It’s December 19th, 2023. We’re coming up to the season when self-described Christians start saying lovely things like “peace on Earth, goodwill to all,” and paying lip service to the teachings of a Hebrew Palestinian carpenter with proto-socialist sensibilities, who happened to be born in Bethlehem a couple millennia ago. Not long ago, back in early November, many of these same people, and countless others, donned poppies on their lapels, and said “lest we forget,” to pay their respects to those who fought and died in various (typically state-sanctioned) wars, and ostensibly at least, to try to ensure that genocide and other “crimes against humanity,” broadly-construed –– such as those perpetrated against Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma, and others by Nazis and other fascists before, and during World War II –– would never be tolerated again.
But funnily-enough, or not-so-funny if you think meaning what you say actually ought to matter, these annual rituals of performance happened to coincide – and not for the first time – with another series of bombardments of the Gaza Strip. I have been speaking and writing about the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians, and the complicity of Canada and the United States in it, for 30 years. I don’t claim to be an original thinker, or a particularly insightful commentator, on any of this. There are countless others, Jewish, Palestinian, both, neither, with far more knowledge and insight than I, whose words ought to be read before mine.
But let’s be clear here. These rituals of performance have coincided with the very crimes against humanity they have purported to “never again” tolerate. And they have coincided with denial, silence/indifference, or outright apologia – an unholy trinity that is the absolute opposite of “lest we forget.”
In fact, about 75 days have passed since the latest Israeli assault on Gaza began, in the wake of the events of October 7th. The intensity of the violence, the number of people killed, and the often-open rhetoric of ethnic cleansing and genocide that has accompanied all this, has been stunning to behold, even for those who have long understood the brutal and well-documented record of Israeli state terror.
But instead of recoiling in horror at the carnage being unleashed upon Palestinians, we are told time and again in the allegedly-respectable media that the atrocities of October 7th, and the actions of Hamas itself, justify anything and everything. (I am going to assume, for the moment, that there were indeed atrocities as Amira Hass herself suggested –– although it is also clear that much of what was alleged did not actually occur — particularly, the horrific tales of beheaded babies). But whatever occurred, we are told the old mantra: “Israel has a right to defend itself,” as if that too authorizes anything and everything, as if that too authorizes the butchering of babies, the collective punishment of a people, the flattening of hospitals and residential neighborhoods, the killing of journalists, the violation of any and every Geneva Convention, and so forth. We are told that everything must be understood as if it all began on October 7th, the only date and watershed that is meant to matter. Almost every Western politician and mainstream journalist with the air time to promulgate their views has followed suit in advancing these talking points – though some have meekly suggested that maybe, just maybe, Israel’s response has been disproportionate. Israeli officials have routinely gone on record stating that there is no distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians – a conflation they would rightly denounce if directed at them in return. A conflation that is, in fact, as close to a prima facie incitement of genocide as one might encounter. But even if western pundits balk at going that far, they still shrug in the face of genocidal consequences now unfolding, by suggesting that Hamas is more culpable for Palestinian deaths than the Israeli soldiers, drones, and snipers actually killing them … let alone the Canadian and U.S. arms and military equipment they need to constantly replenish in order to accomplish that scale of destruction.
The talking points that have become normalized in mainstream media are not entirely new. Most of them have been peddled in one form or another since before I first started paying close attention to events in Israel and Palestine in the late 80s, in the wake of the first Intifada. Labelling every critic of Israeli apartheid and human rights violations an “anti-Semite” or a “self-hating Jew” has always been a preferred diversionary tactic to employ against those who think Palestinians ought to be afforded equal rights and justice in their own land. This is no surprise. This *always* becomes the preferred approach precisely at the moments of Israel’s greatest brutality. It’s been this way since at least the 1980s. Mudslinging and ad hominem attacks are one of the few tools left in the tactical toolbox, particularly when truth and honesty and actual arguments are inconvenient or unavailable.
In recent weeks we’ve seen a few variations and twists on this theme, such as the attempt to suggest that anyone uttering the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is – allegedly by definition – calling for the extermination of Jews. In my opinion, this is utter rubbish. If it did mean that, I would denounce it. But like most political concepts, rhetoric, and slogans, one has to actually ask people what they mean by the words and phrases they use, to make any reasonable assessment of their political vision and aspirations, let alone assess what means they consider justified by their professed ends. Political concepts and slogans are not quite like mathematics, but even in mathematics one has to define one’s terms and variables in order to proceed in a constructive fashion. We don’t tell people what their language means, and what their definitions must be. We ask them to tell us. In politics, particularly when one is talking about visions of justice and social justice, we need to ask people what *they* mean by their use of a term or concept, not presume that how we receive it must be the only barometer for understanding.
To illustrate this point, it might be useful to talk about the similar kinds of talking points that were employed in the struggle for and against South African apartheid, before and after much of the world had begun to recognize both the de jure and de facto structures of white supremacy and settler-colonialism (and of course, capitalism and imperialism too) that were standing in the way of peace and justice. There were many political concepts and slogans employed by the African National Congress (ANC), for example, including calls for decolonization, meaningful democracy, “one person one vote,” the end to two-tiered legal systems and race-based legislation, land reform, and so on. Almost every single one of the aspirations outlined in the “Freedom Charter” of 1955 was interpreted by defenders of the apartheid regime as a call for the elimination of not just South Africa as a polity, but also as a call for the murder of white settlers. Pro-apartheid voices in Canada shared this talking point. Conrad Black, for example, explicitly smeared (in the pages of the Globe and Mail) the ANC’s call for “one person one vote” as a “euphemism for massacre, expulsion or subjugation of the whites.” Did Conrad Black’s assertion of such make it so?
Just as Conrad Black’s interpretation of the ANC’s vision of decolonization, democracy, and justice said more about his own ostensible fears that the national liberation movement would treat white South Africans the way they had been treating the black majority for decades (or perhaps less generously and more accurately, said more about his fear of losing record profits from his company’s corporate dealings with the apartheid regime) … Zionists have also interpreted Palestinian aspirations, and indeed a continued Palestinian presence on the land itself, as similarly existential threats. But labelling the aspirations of an entire people for freedom and self-determination (and equality and justice) as “genocidal” simply because their slogans centre the oppressed majority, or because they demand an end to the structures of power and privilege that consign them to, say, second-class citizenship (or worse) from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, is no less a leap in the context of Palestine as it was when Conrad Black equated meaningful democracy in South Africa with the massacre and ethnic cleansing of white settlers.
At the very least, if one is going to be honest, one has to ask people what they mean by such things. There are indeed different, competing, sometimes mutually-exclusive visions of decolonization and liberation espoused by Palestinians – as there are in any past or present national liberation movement, anywhere else on the planet. Diversity and disagreement are not flaws, they are inevitabilities. Likewise, there are different, competing, and sometimes mutually-exclusive visions of what we might call “peace” advanced by those who still self-identify as Zionists. There may be points of commonality worth talking about, but of course there are differences and debates within Zionism too, both historically and to the present day. Some of these visions of “peace” imagine a Pax Romana of the type described by Tacitus two millennia ago. For those who might not be familiar with Tacitus, he understood quite well two thousand years ago that –– from a Roman imperialist perspective –– the “peace” sought was often the “peace” of a desert, the tranquility of a disappeared or subjugated enemy, the absence of resistance to Roman rule, the unopposed absorption of other people’s territory. In other words, what was called “peace” was often, by definition, the absence of justice for, and the absence of resistance from, those whose lands and lives were being stolen.
But I do not presume all self-described Zionists subscribe to such an imperialist vision, any more than I assume all Palestinians (and their supporters) subscribe to the more exclusivist, supremacist, or narrow visions that their detractors allege them to hold.
We hear a lot of talk about the Hamas charter, just as we used to hear a lot about the various declarations and documents of the PLO and the PNC. But what we don’t typically hear or make room for is how supporters of Palestinian freedom, crucially including non-Zionist Jews, interpret and utilize slogans such as “from the river to the sea” themselves. This refusal to engage with how Palestinian scholars and activists, and their supporters, themselves understand their own analytical frameworks, concepts, and slogans –– and refusal to honestly engage with their visions of justice and liberation –– is at least as lazy and disingenuous as suggesting that everyone who calls themself a Zionist must somehow endorse the provisions in the original 1977 Likud charter, which articulated an equally exclusivist vision: that “between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Imagine if western politicians, pundits and journalists asked people to repudiate the various iterations of the Likud charter –– a prima facie rejection of Palestinian self-determination if there ever was one –– as often as they ask them to repudiate the Hamas charter.
We have also seen renewed attempts over the last two months to suggest that anyone who describes Israel as an “apartheid” state, and anyone who understands its history, structure, and behaviour through, in part, a lens of settler-colonialism, is either deluded, or similarly-motivated by “hate.” Even worse, we are told, is to suggest that analogies to concentration camps, the Warsaw Ghetto, or Nazi policies, laws, and practices – up to and including genocidal ones — might be appropriate for some purposes, or offer insights that have political and ethical and moral relevance today. Anyone who might resort to such analogies, we are told, must be ignorant about both the Nazi record and Israeli history and contemporary practice. These things are apples and oranges, we are told. They cannot be compared, we are told. There is no equivalency, we are told.
Part of the problem with these kinds of declarations about what sorts of analytical lens and analogies are acceptable, and what kinds are “off limits,’ is that there doesn’t appear to be any recognition of the fact that even to dismiss the relevance of a comparison or analogy, one must first make a comparison. But secondly, no one is actually suggesting equivalency. This is a straw person fallacy. In elementary school we were often tasked with an assignment that asked us “to compare and contrast” two or more distinct things, understanding quite well, even at that young age, that similarities and differences could both be striking, could both be insightful, and could both be worth exploring.
But beyond these disclaimers, it’s also worth noting that the world’s leading experts on the meaning of apartheid -–– in other words, black South Africans inside and out of the ANC –– have themselves described Israel as an apartheid state. Anyone with a shred of integrity can easily find and fact-check what Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko, or even Jewish South African ANC activists like Ronnie Kasrils, had to say about Palestine. It takes a great deal of duplicity or ignorance, in my opinion, to suggest that apartheid is an inappropriate lens of analysis for understanding social and legal relations in Israel-Palestine, while simultaneously ignoring what some of the leading authorities on apartheid in South Africa have historically had to say about it.
When it comes to the lens of colonialism and anti-colonialism, and whether or not these are appropriate terms for describing and understanding Zionist history since the 19th century, the denials are even more uninformed. But let’s be clear about what is, and is not being asserted. Some commentators have tried to suggest that anyone who adopts a colonial lens for understanding the Israel-Palestine conflict is in denial of the fact that Jews are themselves one of the Indigenous peoples of the land. But no one with any actual knowledge is claiming that. It’s a straw man, and a red herring. Speaking only for myself, of course, I would never claim or assert that Jews are not historically and even continuously Indigenous to the land in question. But this has nothing to do with the analytical lens of colonialism as it applies to the 19th and 20th century Zionist movements, let alone a post-1948 assessment of power relationships. And the most striking thing about this denial of applicability of a colonial lens for understanding Zionism, is that it ignores the words and sentiments of historical Zionist leaders themselves – whether we want to go all the way back to Theodor Herzl, or Chaim Weizmann, or fast forward to Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion. The universally-acknowledged founders of Zionism understood things unequivocally in colonial terms. This is part of the documentary record as anyone with passing knowledge of the historiographical literature understands. Anyone claiming today that describing social relations between Israelis and Palestinians, historically or now, in colonial terms is somehow illegitimate … is clearly ignorant of how “classical” Zionists understood their own movements and agendas.
Now of course there are settler voices, even in Canada, that remain in denial of any colonial relationship here, too – not just in the present-day, but also historically. Is it any wonder that we might find similar kinds of denial at work in the context of Israel and Palestine? It was not that long ago that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper asserted that Canada had no history of colonialism whatsoever. Harper’s stunning ignorance about Canadian colonial history, and indeed, Canada’s colonial present, finds many counterparts in political discourse around Israel and Palestine –– not the least of which is the denial of such an analytical lens in the first place.
There is so much that ought to be said about the current moment, and about the need for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and the need for an end to military and colonial occupation, and an end to apartheid both within Israel’s 1948 borders, and west of the Jordan River more generally. I can’t attempt to say it all here. The devastation of the last two and a half months has been unspeakable. I will say, however, that I think it is entirely appropriate to use the lenses of apartheid and colonialism, and also to call Gaza a concentration camp, to compare it to the Warsaw Ghetto, or to compare it to Nazi labour camps. Nobody thinks these things are the same. That’s not the point. All analogies presume difference. I am not going to write an essay on why I think such analogies are appropriate, but I will note that there are a LOT of Israeli scholars and journalists, and numerous Holocaust survivors (and their descendants) who have chosen, quite consciously and deliberately, to utilize such analogies themselves. Norman Finkelstein is by no means the only such person to adopt such a framing. Israeli journalist Amira Hass is another. The late Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling was another. And to mention only one more quite-recent example, Masha Gessen (recently awarded the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany, but “cancelled” from their own awards ceremony) is another. I could post links to examples of all their work, or interviews they’ve conducted, but anyone can google them if they wish to understand why some of the most informed and astute Israeli and Jewish diaspora voices in the world have not shied away from adopting such analogies – in many cases, at great personal cost. It would be absolutely absurd to imply that these voices, in some cases Holocaust survivors or children of survivors themselves, don’t understand what they’re talking about when they invoke the spectre and analogy of the Nazis, the occupation of Warsaw and Poland, the labour and concentration camps, to bring attention to the plight of Gaza.
