Sana Wazwaz, contributor

I couldn’t dare brush off the image circulating in May of an armed cop kneeling on the neck of an unarmed man of color. That snapshot, the jaw crushed into concrete, the “I can’t breathe” being forced from his strangled throat — I knew I’d seen it many times before. Each time, the verdict within progressive discourse was the same: No matter what the victim did, nothing justifies an agent of the state extrajudicially kneeling on him without due process. 

I am not talking about George Floyd. I’m talking about an assault that was just as morally unambiguous: The Israeli police’s assault on Omar Al-Khatib, an unarmed Palestinian man from Jerusalem. 

Now that I mention the words “Israel,” and “Palestine,” the tune changes. I know your script: Whereas Chauvin’s knee-on-neck was an unjustifiable extrajudicial murder, that Israeli knee is complicated and nuanced. “Both sides are wrong,” says the ostensible progressive. It’s intractable. It’s too morally intricate for anyone to ever understand. But I understand it quite well, and so did the Israeli founding fathers. The story of Israel and Palestine is not a two-sided conflict; it’s a story of colonizer versus colonized — these two sides will never be equal. 

Don’t take my word for it. Hear it from Israel’s own founding fathers, who explicitly call their state colonial. In his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky frames Zionism (the movement to establish Israel) as colonization, stating, “all Natives [referencing the Palestinians] resist their colonists.” He goes on to explicitly analogize Palestinians to “the Sioux” and the Zionists to “the Pilgrim Fathers.” Would anyone dare say the Native Americans and US settlers are two equal sides? Edmund De Rothschild, one of the financiers of the Zionist project, celebrated Zionism as a colonial movement in Nahum Sokolow’s “The History of Zionism,” and went on to ask if “European colonization of modern land so very different from this feature of Jewish aspirations?” Here, he not only touts Zionism as colonialism, but analogized it to other European colonial projects. This colonial framing was so mainstream within Zionist discourse, they named their funding bank the “Jewish Colonial Trust.”

Israel’s apologists often claim that this language was only deployed because colonialism was popular at the time. This argument only stands if the colonial intentions were merely stated, not materialized — which isn’t the case. In “The Rabin Memoirs,” former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin openly admitted to expelling 50,000 inhabitants of the Palestinian villages of Ramla and Lydd, noting that “Ben-Gurion [first Israeli Prime Minister] waved his hand in a gesture that said, ‘drive them out.’” Is the morality of driving out 50,000 civilians two-sided? 

If this story were two-sided, casualty counts on both sides would be symmetrical, but they’re not. OCHA reports that in the Summer of 2014, 18,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed or severely damaged in comparison to one single Israeli home destroyed. The fatality toll since 2008, 6,124 Palestinians to 224 Israelis, is similarly disproportionate. If you think political context will render these stats more legally complex — they don’t. Even with context, the most reputable human rights groups, from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch, came to a consensus — Israel is an apartheid regime. Their reports found that in Palestine, only one side is having their houses bulldozed by the thousands. Only one side must cross through military checkpoints just to get to school. Only one side is having their civilians tear gassed, their children tortured and their necks kneeled on until suffocation. 

Yes, my charges against Israel are one-sided, because apartheid and colonialism itself is one-sided everywhere. Nobody would ever say, “both the Native Americans and the white settlers are wrong.” Jabotinsky was right on one thing: All natives resist their colonists. And when these natives resist — when Palestine resists — their resistance cannot ever be equal with the knee that pushes their faces into the concrete until they can’t breathe anymore.