Israel/Palestine

Your Happening World (11)

class war, Israel/Palestine, Your Happening World
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What’s new for Wednesday:

MLK as plaster saint

Activism, history, Israel/Palestine
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Nicky Kristol has some decent advice for the Palestinians:

“On Martin Luther King Day, I wish more Palestinians would absorb the lessons of King and Gandhi and use non-violent but confrontational approaches in challenging settlements, etc. Non-violence is not only morally superior to terrorism, it’s also more effective in challenging a democracy.”

I’m not sure which is worse, Kristol’s cluelessness on how MLK’s activism was recieved back in the day (not well) or his cluelessness about the Palestinian struggle (non-violence has been tried).

But don’t be fooled in thinking this cluelessness is anything but deliberate. MLK, like Gandhi before him, has long since been turned into a plaster saint, the perfect liberal idea of what a civil rights activist or freedom fighter has to be like, with all the more …controversial… parts filed off. It’s an old tactic, also used by people like Christopher Hitches to explain why they did support the Vietcong in their struggle against an US occupation, but not the Iraqi resistance. completely ahistorical of course, and the same people glorifying MLK today would’ve been the first to denounce him had they been there at the time, but in a media climate in which ignorance is king, it’s a tactic that works well. Just look at some of the comments at the post linked above.

Zionists crying wolf too often

Israel lobby, Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Via Aaronovitch Watch (Incorporating “World of Decency”) comes Tony Greenstein’s account of the debate on anti-semitism between Aaronovitch (Zionist / warmonger) and Gilad Atzmon (jazz musician / somebody who if he isn’t anti-semitic, doesn’t do much to deny the charge). Aaronovitch himself was furious that in the choice between two evils, the audience took the side of the jazz musician, but as Greenstein says “the wars and blockades that Aaronovitch has supported in different parts of the world have killed upwards of 2 million people. Atzmon’s anti-Semitism has killed no one because, as far as I’m aware, death by boredom cannot be entered as a cause of death on a death certificate“.

His main point is made slightly later:

When you attack Palestinians and anti-Zionists, not least Jewish anti-Zionists, as being anti-Semitic, then what you do is let the real anti-Semites like Gilad Atzmon off the hook. When you deliberately confuse and conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism it is not the anti-Zionists you hurt but the anti-Semites you help. The only reason Gilad Atzmon can pass himself off as an anti-Zionist, when he is politically at one with Zionism’s founding creed, that diaspora Jewry is a hideous thing and that being Jewish and Zionist is one and the same thing, is because anti-Zionists and anti-Semites are tarred by the Zionists with the same brush of anti-Semitism.

If you cry ‘wolf’ for long enough, don’t be surprised if people no longer believe or listen to you when the wolf makes an appearance. And that is the real contribution of David Aaronovitch and Zionism to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism.

I’m not sure how real this danger is; there have been various studies showing anti-semitism is on the rise in Europe (examples left as exercise for your googling skills) but many of those suffer from the same problem as Greenstein mentions, that they confuse criticism of Israel, anti-zionism and anti-semitism. Anecdotally there have been incidents here in the Netherlands where hotheaded demonstrators against Israel’s War on Gaza have shouted anti-semitic slogans, which have then been used to discredit legitamite attacks on Israel. It does make sense to assume that in a climate where anti-semitism as a charge has been devalued to the point that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic by default, people will wory less about it as they see how ridiculous most charges are. It even makes sense that this will lead to more real anti-semitism.

From the point of view of the Israel boosters this may not even be so bad, as 1) it delegitamises genuine criticism and 2) it adds credibility to the idea that Israel is the sole defence Jews have against persecution and that therefore they should support it unconditionally. Which doesn’t mean this was a conscious goal of those that have made those accusations the most of course, just that it’s a not entirely unwanted side effect.

How Israel is like South Africa

Israel lobby, Israel/Palestine
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Supported by the western powers, treated with kid gloves in the media, but worried about grassroots boycotts:

Isolating South Africa through sanctions and boycotts was certainly not the choice of Mrs Thatcher or Mr Reagan, but their governments were eventually forced to take action by the outrage of their own electorates at the suffering apartheid inflicted. The international anti-apartheid movement began at the grassroots among religious, community and labour groups, but it grew sufficiently powerful to force governments to distance themselves from a regime that they had viewed sympathetically. And that is a lesson that terrifies Israel’s leaders.

Israeli government officials have spoken openly since the Gaza conflict of their growing sense of isolation. Despite their most strenuous PR efforts, the 1,417 Palestinian deaths they caused in Gaza (compared with 13 Israelis, four by “friendly fire”) made it hard to sell the idea that Israel was the victim in the conflict. Israel’s narrative did not fit the images of the Gaza clash. It’s hard to convince people that the guys with the F-16s and Apache helicopters and the tanks are little David, while those facing them with side-arms, mortars and a handful of improvised unguided missiles are actually Goliath.

Coddled in their own narrative in which they are the eternal victims, Israelis are not accustomed to finding themselves the focus of international moral opprobrium. And they see in it a mortal threat.

That’s of course the main difference between South Africa and Israel. Both are racist settler states which drove the indigenious population off the best land in the country and locked them up in Bantustans, but South Africa didn’t have the Holocaust as a justification. The founding myth of Israel is that it was created as a shelter for the people who through the centuries had always been the victims, created from land liberated by them from those who would want to repeat the Holocaust. With the establishment of Israels, Jews worldwide would finally have a safe haven and therefore they need to defend it no matter what its crimes. At the same time, anybody who criticises Israel obviously wants to destroy this safe haven and is therefore evil.

But World War II ended almost 64 years ago, the generations that survived the Holocaust is slowly dying and even their children are getting old. Israel’s existence hasn’t been under threat for decades, its military is the most capable in the region and it’s a nuclear power. the whole victim card just doesn’t work well anymore, either with western Jews themselves or with non-Jews.

The recent Gaza donor conference at Sharm el Sheikh was a familiar exercise of nations pledging large amounts of money while respecting taboos imposed by Israel that effectively block reconstruction. That was in marked contrast to the aid convoy led by the maverick British MP George Galloway that arrived in Gaza two weeks ago, comprising some 100 trucks and ambulances loaded with medical and humanitarian supplies funded and collected at grassroots level in churches, mosques, trade union branches and community groups all over Britain.

Sure, the amount of aid delivered was small potatoes relative to the need, but the gesture showed that hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons no longer accept their government’s equivocation on the fate of the Palestinians. That is exactly how the international anti-apartheid movement was born, back when the governments of the US and Britain were happy to concur with Pretoria that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.

Back when I started blogging, in 2002, online opinion even in leftist blogs was much more in line with official reality, in which both Israel and the Palestinians were to blame for the ongoing conflict but the Palestinians with their terror much more so and any attention to the root causes of the conflict characterised as anti-semitism and beyond the pale. Over the years this has slowly changed, especially after the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza this year, but also through the way the Palestinian population was treated for daring to elect Hamas. Alternative news sources, especially online, have helped a lot in exposing the official reality for the sham it is.

Grassroots initiatives like the British aid convoy to Gaza cannot stop Israeli Apartheid, but they are a hopeful sign that it will be increasingly difficult to maintain.

Better not talk about racism at an UN conference on racism

Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Diplomats walk out as president of Iran calls Israel a racist state:

Diplomats have walked out of a speech by the Iranian president at a UN anti-racism conference after he described Israel as a “racist government”.

Two protesters, wearing coloured wigs, disrupted the beginning of the speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – followed by the Western walkout.

Others enthusiastically clapped as Mr Ahmadinejad continued his address.

France said it was a “hate speech”. A number of other Western countries have boycotted the conference altogether.

The walkout is a public relations disaster for the United Nations, which had hoped the conference would be a shining example of what the UN is supposed to do best – uniting to combat injustice in the world, says the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva.

[…]

Mr Ahmadinejad, the only major leader to attend the conference, said Jewish migrants from Europe and the United States had been sent to the Middle East after World War II “in order to establish a racist government in the occupied Palestine”.

He continued, through an interpreter: “And in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine.”

This walkout by western diplomats is embarassing at best, political correctness trumping truth as what’s being sold as a principled action is the equivalent of a child sticking their fingers in their ears and going “la la la can’t hear you”. What’s more, this is the second conference on racism in which the US and EU are throwing their weight around to defend Israel, the first being the conference in Durban back in 2001, where too much attention was paid to Israel as well. Several western countries, including my own, actually stayed away entirely this time because it “echoed the spirit of Durban” too much. It’s all incredibly cringeworthy, as it shows up how far our governments are willing to go to deny the truth about Israel.