“We Bring With Us European Civilization”: Race, National Oppression and the Construction of a Settler-Colonial Myth

In the spring semester of 1969, my ninth-grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, tasked me with leading the “Arab” side of a debating team on what was then referenced as the “Arab/Israeli crisis.” Two years following the disastrous “preventive” war launched by Israel against Egypt, Jordan and…