After Jehan Bseiso’s “Gaza Lovesong.”
The world’s deadliest land migration route is a land of open graves. The wall along the U.S.–Mexico border is lined by saguaro and prickly pear cacti that, in their many thousands, stand in for cemetery markers of the nameless dead.
Against the extensive violence of the U.S. border, another desert borderland is undergoing a genocide, now seven months in—rapidly counting more than 34,000 massacred, more than 10,000 missing. Shared between these oppressions are patterns of social ordering and othering, circuits and flows of surveillance, the siphoning of pasts and the denial of futures. Ultimately, the security regimes operate in the interest of ceaseless shareholder profits. A nabka is always ongoing.
But there are links between these two catastrophes that extend deeper than the surface resemblances between the U.S. and its client state. In the end, if the Sonoran Desert is distant from Palestine, from Gaza, it is only so in a cartographical sense. By thinking on the level of systems, we can decode how patterns of hypermilitarization and the unrelenting theft and ruination of others’ lands are precipitated by underlying incentives of capital that drive the investment in prolonged occupations. Analyzing the underlying connections allows us to understand the omnipresent state of siege—so that we might better countermand it.
The everyday oppression that is the U.S.–Mexico border is grotesque—an ignominious human rights catastrophe and an indictment of this country’s putative moral standing. The border is a nexus of the security-military-industrial-complex and the unfettered dispossession and exploitation that persists in feeding and continually reproducing the prerogatives of capital. The wall dips in and out of the headlines, but both of the genocidaires racing towards 2024 elections are insistent on sealing the country, shutting down pathways for refuge. The Biden administration, flying in the face of its campaign rhetoric, has demonstrated that it has every intention of continuing to lock down and further militarize the border, despite opposition from allies and the certainty of irreversible environmental impacts.
We will not endeavor here to give a comprehensive treatment of the U.S.–Mexico wall. The wall spans nearly 2,000 miles—from Brownsville, Matamoros and Tamaulipas in the east all the way to San Diego, Tijuana and Baja Mexico in the west. A wall that began not with Trump, not with Obama, but with the demarcations that initiated President Andrew Jackson’s genocide of Indigenous peoples across this continent. Scholar and activist Harsha Walia writes in Border & Rule:
“Interrogating the formation of the U.S.–Mexico border exposes the moorings of the U.S. as a settler, slaveholding, expansionist, and exclusionary state. The southern border has been particularly pivotal in the ideology of manifest destiny, a tenet of territorial expansionism wherein northern and southern U.S. states found common ground in the belief that God had ordained frontier wars.
“[We can look to] President Andrew Jackson, whose bloody reign from 1829 to 1837 included massacring Indigenous people and expanding slavery. Jackson also attempted to negotiate with the Mexican government for the purchase of Texas, while tacitly supporting the flow of white Anglo-American settlers into the region to mount a revolt. During the 1830s, Mexico’s decision to outlaw slavery and refuse Anglo-settler immigration from the southern U.S. fueled a white secessionist Texian movement. In 1837, Jackson officially recognized the independent Republic of Texas, where Texians affirmed slavery and free Black people required special permission to live. Annexation of the Republic of Texas as a slave state in 1845 was followed by a full-blown U.S. military invasion of Mexico and debt manipulation by President James Polk, eventually resulting in the forced annexation of half of Mexico through the imposition of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.”
Again, a full treatment of the intricate logics and vast systems of elimination and containment that characterize today’s border regime would far exceed the scope of this writing. The sort of machinations that underlie its functioning are equally widespread across geography and time: shapeshifting colonial mechanisms of land theft, from policy to technology, have been deployed to the Sonora and the broader U.S.–Mexico border since their early incarnations in The Homestead Act (1862), The Desert Land Act (1877), and The Dawes Act (1887). Today, the Bureau of Land Management oversees vast expanses of land that have been expropriated from Indigenous peoples.
The Lakota organizer, historian, and journalist Nick Estes, interviewed by Jacobin, related how this theft of millions of acres was facilitated by legal maneuvering:
“The Homestead Act opens up land. Very cheap land. For white settlers. And railroad companies played a major role in this. They have what are called colonization offices, specifically in the Nordic European countries to recruit poor folks to put them out as cannon fodder on the western frontier. To occupy these places near railroads or near infrastructure is to create towns, essentially. The Homestead Act is a series of acts. The Desert Lands Act, which comes much later, provides federal subsidies to improve the land and provide irrigation.”
The Gadsen Purchase (1853) and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) created additional means of exclusion that further dispossessed, amongst many others, the Indigenous Tohono O’odham people, whose ancestral lands have been largely subsumed by two centuries of ever-accelerating settler colonial land theft across this region. Significant amounts of the stolen land have been devoted to military and border security purposes.
The historical scale of racist exploitation, and its persistence in the guise of present-day systems, is staggering: take, for only one example, how Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was birthed from the Texas Rangers, while the Rangers have their origins as an arm of the Ku Klux Klan. Entities such as these have emboldened and empowered white supremacists from the early 20th century through today. The border regime continually terrorizes marginalized people throughout the southwest and beyond in the interest of shaping and protecting white settlement.
Over the decades there has been a barrage of abhorrent and policy and policing practices that have expanded to nearly incomprehensible proportions. The creation of the United States Central Command (1983), Department of Homeland Security (2002), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (2003), and The Secure Fence Act (2006) expedited border externalization and carceral networks of caging, detention, and disappearance. The militarized border regime, in concert with mass incarceration, has inflicted a myriad of economic, material, social, and psychological harms, affecting the entirety of the southwest borderlands and the world writ large. All of this must be taken into account before we examine the manifestations of such that are specific to the Sonoran Desert.
A key cog in the mechanism of modern border enforcement is the surveillance tower program. This border monitoring network comprises a system of Integrated Fixed Towers (IFTs), which are built by a defense contractor called Elbit Systems of America. There are, of course, many other defense corporations involved in supplying the technologies for border control, among them General Dynamics, Advanced Technology Systems Company, and Anduril Industries, all of which have landed contracts from the Department of Homeland Security for construction and systems design.
But the origins of the Elbit corporation are especially telling. Elbit’s IFT project was initiated in 2014. Their military experience, though, extends much further. Elbit Systems of America is only a subsidiary of the broader Elbit Systems: Israel’s largest defense contractor. The company touts that its “integrated border security solutions” have been “field tested” in world conflict zones—i.e., on vulnerable populations from the borderlands of the Sonoran Desert to Palestine.
Along the U.S.–Mexico border, the towers allow CBP agents to maintain omnipresent surveillance over the land and its people. Upwards of 467 surveillance towers, coupled with a matrix of accompanying technologies like ground sensors and drones, form the “virtual wall,” fortifying the “physical” wall of steel and concertina wire. The research, development, and implementation of these systems have led to tactical and technological advances in “the management and administration of borderlands, its people and territory, [as] co-constructed by how and what its technical infrastructures allow it to sense, measure and organize,” as Iván Chaar López put it in The Cybernetic Border.
Elbit Systems is making strides towards fully sealing off and surveilling the borderlands—and beyond. Will Parrish, reporting for The Intercept, cited a company executive: “According to Bobby Brown, senior director of Customs and Border Protection at Elbit Systems of America, the company’s ultimate goal is to build a ‘layer’ of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. ‘Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country… [t]here’s a lot to be done.’”
By necessity, the history of the Sonoran Desert will remain incomplete. Incomplete because it can never detail the past millennia of human and ecological kinship, living by and with the land—ways of living that were extinguished long before the founding of Tucson, my hometown, and its subsequent sprawl across unceded Tohono O’odham territory. This place’s capacity for resilience is tested endlessly against the hydra of settler-colonial destruction.
Military surveillance technology—settler surveillance—seeks to empty the land of all perspectives except that of the state. Amaya Schaeffer expands on the subject in Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (2022):
“Rather than focusing on the bodies caught in the surveillant eye, it is imperative to situate settler seeing within the settler military imaginaries that continue to hide how this gaze targets Indigenous bodies and land, transplanted globally to mean any foe that threatens the colonizers’ land-based power. To interrogate surveillance as a settler colonial technology is to attend to the ways Western spatial imaginaries desacralize relational bonds between land and bodies, regarding them instead as unruly entities to be conquered. The border’s spectacular resonance as an uninhabitable or wild frontier—either empty or overrun—continues to justify the need for settler presence and a ubiquitous security apparatus.”
The cutting, carving, razing, splicing, and sequestration of this fragile desert ecology is being documented by historians, geographers, environmentalists, aid workers, forensic anthropologists, ethnographers, and many other researchers, all of them racing to record its features before they are destroyed. In a 2018 article in The Avery Review, a journal of architectural criticism, Caitlin Blanchfield and Nina Kolwratnik further detail the impositions upon O’odham spaces:
“The Tohono O’odham traditional lands encompass thousands of square miles of the Sonoran Desert in a territory that straddles what is now the border between Arizona in the United States and Sonora, Mexico. Historically, the O’odham have moved fluidly through this terrain, traveling to seasonal villages, harvesting saguaro cactus, fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, and performing spiritual walks or runs. Yet today, the Nation occupies only a tenth of O’odham territory systematically reduced through five centuries of invasion, land purchases, and executive orders that the O’odham—then not recognized as a sovereign nation by the United States or Mexico—were not party to.”
The annexation, occupation, and pillaging of O’odham land comprises much more than a singular border wall or treaty violation. Instead, it is an ongoing process of annihilation—erasing the spaces and times of ceremonies and cultural rites, erasing burial grounds, water resources, infrastructure, migration patterns, geological formations, and so much more, across culture, ecology, and geology. Hundred-year-old saguaros, considered community elders by the O’odham and others, are uprooted, hacked, discarded. So too are the sabr—the prickly pear (Opuntia) cacti who provide sustenance to many forms of desert dwellers and crossers.
While there are innumerable wreckages wrought by militarization, a recent federal audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office spelled out a particularly glaring example. Federal contractors had used explosives to clear sovereign Indigenous lands to make way for expanding an immigration patrol road. As the audit documented, “The blasting damaged portions of Monument Hill, a site that the Hia-C’ed O’odham, ancestors of the Tohono O’odham, and other Tribes historically used for religious ceremonies and that remains important to several Indigenous communities.”
Countless degradations such as this, along with the physical border wall and its virtual counterpart—the government monitoring of every inch of life throughout the Sonoran Desert—have rendered a harmonious way of life impossible, and eradicated its practitioners. Instead, the border regime weaponizes the harshness of the Sonoran terrain into a deathmaking scheme.
Above: The Sonoran Desert, as mapped by Native Land Digital.
In 2018, Elbit Systems acquired Tucson-based Universal Avionics, which develops and manufactures various flight vision systems and displays, for approximately $120 million. Elbit’s outsized presence in the area is joined by Raytheon Missiles & Defense, Caterpillar, the operations of the Davis Monthan Air Force Base, and numerous other surveillance and munitions multinationals, including Leonardo, Sargent Aerospace, and Honeywell Aerospace. War, by every name, has hastened the destruction of this place; the endless Wars declared on drugs, on “illegal immigration,” on terror, and beyond. War, of course, means profit: Tucson’s lifeblood is the war economy, and the Sonoran Desert is one of the world’s foremost laboratories for the “field-testing” of the technologies of war, violence, and exclusion—logics of death, which are then exported to borderlands the world over.
Gaza has its own story, of course. But there are harmonies and resonances. The courage and resilience of Gazans, many of whom have been displaced before (al-nakba al-mustamirra), persists in the face of the grievous, genocidal present campaign. This assault must be understood as part of a long history of settler violence against Palestinians; while it is to some extent new in its severe degree, it is not so in kind.
An August 2012 report by the United Nations Country Team predicted that by 2020, due to the severity of the Israeli blockade and rapidly deteriorating access to basic human needs, Gaza would be unlivable. In other words, Gazans are currently enduring worse conditions than the worst-case scenario. The available extent of food supplies is measured in a mere handful of days. The total destruction of the north, and, at the time of writing, the beginning of the attack on Rafah, will impose “unlivable” conditions on generations of people, just as with the dispossessions of the past. In a chillingly prescient essay titled “Israel Will Invade Gaza Again… The Only Question is How Soon,” collected in Gaza in Context: War and Settler Colonialism (2016), Noura Erakat reminds us that “Israel’s policies toward Gaza are an extension of its ambitions to remove and replace Palestinians living on their historic lands.”
While the scope and scale of the current world-altering slaughter is statistically unprecedented in the region, we are obligated to remember the IDF’s attacks and terror campaigns throughout the last 76 years, and counting, in this “post-livable” place in order to better understand the technologies and tactics that state powers have employed in their unrelenting land grab—and, here, to specifically name Elbit’s ongoing role in atrocity. According to the Who Profits Research Center, which documents corporate involvement in the Israeli occupation, Elbit Systems, as the IDF’s primary source of land-based military equipment, targeted mortar ammunition, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs):
“…supplies two of the three UAVs used by the Israeli military for attack purposes, the Hermes 450 and Hermes 900, both of which are widely used. Israeli media reported that Elbit drones were in use and the company’s personnel were part of the operation room of a special drones unit deployed during Israel’s 11-day onslaught against Gaza in May 2021 which left 248 people dead and over 1,900 injured. Drones manufactured by Elbit were used in coordination with mortars and ground-based missiles to strike dozens of targets miles away from the border, reportedly.
“During Israel’s deadly attack on Gaza in 2014, Elbit’s 7.5 Skylark, an intelligence-gathering drone, operational in the Israeli military since 2008, and its lethal UAV, the Hermes 900, were used. The Hermes 900 is used both for intelligence purposes and for air strikes using guided missiles. The Hermes 900 can stay aloft for up to 24 hours at altitudes of up 18,000 feet and has an array of optical, infrared, and laser sensors that allow the operator to identify and track targets as well as to guide munitions in flight.”
A truncated overview of Elbit’s complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine includes supplying weapons for: the ongoing illegal blockade of Gaza (2007-present); Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), Operation Protective Edge (2014), Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Operation Breaking Dawn (2022), and Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza and the entirety of Palestine (2023-). Elbit’s weapons technologies are integrated into IDF battle tanks, fighter jets, helicopters, and naval vessels. Bombs, missiles, and killer drones manufactured by Elbit are integral to the IDF arsenal. The Investigate project of the pacifist American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) catalogues some of their weaponry products:
“The Israeli military uses Elbit MPR 500, 1000, and 2000 bombs, touted for their ‘high kill’ capabilities, in its attacks on Gaza […] Elbit supplies unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to the Israeli military, including both armed and unarmed Hermes 450 and 900 drones; Skylark intelligence-gathering drones; and accompanying ground control systems, support equipment, and data platforms. These drones have been used extensively for attack and surveillance purposes, particularly in Gaza and along the Gaza–Israel border.
“Elbit’s Hermes 450 drone, developed in 1998, has become the ‘primary platform’”‘ of the Israeli military in its ‘counter-terror operations,’ according to Elbit. During its three-day assault on Gaza in August 2022, the Israeli military deployed Hermes 450 drones equipped with missiles to strike ‘[d]ozens of targets.’ In 2014, Hermes 450 drones were used in two separate strikes that killed four Palestinian children as they played on a beach in Gaza City. Three of the children, killed in the second strike, were attempting to escape at the time. These attacks were subsequently labeled ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity.’ The Israeli military also used Hermes 450 drones during its 2006 bombardments of Lebanon, which killed 1,183 people, around one-third of whom were children.
“Elbit’s flagship drone, the Hermes 900, was first operationalized in the final days of Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza. An ‘improved’ version of the Hermes 450, the Hermes 900—used for both attack and surveillance purposes—has taken part in all of Israel’s major assaults on Gaza since 2014. For example, the Israeli military deployed Hermes 900 drones equipped with Spike MR guided missiles during its 11-day attack on Gaza in 2021, which killed 248 people and injured an additional 1,900.”
During Operation Cast Lead, Human Rights Watch, along with The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, B’Tselem, and the al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, documented the massacre of dozens of Palestinian civilians in Gaza from December 27th, 2008 to January 18th, 2009—a massacre primarily executed by, again, Elbit Hermes drones (UAVs) firing Spike MR missiles. Targets included Gaza Technical College (Gaza City), the Samur family metal shop (Jabaliya), the Mashawari family home (Gaza City), and the UNRWA Asma Elementary School (Gaza City). The drone-launched missiles achieved their operators’ objectives with pinpoint accuracy and lethal destruction. Their targets were scores of children, as well as integral infrastructure and educational and aid facilities.
The casualties were no accident. Palestinian life is simply discounted as part of the larger settler-colonial project, which operates according to what is ultimately a genocidal intent: to claim the land and remove its inhabitants. It is the same unsubtle and vulgar logic behind the Nakba of 1948, and behind generations of oppression, dispensing with human life as if it were waste.
Among all manner of deadly munitions, Elbit also makes “Iron Sting,” a 120mm laser and GPS-guided mortar munition, Legion-X AI software, and Thor and Magni-X UAV drones, all of which are in the IDF’s current arms cache, part of a system that “enhances lethality” and “increases mobility, while minimizing human engagement.” Which is to say that, of course, “human engagement” and consequent risk is minimized for Israeli forces—Elbit’s products empower them to murder Palestinians from afar, without the slightest danger of harm to the operators.
The danger of drones and loitering surveillance and the legitimacy of drone warfare is one of the most trenchant topics in modern conflict. It is crucial to underscore the human cost of the increased use of drones during throughout this genocide; the IDF regime inflicts suffering and slaughter against Palestine and its people by push-button predation, minimizing if not entirely absolving its users’ culpability.
On February 21st, 2024, Elbit unveiled the newest Hermes 650 Spark, an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS). As their product copy flaunts:
“The comprehensive design considerations focus on minimizing the Life Cycle Cost (LCC), ensuring cost-effective mission performance. The UAS upholds the highest standards of safety, survivability, and immunity, complemented by modern, autonomous, and predictive maintenance practices, ultimately contributing to a low Life Cycle Cost.”
This terminology strikes a discordant note. The “life cycle cost” of military hardware is juxtaposed with the destruction of an entire network of hospitals, universities, daycares, mosques, churches, libraries, grocers, fuel and water reserves, agricultural endeavors, community centers, archives, museums, global NGO bases, playspaces, gardens, seafronts, and countless lives. On April 8th, 2024, Elbit Systems released their 2023 summary report, titled “Increasing Profits, R&D Blowout.” A few selections that are worth noting:
“Summarizing the events of 2023 proves to be a challenging endeavour, given the year’s tumultuous nature marked by wars, both local and global military conflicts, and constant economic, political, and security fluctuations. […] At the beginning of the conference, Bezalel Machlis, CEO of Elbit Systems, expressed sincere condolences to the families of employees who had served in the reserves and tragically lost their lives in the Gaza conflict. […] ‘The results are clear,’ Kagan highlighted. ‘Our backlog has escalated to $17.8 billion, marking a significant rise of $2.7 billion from the last year, including an impressive increase of $1.1 billion in this very quarter alone, the fourth quarter.’”
We’re now well into the second quarter of 2024. This war, which comprises every manner of -cide, wears on, and the Department of Defense prepares to disburse its $849.8 billion Fiscal Year 2025 Budget. The IDF’s armory for annihilation is, of course, slated to expand in concert; despite Biden’s public posturing about a “pause” in weapons transfers, ostensibly to discourage a full-scale Rafah invasion, in truth, billions in weaponry continue to flow to Israeli forces.
We hold our breaths as footage of the unfolding ground invasion of Rafah circulates. IDF Merkava tanks roll in, outfitted with Elbit’s “Iron Vision” helmets and the TORCH C4i system (“combat proven,” as it is advertised.) The besieged crossing, where the people fleeing the attacks in the north have concentrated, is poised to become the site of the next massacre—the next swath of mass graves.
These billions of dollars of technologies and tactics used to suppress, humiliate, and mutilate Palestinians and their land are the very same mechanisms in use across the hundreds of miles of O’odham land bifurcated by the U.S./Mexico border. The Elbit TORCH-X Ground Detection System, for instance, that is used to monitor the tunnels beneath Gaza employs technology very similar to the sensor and surveillance monitoring regimes that are in use across the expanses of the border, with its hideous steel-bollard border fencing that cuts through the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe National Monument, and expanses of sensitive desert habitat—all of it Indigenous Tohono O’odham land. These linkages have been noted before. Jimmy Johnson, writing for the anti-imperialist nonprofit North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), referred to the militarized nexus in 2012 as the Palestine-Mexico border:
“Haifa-based Elbit Systems is a prime example of where these systems intersect. Elbit is one of two main providers of the electronic detection systems along Israel’s wall of separation throughout the West Bank, [and] Elbit’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are extensively used by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including during Operation Cast Lead. The same Hermes 450 UAV model deployed against Palestinians was the first UAV to patrol the Mexico-U.S. border in 2004.”
Johnson goes on to note multiple other connections: both major U.S. defense corporations and Israeli contractors like Magna BSP and NICE Systems supply both border regimes, and each country’s military-industrial complex feeds off of and learns from the other. Most recently, XTEND drone systems are slated to become major components in both the Israeli military and U.S. Department of Defense’s armories. The links in weapons and tactical exchange extend to policing: U.S. police are often sent to Israel to learn crowd control and protest suppression tactics from Israeli trainers, who have honed their skills repressing Palestinian dissent. Projects such as DIMSE, the Database of Israeli Military and Security Export, and Workers in Palestine’s “Who Arms Israel?” track the extreme proliferation of the technologies of subjugation.
There are contextual dissimilarities, of course; the southwest is not being carpet bombed, for one. But there is a quietly lethal assault ongoing nevertheless. The proliferation of inhumane policies, enforced by intrusive, violent surveillance technologies, has increasingly rendered life unlivable for many among Indigenous communities, for migrants and asylum seekers (undocumented or otherwise), and for other vulnerable and embattled groups across this territory. The surveillance dragnet and harsh repression have laid ruin to the physical, psychological, and spiritual connectivity of human and natural linkages across this sacred desert. This is the heart of the border-military-industrial complex, just as it has been since the nation’s inception: stealing and ravaging Indigenous life in the name of profit.
By November 22nd, 2023, the death toll of the attack on Gaza had already exceeded that of the Nakba in 1948. Now, as of May 13, 2024, over 2% of Gaza’s total child population—over 14,000 children—have been slaughtered by Zionist settler colonial forces. Analyst Mouin Rabbani asserts in the journal Security in Context:
“Israel [is] doing everything possible to ensure that ‘voluntary’ ethnic self-cleansing remains the only remaining option for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Completing the work of the most intensive bombing campaign in history, military bulldozers and demolition crews have reduced large swathes of the territory entirely to rubble. Civilian infrastructure has been systematically targeted, with the health and education sectors effectively obliterated. Medieval siege tactics have produced the highest proportion of households in hunger crisis ever recorded globally, deprived more than two million civilians of access to potable water, and ended the supply of medication to the chronically ill.”
To make this comparison is not to conflate two occupied lands, or one Indigenous peoples’ plight with the other: they are of course singular in their histories. It is instead the logic of Western imperialism and its client states that creates the common ground. Naming the stakeholders—the profiteers—precipitating and facilitating this extermination moves us closer towards occupation’s cessation.
For all of the border walls and fortresses these multinational corporations conceive, develop, and monstrously test on the most vulnerable—all of the peoples systemically, generationally oppressed by their colonizers, those whose lands are perennially attacked and stolen by powerful entities who claim to pursue only “defense” and “safety”—we are obligated to name and document them, and to continue to resist them, by all means at our disposal. We must recognize our complicity, and we must commit to ending atrocity: to tearing down every last wall. The technologies of division and segregation are made possible by our tax dollars, and capital depends on our apathy and oversight and distraction to continue reproducing spatial expressions of settler violence.
As Lena Khalaf Tuffaha offers in “Variations on a Last Chance” (2024):
“The fence does not hold. The wire sheds its barbs, softens to silk thread. The snipers run out of bullets. The desert, as it always has, of its volition, blooms. The snipers are distracted, sexting their girlfriends. The snipers’ eyes are blinded by smoke from our burning tires. The snipers wonder if they will ever see the end of us. The fence does not hold. The snipers take a lunch break. The bullets melt in their chambers. The bullets disintegrate when they reach the word P R E S S on Yasser’s vest. The news finally breaks the stillness around us. The bullets will themselves away from the boy’s skull. The boy’s sandals sprout wings and he hovers above the bullets’ path. The snipers lose interest in shooting at medics evacuating the wounded. The snipers make eye contact with one of us and see. There are enough saline bags at the hospital. The snipers shoot and miss and miss. We outrun the snipers. We bury the dead at the fence, let their roots reach the other side of home.”
In the O’odham language, there is no word for wall. While it’s not my own tongue, I feel an obligation to repeat this at every turn. I think of the harms inflicted by every earthmover I see gnawing the open-pit mines along Interstate 10, every new contract announced between the Department of Defense and my alma mater, The University of Arizona. I see the latest fortifications of the wall at the Rafah crossing, which evokes the barriers of steel and concertina wire in Nogales.
To be against the wall is to open our minds to being against all borders, both the external walls that mar the landscape and the internalized barriers within our minds. The O’odham language includes the word “himdag,” roughly meaning “cultural values.” Our own values must include a hope for a free Palestine and the desire to end the excluding borders in the West.
Parsing the intentionally murky and grossly entangled web of international arms manufacturing and distribution is a massive undertaking. But in contesting it, we all have a role to play. It has become clear that no politician, no pact, no government, treaty, code, United Nations resolution, international legal framework, nor performative pause will free us. We must demand, as students at universities across the country are doing now, that the unrestricted flows of munitions stop, that borders are abolished. A million new futures are springing forth—it is incumbent upon us to join together, amplify, and co-create them.♦
Cover Image: Daisy Zavala Magaña/ Nogales International.
