Utah Must Stand with Palestine
What is occurring right now in Palestine is genocide, a textbook case of it, a direct result of seventy-five years of occupation and apartheid. Following Hamas's attack on Israel, killing over 1,400 Israelis, the IDF has launched an indiscriminately violent and destructive campaign against the citizens of Gaza. It has deployed illegal weapons like white phosphorus. It has decimated Gaza's health care infrastructure, preventing humane care for tens of thousands of injured. It has killed over 11,000 Palestinians, including 4,506 children, numbers that will have likely risen by the time you read this.
What relationship does this have to Utah? To start, the US sends astronomical amounts of military aid to Israel, which directly funds the weapons used against civilians in Palestine. The house recently passed a bill promising $14 billion aid to Israel, even as the nation uses the money and weapons it obtains from the US and Europe to bomb refugee camps. Israel's massive security apparatus ships its tactics and technology all over the world, including to Utah. Police deploy these inhumane and oppressive tactics against people of color across the US, especially Black people. However, the struggle of marginalized Utahns and Palestinians is interlinked in spiritual, historical, and practical ways.
Utah was founded after Mormons moved further west, fleeing religious presecution. Several groups dwelled in and traversed Utah, including the Shoshone-Bannock, Timpanogos, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute people. The transformation of Utah from indigenous-led land to one of the whitest areas of the United States was violent and aggressive. Over the next hundred years, settlers massacred and fought indigenous groups, adding to the massive, genocidal project of manifest destiny. Some, under the banner of Desert Nation (or DezNat), still long for a more complete ethnoreligious state. An extermination order toward the Timpanogos remains on the books in Utah.
It is not difficult to see the parallels. Like Utah, Israel has a far-right sector (currently in control of its government) that seeks to further remove and displace marginalized people. Like Utah, Israel lies to cover its tracks and obscures its violent history. Like Utah, Israel's very existence is predicated on the violent displacement and policing of the land's indigenous peoples.
However, Utah's relationship with Israel goes beyond parallels. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City, has a friendly relationship with the Israeli government and dedicated the Orson Hyde Memorial Garden in Jerusalem in 1979. The Church-owned school BYU has a center in Jerusalem. Governor Cox has released statements in support of Israel and cloaked the capital building in the occupying nation's colors. These actions directly support ongoing genocide, displacement, and occupation in Palestine, but they also serve as a cover to justify the Utah government's current occupation of indigenous land.
In both places, the land itself suffers under colonial rule. The crisis in Palestine is ecological as well as humanitarian. Israel brags about "turning the desert green" but plants thousands of non-native plants that drain resources. Only eleven percent of forests in Israel date from before 1948. Israel builds walls and fences that doubly oppress the Palestinian people and their environment. Utah's land similarly suffers. As the Great Salt Lake further recedes, creating an imminent threat to Utah's human and non-human population, the state's response has been tepid and unserious. Protests against the to-be-built inland port, which would severely increase the state's carbon emissions, have also gone unheeded. In Utah, just as in Israel, the process of decolonization means a return to the active care of the land, rather than mere cruel exploitation.
Some might ask how I, a trans woman, could support Palestine when Israel is a "safer" place for queer people like me. Israel is guilty of pinkwashing, using a "progressive" veneer to hide or obscure its violence. Every policy that displaces, brutalizes, and murders straight and cis Palestinians harms queer and trans ones just as much. Israel even threatens to out queer Palestinians, unless they spy on their communities. BYU used and uses similar tactics of surveillance against queer students, even as the school's discriminatory policies have softened and as nationwide outrage grows. Utah is one of the states leading the call for anti-trans legislation, making the state hostile for trans children and adults alike. These policies kill and displace the vulnerable, separate families and communities, and force queer people into hiding and shame. On a broader and more horrific scale, Israel apartheid does the same to the people it occupies. Because I am queer, I see my struggle as interconnected with the struggle of Palestine. Queer Palestinians are not an abstract demographic category; they are real people. Some of them even live in Utah.
These connections foreground Utah's complicity in genocide and the necessity of our collective participation in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. So, what can we do in the face of Israel's multi-armed genocide? Simple appeals to non-violence will not end the death in Gaza or in Palestine. We must walk out, strike, and march for a ceasefire. We must divest from, boycott, and sanction the settler-colonial state. We must strike out against the weapons manufacturers in our communities. We must demand a free Palestine and fight for it with every breath.
I love Utah. Every day in Chicago I long for its mountains, for the road trips with my father, for my queer, Mormon friends and family. Because I love Utah, I want it to be free. A similar love motivates the anti-Zionist Jews and Palestinians I am proud to call my friends and colleagues. Utahns, whether marginalized or privileged, have an ethical responsibility to stand with Palestine and to call for land back both there and at home. They have already begun to. Join their voices. Shout with them: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”