I delivered the following comments (originally published at MondoWeiss) at Israeli Apartheid Week events at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Oxford University during the week of February 22, 2016. I remember the intensity of the audience at SOAS. I’d often heard that Zionism in the USA is a uniquely fervid phenomenon, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve had police turn up at my public events in two countries: Canada and the UK. In both cases, it was because of rambunctious pro-Israel partisans. At SOAS, a man kept yelling into the back of my head as my hosts escorted me out of the building. We made it to the sidewalk to find a bunch of constables trying to restore order. Some in the audience wanted to argue with them. The Arabs hightailed it out of there.
This evening I’m going to talk about the challenges of talking about Zionism. I begin with a question I often hear in some variation when people discuss Jews and Palestinians: how do we communicate with folks who have deeply emotional responses to criticism of Israel?
The question is difficult because to even attempt an answer is to validate lethargic impulses. (Note: neither the questioner nor the question is necessarily lethargic; rather, lethargy necessarily exists in any impulse for simple answers to ambiguous questions.)
Here’s how it works: in conversations about Palestine, somebody weaned on the mythologies of Israel as a site of cultural redemption struggles to accept or assimilate the rendition of Israel as a mere nation-state engaged in the violations of international law that attend any colonial or imperial power. This reluctance assumes multiple forms:
“But Israel…”
“What about the…?”
“My entire life I was taught…”
“How can we…?”
These preambles lead to the same predicates: the struggle with an existential crisis of both form and content. The questioner is yet unable to match the idea of Jewish salvation with the reality of Israel. The reality of Israel disrupts the succor of modernity, putting the vileness of colonization into deep conflict with the comfort of redemption.
The discomfort thus produced is valuable. Myth and matter need to conflict if perplexed inheritors of Zionism are to be redeemed of its violence.
The questioner intervenes not to make sense of the world but to be assured that the world can still make sense. Israel’s inherent goodness and indispensability are critical to his political cosmology. To question these narratives is to unsettle a range of commonplaces. The questioner’s intensity pivots on a vital subtext: can I exist in this world?
This kind of conversation occurs in personal and public settings. I’ve spent lots of time assuring mortified interlocutors that I have no interest in expunging them from the earth, that in fact I’m rather partial to the idea of sharing a nation with them. They don’t generally find it convincing. The reticence is perfectly sensible. They can take a political enemy at his word or fall back on years of indoctrination assuring them that, given half the chance, Arabs will toss Jews into the sea and ululate while they drown.
Sometimes the inquiries are tenderly rendered, at other times hostile. They exhibit different gradations of empathy and comprehension, but they ultimately demand the same outcome: an assurance that the Jewish people will survive. Survival in this instance is indivisible from Israel’s billion-dollar war machinery.
But it’s not the native’s duty to ensure the settler’s comfort. It’s a rather ambitious demand, anyway. I vigorously support Jewish survival and success, but I don’t have the power to implement my political desires. Like anybody else, I can only attempt to enact conditions that might make the world more hospitable for all its inhabitants. It requires huge groups of people working together to effect that desire across or within societies. Shocking Zionists out of their ethnonationalist stupor is one way to help.
Doing so isn’t simply a matter of readjusting the colonizer’s attitude. There’s also the pressing need to assure the survival of the Palestinians, who, as we’re so often compelled to forget, suffer the pain of colonization, sustain genocidal threats by mainstream Israeli politicians, remain starved and entrapped in the Gaza Strip, and exist as hobgoblins in Israel’s peculiar insecurities. To make Palestinians human, composed of brain, epidermis, muscle, and bone, and given to silliness, compassion, beauty, contradiction, brilliance, ambivalence, strength, and insecurity, is to simultaneously undermine the most basic aspiration of the Zionist project, the creation of a state defined by its monopoly of an ethno-religious identity accessible through accidents of biology.
It is critical to remember amid the hand-wringing about Arabs destroying Israel and displacing its inhabitants that Israel has already destroyed Palestine and displaced the Arabs. Israel’s existential fears project its actual history. The antidote is not yet another displacement, but neither can we move past the sorrow of the dispossessed. Such propositions are always more pragmatic from the point of view of the settler.
The settler’s pragmatism has a nagging ability to make the native disappear. And though I can be patient with sincere inquests about the preservation of Jewish peoplehood, even if the point is actually to preserve Zionism, I am less sanguine about many of the tactics that focalize Jews and Israelis to the detriment of others invested in Palestine—especially those who have right to call themselves Indigenous. Various discourses in defense of Israel—almost uniformly defending the idea of Israel—purport to complicate convention but produce a severely conventional outcome: the reduction of Israel-Palestine to a fundamental question of Jewishness.
Consider the primary forms of remonstration anybody speaking in support of Palestine encounters: accusations of anti-Semitism; demands to aver Israel’s right to exist or to disavow Israel’s destruction; the association of Palestinians with Hitler; prognostications of a second Holocaust; fear of binationalism (that is, actual democracy); disgust at an atavistic Arab and Muslim desire to harm Jews.
While these approaches seem concerned with Israel’s survival, they actually serve to expedite Palestine’s disappearance. The very notion of an Israel that survives the pressure of decolonization reinforces the disintegration of Palestine, both as a geography and a site of emotional or intellectual engagement. While Zionists fret about Israel’s right to exist, Palestinians endure the violence of nonexistence.
It isn’t just a lack of land that circumscribes the Palestinian’s existence. Identifying with Palestine can produce a constant state of concealment, a clandestine passage into the deterritorialized presence of a dangerous identity.
Where, then, do Palestinians exist? In worldly geographies. In disreputable alliance with other wretched denizens of premodernity. In visions of return and restitution. In the sustenance of olives and legumes. In village ruins dotting the Holy Land. In spaces the colonizer can never enter.
In the end, though, and against great odds, we merely exist. As a result, we haunt the imagination of our oppressor. We have made good use of our existence, for we can be found wherever racism, colonization, and plutocracy are challenged. We must, anyway, always attempt to find these places.
In turn, we win no major awards unless we facilitate our own dispossession. We are absent from the ranks of regular commenters for corporate publications. Our politics must die for our livelihoods to survive. We constantly regroup after experiences of persnickety exclusion. Returning home is a painful adventure. Many of us aren’t allowed to try, disapproved of even having the opportunity to be harassed by teenage occupation soldiers.
Yet a simple fact remains. Israel occupies a limited geography, but Palestine exists everywhere. Palestine’s existence as a universal aspiration to freedom inspires a great deal of Zionist disquiet.
Colonial projects simultaneously generate overconfidence and insecurity. The perturbed Zionist needs reassurance that he will survive because the Palestinian has retained claim to Palestine, the Zionist’s salvation. The greatest mistake of Zionism was its belief that it could produce a society unaffected by the one it endeavored to replace.
Israel has the advantage of international recognition, a military, trade agreements, nuclear weapons, diplomatic relations, and UN membership, which provide geopolitical legitimacy. But it will always be burdened by its failure to expunge Palestinians from history. That burden will ultimately overwhelm it. I suspect that Zionists afflicted by existential anxiety know this and in turn project onto Palestinians the failure of Zionism to fulfill its grandiose promises.
A hard truth exists, however, and we needn’t be shy to speak it: the existential frailty of those weaned on Zionism isn’t a valid reason to stop condemning Israel. It’s a nation-state, not an abstraction.
Consider: since the start of the second intifada in 2000, Israel has killed 1,977 children. Nearly 500 of those children were eight or younger. Over 200 children currently suffer Israeli military detention. At certain points in the past ten years, the number has exceeded 300. From April 2004 to February 2013, twenty Palestinian children were forced into service as human shields. Various human rights groups documented the practice during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 51-day assault on the Gaza Strip. Since the end of Protective Edge, though the assault can’t in any meaningful way be said to have ended, Israel has killed over 600 Palestinians, 110 of them children.
I don’t share these numbers for shock value. They illustrate that while we’re often forced to consider Zionism in the abstract, its victims experience it as a physical reality. That Israel directs so much of its violence at children illuminates the longstanding impulse to halt Palestinian life at its inception.
Israel recently announced the seizure of 370 acres in the Jordan Valley. When the Israeli government seizes land, it justifies the theft on ideological grounds, but treats the land as a commodity. New land means more water, more construction contracts, more weapons purchases, and more electoral posturing. It enhances the colonizer’s agriculture and industry. Palestinian land is the basis of Israel’s occupation economy.
Their land pilfered by rapacious settlers, their farms sealed by steel and concrete, their villages constricted by colonial jurisprudence, their humanity reduced to color-coded identities, I again ask: where do Palestinians exist?
Perhaps it’s better to ask, “Where can Palestinians exist?” We have survived all climates and topographies, but no people is whole deprived of its ancestral land. The Zionist’s existential anxieties linger precisely because he occupies a land whose history has been retrofitted to inform a self-validating impulse that can never actually validate his tenuous colonial existence, and that certainly can never convince the native to offer such validation, on which the colonizer’s self-esteem relies. The Palestinian has no such problem. The Palestinians’ problem is simple: their land has been stolen. Resolving this problem doesn’t require the colonizer’s validation.
All of this can be understood through quick analysis of stones. Yes, stones—chunks of demolished hillside, construction detritus, pieces of granite smoothed over by millennia of wind and water. That analysis can be metaphorical, but even their geological qualities tell us all we need to know about the colonizer’s psychology.
In September 2015, at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel increased the severity of penalties for Palestinian stone-throwers. (Israeli settlers, on the other hand, can throw firebombs into children’s bedrooms without much hassle.) As is common in Israeli jurisprudence, stone-throwing is a crime that inspires collective punishment. This zealousness leads to all kinds of human rights violations, many committed against children—and many affecting people who weren’t tossing stones in the first place.
Israel’s supporters say that stone-throwing can lead to death and is therefore worthy of serious punishment. But are stones dangerous? In the most technical and unimaginative sense, probably. However, if we’re going to reduce a project of ethnic cleansing, illegal settlement, and military occupation to the minuscule chance that a soldier or a settler will be harmed by an act of resistance by the native, then we forfeit all right to be taken seriously.
I don’t want to bog down in the stupidity of comparing the actions of the colonizer and the colonized. That a category of colonizer even exists should end that discussion the moment it begins. Israel’s mere presence is a continuous act of violence.
It’s better to look at the symbolic conditions informing the Zionist’s anxiety about stones. Do Palestinians throw stones as a weapon of warfare? Maybe. Sometimes. They’re more often a weapon of imagination, emblems of a dogged refusal to submit or disappear. No matter the intent when a Palestinian throws a stone, the Israeli perceives it as an act of rejection. It is an accurate perception. This act of rejection, not any perceived danger, provokes the Zionist’s disdain.
Think about the moment in 2000 when Edward Said tossed a stone from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. The stone didn’t come close to hitting anything—the nearest object was an Israeli military watchtower—and the episode would have passed without interest had a photographer not furtively captured it. The photographer was smart. His picture became a sensation, launching a hysterical news cycle about Said’s genocidal tendencies and renewing demands for his termination as a professor at Columbia University.
But what about the military watchtower? It’s the normative object in the scene. It wasn’t threatened by Said’s stone, but it threatens thousands of people. It’s the apotheosis of colonization and militarism. It houses soldiers whose bullets travel at a much greater speed than Said’s manual projectile. Said was well aware of the ridiculousness of the outrage, its sanctimony and disingenuousness. He noted that he had joined in “the spirit of the place that infected everyone with the same impulse, to make a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation [of southern Lebanon] had ended.”
The only inalienable possession of the native is the moral burden of violence. The colonizer owns everything else. Thus the military watchtower is an afterthought—or not even a thought at all beyond its existence as a backdrop to Said’s unconscionable action.
Or consider the mural hanging in the student center at York University in Toronto. It depicts a bulldozer about to plow an olive tree, while a Palestinian watches with stones cupped behind his back. Paul Bronfman, of the famous Canadian bootlegging family, threatened to withdraw his support of the university unless the mural was taken down. York refused to remove it. Bronfman made good on his threat. It’s worth noting that Bronfman’s support went beyond monetary donations; he runs a film production company—there’s a large movie industry in Toronto—and declared that he would no longer allow York students use of his studios or equipment, nor would he continue an internship program with the university.
Bronfman is aware that nobody suffers from this controversy more than students. He was unmoved, though, blaming his choice to pull funding on York’s faculty and president. They all, he declared, share guilt for the promotion of anti-Semitism.
Zionist reaction to the painting is notable not because of politics—of course Zionists dislike the message of the piece—but because it shows that ethnonationalism negatively affects acumen. The colonial gaze is incapable of identifying power anywhere but in the stone, the object that threatens Israel’s covetousness, as represented by the bulldozer. The entire painting is reducible to a miniscule earthly extraction that supersedes all other scenery.
It’s the stone. It has to be the stone. There’s no other way to understand the image if the viewer is beholden to a colonial fetish. The bulldozer is a mere accoutrement to a serene landscape interrupted by the Palestinian’s irrational violence. The Zionist must ignore it. His ignorance is active and vigorous.
It is always this way in geographies of settler colonization. The monuments of settlement, even those erected for the purpose of inflicting harm, disappear into a backdrop of structural normativity. The native’s movements, in contrast, assume a super-political immediacy.
Thus the overemphasis on stones in the Zionist’s paranoid cosmology. The stones assume a primordial importance, but never the bombs and bulldozers that transform structures into rubble. The stones symbolize conflict, but never the land from which stones are excavated. The act of stone-throwing, no matter its intent, always signifies an unearthing of history that the colonizer is deeply invested in suppressing.
In fact, there is little by way of Zionist activism, a corporate affair more accurately described as astroturfing, that isn’t fundamentally an articulation of existential anxiety. Zionists have spent decades shutting down anything to do with Palestine. It’s not just overtly political events, speeches and activism and rallies and the like. It’s anything that endeavors to show Palestinians as a discrete people with history, culture, emotions, and aspirations, anything, in other words, that merely renders the Palestinians human—art exhibitions, children’s debke, film and literary festivals, music performances.
The preferred vocabulary of suppression has long been “balance.” The idea is that a so-called “pro-Palestinian” speaker or exhibit must be countered—or, more accurately, moderated—by a so-called “pro-Israel” speaker or exhibit. (These categories, by the way, are misleading. “Pro-justice” and “pro-ethnocracy” would be more accurate even though they make little sense without an understanding of their context.) But there’s nothing balanced about this structure. The Zionist supposedly devoted to fairness doesn’t seek balance; he seeks oversight.
Balance is a silly overture that precludes intellectual honesty. No serious thinker ever proposes balance, and no thinking person seriously entertains the proposition. Let’s therefore explore what it means in relation to Zionism’s tenuous disposition. Palestinian celebration of life inspires the dissolution of Israel’s ethnocratic aspirations. Balance is vital because suppression provides Israel its sustenance. Balance, in other words, forestalls the ability to picture an afterlife to Zionism.
Suppressing anything Palestine can be seen as an attempt to preserve a political identity. If we understand BDS, for instance, as an articulation of Palestinian aspirations to dignity and freedom, then its delimitation through the force of state power—courts, coercion, criminalization, and so forth—makes sense as an impulse to ensure Zionism’s continued survival. The survival of the ideology, in turn, enables the perpetuation of its proponents.
Yes, Zionists try to shut down BDS because it threatens change and exposes Israel’s dismal human rights record. But they also detest BDS because it endangers their predominance as cultural and political consumers in a marketplace they have long dominated. Palestinians have so long been limited to peripheries of hostility or exoticism in Zionist symbology that their emergence as agents in the public forum has enacted a type of self-reflection incompatible with the demands of ethnonationalism.
So let us return to the original question: what to do when somebody expresses a visceral attachment to the idea of Israel. There is no universal response, but we can deploy a basic strategy: allow the Zionist’s internal conflict to exist. In fact, exacerbate it. That internal conflict isn’t an imperfection to be ameliorated, but a failure of imagination to be overcome. It’s not a matter of assigning blame to a person raised on an ethnonational narrative. Anybody committed to justice has to unlearn reactionary narratives, whether instilled by parents, teachers, peers, clergy, executives, politicians, directors, writers, or broadcasters, or all of them in tandem.
When somebody expresses anxiety about Zionism’s probity, especially in a public setting, it is an indication that the person is thinking about something, considering new ways of approaching an issue, willing to risk acrimony in order to come to an answer. We ought to facilitate that process by rendering the attendant discomfort even more acute.
In the end, there is a truth of which anybody interested in the travails of the Holy Land ought to be aware: Palestine will continue to push inward from the colonial peripheries whose architecture weakens with each new war crime, act of repression, genocidal proclamation, uprooted olive tree, land grab, settlement bloc, home demolition, and mass imprisonment. It’s better to think about the future together, but Palestine’s liberation ultimately doesn’t require anybody’s consent but that of the people seeking freedom.
“I’ve had police turn up at my public events in two countries: Canada and the UK. In both cases, it was because of rambunctious pro-Israel partisans.”
Probably backlash for all the times extremist supporters of the Palestinian Arabs shut down Jewish (not necessarily avid Zionists) speakers by using megaphones to drown off the speakers while threatening the noticeable Jews in the audience. Sauce for the gander, Steve.
Your Zionism, racism, and your hate for Palestinian’s blinds you, Jack. Re-read the piece without the Zionist lens on and you might learn a thing or two.
Mr. Sigman is either being paid by the post or suffers an extraordinarily lonely social life. What else would compel him to be the resident troll on this obscure little website?
–Steve
Does the insignificance and obscurity of your work automatically protect you from honest criticism? Regardless, it is a welcome distraction from working on my dissertation.
Like the hasbarist version of a wind-up toy. I guess the Israeli troll farms are no longer sending out their best and their brightest to defend their crimes, their heinous acts against humanity, all in the name of setting up an illegitimate ethnostate. Then again, how can you continually defend the indefensible, when the world can now bear witness for your crimes to see. Despite their best efforts to hide and obstuficate. You hate to see it.
You can call yourself a post-Zionist, but the Zionist project isn’t done and it will never be completed as long as we continue to resist, which we always will. You call Israel a “thriving democracy”, yet how can it be a democracy when most of its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants, living there since before 1948, and their children have no rights, no freedom of movement, no justice, no right to representation, no life under this democracy. And do not get me started on the PA. Israel controls every aspect of our being there, down to stealing our water supplies, and it’s very othering removes any legitimacy it ever had. Every act of resistance is legitimate under this system of oppression. Our very existence calls for it.
Like a defense attorney attempting to defend a serial killer, you throw dirt and filth at us all in the hope of getting off on a technicality. Israel has no right to exist, as no state has no right to exist, only it’s people do. I look forward to the day when Palestine is free, when all of us, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and whoever else can live there freely and equally.
I don’t know how we’re gonna get there, but we will. And I look forward to that day when this facade of a thriving democracy is torn down along with its walls and settlements. Justice, then peace.
I hope your dissertation gets thrown in the trash where it belongs, and your *Post-Zionist * gets tossed right behind it.
I wonder where Steve digs up all of these ignoramuses and hate mongers to make comments on well thought out rebuttals – Jihadis-R-Us?
I have no idea who the Israel PR section sends out to combat all of the propaganda that appears to be inspired by antisemitism and hatred of Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East that respects the Human Rights of all of its citizens.
There are no indigenous Arabs. They are settler-colonialists who set out to conquer the region, committed cultural genocide, and stole the land from the resident by right of conquest. On the the hand, the Jews returned to their ancestral homeland through peaceful immigration. They purchased the land they lived on from its Arab owners. They built homes, farms, ranches, schools, hospitals, Universities, industries, and institutions of democracy.
One reason why you will never succeed is because you know in your heart you are wrong. That is why you do not know how you will ever succeed. Your heart does not want you to.
Your hopes, like your wishes and desires, will come to nothing as long as you remain this ignorant and hateful.
As I do not hate Palestinian Arabs and as I am not a racist, I fail to see your point. Like Steve, I am a well-educated academic. The difference between us is he has an anti-Zionist point of view and I have a post-Zionist point of view.
Nothing is going to change until the Palestinian Arabs develop a leadership that will negotiate in good faith and does not rely on being a brutal dictatorship.
“They purchased the land they lived on from its Arab owners. They built homes, farms, ranches, schools, hospitals, Universities, industries, and institutions of democracy.”
Most if not all of the settlements on the West Bank are on stolen Palestinian land, an illegal act. To this day Palestinian land continues to be stolen by every hook and crook method.
“Nothing is going to change until the Palestinian Arabs develop a leadership that will negotiate in good faith and does not rely on being a brutal dictatorship.”
Nothing is going to change until Israelis start to treat Palestinians like human beings.
Israeli governments have never negotiated in good faith for a peace agreement. Peace talks towards a two-state solution were always a sham.
“For decades, Israeli governments, pursuing the colonization of the entirety of “Eretz Israel,” have systematically destroyed the prerequisites for a solution involving a contiguous, sustainable, sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Nevertheless, the myth that a real Palestinian state is on offer, and that there actually is a genuine “peace process,” endures as one of the greatest examples of magical thinking in modern times.
That myth has been crucial for the continuation of Israel’s permanent occupation and unending colonization of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, shielding it from any serious international pressure.
The final interment of the already moribund “two-state solution” would force all concerned to face what is obvious to any honest observer. For decades, an imposed reality of one-state – the only sovereign entity enjoying total security control – has existed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. This one state is Israel. Irrespective of the label one uses for it, this is the only outcome that this Israeli government will accept, whatever subaltern, or helot, or “autonomous” status it deigns to allow the Palestinians.” Rashid Khalid
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/18/the-middle-east-peace-process-myth-donald-trump-ended-it
It’s very obvious Jack, that you are not an honest observer.
It is very obvious Sean, you are not a knowledgeable observer.
The vast majority of neighborhood, town, and cities built on the other side of the “green line” by Israel is on what is termed state land, not land privately owned by any Arab. It is true that a small amount doe intrude on private land. So sue. Arabs have been successful in peacefully using the courts to enforce their ownership rights. Abbas cannot sue because it is no land owned by the Palestinian Authority. The initial quote deals with pre-civil war British Mandate Palestine. And you know that. Talk about honesty.
Israel is treating the Palestinian Arabs as human being who are at war with Israel and who refuse to negotiate in good faith.
There is only one sovereign entity. When the Palestinian Arabs decide they will have to cease all murderous actions and negotiate peacefully, things will change.
The Guardian is not an unbiased honest source. Khalidi (not Khalid), while knowledgeable, is also biased.
Ilan Pappe wrote a book, ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ in 1948. To this day Ilan has said the Israeli state continues it’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and continues to steal Palestinian land.
I have already made the substantial case for who is not negotiating in good faith and it’s not the Palestinians.
One just has to read the daily reports about the killing of innocent Palestinian men, women and children by the Israeli army and police to know who is carrying out the murderous actions.
You say that the Guardian and Khalidi are biased, not true at all.
As regards to who is knowledgeable or not, anything I’ve ever read about the occupation by Israel of Palestine, and I’ve read a lot, 100 per cent of it is true, so Jack, please stop blaming the victims.
Lots of people doubt Ilhan Omar’s anti-semitism. I don’t know what you’re educated in, but evidently not facts, history or logic. Your expressed views are racist against Palestinians and entirely Zionists – your claim to be post-zionist notwithstanding.
Here is some historical background: https://palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story674.html. Zionist and Israeli atrocities against the indigenous people of the land they conquered have always been mostly intentional and premeditated if not pre-planned.
Yes, many people, especially Muslims, Somalians, anti-Zionists, antisemitists, and you defend Ilhan’s antisemitism as free speech. Steven’s antisemitism is also defended as free speech. But no one doubts the antisemitic intent. They, and you, consider it reasonable.
Many more think what is considered Islamophobia in the US is actual a very real and reasonable fear based on factual information. Antisemitism is mostly based on fake news or personal animosity. But no one cares why.
As the Arabs are not the indigenous people, just as Venezuelans, Argentinians, and Cubans are not the indigenous people. They are all descendants of invaders who conquered, settled, and committed cultural genocide.
The Jews peacefully and legally immigrated into the Ottoman Palestinian region and British Mandate Palestine. The racist Arab supremacists began their attempt to commit genocide since 1920 was finally defeated in 1949. For their sins, the Arabs suffered a deep humiliation from which they will never recover. So sad.
Whataboutism is a purile defense.
Backlash, not whataboutism. Big difference.
In the end, there is a truth of which anybody interested in the travails of the Holy Land ought to be aware: Israel will continue to push upward and outward as its vibrant liberal democracy and economy continues to grow. The war crimes, acts of murder, acts of genocidal violence, genocidal proclamations, burnt farmlands, by the Palestinian Arabs will eventually be punished, disproportionally.
The formation of a second (or third if you count Hamastan) Palestinian Arab state ultimately requires a leadership that wants peace and not the destruction of Israel.
Jack, please seek therapy. It will do you good.
Why? How did it work out for you?
Normally, I make one post and wait. But this essay (?) is so long with so many mistaken beliefs that I have to add one more post.
Zionists try to shut down BDS because it is inherently antisemitic and calls for the destruction of Israel. BDS exposes nothing but the antisemitism of its supporters.
Tell that to the Jews who support BDS. You actually know better. Your knee is jerking.
Are you saying that Jews cannot be antisemitic? Nonsense. The Jews who support BDS are ignorant. Same as the Jews who supported communism even while Stalin was murdering them.
Beautifully written Steve. Thank you.
“Anybody committed to justice has to unlearn reactionary narratives, whether instilled by parents, teachers, peers, clergy, executives, politicians, directors, writers, or broadcasters, or all of them in tandem.” Virtually everything Americans are taught, what the MSM publish and broadcast, what government officials say: narratives of reaction in service to a hideous capitalist ideology that wants all indigenous ppls exterminated.
But nobody has to unlearn reactionary narratives such as “there is a hideous capitalist ideology that wants all indigenous ppls exterminated?” Talk about falling for a conspiracy.
Dear Steve,
This is an elegant and compelling presentation and argument. But, of course, I am only an ignoramus.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Boyarin
Taubmann Professor of Talmudic Culture (retired), UC Berkeley
You are just shockingly wrong, and while an expert on historical Judaism, you are apparently not a historian of the conflict, or you see it through Pappe’s eyes. Or your political agenda allows to to ignore the obvious.
On second thought, I read your petition of 5/21. I accept your self analysis as accurate. Your politics have obscured your senses. But then you are from Berkeley, a hotbed of academic antisemitism.
Thank you Steve for a brilliant analysis of Palestine’s occupation by the Zionists. Thanks too for including the symbolic throwing of a stone by Edward Said. The Zionists didn’t succeed in getting Edward terminated from his tenure at Columbia. Unfortunately in your case they succeeded. For those of your readers who aren’t aware of the saga, this is a brief history.
“The Steven Salaita hiring controversy was a controversy about an American professor who was un-hired following a campaign by pro-Israel students, faculty and donors who contended that his tweets protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza were anti-Semitic. The un-hiring sparked a debate about academic freedom in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, social media, and the influence of pro-Israeli lobby groups on American universities. The professor who was denied the job successfully litigated against the university and was awarded a settlement of $875,000, while the university’s Chancellor Phyllis Wise resigned due to being implicated with hiding and destroying evidence.”
Sean,
“You say that the Guardian and Khalidi are biased, not true at all.” Not true for you, who have already been proven to be biased and dishonest.
Others disagree with you: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/8787/
Your “negotiating case” does not hold water.
There are exceptionally few reports of the IDF targeting “innocent” people. Thus there is no “daily” report. As for Palestinian Arabs targeting innocent Jews (and accidentally including innocent Arabs who become instant martyrs) consider the deliberate Sbarro, Dolphinarium discotheque, Passover massacres, the massacre of the Fogel family, the Hatuel family (shot the 4 pre-rteen daughters in the head in front of the pregnant mother, shot her in the womb so that she would know all of her children were dead and then killed her. I am not blaming the Jewish victims. So rest your little Kepi.
Pappe? Really? The sloppiest and most dishonest of all the new historians?
“When we advance beyond the title of this eye-catching volume of one-sided “History,” whose author has been called “Israel’s bravest, most principled and most incisive historian,” the picture becomes more nuanced and can be argued either way. Even if one grants that many of the detailed cases discussed and documented by Pappe reflect a certain reality, it is the author’s generalizations and conclusions which lead him astray, and in turn mislead his readers, especially the uninitiated.
Had the unbiased context been laid out fairly to the readers, one could draw one’s own conclusions. But to apportion the blame to one party, making the other a cohort of saintly victims, simply does not tally with the known record.”
“I’ve read a lot, 100 per cent of it is true.” It took me a minute to cut and paste, I was laughing so hard.
“ Not true for you, who have already been proven to be biased and dishonest.”
I will leave it to the readers to this website to decide who is biased and dishonest.
“ There are exceptionally few reports of the IDF targeting “innocent” people. Thus there is no “daily” report.”
You are obviously not reading the unbiased reporting that I am reading.
If we talk about massacres, we just have to go back to May this year, when the Israeli airforce bombed countless innocent families in Gaza, a war crime.
“ Pappe? Really? The sloppiest and most dishonest of all the new historians?”
Ilan Pappe, to put it simply is the most honest of all the new historians.
“ It took me a minute to cut and paste, I was laughing so hard.”
Don’t laugh too hard, we don’t want you getting a heart attack.
Leave it to the readers of this blog? What a joke. Truth determined by popularity. Antisemitism decided by antisemites. Morons deciding what IQ level determines one to be a moron.
The May retaliation against Hamas targets, due to Hamas’ genocidal rocket attack was no war crime. But that was just your uneducated attempt to deflect from the heinous and brutal crimes committed by Palestinian Arabs against innocent Jews. They made you so sick to your stomach you could not defend them.
Obviously, you are not reading any unbiased reporting. I do read what you read. But then I read all of it. Not like you who read only what you agree with.
Dr. Salaita’s tweets were more towards the antisemitic side that Ilhan Omar’s, and no one doubts her antisemitism. He was terminated from his next teaching position and he is so toxic that no one, by his own admission, will hire him for a teaching position. I am shocked that Hatem has not hired him.
These are some of the Salaita quotes that only “pro-Israel students, faculty and donors” found to be antisemitic.
“There is no denying the number of Palestinian casualties that have occurred in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Innocent people have died and the Israeli government should be held accountable for its actions. However, there are ways to go about critiquing these actions without simultaneously being anti-Semitic, and Steven Salaita has not succeeded.”
“Zionist uplift in America: every little Jewish boy and girl can grow up to be the leader of a murderous colonial regime. #Gaza”
“Zionists: transforming ‘antisemitism’ from something horrible to something honorable since 1948. #Gaza #FreePalestine”
These were two of the tweets Salaita posted last summer at the height of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and if neither of them raised a red flag for the Kenyon Students for Justice in Palestine when they were considering speakers to invite, then I don’t know what else to say. Most Jewish people I know, including myself, are plenty critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions, and certainly don’t want to see more innocent people killed. Salaita’s false equivalency of Israel with all Zionism (which, at its heart, is the idea that Jewish people have the right to nationhood and a homeland after centuries without it — something Salaita fundamentally misunderstands), and then with American Diaspora Jewry, is heinous, not only because Jewish people living in the Diaspora have literally nothing to do with Israel or its government, but especially considering he is talking about young children who don’t even know the full extent of what is happening.
Secondly, putting anti-Semitism in scare quotes and saying it is something honorable to participate in should have been the first sign for people to stop reading. This is nothing but blatantly anti-Semitic, and it does nothing to help the pro-Palestine movement.
“ Dr. Salaita’s tweets were more towards the antisemitic side that Ilhan Omar’s, and no one doubts her antisemitism. He was terminated from his next teaching position and he is so toxic that no one, by his own admission, will hire him for a teaching position. I am shocked that Hatem has not hired him.”
“Anti-Semitic?’ It’s a trick, we always use it, to stifle legitimate criticism of Jews and Zionist Israel.”
Jack,
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Have a good day.
I see you are an Alison Weir acolyte, an American antisemite who promotes a democracy now clip featuring an old “progressive” Israeli politician with no counterpoints.
No one needs to fool you. You fool yourself. All of the time.
In a nutshell:
“ Israel – foundling of a failing empire (British) on the backyard of another (Ottoman), within the nightmare shadow of a third (Nazi), adopted by a fourth (US), whose exploitative bid to establish a proxy imperial force in the Middle East and scatter competing candidates for imperial failure (including Soviet, Arab, and Iranian), has helped beget and stiffen this settler-dominated, nuclear, dependent, theocratic, apartheid, political entity (i.e. a state and the territories it has forcibly annexed) of approximately seven million Israelis (mainly Jews) and seven million Palestinians (mainly Muslim) – equivalent to only a third of the population of California – whose perennial conflict is a disproportionately fractious threat to a planet of eight billion.”
https://www.unz.com/article/one-state-terror-and-two-state-bunkum/
You are in a nutshell. Nice over-simplification of your obsession because the land is under Jewish sovereignty.
Another nutshell:
“Let’s have a frank talk about Israeli oppression and antisemitism
Palestinian oppression is a Jewish shonda, overwhelmingly supported by world Jewry with cultural, political and financial backing. So Jews who object to Israeli crimes must come forward.
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/lets-have-a-frank-talk-about-israeli-oppression-and-antisemitism/
MondoWeiss is a borderline antisemitic eRag. To Weiss and his acolytes (I would contend you are typical of that lot), the Jews are to blame for all the ills in the world.
As the Arab world draws closer to Israel, it is apparent that the Arabs who object to the Palestinian Arabs’ desire for genocide are coming forward, much to your chagrin.
Sean, you go from one antisemitic source to another. I am waiting for the Arabs who object to the deliberate Sbarro, Dolphinarium discotheque, Passover massacres, the massacre of the Fogel family, the Hatuel family (shot the 4 pre-teen daughters in the head in front of the pregnant mother, shot her in the womb so that she would know all of her children were dead and then killed her, to come forward.
The Palestinian Arabs celebrate these type events and name streets, schools, and sporting events after the criminals.
I would never condone the killing of even one innocent person.
You obviously though, prefer not to mention Israel’s massacres of innocent Palestinians. In the recent attack on Gaza, at least 212 Gazans, including at least 61 children and 36 women, most of whom were blown to bits.
Hopefully very soon the International Criminal Court, on looking at all of the evidence, will report on war crimes in the occupied territories.
According to Jim Kavanagh, ‘Apartheid Does Not Have the Right to Defend Itself, Or To Exist.’
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/21/apartheid-does-not-have-the-right-to-defend-itself-or-to-exist/
Who cares what you condone? I am concerned with what the majority of Palestinian Arabs condone. I am concerned about the supporters of these Palestinian Arabs, of which you are one. Especially as you refuse to recognize Hamas’ genocidal attacks in Israel as war crimes for the ICC to investigate.
The Israeli government has never deliberately massacred innocent people. There has been collateral deaths and collateral damage. There have been “rogue” Jewish and Israeli troops during the 1947-1949 war which the Arabs started with genocidal intent.
Again, you use an antisemitic source making an unsupportable accusation based on pronouncements by the two major HR organizations condemned as antisemitic by there own former leadership. You are becoming an unemployable comedian.
Jack,
I did submit a reply to your last post, but for whatever reason it hasn’t been posted, probably lost in translation. Anyway, I believe I’ve made my case with the help of, Steve Salaita, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Jim Kavanagh and Robert Herbst
Seab,
You had no case to make. Like your last name, you have nor breathed life into your argument. You use ridiculous sources. You betray a severe lack on knowledge.
We will let the ICC decide who is committing the war crimes, be it Israelis or Palestinians. Since the ICC announced its investigation, Israel has been crying wolf, running down the court, suggesting they are bias, refusing to cooperate? I wonder why?
The ICC was set up in 2002 to bring to justice those responsible for the worst crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. It has the power to act where a state is “unable or unwilling genuinely” to do so itself.
According to Norman Finkelstein, “Israel has no right of self-defence against Gaza.”
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/does-israel-have-a-right-to-self-defence-against-gaza/
Yes Jack, time for Israel to confront the inconvenient truth.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1798921
As the ICC violates the standards so as to achieve jurisdiction, it has already proved its bias in the case. Israel might as well be tried by you. The flimsiness of the judgment would be the same.
No one but antisemites and Arab supremacists and fanatical hatemongers take Finkelstein as an expert in the matter.
Israel is quite comfortable with the truth. You are not.
I find the articles publishes here fascinating, and also appreciate the discussion back and forth, with the exception of the personal insults and ad hominem attacks. I have followed the “conflict” for fifty years, and find new insights and perspectives frequently as I read the various pieces of information here and in other sources.
I have a couple of questions to ask of one of the the most prolific interlocutors, Jack Frank Sigman:
1) I am not familiar with the terms “post-Zionist” or “post-Zionism,” and would appreciate a definition. Your comments suggest that you are a Zionist of some commitment, and many of your arguments are commonly offered by people who claim to be Zionists.
2) How would you define anti-Semitism? It appears that there are many definitions, some of which seem more reliable than others, which seem to be primarily designed to silence criticism of Israel. Having recently read an interesting, lengthy, and extensively researched book by Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro “The Empty Wagon,” one gets the impression that Zionists are, themselves, anti-semites, considering the disparaging manner in which they refer to observant Jews. I recommend the book highly as yet another perspective on this matter, one rich with historical information, and would welcome your comments.
3) Instead of the ad-hominem attacks and out-of-hand dismissal of Ilan Pappe’s book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” which relies on records of the State of Israel in presenting its position, a fact and reference-based critique would be most valuable. Your rejection of his account must have some basis other than your intuition and obviously pro-Israeli political position.
4) You refer, frequently, to your academic activity and pending dissertation. What is your area of study, and in which institution do you do your work?
First, let me apologize for not replying sooner. I was not notified of your post. Post-Zionism is the philosophy of what should occur once the goal of political Zionism was achieved, that being the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Post-Zionism deals with protecting the state. Unfortunately, winning the Six Day War disrupted much of that thought and we are likely in what could be considered neo-Zionism – how to incorporate or rid Israel of the territories captured. That included the Sinai, Gaza, Judea and Samaria (as labeled by the UN), and the Golan Heights.
In dealing with subjects that reflect Zionism pre-Israel, my comments would most likely mirror that of mainstream Zionist argumentation.
I accept the IHRA definition of antisemitism. As for the absurdity of having an impression of Zionist antisemitism, it remains absurd and reflect an imagination running away with itself.
Pappe has stated that his agenda is more important than the facts. He interprets the archives, adding and subtracting as he see fit to achieve his goals. Many have proved that Pappe deliberately lies in some cases. I believe that Marris and Gelber are the main critics. As Pappe writes IAW his prejudices, the “ad-hominem” attacks are justified. Pappe is not the messenger. He is writing the message. Thus he becomes the subject.
My dissertation deals with the political ramification of the genocide accusation as reflected in the behavior of the major states. Is the accusation meaningful or just a grade school playground insult about your mother?