NOVANEWS
The issue that I am uncomfortable with – and this also applies to @R Ross’s comment – is the absolute distinction between victim and victimiser. It suggests a total lack of agency to the Palestinians and by implication a complete lack of any responsibility. Now the Palestinians are incontestably the weaker party in the conflict and I do agree that Israel has the greater weight of responsibility on them. However, the Palestinians are not wholly without agency. The actions that they take have consequences, even if they are not able to dramatically alter the situation as Israel can.
For one thing, they have support from other states. The support Hamas receives from Iran is modest but far from trivial. The overwhelming sympathy for the Palestinian cause from Muslims worldwide and increasing numbers of western sympathisers may not put food on the table, but it is psychologically important.
The decisions whether to fire or not fire missiles to Sderot, to send or not send a suicide bomber into a Jerusalem cafe, are decisions that have consequences. It is true that neither total passivity nor total war may necessarily bring about Palestinian liberation, but neither is the choice between them completely unimportant.
There is another issue here: if you trest the Palestinians as without agency then you endanger the viability of a future Palestinian state. It is a big mistake if all questions regarding how to organise Israeli or Palestinian society are put in abeyance until some putative ending to the conflict.
Post-liberation societies are built in embryo during the liberation struggle itself. So Hamas’s Islamism hugely significant: what kind of hope does a post-liberation Hamas state hold out for Palestinian gays and Christians, for example, to say nothing for possible Jewish minorities in a future Palestinian state?
Ironically, looking at Israel and the Jewish people provides important lessons here. Jews during the holocaust were oppressed and virtually powerless. Going by your logic, it was fine for powerless Jews during the holocaust to be Zionist. When did Jews suddenly start to have responsibility? When the holocaust ended?
My point is that people are accountable for their political decisions at all times. Zionism was or was not a valid ideology regardless of antisemitism. Hamas’s Islamism is or is not a valid ideology regardless of Palestinian oppression.
The issue that I am uncomfortable with – and this also applies to @R Ross’s comment – is the absolute distinction between victim and victimiser. It suggests a total lack of agency to the Palestinians and by implication a complete lack of any responsibility. Now the Palestinians are incontestably the weaker party in the conflict and I do agree that Israel has the greater weight of responsibility on them. However, the Palestinians are not wholly without agency. The actions that they take have consequences, even if they are not able to dramatically alter the situation as Israel can.
For one thing, they have support from other states. The support Hamas receives from Iran is modest but far from trivial. The overwhelming sympathy for the Palestinian cause from Muslims worldwide and increasing numbers of western sympathisers may not put food on the table, but it is psychologically important.
The decisions whether to fire or not fire missiles to Sderot, to send or not send a suicide bomber into a Jerusalem cafe, are decisions that have consequences. It is true that neither total passivity nor total war may necessarily bring about Palestinian liberation, but neither is the choice between them completely unimportant.
There is another issue here: if you trest the Palestinians as without agency then you endanger the viability of a future Palestinian state. It is a big mistake if all questions regarding how to organise Israeli or Palestinian society are put in abeyance until some putative ending to the conflict.
Post-liberation societies are built in embryo during the liberation struggle itself. So Hamas’s Islamism hugely significant: what kind of hope does a post-liberation Hamas state hold out for Palestinian gays and Christians, for example, to say nothing for possible Jewish minorities in a future Palestinian state?
Ironically, looking at Israel and the Jewish people provides important lessons here. Jews during the holocaust were oppressed and virtually powerless. Going by your logic, it was fine for powerless Jews during the holocaust to be Zionist. When did Jews suddenly start to have responsibility? When the holocaust ended?
My point is that people are accountable for their political decisions at all times. Zionism was or was not a valid ideology regardless of antisemitism. Hamas’s Islamism is or is not a valid ideology regardless of Palestinian oppression.
This is stupid beyond measure, and I’m not interested in rebutting or dissecting the whole thing. I am interested in one of its aspects: the way a piece about the “Israeli left” can’t help but reek of the racism of its authors, now no longer restricted to lingering stink but out in the open. Here’s why Schalit and Kahn-Harris can’t or refuse to see the anti-racist (anti-Zionist) left: because they are racists themselves, a bigotry that was hidden in the subtext and gaps of the original article.
They trot out a series of flimsy equivalences to divert attention from Western responsibility, rejecting the “the absolute distinction between victim and victimiser,” because “It suggests a total lack of agency to the Palestinians and by implication a complete lack of any responsibility. Now the Palestinians are incontestably the weaker party in the conflict and I do agree that Israel has the greater weight of responsibility on them. However, the Palestinians are not wholly without agency.”
Watch this thick billowing verbal smokescreen move about, the bit about Palestinian violence and how Hamas treats gays and will treat Jewish minorities in a Palestinian state and all the rest of it, oddly bringing up the “powerless” North American and British Jews during the Holocaust and the “powerless” Zionists who collaborated with the Nazis, all this sophistry and erasure of history and logical train-wrecks, so much of the rubbish only an intellectual could summon up, skillfully deployed to occlude the basic core of the conflict: settler-colonial invasion that is dispossessing the Palestinians.
Keith also writes of how Fatah “are actually working to build a functional state in waiting and the state they are building looks like it will be much more liberal than a hamas state in waiting,” (serious?) pretty much explaining why “many progressives outside Israel overlook the fact that an Israeli left still exists”–is this the sort of thinking that its Western Dissent-lite allies produce? No thanks.
And the coda is beautiful, comparing the “validity” of Zionism with the “validity” of Hamas’s Islamism. Scoured of euphemism, what’s the point, at its core? Simple: us white Jews need to protect Islamic brown people from themselves = mission civilatrice = humanitarian intervention in the Balkans = Kipling’s White Mans Burden. If you don’t like Hamas, you can blather about Islamism, Qutb, Qassams, the Koran, misogyny, Ahmadinejad, Holocaust denial, violent vs. non-violent resistance, while trying to re-set the agenda of the global left to tacit collaboration with occupation through intellectual mis-direction. I think it’d be a little more straightforward to just end the occupation.
Technorati Tags: civilizing mission, Gaza, Hamas, In search of an Israeli left, Joel Schalit, Keith Kahn-Harris, racism
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