Both the United States and Israel were shaped by political systems built alongside racial hierarchy and contested citizenship.
Each proclaimed democratic ideals while simultaneously managing populations excluded from the full promise of those ideals.
They are both profoundly unfree and racially riven societies..
That shared history matters.
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#iran #history #histodons #israel #blackmastodon
Image: Benjamin Netanyahu hugs Joe Biden at Ben Guirion Airport on October 18, 2023. AFP.
The United States declared universal liberty in 1776 while sustaining a massive system of racial slavery.
After emancipation, the system reorganized itself through Jim Crow—disenfranchisement, segregation, and racial terror.
For nearly a century, American democracy functioned fully for some citizens and only partially for others.
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Image: Each time word of a lynching reached the NAACP, a simple, somber flag flew outside the group’s offices at 69 Fifth Avenue in NYC. (Library of Congress).
Israel’s political structure emerged from a different history but a similarly unresolved conflict over land and sovereignty.
The creation of Israel in 1948 produced a Jewish national state alongside the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Today Israelis and Palestinians live on the same land under profoundly unequal legal and political systems.
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Image: Cover of the 1st edition, showing part of The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Clark Art Institute.
In both societies, the language of democracy operates beside enduring structures of hierarchy.
Those shared contradictions shape how each country understands security, territory, and political control.
That parallel history does not fully explain the alliance.
But it helps explain why the two states often recognize themselves in one another.
it.
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Video: Ex-Marine Brian McGinnis is removed as he shouts, “No one wants to fight for Israel.” USA Today.
@Spacehistory @Deglassco @blueorchestra I don’t know how you can argue that Israel has not been expansionist. There was no “Israeli” population in Israel prior to its founding. It would be hard to find a current Israeli family that was living in Palestine prior to the 1930s. The borders have, during my lifetime, expanded frequently, and are in the process of doing so again.
Your second point is horrific. Leaving aside the issue of conflating political entity with ethnicity, which is, rightly, seen as racist, you accuse a scholar of racism of being racist. This, sir, is what is meant by white privilege. This is not two historians disagreeing. This is raw naked racism in action. Yours.
I know Dr Glassco does not need and probably will not welcome my response. Her silence is more dignified than my outrage. I hope, though, that you will reflect on what you have written here, and either try to be more sensitive to a history of oppression, or more openly proclaim your own allegiance to the same brand of white supremacy that occupies the White House.
@Spacehistory I made no claim to always being right.
1930 was, as you know, an arbitrary date, indicating that the Israeli state is not a continuous occupation by a people. Supporting their ancestral right to a historical homeland is the same as supporting their ancestral removal of the US government and placing the modern state in indigenous hands. This would, no doubt, be an improvement, but hardly fair to the other ethnicities present on the landmass if they suddenly found themselves to be a disenfranchised and subjugated people.
Your work on Black history just makes me more disappointed that you cannot see the wrongness in the second of your original points.
Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco
Richard Paul
La Dame d'Azur
Tattered