Wonderful piece by Daniel Breslau at Kibush on the attacks by the right on the left over the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis. The right wing is saying the left fails to see extremism in Palestinian life. Breslau says we see it, but we don’t like your racist answer to it. The piece mentions an Avi Shavit attack on the left, then…
Still more direct was a publicist named Yehuda Drori (Hebrew)…:
`I have no doubt that Juliano Mer fell victim to murderers representing the very group of people that he was trying to help. But in plain terms, he lived among snakes, and one of them killed him with its bite. … Now I believe that Juliano Mer is of greater value in death than in life, because he proves to us once more that there is no one to talk to, there`s no one there to work with toward `peace` and we must be extremely wary of them, and of all the do-gooders who believe that it is possible to build a bridge to peace with that rabble.`
In all of these comments racism is tightly coupled with attacks on the left.
The belief that the Palestinians suffer from inherent moral and cultural deficiencies, and that the left makes things worse by ignoring this self-evident fact, are two sides of a single discourse. From this outlook, which is that of the Israeli mainstream, the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis is the perfect parable: naive leftist meets his death at the hands of the inherently hateful Palestinians whose dark side he willfully denied.The Palestinians are evil and the left is in denial. What better way to justify continued oppression of four million than to hold that they are undeserving of human rights and that those who advocate for them are hopelessly deluded?
Political repression, violent Islamic political movements, oppression of women: are these phenomena better understood by those who insist they be denounced as `forces of evil` or by those who see them as having historical causes, as not inherent to a race, religion, or culture? Which of these demonstrates an `ability to see historic reality as a whole, in all its complexity`? There are countless studies, essays, and commentaries by people on the left that relate the rise of Islamic violent movements to a set of historical circumstances that include autocratic regimes, Western imperialism, the distortion of the political space by autocrats and occupiers, and the repression of secular alternatives, among other factors.
