Deeds not Words

As the poster for 1982’s action epic Megaforce had it. A motto a certain breed of liberal Biden defender and Democrats stan should adopt, as even now they keep putting more value on what’s being said than what’s being done. Throughout the genocide in Gaza I ran into people who took what Biden was saying at face value while refusing to take his actions into account. If Biden said he was working on a peace plan that must be true and that means you can ignore him sending more bombs and weapons to Israel and still vote for Harris. The mantra for anybody who argued against this was that “Trump would be worse” while Gaza was flattened and tens of thousands were murdered. A complete refusal to accept what a Democratic president was perpetrating in reality justified with a hypothetical. Instead of putting pressure on the Democrats to stop the genocide, this type of liberal rather spent their time scolding strangers online for not believing enough in what’s in Biden’s heart.

What frustrated me in this is not even that these people were comfortable having the genocide in Gaza as the price to pay for their own safety, but their refusal to admit that this was what they were doing. Plenty of Democratic voters were both revulsed by their party’s ongoing support for genocide yet still felt compelled to vote for them considering what Trump had in store for America. So many people I talked to in the run up to the election felt helpless and frustrated because of this. But not these people. Even as Trump got Netanyahu to (temporarily) end the genocide, they still put more stock in what he’s saying than in what he’s doing, as with his recent remarks on wanting to remove all Palestinians from Gaza.

This for them is supposed to prove once and for all that Trump is worse than Biden, that they were right to not protest and that those who did were handing Trump the election. Unfortunately, even on their own terms this does not hold water, because Biden too talked about evacuating Gaza:

The plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians—while insisting that it’s a temporary measure for their own good—is an eerie echo of former President Joe Biden’s approach to the region. In the first few days of the war, the Biden administration tried to push Egypt to accept a mass exodus of Palestinians. Bringing up that possibility again, now that the bombs have stopped dropping, is seen by both Arab and Israeli figures as an attempt to restart the war.

Yes, in Biden’s case this was supposed to be temporary and for humanitarian reasons, but that’s the case for Trump too. Trump talked about how Gaza is “literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there” as his justification and Biden’s argument was little different. It makes some sense to evacuate and individual Palestinian families have chosen exile over remaining in a war zone, but does anybody really expected Israel to allow them to return once they left? Even if done for different motives, the end result in both cases would be the same, an emptied Gaza with its population in permanent exile as Israel would never let them return. After all, they haven’t allowed the 1948 refugees to return either.

The World’s Most Moral Army ™

As Yuval Abraham reveals in an article for 972+ Magazine, it turns out Israel deliberately targets ‘militants’ when they’re at home with their family:

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

Just deliberately murdering entire families because it’s easier:

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Oh and this is not an accident, this was explicitly authorised:

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

But it’s blood libel to suggest Israel is committing genocide.

“Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.”

We’re always told that we should be careful to distinguish between Israel and “the Jews” and rightly so, that any particular Jewish person or group of Jews cannot be held accountable for the actions of Israel just vbecause they are Jewish. That even as genocide is waged in the name of the Jewish State, we should still make that distinction no matter how much Israel and its propagandists want to erase it, to pretend that Israel is the end and be all of Jewish existence, that all Jews worldwide support it, that opposing it is alwayys antisemitic.

This is good and moral and just to strive to. Plenty of Jewish people and organisations have been outraged and protesting the genocide in Gaza, while plenty of non-Jewish Zionists have enthusiastically supported it. Our governments are not delivering arms and support for the genocide because they’re run by a secret Jewish cabal, they do that for their own purposes. Indulging in antisemitic nonsense about “the Jews” is just letting them off the hook, no different from thinking all Muslims are terrorists.

For Palestinians –the actual victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide– though the story is different. They have to live with the reality of what is genuinely a Jewish supremacist state, no different from how Black south Africans had to live with the reality of the Apartheid white supremacist state. The violence against them is Jewish violence and yet they are asked to deny this, as Mohammed El-Kurd talks about in this Mondoweiss article from September 2023:

This was no secret. We lived under the rule of the self-proclaimed “Jewish State.” Israeli politicians have exhausted this line, and their international peers nodded along. The army declared itself a Jewish army and marched under what it has called a Jewish flag. Jerusalem city councilmen boasted “tak[ing] house after house” because “the bible says that this country belongs to the Jewish people,” and Knesset members sang similar tunes. These legislators weren’t fringe or far-right: the Israeli nation-state law explicitly enshrines “Jewish settlement” as a “national value … to encourage and promote.”

Still, though this was no secret, we were instructed to treat it as such, sometimes by our parents, sometimes by well-meaning solidarity activists. We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It didn’t matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial. What mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all.

For the sake of western optics, Palestinians are supposed to deny the reality of their oppressors. Because of the inherent antisemitist history of Europe and America, abny allusion as to why these oppressors feel entitled to their land is verboten and Mohammed El-Kurd is tired of it:

Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives–by force—in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree.” Many others reside—by force—in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in memorizing or apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, or in giving semantics more heft than they warrant, chiefly when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarize. I’m tired of the impulse to preemptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty, and particularly tired of the assumption that I’m inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretense that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless. Most of all, I’m tired of the false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.

I think he’s right to be tired. It’s impossible to dismantle the Israeli system of Apartheid if we dcontinue to close our eyes to the reality of it, that it is Jewish supremacist, that it justifies its existence through Jewish history. Again, that does not mean that Jews should be blamed for this just because they’re Jewish, but that we should challenge the idea that being Jewish means being in support of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

Zionism’s problem with antisemitism

So BBC Radio Four tweeted about Michael Rosen’s latest Word of Mouth programme, which prompted one Simon Myerson QC to complain about this:

Very sorry to hear Rosen being given a space. His support of the WRP and tolerance for the behaviour of the far left towards Jews who don't think like him (i.e. 99%) should place him outside these conversations.

Which in itself was bad enough because this dude took some petty political difference to a completely unrelated topic, but hey. Somebody else responded to him demolishing his argument:

1. Michael Rosen has never supported the WRP. 2 He has presented Word of Mouth for 20 years. 3 He has never used the programme as a “platform”. 4 He often celebrates Yiddish on the prog 5 He has helped 2000 children write poems for #HMD2019 in Cambridge tomorrow

To which he responded:

Interesting equation.
Alas it ignores - & thus approves - his v limited definition of Jew hatred. Educating children via such poor methods lets them down.
Rosen celebrates shtetl Judaism. Which was immolated, because Jews were powerless.
Your points 2-5 are utterly irrelevant.

Which struck me as rather antisemitic in its undertones. Tweeting on Holocaust Memorial Day that “shtetl Judaism” was immolated “because Jews were powerless” is pure victim blaming, of a sort you sometimes seem from Zionists, if not often this openly. Zionism is of course just another variant of 19th century nationalism, the idea that you need to have your own country to be a true nation or people. And if there were other peoples already living in your chosen land, that was of no importance. As such Zionism is really no different from e.g. Serbian or Polish nationalism bound in ethnicity and loath to recognise the rights of other peoples on the same lands.

At the same time Zionism was always opposed to those Jews who’d either choose to assimilate or to live their lives according to their own traditions, without wanting or needing a ‘return’ to Israel. You see that contempt here in Myserson’s dismissal of “shtetl Judaism”. It didn’t survive, it couldn’t defend itself against the Nazis, so it’s worthless, an attitude consciously or unconsciously shared by many Zionists, seeing a strong Israeli state as a shield against persecution. Israel and Israel only can save Jews from persuction, so any other way of Jewish life is suspect and needs to be torn down to save its people from itself. And of course the worst sort of Jewish people doing it wrong are the poor peasants of Eastern Europe, backward and humble and powerless in the face of the Nazis, so there’s a particular hatred among some Zionists for anything that reminds them of that.

Myerson taps into all that, going from trying to dob in Rosen for some imagined crime against Jews to dismissing entire Jewish populations as wrong in the space of two tweets. Interesting to see how quickly somebody like him dives head first into antisemitic ideas, completely unprompted. On Holocaust Memorial Day. While lecturing others about antisemitism.

Cartoonists urge Angoulême to drop Sodastream

Dozens of well known cartoonists, including Joe Sacco, Tardi and Baru have signed an open lettre urging the Angoulême Comics Festival to drop Sodastream as a sponsor:

We, cartoonists, illustrators and authors from all countries, are surprised, disappointed and angry to find out that SodaStream is an official sponsor of the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

As you must know, SodaStream is the target of an international boycott call for its contribution to the colonization of Palestinian land, due to its factory in the illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, its exploitation of Palestinian workers, and its theft of Palestinian resources, in violation of international law and contravening international principles of human rights.

Angoulême has had an important role in the appreciation of comics as an art form for over 40 years. It would be sad if SodaStream were able to use this event to whitewash their crimes.

We ask you to cut all ties between the Festival and this shameful company.

Sincerely,

This fight against Sodastream, for having established a plant in a Israeli settlement on stolen Palestian land in the West Bank, a plant Sodastream itself has admitted was a mistake, is just one small battle in the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) struggle against the Israeli Apartheid State. It’s similar in fact to that long struggle against South African Apartheid in the seventies and eighties and hopefully it can lead to similar results. Certainly the Israeli government fears the movement:

The movement’s economic impact is also becoming evident. The recent decision by the $200 billion Dutch pension fund PGGM to divest from the five largest Israeli banks because of their involvement in occupied Palestinian territory has sent shock waves through the Israeli establishment.

To underscore the “existential” danger that B.D.S. poses, Israel and its lobby groups often invoke the smear of anti-Semitism, despite the unequivocal, consistent position of the movement against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This unfounded allegation is intended to intimidate into silence those who criticize Israel and to conflate such criticism with anti-Jewish racism.

Getting Angoulême to drop Sodastream sponsorship, though welcome, is of course not going to change Israeli policies but seeing conservative pension funds start to drop Israeli investments, as much out of conviction as for legal concerns, that’s a game changer.