As we keep saying, Palestinian solidarity reached a new benchmark in American media/politics during the May assault, and it would be remiss not to laud Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times two days ago, “Were My Criticisms of Israel Fair?” It represents a great new position for a mainstream columnist: Hamas hitting Israel with rockets does not justify Israeli war crimes against Gaza.
Kristof says that after he published two columns critical of Israel and Hamas during the conflict, many readers landed on him, asking, “What would you have Israel do?” This is of course a standard line of defense by the Israel lobby. If rockets were falling on New York from Canada — Americans would retaliate. Etc.
Kristof blows the argument out of the water, saying that this is a political dispute that will not be solved by “war crimes” by Israel and Hamas. He notes that Spain suffered “brutal terrorist attacks for decades from ETA Basque separatists. Spain didn’t send troops to storm the Basque Country, nor did it invade France (which ETA used as a base for terrorism). Instead, it gritted its teeth and granted autonomy to the Basque Country.”
Similarly, the Irish Republican Army, with support from some in Ireland and the United States, bombed Britain’s Parliament, Harrods department store and the Conservative Party Conference, along with innumerable other targets. Yet Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did not bomb Dublin or Boston, nor did she bulldoze the offices of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.’s political wing.
He notes that three years ago the Basque separatist organization announced that it was disbanding, adding “we are truly sorry” for violence that claimed 800 lives. “In Northern Ireland, where the conflict initially seemed even more intractable than the disputes in the Middle East do today, a negotiated peace was reached with the Good Friday accords of 1998.”
He concludes by saying that Israel and Hamas should “stop committing war crimes.” That’s the only way to end an intractable problem.
We wish he’d gone further — that he’d described the inhumane conditions imposed on Gaza’s 2 million people, and that he’d described the origins of the Gaza enclave/prison in the ethnic-cleansing period of 1947-49, a history that lives on in the huge number of refugees in Gaza. These people have rights inside Israel that have never been honored.
Still this is a big step forward for a columnist at the newspaper that ran four columns defending Israel’s slaughter of nonviolent Palestinian protesters in Gaza in 2018. Clearly, Kristof is speaking his mind and not stepping back now because the climate has shifted, and he doesn’t think his career is going to go off the cliff if he does express these ideas. Those red lines held for decades till this spring. . . Marc Lamont Hill was fired three years ago by CNN for calling for Palestinian freedom, and Steven Salaita had his academic contract revoked seven years ago for tweeting about Israeli war crimes.
Of course the Israel lobby is still live and kicking. Compare Kristof’s report with the unreconstructed hasbara from Jackie Northam on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Friday, that described militants’ tunnels in Gaza as an “urgent threat” to Israel.
Northam quotes Israel army mouthpiece Jonathan Conricus describing the tunnels as “the Metro,” and also an Israeli law professor, Daphné Richemond-Barak, saying the tunnels epitomize terror.
I think it epitomizes the meaning of terror and terrorizing the civilian population.
Somehow overlooking the hundreds of Palestinian families terrorized by Israeli violence.
Richemone-Barak goes on:
It’s the great equalizer, so it enables Hamas operatives to operate undetected.
Are these sides “equal”? One is the colonizer, the other the indigenous population. 256 Palestinians were killed in the last conflict, most of them civilians, including many children. Thirteen Israelis were killed, one of them a soldier.
Northam does quote a couple of Palestinians to try to “balance” her report but the thrust of the story was that Hamas is “burrow”-ing into Israel. With no sense of how Gazans are confined and why.
Another step forward in the MSM: David Remnick interviewed Sarah Schulman— “an important figure of queer history”–for the New Yorker Radio Hour yesterday about her new history of the radical origins of ACT-UP during the AIDS crisis, 1987-1993. Schulman praised “Palestine solidarity” work as a radical movement today, and offered wise counsel on how queer activists were able to achieve a “paradigm shift” in American consciousness through the principle of “radical democracy”. Schulman:
The takeaways from ACT-UP are very important for movements today. The most important is that ACT-UP was not a consensus based movement. People did not have to agree in order for actions to go forward. There was a one-line principle of unity, Direct action to end the AIDS crisis. That was as opposed to social service provision. So if you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, you could do it. And if I didn’t like it I might argue with you but I wouldn’t try to stop you from doing it. I just wouldn’t do it and I would go off with my people and organize what we wanted to do. As a result, the wide range of action and different milieus and levels at which ACT UP responded was so broad that it crated a kind of simultaneiety of response, and that was a great contributor to the paradigm shift. I think the big message is, Radical democracy inside your organizations, and big tent politics, and the kind of movements that allows people to respond from where they are at with what makes sense to them.
“Of course the Israel lobby is still live and kicking” cue a workd wide tsunami of anti-semitic attacks
“The Myth of “Anti-Semitic Violence”
The claim that the world is awash in an outbreak of Jew-hatred is a myth – a fiction cynically recycled every few years as a cover for Israeli brutality.
That’s easily said. Still, with so many falsehoods parading as news these days, why single out the lie that Jews are “under attack” in what mainstream media monotonously call a “wave of anti-Semitic violence”? Why not just ignore it and move on?
First, because this particular lie is peddled by so powerful an array of propagandists, and swallowed by so many well-meaning people, that a prompt corrective is needed to set the record straight.
Second, and even more importantly, because the lie is part of an organized campaign to turn reality upside down – to convert supporters of Israeli violence into victims”
https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/05/the-myth-of-anti-semitic-violence/
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It’s Time to End the ‘Special Relationship’ With Israel (foreignpolicy.com)
“It’s Time to End the ‘Special Relationship’ With Israel”“The benefits of U.S. support no longer outweigh the costs.”By Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, May 27/21EXCERPT:
“The latest round of fighting between Israelis & Palestinians ended in the usual way: with a cease-fire that left Palestinians worse off & the core issues unaddressed. It also provided more evidence that the United States should no longer give Israel unconditional economic, military, & diplomatic support. The benefits of this policy are zero, & the costs are high & rising. Instead of a special relationship, the United States & Israel need a normal one.
“Once upon a time, a special relationship between the United States & Israel might have been justified on moral grounds. The creation of a Jewish state was seen as an appropriate response to centuries of violent antisemitism in the Christian West, including but hardly limited to the Holocaust. The moral case was compelling, however, only if one ignored the consequences for Arabs who had lived in Palestine for many centuries and if one believed Israel to be a country that shared basic U.S. values. Here too the picture was complicated. Israel may have been ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ but it was not a liberal democracy like the United States, where all religions & races are supposed to have equal rights (however imperfectly that goal has been realized). Consistent with Zionism’s core objectives, Israel privileged Jews over others by conscious design.
“Today, however, decades of brutal Israeli control have demolished the moral case for unconditional U.S. support. Israeli governments of all stripes have expanded settlements, denied Palestinians legitimate political rights, treated them as second-class citizens within Israel itself, & used Israel’s superior military power to kill & terrorize residents of Gaza, the West Bank, & Lebanon with near impunity. Given all this, it is not surprising Human Rights Watch & the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have recently issued well-documented & convincing reports describing these various policies as a system of apartheid. (cont’d)
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“The rightward drift of Israel’s domestic politics & the growing role of extremist parties in Israeli politics have done further damage to Israel’s image, including among many American Jews.
“In the past, it was also possible to argue Israel was a valuable strategic asset for the United States, though its value was often overstated. During the Cold War, for example, backing Israel was an effective way to check Soviet influence in the Middle East because Israel’s military was a far superior fighting force than the armed forces of Soviet clients like Egypt or Syria. Israel also provided useful intelligence on occasion.
“The Cold War has been over for 30 years, however, & unconditional support for Israel today creates more problems for Washington than it solves. Israel could do nothing to help the United States in its two wars against Iraq; indeed, the United States had to send Patriot missiles to Israel during the first Gulf War to protect it from Iraqi Scud attacks. Even if Israel deserves credit for destroying a nascent Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 or helping develop the Stuxnet virus that temporarily damaged some Iranian centrifuges, its strategic value is far less than it was during the Cold War. Moreover, the United States does not have to provide Israel with unconditional support to reap benefits such as these.
“Meanwhile, the costs of the special relationship keep rising. Critics of U.S. support for Israel often start with the more than $3 billion dollars of military & economic aid Washington provides Israel every year, even though Israel is now a wealthy country whose per capita income ranks 19th in the world. There are undoubtedly better ways to spend that money, but it is a drop in the bucket for the United States, a country with a $21 trillion economy. The real costs of the special relationship are political.
“As we have seen over the past week, unconditional support for Israel makes it much harder for the United States to claim the moral high ground on the world stage. The Biden administration is eager to restore the United States’ reputation and image after four years under former U.S. President Donald Trump. It wants to draw a clear distinction between the United States’ conduct & values and those of its opponents like China & Russia &, in the process, reestablish itself as the primary linchpin of a rules-based order…”
I believe the fact that a great part of the world, especially in the West, believes that the colonizers of Palestine have a biblical right to the land is the intractable problem – or the origin of the chaos.
This quote from Jewish-American geneticist Dr. Eran Elhaik, in his research that turned two generations of Jewish genome inquest upside down, can help those on the problem side of the equation:
“The various groups of Jews in the world today do not share a common genetic origin. We are talking here about groups that are very heterogeneous and which are connected solely by religion…[the] genome of European Jews is a mosaic of ancient peoples and its origin is largely Khazar.”
The press is slowly and reluctantly coming around – see this Nicholas Kristof-ish piece in The Hill titled “Israel, Democrats and the problem of the Middle East” ( https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/israel-democrats-and-the-problem-of-the-middle-east/ar-AAKKWgY?ocid=msedgdhp ) but it still won’t tackle the issue of the structure of Israeli society. Haim Bresheeth-Zabner has a chapter in his book “An Army Like No Other” titled “Is Israel A Democracy?” Pages 352, 353:
In Israel and abroad, the standard position of Zionist apologists is that Israel….remains ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Interestingly, in its Proclamation of Independence, signed on May 14, 1948… the word ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ is never mentioned in the official translation of the Proclamation into English….from the outset, it became clear that inequality before the law is the main characteristic of the new state….Israel was to be a herrenvolk democracy from its inception. If South Africa, about which the term was coined, was democracy for whites only, Israel is a democracy for Jews only.
herrenvolk democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenvolk_democracy