How Mass Imprisonment Connects New Afrikan and Palestinian Youth
I have been trying to follow the Palestinian liberation struggle for some time now, well at least in the best ways I can behind enemy lines: piecing bits and pieces of information together from the various media sources that make it in here.
What strikes me the most at this juncture is the dialectic between New Afrikan youth and Palestinian youth. Over here in the Amerikkkan empire, New Afrikan youth, particularly New Afrikan male youth occupy very unfortunate spaces in the Amerikkkan oppressor nation’s mental. These youth dwell in the danger zone, spaces that are purely a figment of the “white” imagination. This criminal Black youth label. This “hyper-reality” is no more real than the emperor’s new clothes, analogous to the rapist who takes the mentally ill patient back to the scene of the crime, back to the moment of trauma, when the delusions began. It is within the dark interiority of this lived nightmare, the womb of the unforgiving chattel slavery regime enclosed within old style colonialism that the New Afrikan male youth was conceived. This is critical and informative for understanding mass imprisonment in New Afrika.
This process of marking New Afrikan youth as criminal prisoners essential to the functioning of mass incarceration is a mechanism of social control operative under national oppression. For this repressive institution to succeed, New Afrikan youth must be branded as criminal before they are formally subject to this mechanism of control. This is essential, for forms of explicit colonial control are not only prohibited but are widely condemned. Capitalism evolved.
Both New Afrikan and Palestinian people are entrenched beneath the boot of their colonizers without a state that is theirs to foster, nurture, and facilitate their respective national liberation struggles to actualize control over their destiny. Both face the repressive arm of mass imprisonment to undermine and destroy their resistance efforts and thus fine comb their national oppression nightmare.
The I$raeli colonial project is a direct extension of U.$. imperialism. The U.$. penal system being the first and largest experiment in humyn bondage, it is only fitting that this institution of social control finds its way into the Palestinian lived experience under I$raeli occupation.
Palestinian youth are the only youth that are formally subject to a “military” court/detention system. Palestinian youth are not privy to a civil court; that means when they go before a judge they are not entitled to a lawyer, nor a translator even though the entire court proceedings are in Hebrew – a non-Arabic language. And if they remain silent, that means they plead guilty. So no civilian proceedings for any Palestinian youth at all.
Many of these oppressed youth are taken during night raids from their parents or adult supervisors to further facilitate intimidating interrogation techniques. These parallel a lot of New Afrikan juvenile situations as the school-to-prison pipeline. The harsh penalties for simple offenses that are the rule, just the whole criminalization process of entire neighborhoods/locations mirror U.$. law enforcement imposition of gang injunctions/occupational patrolling of predominantly New Afrikan neighborhoods in the United $tates of Amerikkka.
The I$raeli settler occupation project parallels Amerikkkan national oppression of New Afrika with the language and practical application of the tried and tired excuse of blaming the so-called “savages” for provoking the “reasonable” and “peace loving” settlers into defending themselves and the land “God ordained” them to have thus dehumanizing and criminalizing a whole nation. The zionist regime’s actions against Palestinian youth are nothing short of genocidal.
In the current news, it is important to note the essential role played by the Palestinian youth, mostly under 18. The resistance movement there is mobilizing their youth to stand up and struggle forward. This is very important to glean lessons from, particularly within the historical and contemporary social dynamics encircling settler colonialism and national oppression in Occupied Palestine. This is good for an application to the Amerikan empire. As ULK aptly notes: the Black Panthers were mostly teenagers.
