It’s difficult to reflect on the history of radical social movements without the curse of nostalgia. Partly this is because time mitigates bygone frustrations, leaving us with exaggerated memories of idealism and youthful energy. But partly it’s also because radical social movements in the USA all seem to follow the same negative trajectory. (It doesn’t help that the climate apocalypse is palpable with no possibility of relief in sight.)
Those movements begin with vim and grand ambitions, with visions of salvation and victory, with contempt for orthodoxy and structures of power. If effective, they force some kind of confrontation, at which point the state mobilizes incomprehensibly vast resources to contain the threat. Feds and snitches get involved. Social climbers and influencers take center stage. U.S. exceptionalism reemerges as common wisdom. A new generation, emboldened by the rewards of compliance, dismisses radical holdouts as maladjusted wreckers. The movements end up toothless and conventional, begging for inclusion in the very system they once deplored. Obsessive focus on electoral politics and cosmetic reform is usually the material expression of this transformation.
And so it’s been with the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States. I follow the debates on social media and read the opinion pieces. If Palestine still exists as a radical devotion in this corner of the diaspora, as a prelude to old-fashioned leftist internationalism, then it’s only among a smattering of unapologetic rejectionists—a subculture of the solidarity movement, really—disavowed by more tasteful voices as irrationally recalcitrant (or aggressively ignored altogether).
Withhold praise from a nominally pro-Palestine movie star and watch the ensuing histrionics. Why do you have to be so harsh? Why do you have to be so ungrateful? Why do you have to be so…uncivilized? The same holds true of big-name activists: criticizing their dissimulation is an invitation to sanctimonious outcry. We can’t be so uncompromising. We can’t be so divisive. We can’t be so…Palestinian. Indeed, the most consistent semblance of radicalism in the community exists in the form of digital nostalgia: images of Said, Habash, and Kanafani, often in black and white, stately and handsome, disembodied emblems of national pride. All memes, no material politics.
Today’s pundits, hip to the importance of personal branding, rarely transcend the insipid vocabulary of good citizenship. They speak of rights and democracy and civil liberties and then superimpose those categories onto Palestine. It doesn’t occur to them that Palestine has its own vocabularies of freedom worth forcing into the American conversation. They imagine that institutions of the American state can be made to facilitate decolonization. Vote, they implore. Canvass for the superior class of Democrat. Educate our rulers. Celebrate representation in the very institutions that abet the Zionist entity. What comes of this cynicism dressed as piety? Not much of anything beyond greater access to boutique publications selling attenuated visions of socialism.
Watch how your favorite pundit reacts when Palestinians take up armed struggle or consort with actors beyond the U.S. sphere of influence. Does the pundit drop the crowd-pleasing slogans and start yammering about strategic errors and moral failures among the resistance? Does the pundit exhibit a sudden compulsion to nuance? Does the pundit begin ruminating about how this-or-that U.S. enemy is actually worse than Israel? Those are your tells. Those are the habits that earn fancy credentials.
A once-radical movement has become deeply American. But watch for those solemn images of Bassel al-Araj to show up in the cover photos of bluecheck Twitter.
Thought-leaders conceptualize apparent gains within the Democratic Party as progress, or, worse, as some kind of hard-fought victory. Apart from its dubious judgment, this approach speaks to a sensibility oriented not in the soil of Palestine, but in the marrow of the U.S. colony. What happens if we acknowledge that the U.S. colony is anathema to Palestinian liberation? We consign ourselves to economic insecurity and professional disrepute, to the remarkably difficult task of upending the world as we know it, exactly what liberation requires. There are no easy solutions to Zionism. It won’t be defeated with smarmy optimism and a rah-rah spirit.
Anyway, what evidence shows that working within, or alongside, the Democratic Party has aided the project of Palestinian liberation? What evidence suggests that celebrity endorsements and upward mobility within hostile institutions will improve material conditions in Palestine? Reality tells a different story. Take away the glossy PR and the online bluster, and “the squad” has done basically nothing for Palestine. (Centrist Betty McCollum has been the most steadfast advocate of Palestine in the U.S. Congress, according to the moribund standards of that reliably Zionist institution, anyway.) Celebrity support for Palestine often proves fleeting, given the class interests at play; deleting “#freepalestine” is now a bona fide Hollywood tradition. And far from having energized the Palestine solidarity movement, as those who call him “Amo” like to proclaim, Bernie Sanders helped deplete it of revolutionary potential.
Other problems are more entrenched.
Educated professionals dominate the Palestine solidarity movement. There is little outreach to working-class Palestinian Americans, whose concerns and sensibilities are rarely found in movement literature. Too many self-appointed leaders thus misapprehend or ignore the complexity of thought in the Palestinian American community. It’s easy to conscript business owners and middle managers into defense of police and private property, an attitude that’s necessarily averse to Black and Native peoples.
Various community organizations have paymasters in Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, not to mention formal and informal ties to a vast Democratic Party apparatus. Anti-Zionism with CEOs and advisory boards. Aspirations to CNN and The Washington Post. Palestine is always the pretext, but rarely the priority.
We’re wise to remember that the homeland offers abundant love. We needn’t ingratiate ourselves to the U.S. professional class. It’s a losing strategy. And it can’t be done without abandoning our Palestinian brethren.
We should aspire to something better than being merely tolerated. We needn’t be grateful just to be seen; we can articulate compassion through obstinance and reproach. Anti-Zionism isn’t simply a politic; it is a sensibility, an attitude, a worldview. It is a refusal to accept any society predicated on suffering and displacement. It detests the ruling class. It rejects the misery presented as natural under capitalism. It honors those old revolutionary devotions: fuck Israel; fuck landlords; fuck civility; fuck the police.
The solidarity movement of the United States is no closer to effecting Palestine’s liberation than it was fifty years ago. In some ways, our position is worse, for fifty years ago our marginality indemnified us from easy cooptation or infiltration. Palestine has largely been appended to a social democratic left with a nagging habit of abandoning the nation and its people in service to electoral success. This legibility in leftist spaces has diminished rather than solidified the revolutionary properties of Palestinian resistance. Being nothing in this country wasn’t so bad, after all.
I stay certain of Palestine’s liberation, but have come to understand where the certainty is misplaced. With a seemingly magnetic attraction to (and glorification of) electoralism; a yearning for representation within a fundamentally hostile system (no matter how frequently, and harshly, unrequited); inattention to ongoing settler colonization in North America (and in the Pacific); a perverted and self-defeating understanding of imperialism (wherein activists reproduce State Department talking points); standard immigrant contempt for homegrown poverty; the astroturfing that dominates civic and religious organizations; an inbuilt culture of anti-Black and other forms of racism; relentless left-punching; the effectiveness of Zionist recrimination in spooking would-be dissidents; the emergence of social media influencers who capitulate to respectability politics and cultivate antipathy to armed Palestinian resistance (or really to any resistance unauthorized by large foundations with CIA ties); and a preponderance of petite bourgeois social climbers—all of it abruptly unleashed last week in shameless celebration of American policing—it’s pretty clear that maintaining a proper anti-Zionism in the U.S. metropole has become all but impossible.
Zionism cannot be defeated as it reached its conclusion with a victory so overwhelming that it cannot be touched. We are in a post-Zionist period with the unfortunate status of having physical control of an enemy population the rightfully wants to have its own corrupt government controlling their lives. Israel really would like them to have it but neither side of the conflict will come up with terms pleasing to the other. Truth be told, Israel, with the upper hand in every department, does not have to compromise. The Arabs, knowing they are a thorn that cannot be removed, thinks it can wait until the wound is infected. However, the infection will lead to a greater Nakba.
The US can do nothing. The Squad can only continue to try to spread antisemitism, which is counter-productive. Anti-Zionism was never going to work. The Arabs, like the Tamils and the Basques, are too impatient.
This is part and parcel (and a most tellingly significant part and parcel) of what Stalinism has done to communism. Justly, you are enraged, not simply disgruntled. Habibi!
Excellent analysis Steve, thanks for writing it. You are right to call out what should be called out.
I stay certain of Palestine’s liberation
So do I , Steve. The entity will ultimately be crushed in blood. Nil desperandum!
That is a bit confusing. Are you suggesting that by crushing the Palestinian Arabs, they will be reborn into liberation? My MA dissertation dealt with that issue, the strategies used to force the enemy into committing genocide.
Wishful thinking. Must have been a Jewish university.
No. It was not. It was based on successful separatist movements post WWII.
Maybe put the crackpipe down?
Put the crackpipe down
Why hasn’t a collectivity of sovereign states found a strategy to require the ICC to bring criminal charges against Israeli officials and Israeli military leaders?
Because a collectivity of sovereign states know that the ICC has become a joke that is trying to salvage its sorry reputation by going after the only liberal democracy in the Middle East that respects and enforces human rights within it borders. In this, it seeks to win the approval of dictatorial states throughout Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East.
Errr… are you claiming that Israel is a “liberal democracy in the Middle East that respects and enforces human rights”? If you are, the preponderance of evidence is against it. Israel’s friends are of a far-right or theocratic ilk, such as Saudi Arabia, Viktor Orbán and Fidesz in Hungary, Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Lega Nord, Stephen Bannon of the USA’s Breitbart website and Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League here in the UK. As for respecting human rights inside Israel, I doubt you’ll find many Palestinians to agree with you, nor Amnesty International:
“Israel continued to impose institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians living under its rule in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). It displaced hundreds of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as a result of home demolitions and imposition of other coercive measures.
Israeli forces continued to use excessive force during law enforcement activities in Israel and the OPT. Israeli forces killed 31 Palestinians, including nine children, in the OPT; many were unlawfully killed while posing no imminent threat to life. Israel maintained its illegal blockade on the Gaza Strip, subjecting its residents to collective punishment and deepening the humanitarian crisis there.
It also continued to restrict freedom of movement of Palestinians in the OPT through checkpoints and roadblocks. The Israeli authorities arbitrarily detained in Israel thousands of Palestinians from the OPT, holding hundreds in administrative detention without charge or trial. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, including children, were committed with impunity.
The authorities used a range of measures to target human rights defenders, journalists and others who criticized Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights. Violence against women persisted, especially against Palestinian citizens of Israel. The authorities denied asylum-seekers access to a fair or prompt refugee status determination process. Conscientious objectors to military service were imprisoned.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/
Errr… Israel is not Saudi Arabia, Viktor Orbán, Fidesz, Hungary, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s Lega Nord, Stephen Bannon, Breitbart, Tommy Robinson, nor the English Defence League. It is Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and the only state in the Middle East with a record of upholding human rights of here in the UK. As for respecting the human rights of all of its citizens no matter their religion, color, or country of origin.
There are no Palestinian citizens of Israel. Only 1.6-1.8 million Arab Israeli citizens, no matter where they were born nor how they may self-identify for whatever political reason. Amnesty International is a joke when it comes to their extreme bias against Israel.
https://www.ngo-monitor.org/ngos/amnesty_international/
The head of AI in Israel is a stooge for the Palestinian Authority – you know, the one that is headed by a Holocaust revisionist.
Arab residents of the disputed territories are enemy aliens. Israel is in legal control of a belligerent enemy population.
But thank you for the propaganda report. Well done!
We can judge someone, or a government, by the friends they keep. You’ll need to explain why the apartheid Israeli government is turning to the far right for allies. Merely restating your claim about democracy and human rights without evidence is unlikely to convince anyone. Your Zionist views have a very nasty origin, as anyone with a knowledge of its history can attest:
“The understanding of Theodor Herzl, as well as the Zionists, about the inevitability of anti-Semitism was possibly self-fulfilling, for rather than opposing anti-Semitism in the first half of the 20th century, the Zionists found common cause with Hitler, Eichmann, and the Nazis and used anti-Semitism and Nazism as a means of achieving their end which was the establishment of a Jewish state. The two reactionary movements shared the view that German Jews were living in that country as a ‘foreign race’ and that the racial divide was essential to maintain. The Zionists’ use of Nazism involved, among other things, the blocking of avenues of escape to other countries of Europe’s Jews and diverting them to Palestine, even as the death trains began to roll in Europe. The rise of Nazism and Hitler to power was never, or almost never, opposed by the Zionists prior to the establishment of Israel.”
https://dissidentvoice.org/2012/07/the-zionist-nazi-collaboration/
The same applies to your claim about Amnesty International. Are you telling us that the facts which AI uses in its appraisal of apartheid Israel’s actions are incorrect? If so, you’ll need to provide evidence about particular facts in the AI summary. Again, merely making a claim will not be convincing.
As for the Palestinian Authority, the ‘government’ under the thumb of apartheid Israel:
“Contrary to many misconceptions in the West (even among many on the left and in the Palestine solidarity movement) the PA is not a “government” in charge of a state. Ironically, considering its name, it has little real authority and does not serve Palestinian interests. In fact, its main and only real purpose is to quash Palestinian resistance to Israel – whether armed or peaceful. And the PA’s policy of collaboration with the enemy is not a matter of weakness, degeneration or of corruption (although the PA is also very corrupt, with a well-known and well-deserved reputation for misappropriating funds) – it is a matter of design during the Oslo capitulation process.
The PA was always designed as a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation. Every occupation force and colonial entity in history has sought to recruit native informants and agents to its cause, and Israel is no different in that regard.”
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210627-the-palestinian-authority-is-actually-israels-auxiliary-occupation-force/
“Arab residents of the disputed territories are enemy aliens.” They are not “disputed”. They were stolen by apartheid Israeli military forces in the 1948 Nakba and have been illegally occupied since then. Palestinian people have the same legal right of return under international laws that apartheid Israel falsely grants to Jewish people:
“The right of return is a universal right that is binding under international law, enjoyed by every people regardless of where they come from. The idea of universal rights is an ancient one, but one of its first international expressions is found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948 “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”. One of the core rights set out in the UDHR is the right of return. Article 13(b) of the UDHR states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Palestinian refugees are entitled to this binding universal right, in the same way that all other refugees are, whether they come from Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa or anywhere else.
In spite of ill-founded – and quite frankly racist – arguments concerned with denying this universal right to them, the United Nations has frequently insisted on its particular applicability to Palestinian refugees, who constitute the world’s largest refugee population. For instance, General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 2535, passed in 1969, recognises “that the problem of Palestine Arab refugees has arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights under the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. In the same vein, UNGA resolution 3236 reaffirms “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.””
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/9/23/why-palestinians-have-a-right-to-return-home/
States do not have friends. They have common interests. If it were an issue of friends, we could say the the Palestinian Arab cause is basically that of a communist dictatorship and was a puppet of the USSR because Arafat was friends of Castro.
The origin of Political Zionist views stem from antisemites trying to murder all Jews. The Arabs of the Palestinian region did their incompetent utmost in their attempt. Many antisemites attempt to use the fact that Zionists used Nazi Germany’s need for capital as a means to get Jews safely out of Germany and into British Mandate Palestine. It is known as Holocaust revisionism. Good for you!
From there you leave copying some pseudo-intellectual scholarship to pure malarkey. Yes, the PA was invented, organized, and run by Israel. Anymore conspiracy nonsense up your sleeve?
The Palestinian Arabs do not have some magical “right” to return to the square foot of the apartment they rented or the farm where they were sharecroppers. The vast majority of Arabs who left the area that became Israel are still in their “homeland,” the remains of British Mandate Palestine.
Any demand for the mass migration of 5-7 million Arabs into Israel is a demand for the destruction of Israel. That is antisemitism.
By the way, the UNGA resolutions you mention have no legal ramifications. They are the essence of political poppycock. They are the same as the man who stands on a soap box in the middle of Times Square screaming. Traffic just moves around him. The only ones paying attention are like minded.
“UNGA Resolution 194 clearly resolves that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible”. Israel’s admission as a member of the UN was made conditional on its acceptance and implementation of resolutions including UN Resolution 194; this demonstrates that without question, the UN and the international community saw Israel as fully responsible for the complete implementation of this right. This right was further reaffirmed by the UNGA on more than 135 occasions, clearly reflecting the consistent will of the international community on this matter.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/9/23/why-palestinians-have-a-right-to-return-home/
You start with the assumption that Zionists had the support of all Jewish people, and that Zionists had a historical right to the already-inhabited land of Palestine. Neither is true. Apartheid Israel has no right to exist in its current form. It is a settler-colonial state, undemocratic for many of its people, discriminatory on the basis of race, and militarily aggressive. Is it any wonder that the people you clearly despise are fighting back against you?
The Zionist project was founded in the late 19th century as a quest for what the Nazis later termed Lebensraum. Just like them, and like the settler-colonial projects of the USA and Canada, the indigenous people were to be erased so far as was physically and politically possible. That project is ongoing in apartheid Israel, as independent human rights organisations state clearly. You do not deny this. It is why there is a BDS movement which is increasingly popular and successful. The more that apartheid Israel murders, injures and discriminates against Palestinian people, the more the rest of the world is taking notice and coming together to ensure that Israel becomes a free, democratic and just state. This is not anti-semitic; it is anti-Zionist, pro-Jewish and pro-Palestinian.
I urge British readers to join the campaigns:
https://palestineaction.org/
https://www.palestinecampaign.org/
https://bdsmovement.net/
You could try the truth, it could help your cause, though that is doubtful.
The vast majority of Jews did not support political Zionism until after the Holocaust. Prior to the Holocaust, those that did contributed to the peaceful immigration of Jews into the Ottoman Palestinian region and then British Mandate Palestine. The Jews purchased every bit of land they lived on from the Arab owners. It is a story seen around the world; people get up and immigrate for whatever reason. No different with the Jews except they were legally moving back into their ancestral homeland.
In the time from of 1860 through 1948, the Palestinian region was as inhabited as Texas, yet 100s of thousand of Mexicans moved in (many to their ancestral homesites). Of course, they mostly did not come with capital, advanced degrees, and skills and they were exploited as cheap labor, but still they came.
The Texans did not try to wage a genocidal war against them.
Your sources are exceptionally bigoted so they are worthless. You should try to read Tessler or Bickerton to get an education of the actual history rather than the two-bit nonsense filling your head. Salaita, being an honest scholar, would, or should, agree.
That a human rights organization is independent does not mean they are not bigoted and antisemitic. The head of HRW in Jerusalem is a former PA official. The founder of HRW says the current organization is quite bigoted.
Claiming anti-Zionism, which is an increasingly widespread view amongst Jewish people, is inherently anti-Semitic has undermined all of your comments. You provided no evidence that the recent assessments of Israel by human rights organisations to be an apartheid state are incorrect, you simply try to undermine their credibility. This non-Jewish British man who had no understanding or interest in the Israel question until a few years ago is utterly unconvinced by you.
Israel is apartheid; undemocratic; viciously repressive; threatens mass death on the world through its illegal possession of nuclear weapons; racist… the list goes on. That’s what I learned. It’s time you did, too.
Anti-Zionism is a small movement among the old guard of socialism and college students too ignorant to know better. The author of the paper is the former PR rep of the Palestinian Authority. The founder of HRW points out that the organization has lost all semblance of objectivity.
That you are unconvinced is unimportant. The facts remain. Israel is a vibrant liberal democracy that respects the human rights of all of its citizens. It is in a sea of Islamist dictatorships, thuggeries, kleptocracies, theocracies, and anarchy.
Your main complaint is that Israel is not perfect.
Israel is neither vibrant, liberal (except in the Hillary Clinton sense) nor a democracy by any reasonable definition of those terms. I’m not comparing it with the autocracies and theocracies around it, many of which are allied to apartheid Israel and are heavily bankrolled by the USA. If you regard those undemocratic regimes as vile, why is the apartheid Israeli government so supportive of them? Again, it’s the friends you keep. I utterly oppose my own UK government’s uncritical support for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Middle East non-democracies.
“Over the past two decades, Israel and Arab Gulf monarchies have forged a tacit partnership, increasingly aligning their interests and agendas, while hiding behind a public perception of being enemies. Saudi-Israeli links are not new. They’ve made covert contacts through back-channels since Sheikh Kamal Adham’s time, when he ran the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate from 1965 to 1979. Though still having no official diplomatic relations, in recent years the Kingdom and Israel have put far less effort into concealing their unspoken strategic partnership.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/30/the-real-saudi-israeli-relations/
As for anti-Zionism… it’s growing quickly amongst Jewish people, especially younger Jews, and even more so around the world among non-Jewish people.
“Jewish Voice for Peace opposes anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab bigotry and oppression. JVP seeks an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians; a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on principles established in international law; an end to violence against civilians; and peace and justice for all peoples of the Middle East.”
https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/mission/
“IJAN is an international network of Jews who are uncompromisingly committed to struggles for human survival and emancipation, of which the liberation of the Palestinian people and land is an indispensable part. We are committed to the right of return for Palestinian refugees and to ending Israeli colonization of historic Palestine, which is reinforced by US economic and military power. We support full Palestinian self-determination and the right to resist occupation. We look to the Palestinian grassroots and Palestinian-led organizations as our primary points of reference in this struggle.”
http://www.ijan.org/who-we-are/
“While today a majority of observing Jews identify with the state of Israel, there is both a growing and visible minority of anti- and non-Zionist Jews, and a rich history of anti-Zionism within Judaism. Political movements like The Jewish Labour Bund and thinkers such as Abraham Serfaty, Emma Goldman and Leon Trotsky are often ignored or dismissed as “self-hating traitors”. In the UK today groups like Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jewdas, Young Jewish Left and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist network are active voices against the occupation…
This month, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated worldwide against the massacre in Gaza. Marching in London with the Jewish bloc has been a powerful experience. Under the banner “not in my name”, we show that Israel does not speak for all Jews. ”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/why-i-am-antizionist-jew/
It is well known that the “refugees,” given this opportunity (not a right) refused to accept the condition of “wishing to… live in peace with their Jewish neighbors,” just having waged a genocidal civil war against the Jews and refusing all peace negotiations, and that only about 5,000 took advantage of “compensation” with the rest refusing as that meant recognizing the legitimacy of Israel.
It demonstrates nothing of consequence as the Arabs initiated the civil war with genocidal intent and then launching a full blown genocidal regional war. Regardless of the million time the UNGA say something about a “right to return” for the Arabs who waged war against the Jews, it remains a fictitious political attempt to eradicate Israel. As Al Jazeera is the propaganda arm of the Qatar government, it is a useless source of factual information.
You think Israel committed fraud upon its entrance to the UN? Too bad. So sad. No one cares and no one is going to do anything about it. This is not might makes right, this is right makes right. Learn to live with it as it will not change without the Arab armies amassing and invading, which will never happen again unless they can take advantage of WWIII.
JVP is a borderline antisemitic organization that uses the fact that some of their parents were Jews to shield themselves while they promote antisemitic propaganda. It is committed to the destruction of the state of Israel as a vibrant liberal democracy that protects the human rights of all of its citizens. Relying on them as a source brings your credibility to zero.
While hatred of Israel is growing among the poorly educated, it is not growing much. The Bund died in 1945. It has been resurrected as a shell with little in common except hatred of Israel.
Israel, like all other states, including the UK, do not have friends, they have mutual interests with other states. It is foolish for a state to antagonize its neighbors unless the neighbors are doing so first. Same with the rest of the world. Israel had good relations with Poland but it is now suffering due to Polands actions. The same with Turkey years ago. Israel has okay relations with Jordan and Egypt. Lebanon and Syria know better than to upset the apple cart.
It is clear that international relations (MA 2013) is beyond you.
Israel has never spoken for all Jews and it has never attempted to speak for all Jews. But its borders are open for all Jews that need it. One reason was that the UK closed its borders to Jews during the rise of Hitler. Then they closed the borders of British Mandate Palestine to appease the Arab supremacists and restricted the land purchases of Jewish residents of British Mandate Palestine.
“JVP is a borderline antisemitic organization”. Is that all you can say about anyone campaigning for a free Palestine? Really, give it up. We don’t hate Jewish people but we do hate what the Zionist apartheid Israeli state has been doing to Palestinian people since 1948. All you can offer is abuse, not evidence that apartheid Israel is the great place you claim it to be. I’m fascinated to read your replies because they offer nothing new, no substance, just hatred and vitriol. In many ways, your comments are eerily similar to the excuses made by white South Africans during their apartheid era. A racist government to which Israel tried to sell nuclear weapons, remember?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons
“its borders are open for all Jews” is both racist (no state should be restricted to an ethnic group) and incorrect. Israel practices racism against non-white Jewish people: “Racism is integral to Zionism, and we see this not just in the treatment of Palestinians, but also in how they treat Jewish people of African descent. The Zionist project is fundamentally about capitalism, settler-colonialism and maintaining an “ethnically” Jewish state. The Ethiopian Jewish community has existed for thousands of years, tracing its history to the ancient kingdoms of Aksum and the Ethiopian Empire. Many Ethiopian Jews immigrated to Israel in the late 20th century.
Since arriving in Israel, many Ethiopian Jews have faced constant discrimination. Their faith was questioned by rabbis and their communities ostracized from the rest of Israeli society. In 1990, the National Israeli Blood Bank routinely destroyed blood donated by Ethiopian Israelis because they were “afraid that the Ethiopians carried HIV.” There was a cap on the number of Ethiopian Jews entering Israel until relatively recently.
The minority status of the Ethiopian Jewish community creates poor material conditions. They have the highest poverty rate among the Jewish population in Israel, and face the highest levels of police violence after Palestinians. Israel calls itself a bastion of human rights and progress, while denying rights to both Palestinians and Ethiopian Jews. The treatment of Ethiopian Jews is completely different from the warm welcome offered to Jewish people from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, for instance. ”
https://www.liberationnews.org/israels-long-history-of-anti-black-racism/
As for the UK’s historical treatment of Jewish people: it was shameful. But that offers no excuse for apartheid Israel to practise racist policies. I don’t defend Hamas, either: I regard them as repressive and authoritarian, if on a lesser scale than that of apartheid Israel:
“Hamas security forces’ violent crackdown against peaceful Palestinian protesters, activists, human rights workers – including an Amnesty International worker – and local journalists must be immediately halted and investigated, said Amnesty International. Hundreds of protesters have been subjected to beatings, arbitrary arrest and detentions, and torture and other forms of ill-treatment since 14 March, when Palestinians took to the streets across the Gaza Strip to protest against the rising cost of living and deteriorating economic conditions under the Hamas de facto administration.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2019/03/gaza-hamas-must-end-brutal-crackdown-against-protesters-and-rights-defenders/
But the above quotation is from AI which you think is a Palestinian stooge organisation, so naturally you will think it untrue.
“But the above quotation is from AI which you think is a Palestinian stooge organisation, so naturally you will think it untrue.” Don’t take my well educated and supported word for it.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/1576998637-amnesty-int-l-institutionally-biased-against-israel-new-british-report-finds
https://nypost.com/2018/01/27/amnesty-international-shows-its-anti-israel-bias-yet-again/
https://david-collier.com/amnesty-international-obsession/
https://observer.com/2016/06/human-rights-watch-and-amnesty-internationals-little-bias-problem/
https://www.cfr.org/blog/amnesty-international-and-hamas
JVP is not campaigning for a state for the Palestinian Arabs as much as they are campaigning for the destruction of Israel.
In 1947, The Palestinian Arabs, with the aid of the Arab League sponsored Arab Liberation Army started a civil war with the goal being genocide. This was a continuation of the murderous rampages of Arabs against Jews in 1921, 1929, and 1936-39 resulting in the British appeasement of the Arab supremacist demand to prevent Jewish refugees from entering British Mandate Palestine (think US southern border except the land is the ancestral homeland of the Jews).
You have to pay for the sins of Britain by supporting the state of Israel. That support means you have to stop relying on BS from so-called “progressives” whose goal is the destruction of Israel.
Your inappropriate use of keywords prove your ignorance. Read a textbook before your read JVP, INN, SJP, and Salaita propaganda. Then you can laugh at their ignorance instead of having people laugh at yours.
Never forget; Jews peacefully immigrated bringing skills and capital. They bought the land where they lived, farmed, and ranched. They built schools, hospitals, industries, universities and institutes of democracy. The significantly improved the economy which improved the lives of the residents, Jew and Arab alike. They were repaid with attempted genocide.
You are fascinated as you are actually getting an education instead of relying on propaganda from hate sites.
The amount of evidence-free propaganda you write would be astonishing if I hadn’t become used to seeing this kind of stuff elsewhere. You deliberate conflate “a free, democratic, non-sectarian, non-ethnic-based state” with “the destruction of Israel”. Apartheid Israel never had a moral right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state in the first place. You base your claim on the Old Testament in which a monotheistic deity, Yahweh, commands his followers to kill all the inhabitants of Canaan and take over their land. That’s your model and you’re following it explicitly.
“Jews peacefully immigrated”… no, seriously? Really? From Israeli Jew Ilan Pappe’s book ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’:
“Emboldened by the Balfour Declaration, in the 1930s Zionists formulated a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of her indigenous population. Demonizing the Palestinians as cockroaches, jackals, subhuman, primitive, and dirty, and with the help of European Zionists, pressure was exerted on England to implement the 1917 Balfour Declaration…
Under the cover of dark, Jewish terrorists would enter villages from the three weakest flanks; bombs would be thrown through windows of alternating homes and, as the terrorized villagers emerged from their homes, they were machine-gunned in cold blood. The same tactics were used either in the early or late hours of the day. With the help of masked informants, males were targeted for executions either in the center of the village square or on the outskirts of villages. Frequently one group of males was ordered to dig graves into which corpses were deposited and, Nazi-style, these unsuspecting villagers were in turn gunned down and deposited into the mass graves. The coup de grȃce for rural Palestine was the summary expulsion of the entire population – this after looting, the stealing of jewelry, and ISIS-style assaults on women and girls, including the raping of young girls.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/09/71-years-later-zionist-terrorism-is-alive-and-well/
This is your history.
Counterpunch is your source? Really?
Counterpunch has repeatedly run articles by prolific anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon. Briefly, Atzmon has questioned whether the Holocaust occurred, while simultaneously arguing that, if Hitler’s genocide did occur, it can partly be explained by Jews’ villainous behavior. Atzmon also explicitly charged that Jews are indeed trying to take over the world, and has endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, arguing about the document that “it is impossible to ignore its prophetic qualities and its capacity to describe” later Jewish behavior.
Counterpunch published an article by Alison Weir which alleges that the blood libel, (the charge that Jews ritually murdered gentiles), is true and is related to the false reports, in 2009, regarding Israeli thefts of human organs from Palestinians.
CounterPunch has made a cause celebre of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.
CounterPunch’s Alexander Cockburn has advanced the argument that Jews have a stranglehold on the U.S. media.
CounterPunch has published bizarre conspiracy theories, such as one piece written by Paul Craig Roberts about the Iranian protests in 2009, with the title “Are the Iranian protests another American orchestrated ‘Color Revolution‘?”
CounterPunch‘s Alexander Cockburn has cheered on mass-murdering Islamist terrorists in Iraq.
As for the rest of your nonsense: Years ago I asked, disguised as an antisemitic anti-Zionist, the head of SJP, why the “Apartheid” campaign when there was no proof of such. He said, “well, nothing else has worked.”
It is all astonishing to you because you have no knowledge outside of the extreme anti-Israel propaganda you devour and defecate on this site.
Israel is not a settler-colonial state, it is not an apartheid state, it is not a Jewish supremacist state any more than all of the European states are White supremacist and all Islamic states are Islamist supremacist and all Asian states are Asian supremacist, and all African states are Black supremacist. It did not expulse of the entire Arab population (all credible scholars, including Salaita, acknowledge that about 750,000 out of 900,000 Arabs left, by whatever means and reasons including possibly 400,000 being driven out), and 90% of those who left stayed within the historic boundaries of British Mandate Palestine. 90% never left their homeland.
Your use of ridiculous imagery only sharpens your image of being a clown. Keep at it. It is certainly amusing.
James, You wrote: https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/09/71-years-later-zionist-terrorism-is-alive-and-well/ This is your history.
The first paragraph of your source states: “The April 9, 1948 massacre of 107 Palestinians in the Christian Village of Deir Yassin (monastery of Yassin)’
No honest credentialed sources states what religion dominated the village. At best, source talk about a mosque. None talk about a Church. Walid Khalidi, one of the Palestinian Arabs’ best historians says the village was 100 percent Muslim.
The second paragraph is used by the author to demonstrate that he is not an antisemite because he is a Semite, even though antisemitism has nothing to do with Semites, speakers of a Semitic language.
Can’t you even be bothered to vet your own propaganda to see if there is even a kernel of truth?
“But the above quotation is from AI which you think is a Palestinian stooge organisation, so naturally you will think it untrue.” Do not take my well-educated and supported word for it:
The current conflict between Hamas (and other terrorist groups) and Israel has brought out the worst in Amnesty International. Amnesty has taken a position that can only be called anti-Israel, treating the terrorists and Israel with an “evenhandedness” that bespeaks deep biases.
The story is well told at the web site of NGO Monitor, an NGO set up precisely to catch self-proclaimedly neutral human rights organizations doing just what Amnesty is doing: taking sides, and in this case taking sides with terrorists. As NGO Monitor summarizes,
During the weeks of escalation in rocket attacks prior to the Israeli response, Amnesty International failed to issue a single statement condemning the firing of scores of rockets by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups at Israeli civilians in southern Israel, demonstrating Amnesty’s lack of regard for Israeli human rights.
Amnesty has repeatedly blamed Israel alone for “re-igniting the conflict.”
Amnesty asks for two remarkable things in its November 19th statement. One is for the International Criminal Court to take up the Goldstone Report and seek war crimes prosecutions based on it. No notice whatsoever is taken by Amnesty of Goldstone’s own “reconsideration” (largely a recantation) of his own report, in which he notes that
We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.
The second remarkable Amnesty demand is that
“The UN Security Council should meet urgently to impose an international arms embargo on Israel, Hamas, and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza.”
There is Israel, under attack by terrorists launching hundreds and hundreds of missiles and rockets into its territory–not just this week but all year, year after year; threatened by an Iranian regime that states its wish to wipe the Jewish state off the map; in a legal state of war with Syria to its north…Well, one could go on. And Amnesty seeks an arms embargo that would prevent Israel from seeking the means to defend itself. All that in the name of “human rights. “
No better. NGO Monitor is an apartheid Israel lobby group with its HQ in Jerusalem and close links with the far right. But you knew that and pretended it to be independent of your apartheid state. You refuse to acknowledge that apartheid Israel’s increasingly close links with anti-Semitic, close to fascist, far right governments and organisations are important. They show clearly the true nature of Zionism and of the apartheid Israeli state.
Nothing of what you quote from Amnesty is surprising or objectionable. There isn’t a conflict in Palestine at all. It’s not a war between states. It’s an ongoing genocide against a small ethnic group by a nuclear-armed state with the most powerful weapons in human history. Yes, apartheid Israel’s government and the Israeli Defence Forces should be held accountable to the ICC, as should Hamas for its far smaller crimes, and as should Tony Blair here in the UK and George W Bush in the USA for their own vast crimes against humanity. You refuse to admit reality: apartheid Israel has always been a failure, relying on outside forces and the USA for its very existence as a deeply racist, ethno-religious society which legally or de facto makes second class citizens out of anyone who isn’t white and Jewish. All we ask is for a single-state, free democracy in Palestine with human rights for all. No, Hamas doesn’t want that either, so I don’t support their Islamist goals. But you want a state purely for Jewish people – and not even all of them. That’s not a democracy.
I make no excuses for Iran, a vicious and repressive theocracy, or for any other nation including my own with its racist, violent, imperial past and its ongoing allyship with apartheid Israel and with Saudi Arabia. You place the state of Israel and some Jewish people on a pedestal. I noticed you failed to even address the racism that Ethiopian Jewish people experience every day in Israel at the hands of the authorities, the police and of white Jewish people. Nor did you explain apartheid Israel’s close relationship with apartheid South Africa and its attempt to sell it nuclear weapons.
Your support for all this should be your shame, not your pride.
Sure it is. You got to inappropriately use “apartheid” 4 times in a sentence. Is that a record?
Are you now accusing Israel of using nuclear weapons in the “genocide” of the Palestinian Arabs who have managed to grow from 1.3 million to over 12 million despite the 73 years of genocide?
Hamas’ smaller crime? The deliberate launching of missiles with the sole purpose of murdering Jews (accidentally killing the odd Israeli Arab and many Gazans), which is a crime of genocide, is a smaller crime? really? Do you even read what you write with any sense of critical thinking?
Israel is an amazing success story. It has maintained a vibrant liberal democracy that supports the human rights of all of its citizens, despite, at times, being surrounded by genocidally-minded Arab enemy states. It even managed to sign two peace treaties and convince the rest of the folly of attacking Israel. If only the Palestinian Arab leadership were rational actors.
Palestinian Arab residents of Jerusalem are not israeli citizens. Thus they cannot be second, tird, fourth, etc… citizens. All Arab Israelis are first class citizens of Israel. Is there discrimination? the same as there is in any liberal democracy wherein there is a minority.
I have explained the basis of international relations to you many times now. It is not my fault you still haven’t a clue.
Jews are not considered why by White Supremacists. It is only racists of color, and their supporters, who consider Jews to be white.
Thank you for distracting me from my dissertation and allowing me to hone my skills in the written combat of hate mongers, antisemites, and pro-Palestinian propagandists.