freedom to worship – no, again. All minority sovereignty must be suppressed.
Seemingly divergent events – ISIS destroying Nimrud, Arafat’s life-long rejectionism, The Armenian genocide, 400 miles of tunnels built after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and child suicide bombers – are all weapons of colonial erasure – with BDS campaigns and campus protests tactical extensions to “globalize the intifada.”
With Hamas in Gaza, PFLP and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in the West Bank, ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Houthis in Yemen, al-Shabaab in Somalia, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Boko Haram in Nigeria and Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – the list goes on – ethno-religious minorities face an array of militias propagating backward, religious extremism that demands submission. Are the goals of white Christian nationalists much different?
Independent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's disastrous leadership, his attacks on Israel’s democracy, and horrendous devastation in Gaza, Sunni Arab colonialist domination remains.
Struggles against erasure occur on timelines spanning millennia, and on battlefields more nuanced, numerous, and diverse than what Qatari-funded professors and social media memes suggest.
The chant “from the river to the sea” is a clarion call for Tulsa-like destruction. Denying that meaning reflects intentional gaslighting or catastrophic misunderstandings of who’s pulling the strings. And it's a sad, disturbing, upside-down world, indeed, when so many fellow progressives who fight for peace and justice – knowingly or not – embolden the oppressive, patriarchal, anti-democratic forces they claim to abhor.
Daniel Heller is based in Nashville. He has traveled extensively throughout Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, Morocco and Turkey, and his columns have been published in newspapers across the U.S.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Israel-Hamas war: Radical forces attempt to erase reviled minorities
