I first saw this sometime in 2002 or 2003 or so, during the runup to the War on Iraq. These days it’s strangely relevant again.
How Israel is like South Africa
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
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.
Comment of the Day
Carloshasanaxe on the news that Spider Robinson had sold three sequels to his “collaboration” with Robert Heinlein:
And so the Campbellian era of science fiction came to a close, wanked to death by a damn hippie.
J. G. Ballard has died
This is how the BBC broke the news: “the author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness“. No mention whatsoever in the rest of the article that he was actually a science fiction writer and made his reputation doing exactly that. The obituary is the same, calling him “surrealistic” and as “fusing external landscapes of futuristic visions with the internal workings of his characters’ minds”. Hell, whoever wrote it didn’t even know what his first novel was: the article thinks it’s The Drowned World (1962) while it’s in fact The Wind from Nowhere (1961).
It’s the sort of lazy biography you see a lot with science fiction writers who broke out of the ghetto, where their earlier works are de-emphasised, seen as unimportant youthful mistakes or at best stepping stones to their real work. We’ve seen it with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson as well.
It annoys the fuck out of me, not so much out of some tribal loyalty to science fiction, but because you just cannot judge his later, more “mainstream” novels without knowing his earlier work. There’s a logical progression in his work going all the way back to his earliest short stories to his last novel. Ballard always was a perfect modernist “post-modernist” writer, growing up in the legacy of twentieth century modernism and dissatisfied with what it had brought, reveling in the onset of entropy bringing down its works. Whether it’s the lush tropical primeval jungle invading luxuery hotels in The Drowned Word or the anarchy depicted in High-Rise taking that symbol of post-war modernist architecture, the tower block, the images remain the same: stark, concrete forms smothered in chaotic but natural shapes. Take his more mainstream work out of this context and it loses its value.
UPDATE: David Pringle’s obituary in the Guardian is quite good, explaining why his science fiction is important as well as his evolution as a writer movign away from it. Pringle’s prediction that Empire of the Sun “is likely to be the book upon which much of his reputation will rest” is mildly depressing, especially since much of the attention paid to it stems from the fact it was made into a Spielberg movie. It’s nowhere near Ballard’s best work, though it does provide some insight in where he found certain of the images that crop up in his other work. Personally I find everything after his seventies work to be of less value.