Stop the Genocide in Palestine Now!

I am Palestinian.

I wasn’t born in Palestine. I don’t have direct lineage to the people who’ve lived there for thousands of years. I’m Palestinian because I’m human. Their ancestors are my ancestors as “mine” are theirs. During the Holocaust, I was Jewish. I wasn’t born during the Nazi genocide of Jews (I was born some ten years after the end of the Third Reich). But when they were being exterminated it impacted me tremendously.

I’m human. We have the same ancestors in the great human lineage of all ancestors.

When Africans were stolen from their homes as part of the Transatlantic slave trade, I never saw the inside of a slave ship or lived on the terrible plantations where they lost everything to help build this so-called country called “America.” But I was one of them.

I was Irish during the English colonialization and the famine. I was Lakota, Haudenosaunee (Mohawk), Laguna, Diné, and Chumash when their lands and livelihoods were taken away by European powers.

They are all my people.

How can I say this? Borders, nations, languages, belief systems—they came later. They were created under distinct historical circumstances, but what’s common about us is greater than what distinguishes us. Everyone has their stories, values, histories, expressions. Unique and valid. They are all human. Like me.

If you must know my genealogy, from at least 1,000 years, I’m Indigenous with roots in original Mexican peoples such as the Rarámuri, Chichimecas, and Nahuas (different peoples, different idioms, different myths). But we are all one.

I also have Iberian, other European, and African DNA. It’s all good and important to know. But I wasn’t born “fractured” or “mixed,” with “this blood and that blood.” My blood is human. I’m not “mestizo” (part of the Spanish casta system). I was whole and complete the day I was born.

While some in the U.S. have called me “foreigner,” “alien,” and “stranger” (and worse things than that); while a teacher slapped my face at six years old for speaking Spanish (another colonial language like English) in a Watts public school; while police harassed me in my barrio neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County in the 1960s and early 1970s when Mexican migrant barrios were as poor as the Deep South, Appalachia, or any Indigenous Reservation (most of area is now “gentrified”)—and I lost four friends to police violence—my roots run deep.

I belong here and everywhere.

Am I bitter? No. I’m beyond “victimhood.” I embody a spirit of resistance, a revolutionary, who will fight for the liberation of the planet and its people—to remove all chains of social class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and whatever other oppressions have held us down for centuries.

I’m human above all else. I’m an Earth being. I’m for the whole integrated earth and sky systems. People-made systems are only any good if they align with these other natural and truly long-lasting systems. When they don’t, I will fight back—think, study, write, and organize.

I have agency. I’m human.

Israel and the United States are made up entities, no matter what Zionists or Christian Nationalists/MAGA may claim. Neither “God” or “manifest destiny” created them. They were founded on genocide. Israel against Palestine. United States against the original peoples of the land. Although I’m a U.S. citizen, I also have my own mind and heart: I’m critical of those entanglements that draw from and celebrate this history, this genocide.

Any genocide. All genocide.

Countries come and go. Humans continue. Parties and allegiances serve minimal and narrow things. Any religion does the same—except for the expansive and embracing believers, it’s their “god,” “their” rituals, “their” laws. Good for them, but not for everyone.

So as a human, beyond borders, country, or party, I say along with most of the world: We must stop the Genocide in Palestine. In any part of this planet. We are human first. Remember that. Not “America” first. Or this or that religion “first.” Or this piece of real estate “first.” We are one as human beings. Like the Yucatan Mayans say: “In Lak'ech, Ala K'in”—You are the other me; I’m the other you.

I’m Palestinian. Stop the Genocide now!