September 29 marks 100 years since Britain was assigned the role of Mandatory Power in Palestine. Despite a hundred years of bloody conflict and grief, the international community’s obligation to decolonize Palestine continues today.
A new documentary featuring at Sundance this weekend demolishes the official denial of the Tantura massacre, when more than 200 Palestinians in a seaside community were gunned down by a Zionist militia days after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Members of the militia were successful in 2000 in quashing a crusading academic’s documentation of the atrocities.
Use of the term “Israel Palestine conflict” may fall short of “settler colonialism” and “sociocide,” but it can open the door to the very conversation we need to have with people new to the issue. Asking “Who are the sides” allows us to talk about the context and intent of Zionism, and the way it disregarded the rights of Palestinian communities residing in the lands it craved. It also allows us to talk about the sadly neglected topic of Palestinian resistance and steadfastness, or sumud.
Several recent findings that Israel is an apartheid state reflect a mounting international recognition. But the indifference to them in the U.S. is also in a long tradition: ignoring apartheid pronouncements about Israel in the U.S. To accept the finding would create a crisis in the Democratic Party and require support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and the Israel lobby including its liberal branch insists that BDS is antisemitic.
Today the idea of a hopeful, humane Zionism is obsolete. For more than 100 years Jews wrestled with Zionism’s darkness. Daphna Levit profiles those thinkers, who range from enshrined heavyweights like Buber, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, through more specialized contemporary scholars, journalists, activists, and lawyers. All of them once believed in a hopeful Zionism; all resisted its darkness; not all of them went all the way to renounce it completely.
100 years ago today, one British officer turned Palestine over to another British officer with a jesting receipt, “One Palestine, complete” –among the most often quoted Zionist documents. Their joke is still galling 100 years later in the history of colonialism.
Haaretz reveals the existence of a secret department under the Defense Ministry which is tasked with making previously-open archives disappear in vaults. It was ostensibly tasked with protecting nuclear program secrets – but statements by its founder make it clear that it’s about undermining critical Nakba scholarship, such as the document stating that the principal reason Palestinians were fleeing in 1948 was hostilities by Zionist forces.
Prominent Jews, including Molly Crabapple, Dave Zirin, Tzvia Thier, Naomi Klein, Ilan Pappe, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Shir Hever, and Moshe Machover sign a statement standing by Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar for her criticism of AIPAC. As long as the US gov’t stands behind Israeli crimes, the 229 signatories and counting will point to the outsize role of the Israel lobby.
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