{"id":280,"date":"2023-12-19T16:28:47","date_gmt":"2023-12-19T22:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/?p=280"},"modified":"2023-12-20T13:22:43","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T19:22:43","slug":"gaza-peace-on-earth-goodwill-to-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/2023\/12\/19\/gaza-peace-on-earth-goodwill-to-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaza: Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s December 19th<\/sup>, 2023.  We\u2019re coming up to the season when self-described Christians start saying lovely things like \u201cpeace on Earth, goodwill to all,\u201d 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 \u201clest we forget,\u201d 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 \u201ccrimes against humanity,\u201d broadly-construed \u2013\u2013 such as those perpetrated against Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma, and others by Nazis and other fascists before, and during World War II \u2013\u2013 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 \u2013 and not for the first time \u2013 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\u2019t 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\u2019s be clear here.  These rituals of performance have coincided with the very crimes against humanity they have purported to \u201cnever again\u201d tolerate.  And they have coincided with denial, silence\/indifference, or outright apologia \u2013 an unholy trinity that is the absolute opposite of \u201clest we forget.\u201d

In fact, about 75 days have passed since the latest Israeli assault on Gaza began, in the wake of the events of October 7th<\/sup>.  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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/sup>, 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 \u2013\u2013 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: \u201cIsrael has a right to defend itself,\u201d 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<\/sup>, 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 \u2013 though some have meekly suggested that maybe, just maybe, Israel\u2019s response has been disproportionate.  Israeli officials have routinely gone on record stating that there is no distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians \u2013 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 \u2026 let alone the Canadian and U.S. arms and military equipment they need to constantly replenish in order to accomplish that scale of destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201canti-Semite\u201d or a \u201cself-hating Jew\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent weeks we\u2019ve seen a few variations and twists on this theme, such as the attempt to suggest that anyone uttering the phrase \u201cFrom the river to the sea, Palestine will be free\u201d is \u2013 allegedly by definition \u2013 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\u2019s terms and variables in order to proceed in a constructive fashion.   We don\u2019t 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<\/em> must be the only barometer for understanding.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> and de facto<\/em> 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, \u201cone person one vote,\u201d 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 \u201cFreedom Charter\u201d 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<\/em>) the ANC\u2019s call for \u201cone person one vote\u201d as a \u201ceuphemism for massacre, expulsion or subjugation of the whites.\u201d  Did Conrad Black’s assertion of such make it so?  

Just as Conrad Black\u2019s interpretation of the ANC\u2019s vision of decolonization, democracy, and justice said more about his own ostensible fears<\/em> 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\u2019s corporate dealings with the apartheid regime) \u2026 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 \u201cgenocidal\u201d 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 \u2013 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 \u201cpeace\u201d 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 \u201cpeace\u201d 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 \u2013\u2013 from a Roman imperialist perspective \u2013\u2013 the \u201cpeace\u201d sought was often the \u201cpeace\u201d of a desert, the tranquility of a disappeared or subjugated enemy, the absence of resistance to Roman rule, the unopposed absorption of other people\u2019s territory.  In other words, what was called \u201cpeace\u201d was often, by definition<\/em>, 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.       <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We hear a lot of talk about the Hamas charter, just as we used to<\/em> hear a lot about the various declarations and documents of the PLO and the PNC.  But what we don\u2019t typically hear or make room for is how supporters of Palestinian freedom, crucially including non-Zionist Jews, interpret and utilize slogans such as \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d themselves.  This refusal to engage with how Palestinian scholars and activists, and their supporters, themselves<\/em> understand their own analytical frameworks, concepts, and slogans \u2013\u2013 and refusal to honestly engage with their visions of justice and liberation \u2013\u2013 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 \u201cbetween the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.\u201d  Imagine if western politicians, pundits and journalists asked people to repudiate the various iterations of the Likud charter \u2013\u2013 a prima facie rejection of Palestinian self-determination if there ever was one \u2013\u2013 as often as they ask them to repudiate the Hamas charter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have also seen renewed attempts over the last two months to suggest that anyone who describes Israel as an \u201capartheid\u201d state, and anyone who understands its history, structure, and behaviour through, in part, a lens of settler-colonialism<\/em>, is either deluded, or similarly-motivated by \u201chate.\u201d  Even worse, we are told, is to suggest that analogies to concentration camps, the Warsaw Ghetto, or Nazi policies, laws, and practices \u2013 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 \u201coff limits,\u2019 is that there doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cto compare and contrast\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But beyond these disclaimers, it\u2019s also worth noting that the world\u2019s leading experts on the meaning of apartheid -\u2013\u2013 in other words, black South Africans inside and out of the ANC \u2013\u2013 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/sup> century, the denials are even more uninformed.  But let\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/em> Indigenous to the land in question.  But this has nothing to do with the analytical lens of colonialism as it applies to the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> 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 \u2013 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<\/em>.  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 \u2026 is clearly ignorant of how \u201cclassical\u201d 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 \u2013 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\u2019s stunning ignorance about Canadian colonial history, and indeed, Canada\u2019s colonial present, finds many counterparts in political discourse around Israel and Palestine \u2013\u2013 not the least of which is the denial of such an analytical lens in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 1948 borders, and west of the Jordan River more generally.\u00a0\u00a0I can\u2019t attempt to say it all here.\u00a0\u00a0The devastation of the last two and a half months has been unspeakable.\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0\u00a0Nobody 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.\u00a0\u00a0Norman Finkelstein is by no means the only such person to adopt such a framing.\u00a0\u00a0Israeli journalist Amira Hass is another.\u00a0\u00a0The late Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling was another.\u00a0\u00a0And to mention only one more quite-recent example, Masha Gessen (recently awarded the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany, but \u201ccancelled\u201d from their own awards ceremony) is another.\u00a0\u00a0I could post links to examples of all their work, or interviews they\u2019ve 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\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0shied away from adopting such analogies \u2013 in many cases, at great personal cost.\u00a0\u00a0It would be absolutely absurd to imply that these voices, in some cases Holocaust survivors or children of survivors themselves, don\u2019t understand what they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s December 19th, 2023.  We\u2019re coming up to the season when self-described Christians start saying lovely things like \u201cpeace on Earth, goodwill to all,\u201d 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 \u201clest we forget,\u201d 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 \u201ccrimes against humanity,\u201d broadly-construed \u2013\u2013 such as those perpetrated against Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma, and others by Nazis and other fascists before, and during World War II \u2013\u2013 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 \u2013 and not for the first time \u2013 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\u2019t claim […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6,48,24,23],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political-writings","tag-apartheid","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-settler-colonialism","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}