By TAYTYN BADGER
This article is based on a speech that the author delivered on Feb. 4 at a Palestine Solidarity Rally in Saskatoon.
Good afternoon everyone! My name is Taytyn Badger, with Workers’ Voice. It’s great to see all of you out here standing up against Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestine. As we do, however, we must remember that we stand on Nehiyaw-Pwat and Michif land, occupied by the ongoing, genocidal, settler-colonial project that is Canada.
Settler-colonialism is rooted in the desire, driven by profit, to invade, occupy, and exploit a people’s land and resources. To do so, it must expropriate and eliminate the Indigenous people as a potential or real threat to settler-colonial domination. Settlers are used to expropriate, eliminate, and replace the Indigenous population. In return, they receive land, higher wages, better work, and state support and protection.
The early Zionists understood Zionism as a settler-colonial project, following in the footsteps of the United States and Canada. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, stated that “Palestinians feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling prairies.” He said that Palestine must be taken by force because “every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.”
Like Canada, Israel systematically displaces and segregates Palestinians onto whatever land is currently unwanted by settler-colonists. On the West Bank, Israel has taken direct control of the vast majority of the resource-rich or fertile land, as well as all major routes in the region, dividing up the “Palestinian enclaves” to maintain control, and poverty, to force Palestinians into hard, underpaid work. Meanwhile, over a quarter of Palestinians on rightful Palestinian land are sealed in the concentration camp of Gaza, under blockade and non-stop attack by Israel.
Here, Indigenous people were forced into cycles of debt to hunt and work for Canadian fur traders. Then, once settlers had arrived, we were scattered onto small reservations far from land that was seen as valuable and barred from leaving for the better part of a century. Look at a map of reserves, and then one of Palliser’s Triangle [a prairie area straddling southern Alberta and Saskatchewan], and you will find that the reserves begin right where the farmable land ends.
Like Canada, Israel and its supporters justify its existence by imposing treaties and agreements it has no intention to uphold. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, wrote to his son regarding the 1937 partition proposal that “through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole … I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country.” Every agreement, whether the 1947 partition, the 1949 Armistice, the 1978 accords, or the Oslo Accords, are used and discarded whenever convenient.
Here, treaties, signed under duress, provide legal and moral justification for Canada’s theft of Indigenous land, while their other provisions are ignored until forced or convenient. Chief Mistahi-Maskwa said it best: “When we set a fox trap, we scatter pieces of meat all around, but when the fox gets into the trap we knock him on the head.” Canada continues to justify its existence through the treaties today, while seeking to eliminate Indigenous peoples.
Like Canada, Israel justifies is colonial project by appeals to “terra nullius,” that the land was unclaimed, or insufficiently exploited, and thus free for the taking. Even before the Nakba, Zionists justified invasion by claiming to “make the desert bloom.” The absurdity of claiming that the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of Eurasian agriculture, was desert is ignored, as are the hundreds of thousands of tons of Palestinian crops that are stolen, alongside their fields, by Israeli settlers.
Here, this land has been the home of the Nehiyaw-Pwat and other Indigenous peoples for over 10,000 years. We grew with the land, managing the prairies with controlled fires and other tools in a sustainable mutually beneficial way. To the settlers, however, it was “perpetually desolate and waste,” even as their farms only succeeded due to the fertile earth we nurtured.
Like Canada, Israel uses food, shelter, and health-care deprivation as a means of control, retribution, and murder. The UNRWA reports that nearly 600,000 Gazans are currently experiencing famine level starvation as Israel expands its blockade of Gaza in retribution for Palestinian resistance, while over 2/3 of hospitals have been forced to suspend operations.
Here, after destroying our means of subsistence, Canada withheld food and aid to force us into complying with their treaties. In just one episode in 1881, promised rations were cut after 15,000 Nehiyaw-Pwat, led by Mistahi-Maskwa, gathered in Cyprus Hills to demand promised rations, funds, and a single, large reserve for their people. On their death march to the north, 10% are estimated to have died. Still today, Indigenous people face food insecurity rates several times that of settlers.
Like Canada, Israel subjects Palestinians to non-stop military and paramilitary harassment, murdering men, women and children with impunity. Over 25,000 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel since Oct. 7, and before and after in Gaza and elsewhere, have been constantly subject to harassment, abuse, and murder.
Here, the RCMP was founded as an army to occupy the West. The Riel Revolution was suppressed with overwhelming force, followed by settler reprisals across the West. Today, armies of police invade the Wet’suwet’en Yintah while harassing, beating, and murdering countrywide to maintain settler-colonial dominance.
We have been where you are, and know what Israel intends, so it is our duty to unite with Palestinians, all Indigenous peoples, and anyone who will join in our shared struggles against settler-colonialism.
End the bombing and invasion of Gaza!
End Israeli settlement building, and Palestinian expropriation, and expulsion!
End all aid, arms deals, and business with Israel!
End the Zionist project!
Win a free, free Palestine, a single democratic, secular, and multinational state, with right of return for all Palestinian people!
Hai hai!