Tom Suárez’s “Palestine Mapped” is an essential guide to how conceptions and mappings of the “Holy Land” have evolved over millennia and why they continue to influence political thought today.
After Palestinians in Jenin Refugee Camp protested Israeli onslaught on Gaza in May, Israeli military raided the Al-Tafawk Children’s Centre and wrecked it. “Their pretext was that they were looking for arms but of course, they found none.” One soldier tore up children’s books, saying that Palestinian children didn’t need them, which reminds author Tony Greenstein of attitudes of Nazis towards Jewish children.
The JDA is an overwhelmingly positive contribution to detoxifying the debate over antisemitism and the dishonest attempts of Israel’s supporters to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism. It should therefore be welcomed as a wholly positive contribution to demystifying the question of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Tony Greenstein writes.
The antisemitism controversy in the British Labour Party was orchestrated by rightwingers and Israel supporters. Joshua Leifer of Jewish Currents fails to call out the bigotry of those who attacked Corbyn. Tony Greenstein relates the true history of Corbyn’s downfall.
Guardian editor Jonathan Freedland’s latest attack on Jeremy Corbyn robs the charge of antisemitism of its real and important meaning. His broadside is a hodgepodge of assertions based on guilt-by-association and statements taken out of context. If 87 percent of British Jews now believe Corbyn is antisemitic it is because of the media parroting pro-Israel propaganda.
On November 17, the British anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein was informed by Twitter that his account was suspended permanently. No reason was given. It turns out that according to Twitter, comparing the siege of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto is a breach of rules whereas wishing Jewish anti-Zionists had died in Auschwitz is not.
The historic contradictions of the Zionist Left are being played out in the death throes of Meretz. As Israel becomes more nakedly rightwing and racist, some elite intellectuals will delude themselves about left Zionism, but Zionism has no ideological need any longer to pretend that it can be reconciled with universalist principles.
Comparisons of Israel to the Nazis, now deemed to be anti-semitic by some officials, are actually helpful. And Zionists have never hesitated to compare their opponents to Nazis. Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker. Ha’aretz observed that Calling your political rival a Nazi is a time-hallowed tradition in Israel. In 2008 a deputy defence minister warned Palestinians living in Gaza that they were bringing ‘a bigger Shoah’ on themselves. And Abba Eban talked of the 1967 Green Line as the ‘Auschwitz border’. Anti-Zionists should be able to wield historical analogy, too, writes Tony Greenstein.
When Seth Anderson urges us to see international law and the two state solution as the basis for resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict, he ignores the fact that the law has meant nothing in the context of power politics, and that partition would create Palestinian bantustans and leave intact the discriminatory structure of the so-called Jewish state. So writes Tony Greenstein.
Israeli socialists have long argued that the primary agent for change in Palestine is the Israeli-Jewish (Hebrew) working class which must be tempted into abandoning the advantages that it presently enjoys, or perceives that it enjoys, in a Zionist state based on Jewish supremacy. Tony Greenstein counters that until Zionism is defeated socialism will be off the agenda in Israel and the Middle East. Zionism and the idea of a Jewish nation are the guarantee against any unity between the Jewish and Arab working classes.