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In early July 2014, Israel launched its third and most aggressive aerial and ground offensive against Gaza in six and a half years. Israel sealed Gaza’s borders, concentrated its 1.8 million Palestinians into the center, thereby not giving them the option of becoming war refugees, and pounded it with advanced weapons technologies for fifty-one consecutive days. The carnage was devastating and included the killing of 2,200 Palestinians, more than 500 of them children. Israel partially or completely destroyed eighteen thousand homes and displaced nearly 30 percent of the population at the height of the offensive. The singular Middle East nuclear power targeted Gaza’s sole power plant, causing fifteen thousand tons of solid waste to run into the streets. By the operation’s end, 373,000 children were left in need of psycho-social treatment.1 Israel and the United States claimed this violence was legitimate self-defense and any casualties were to be blamed on Hamas.2
On August 9, 2014, nearly three weeks into the onslaught of Gaza, Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old Black teenager, six times above the waist (including twice in the head) in Ferguson, Missouri. Wilson then left Brown’s bleeding body out in the summer heat for four hours.3 Ferguson’s police department refused to release the name of the officer for six days, citing concerns for his safety. Upon announcing his name, the police chief also publicly released footage of Brown shoplifting, suggesting a relationship between the teenager’s petty theft and his killing.4 Brown’s killing was the latest in a series of killings of Black boys, men, women, and girls by agents of the state or vigilantes with near impunity that had gained acute attention since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and prompted a national convergence in Ferguson.5
Police forces from Ferguson and dozens of surrounding cities met protesters with excessive force, framing the protests as a threat to property and community safety and further obscuring the crisis of racialized state violence. Within a week of Brown’s killing, Missouri governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and set a midnight curfew.6 Ferguson was placed under occupation and featured military-style weapons used against unarmed protestors. Equipment included body armor, camouflage uniforms, 5.56...